Category Archives: Books/Media

An old joke I heard a few years ago goes something like this: “Talking about the differences between America and Canada is like contrasting Germany and Austria. At the end of the day, only the Austrians notice or care.”

So I expect that only Canadians will bother to read this review of one of the finest books in their national canon.

Canadians themselves don’t seem to understand what separates their nation from the U.S., as evidenced by the constant whining from their left about how Stephen Harper is “Americanizing” their nation. Sorry ladies, but that ship has long since fucking sailed. The leftist, Handmaid’s Tale conception of Canada as an enlightened, progressive, multicultural refuge in opposition to those Bible-beating rednecks south of the border is a fiction invented by Pierre Trudeau and Lester Pearson.

Indeed, the reality is the reverse: Canada is innately a conservative country and America is innately progressive.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone steeped in neoreaction, but Lament for a Nation is an excellent primary source detailing precisely how these ideas work in real life. George Grant witnessed the Cathedral assimilating his country before his eyes and produced not only an excellent summation of what separates America and Canada, but elucidating first principles that could guide reactionaries in the future. Despite this edition’s flaws, it’s a worthy addition to anyone’s library.

And believe you me when I say that this edition (the 40th anniversary McGill-Queen’s University edition) is flawed. The main text of Lament must have been sourced from a half-finished Word document, because it’s full of basic typos and grammatical errors that are simply unacceptable in a published work. Additionally, the use of the Maple Leaf Flag on the cover is a slap in the face to Grant’s Red Tory, anti-continentalist beliefs. Nonetheless, this book is important enough that I’m willing to overlook misplaced quotation marks and missing periods:

And there ends the argument of Lament for a Nation. Canada makes sense only as a conservative country and Diefenbaker’s stand was the last political gasp of conservatism in the face of the ineluctable fact that conservatism is not possible in an age of progress. Canada’s disappearance was inevitable. You can’t fight necessity, because “fate leads the willing, and drives the unwilling. The debt we owe the Liberals is that they have been so willing to be led. The party has been made up of those who put only one condition on their willingness: that they should have personal charge of the government while our sovereignty disappears.”

Reviewing Lament for a Nation is difficult without explaining the context in which Grant wrote it. The book was largely a reaction to the Canadian elections of 1963, in which the Progressive Conservative government of John Diefenbaker was voted out of office in favor of Lester Pearson’s Liberals, who were openly being supported by Washington. Indeed, President Kennedy actually sent his top pollster, Lou Harris, to work for the Liberals in both this and the previous election in 1962.

Why did Kennedy want to take down Diefenbaker so badly? Because the latter didn’t ask “How high?” when Washington told him to jump.

Under the terms of NORAD, Diefenbaker had been pressured into allowing American nuclear weapons to be stationed on Canadian soil, a decision which he repeatedly waffled on. Additionally, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Diefenbaker refused to immediately go along with Kennedy’s diktats, delaying a DEFCON 3 order to Canadian forces and requesting that representatives from neutral countries be sent to Cuba to verify Kennedy’s claims. This combined with Diefenbaker’s other failures led to the downfall of his government and, as Grant saw it, the end of Canada as an independent nation:

Diefenbaker’s confusions and inconsistencies are, then, to be seen as essential to the Canadian fate. His administration was not an aberration from which Canada will recover under the sensible rule of the established classes. It was a bewildered attempt to find policies that were adequate to its noble cause. The 1957 election was the Canadian people’s last gasp of nationalism. Diefenbaker’s government was the swan song of that hope. Although the Canadian nationalist may be saddened by the failures of Diefenbaker, he is sickened by the shouts of sophisticated derision at his defeat. Those who crowed at Diefenbaker’s fall did not understand the policies of government that were essential if Canada was to survive. In their derision they showed, whether they were aware of it or not, that they really paid allegiance to the homogenized culture of the American Empire.

The average idiot will no doubt chafe at Grant’s assertion of Canada as being a fundamentally conservative country, what with their expansive social welfare state and liberal social policies. This analysis ignores the very reason how Canada came into being: as a refuge for English- and French-speaking peoples who did not want to become part of the United States.

Much in the same way that Jews define themselves primarily in opposition to Christianity, Canadians define themselves primarily in opposition to America. Nobody nowadays truly understands how radical the American Revolution was: its elevation of individual rights was unprecedented in recorded history. The Quebecois and the Loyalists sought to preserve pre-existing traditions in the face of the Puritan progressives down south, drawing on pre-Enlightenment English philosophers such as Richard Hooker:

The Conservatives came to power at a time when world economics were less favourably disposed to Canada than at any time since the war. The less prosperous felt the pinches of the recession which started in 1957. Diefenbaker did not meet this situation with any co-ordinated economic plan. The government only alleviated the growing unemployment by winter works, and scarcely touched upon the problems caused by automation. Diefenbaker lost the wide support he had once held among the ordinary people of Ontario. Those who were suffering came to think his nationalism was the usual political yapping. Once more the Conservative party was associated with unemployment and recession.

Canada was founded not just on the rights of individuals, but the rights of nations: the right of English- and French-speaking communities to safeguard their cultures against American imperialism. In this sense, socialist endeavors such as the creation of the CBC and Ontario Hydro (which Grant gives as examples of how Canadian Conservative governments were unafraid to expand government as necessary) are entirely consistent with conservatism, as their purpose was to protect Canadian society from American encroachment. This concept is still somewhat present in Canadian legal theory, as shown by how the Canadian Human Rights Commission rejected freedom of speech as an “American concept” during the Marc Lemire case.

So what went wrong?

Grant traces Canada’s fall as the product of both technological progress and political necessity. World War I was the first nail in the coffin of the U.K., Canada’s progenitor and benefactor; the British progressively lost both the ability to and interest in maintaining its empire, as shown by the Statute of Westminster 1931. At the same time, the industrial needs of both World War II and the Cold War necessitated that Canada seek closer economic ties with the U.S. Capitalists, who have no loyalty to anything other than that which makes them money, were among Diefenbaker’s fiercest opponents:

The free-enterprise assumptions of the Diefenbaker administration led to actions that were obviously anti-national. In appointing the Glassco Commission as an equivalent to the Hoover Commission, the government seemed to be appealing to an element of the American “conservative” tradition. The civil service was investigated by the head of Brazilian Traction. Although such “conservatism” may be appropriate to the United States, it cannot be to Canada, where limiting the civil service in the name of free enterprise simply strengthens the power of the private governments. Such strengthening must be anti-nationalist because the corporations are continental.

Although Grant does not use the term, what he was describing was the rise of managerialism in Canada: the agglomeration of power in the hands of CEOs, civil bureaucrats and other managers who have no loyalty to anyone other than themselves. Managerialism demanded that Canada be subsumed into the American Empire, with Diefenbaker standing athwart history trying to push against the winds of progress.

Grant views technology itself as an instrument of leftism, as opposed to a “tool” that can be used for good or ill. He points out that the technological advances of the industrial era, while improving the standard of living for all Canadians, had also accelerated the nation’s decline into an American satrapy. For example, automobiles made transportation between the two countries much more convenient, allowing the U.S. to project power more easily, while television allows corporations to beam American culture and values directly into the living rooms of every Canadian family. Indeed, Grant lays the blame for Quebec’s hyper-leftist “Quiet Revolution” at the Duplessis’ government’s attempt to fuse technology with traditionalist Catholic morality, creating a generation that despised traditional values; even today, Quebec is the most atheistic and degenerate province in Canada.

While I don’t share Grant’s pessimism, his point about how technology is usually co-opted by the powers-that-be is a good one. Take the Internet as an example. Sure, the Internet has allowed thought-criminals like ourselves to connect and network in a way that would have been impossible thirty years ago, but it’s also allowed the Cathedral to extend its control over us, both directly (through the NSA’s spying) and indirectly (by enabling leftists to form lynch mobs to hunt down anyone who offfeeennnds them).

There is no way out.

Grant also blames Diefenbaker’s incomplete understanding of Canada for the defeat of Canadian nationalism. Diefenbaker came from outside of the existing Canadian power structure; as a lawyer from Saskatchewan, he had little understanding of how central Canada had been transformed in the two decades that the Liberals had been in power. His conception of “One Canada” was entirely based around American-style individual rights, completely neglecting Canada’s historic origins.

The end result is that Canadians have become ersatz Americans without even realizing it. The Soviet-style erasure of Canada’s British heritage began under Lester Pearson, who adopted the Maple Leaf Flag and made “O Canada” the national anthem, replacing the British Red Ensign and “God Save the Queen.” The process accelerated under Pierre Trudeau, who stripped the Canadian military of its “Royal” designation (recently reversed under Harper) and plagiarized America’s Ellis Island mythology in an attempt to make “multiculturalism” part of Canada’s national heritage.

Occasionally, the puppet government in Ottawa is allowed to “defy” its masters, as shown by how Jean Chrétien kept Canada out of the Iraq war. But these little acts of resistance only underscore how subservient Canada is to the U.S. in the areas that matter: capital and culture. Canadians like Heather Mallick consume American TV and movies, enshrine watered-down American leftist concepts like multiculturalism, and want to make their country more like America; the real America, not the right-wing “Jesusland” that exists only in their nightmares.

Canada is the equivalent of a snotty teenager backtalking his parents; he might bitch about the quality of mom’s meatballs, but he still lives in his parents’ basement.

This is why Lament for a Nation is worth reading; it offers a clear, concise vision of what a non-progressive, non-leftist society looks like. Not only that, it shows how America’s cultural Marxism erodes the soul of a nation slowly but steadily. And despite being Canadian, a land that enshrines mediocrity in its art (see: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and those awful Group of Seven paintings), Grant’s prose erupts with joy and life, with countless quotable lines such as this:

When a man truly despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide.

Now there’s a saying to put on your wall.

Is the triumph of leftism inevitable? I don’t agree with Grant on this, though in 1965 it must have seemed like America (read: the Cathedral) was invincible. But a combination of idiotic diplomatic and economic blunders combined with the flagging birth rates of white leftists has endangered the progressive project. Russia and China are standing tall against our gelding of a president, and the latter have Washington by the balls economically.

New England Puritanism might be on the way out. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Click here to buy Lament for a Nation.

Read Next: A Nation of Crybabies

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: there’s no reason to take feminism seriously. It’s a contradictory, nonsensical ideology whose most fervent proponents are all failures at love and life. It’s aborting and contracepting itself out of existence: each generation of whites born since the Sexual Revolution has been more conservative and patriarchal then the last. It’s a threat to men in the same way that a pile of dog turds is a threat to your shoe.

But if all that isn’t enough for you, you need to read The Inevitability of Patriarchy.

Much like The Managerial Revolution, The Inevitability of Patriarchy is a wonderfully explanatory volume that’s been left to molder in the pile of out-of-print books. Writing in the early 1970’s, the high-water mark of second-wave feminism, Steven Goldberg confronted Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer and the other prophetesses of women’s lib… and laughed at them. Their arguments were ramshackle, their logic nonexistent, their beliefs nothing more than elaborate emoting.

Placed under the warm light of scrutiny, feminism shriveled like a raisin in the sun.

Goldberg begins the book by assaulting that most cherished of feminist beliefs, the rotten foundation of their teetering ideology: the concept of gender as a “social construct.” Armed with a library’s worth of anthropological evidence, he shows that virtually all societies, tribes and peoples throughout human history have been patriarchies, dominated by men:

Men do not merely fill most of the roles in high-status areas, they also fill the high-status roles in low-status areas. The higher the level of power, authority, status, prestige, or position—whether the area be economic, occupational, political, or religious—the higher the percentage of males. Thus the percentage of women in the work force in the United States has risen by 75 percent since 1900, but the percentage of women in the high-status area of medicine has declined during this period. In the Soviet Union, where medicine has a far lower status than it does in the United States, the majority of all doctors are women, but as one ascends from the level of practical medicine to the levels of authority the percentage of males rises until, at the top, males constitute the overwhelming majority.

It’s quite telling that even in the time since Patriarchy was first published, no one has managed to produce evidence of a truly matriarchal or even egalitarian society. Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas: every civilization of importance was founded and ruled by men. Gender is supposedly a “social construct,” yet it seems that men and women are “socialized” in exactly the same way across the globe, with the only exceptions being the occasional tiny, obscure village that’s still living in the Stone Age.

And people actually take feminist arguments at face value.

But it’s Goldberg’s discussion of human biology that really takes a sledgehammer to feminism. In his chapter on hormones, he explains that it’s the very physical nature of mankind that will forever ensure male domination. Goldberg vivisects feminist arguments like slabs of meat, including debunking the leftist proclivity of using exceptions to disprove rules (i.e. “Not all unmarried women become crazy cat ladies! My best friend has never been married and she likes DOGS!”):

Whenever a biologist speaks of men and women he is speaking in virtually absolute terms. For all intents and purposes every human being begins life as either a genetic male or a genetic female. When a biologist speaks of masculine and feminine characteristics he is almost always speaking in the statistical terms of probability. When one deals with probability of any sort he expects exceptions. The biological nature of height is not brought into question by the fact that some women are taller than some men or by the fact that within-sex differences in height are much greater than the between-sex differences in height. Few genetic females have testosterone levels approaching that which would be normal for a male; a woman whose testosterone level is even half that of a normal male displays undeniable signs of hirsuteness and general virilization. But even if 10 percent of all women had higher testosterone levels than 10 percent of all men one would not be led to the conclusion that the parameters of hormone distribution by sex are irrelevant any more than he would say that the fact that there are some six-foot women and five-foot men disproves the biological nature of human height… We speak of men being taller than most women because we observe that most men are taller than most women. This would all seem too obvious to even mention, but so many authors have pointed to exceptions to male-female differences in attempts to deny the importance of biology that it is worth introducing this point here.

Goldberg also finds time to rip apart John Money, the Josef Mengele of the American left, whose crackpot theories on gender-bending led to countless boys having their lives destroyed.

But just because mankind’s past was patriarchal doesn’t mean that its future will be, some may argue. Goldberg crushes this notion before it can get out of the gate. Because both men and women are natively inclined to seek male dominance, feminism will never achieve its goals because women will not allow it to:

Likewise, one who predicates political action on a belief that a society is oppressive until half of the positions of authority are filled by women faces the insuperable task of overcoming a male dominance that has forced every political and economic system to conform to it and that may be maintained as much by the refusal of women to elect widespread female leadership as by male aggression and ability. No doubt an exceptional configuration of factors will someday result in a woman’s being elected president, but if one considers a society “sexist” until it no longer associates authority primarily with men and until a woman leader is no longer an exception, then he must resign himself to the certainty that all societies will be “sexist” forever. Feminists make much of the fact that women constitute a slight majority of voters but in doing so make the assumption that it is possible to convince the women who constitute this majority to elect equal female leadership. This is a dubious assumption since the members of a society will inevitably associate authority with males if patriarchy and male dominance are biologically inevitable…

We can see the evidence of this today. Despite the hysteria about the GOP’s “War on Women,” the majority of married white women still vote Republican. Feminists try to tar traditional women as having “internalized misogyny,” yet by every metric of success—wealth, health, happiness—conservative women are beating the shit out of leftists. The kinds of women who swallow the feminist cant are societal deadweight: black baby mommas on food stamps, barren yuppies with more dogs than children, clueless college debutantes with six figures of student loan debt, the list goes on.

If they all got abducted by aliens tomorrow, nobody would even notice they were gone.

There’s more, way more in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, making it a one-stop shop for all your anti-feminist needs. For example, Goldberg destroys the foundations of modern feminism by turning its own logic against it: calling men and women “classes” in the Marxist sense makes no sense because individual men and women are dependent on each other for reproduction and survival, which completely goes against the Marxist conception of class. Additionally, Goldberg exposes Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone and other feminist polemicists as frauds, pointing out how books such as The Female Eunuch and The Dialectic of Sex either misrepresent or outright lie about scientific research in order to further their agendas.

Goldberg’s writing style is decidedly academic in tone, albeit with a dry humor that doesn’t pander to idiots. You can just sense the sheer joy he got from tearing these idiots apart. He’s also an equal opportunity offender, taking the time to point out—like I do—that feminism would have gotten nowhere had it not been supported by men (i.e draft-dodging hippie cowards who just wanted to get laid):

No doubt there are many reasons why some women will accept the illogic of feminism. Anyone wishing to explore this area should examine a contemporary America in which the rage of young women protesting professional discrimination is complemented by a revulsion toward professional roles by the men who are “supposed” to fill them. For an understanding of the forces that lead to the feelings of meaninglessness that so many men and women now seem to attach to their traditional roles perhaps one should begin not with the content of roles that were formerly capable of providing meaning, but with the failure of contemporary American society to inculcate in the society’s members the feeling that the society’s value system, its way of defining reality, is correct and meaningful. It is this ability, rather than the specific characteristics of the value system or the value system’s “humaneness,” that is the precondition for the society’s survival and that is relevant to the members’ current feelings of meaninglessness and the feelings of aloneness that are inevitable if the members have no meaning to share. When a society loses its ability to inculcate values its members fall into the abyss…

Men and women form a closed circle: what affects one will affect the other. The counterpart of the clit-swinging harridan is the effete onanist, the gelding, the slack-wristed pussyboy. Bitches create bitches. The boorishness of feminists is enabled and fostered by the slavering manbabies who suck up to them. John Scalzi, P.Z. Myers, Anil Dash: without them, feminism would collapse yesterday.

It is the sacklessness and cowardice of our fathers’ generation that created feminism; it will be up to us to slay the dragon.

If I were to critique The Inevitability of Patriarchy, it’s that its central argument is a bit on the light side. While Goldberg makes his point with aplomb, he spends too much time discombobulating individual feminist arguments for my taste. Admittedly, this sort of thing was necessary back in 1973, before a complete anti-feminist canon had been established, but it still seems like something of a diversion.

Aside from that, The Inevitability of Patriarchy is a must-read for men. No other book out there so effectively deflates and demolishes feminism. The empire never ended, the king never died. And he’s coming to take back what’s his.

Be afraid.

Click here to buy The Inevitability of Patriarchy.

Read Next: The Inevitability of Female Submission

It’s a real talent to take a story of anal rape, child abuse and secret Ku Klux Klan conspiracies and make it as enjoyable as a visit to the dentist, but James Shelby Downard managed to do it.

Well okay, maybe that’s too harsh. This first volume (and only one, as Downard died before completing the second) of autobiography has its definite ups, flashes of brilliance that will shake you to your core. But as a complete work, The Carnivals of Life and Death simply doesn’t mesh. Downard grabs you by the neck, shoves you face-first in the depravity that was his life… and then leaves you there so he can go jerk off in the corner.

But just who is James Shelby Downard, and why would anyone give a crap about his autobiography?

During his lifetime, Downard was a well-known conspiracy theorist, known for the lucidity of his writing and the left-field nature of his beliefs, which made him a stand-out even considering the insane nature of many tinfoil hat writers. His most famous work is “King-Kill/33: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” an essay that alleges that JFK was the victim of Masonic conspirators. That essay appeared in the original edition of Apocalypse Culture; Feral House, who published that book, is responsible for The Carnivals of Life and Death. There’s also a foreword from Feral House impresario Adam Parfrey himself:

Around Shelby Downard, things are never what they seem. Having read a number of his essays full of recondite factoids, I expect his library to be filled with thousands of obscure books. Instead there’s an old set of World Book encyclopedias, a dictionary, an abused set of Man, Myth and Magic, and a couple dozen tomes that could probably be found in any large used bookstore. Downard does not rely on many secondary materials for his research, but instead upon topographic and city maps to prepare for personal visits to sites of arcane and personal significance. Downard had a batlike intuition for navigating dark and hidden terrain that sometimes amazed experts.

Carnivals covers Downard’s early life, beginning with his childhood in Ardmore, Oklahoma, a town straight out of a David Lynch movie: wholesome on the outside but hiding deep dark secrets. Downard repeatedly finds himself in the crosshairs of both the Freemasons and the Ku Klux Klan, always managing to escape from their secret rituals and sadistic tortures in the nick of time:

Before they left, they tied a slip knot between my ankles and my neck so that when I tried to relieve the tension in my back muscles the rope would choke me. As soon as they left me to go into the house I began to rub the lower part of my face on the ground to get the gag and bandanna loose. I knocked over the topmost dynamite box. Squirming as best I could, I picked up a stick of dynamite in my teeth and wiggled to the doorway. It hurt me to get there, as I had to twist and turn over sticks of dynamite and was continually being choked. I discovered that by pulling on the rope that tied my wrists to my ankle with my arms, I could keep it from choking me. I felt sure that as soon as I was out of the chicken house, I could roll to the house with the men. For thirty minutes I lay there with a dynamite stick under my mouth, peering out; then I started the painful process of rolling to the house.

On a technical level, Downard is a good writer; his prose lurches forward with frightening clarity, painting a vivid picture of all his disturbing encounters. The problem is that he never goes beyond mere recitation. He does little to contextualize the various episodes of his life, instead stringing them out one after the other at a breakneck pace, giving the reader no time to catch a breath:

As I approached, a man who must have been near the door threw it open violently. Inside, I could see two other men and a woman. An array of bottles on a table indicated that the men were probably intoxicated. The disarrayed woman, about nineteen or twenty and pretty, seemed sober but had been accorded some rough treatment. Astoundingly, I entered the house, definitely more out of heedless insensibility to the danger than bravery. I noticed three lethal-looking lever-action rifles propped against the west wall. The men were wearing deputy badges, which was not really too unexpected, given the fact that every sort of riff-raff was accorded legal authority back then. Or the badges were costume props that could be purchased for two dollars each from the pawnshops that dotted Bloody Elm Street like open sores. Frightened and not knowing what to do, I blurted out, “Are you men going hunting?”

While I was initially captivated by Downard’s story, I eventually got sick of the nonstop depravity and just skipped through the last third of the book.

The other problem with Carnivals is that it ends suddenly, without building up to any kind of climax or resolution. This isn’t Downard’s fault, seeing as he died before it was finished, but the book comes to a screeching halt with “The Chicken Caper,” another disturbing tale of good ol’ boy anarchy down in Alabama.

The Carnivals of Life and Death has a lot of good points, and if you’re a conspiracy buff, you’ll definitely get a kick out of it even if Downard’s repetitious writing doesn’t appeal to you. At the end of the day, though, this is one you can skip.

Click here to buy The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth.

Read Next: The Smell of Pines: A Long Walk with Death by James Druman

The problem with doing an homage to another book or fictional property is that your work is inherently constrained by the limits of whatever you’re riffing off of. Even if you’re a creative person, you are hemmed in by the restrictions of those who came before you.

And then there’s the matter of the actual quality of whatever you’re paying homage to.

Richard Nixon’s Guide to the Multiverse is a pretty obvious homage to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that massively overrated, unfunny pastiche of goonisms and moldy 70’s era BBC humor. The story, if you can call it that, revolves around a band of adventurers traveling between different dimensions, like Planescape: Torment in a contemporary setting. While I wouldn’t claim that the book is mindblowing, Multiverse is an amusing, lighthearted romp and worth a read.

And when I dismiss the book’s plot, I’m not just being snobby; there really isn’t one. The novel begins with mild, unassuming Minnesotan Elof Malmgren (now there’s a stereotypical Minnesota name if there ever was one) getting pulled into a web of intrigue involving a war between the Prussians and the Tee’say, pissed-off Mormons, a trans-universal coffee monopoly, and more:

Turning onto Otter Avenue, Elof saw his quarry running north, now a quarter mile ahead of him. The horse wasn’t swift, but he was faster than the skinny man trying to run with four very large bags of coffee beans. Half a mile outside of town, Elof had closed the gap to just over twenty yards or so when the man suddenly stopped and started firing his gun. Instead of bullets, intense rays of blue light streamed by Elof, who instantly returned fire with his Colt Peacemaker. Two seconds into the firefight the horse panicked and threw Elof to the ground.

Marty Andrade’s prose is rather basic but conveys the wackiness and implausibility of his world pretty well. Freed from the restrictions of Newtonian physics, he paints a world of ridiculous and amusing contrasts, from the universe that consists of a casino built atop an infinite spire of turtles (vaguely reminding me of Sigil from Planescape) to the concepts of “meta-cars” and “meta-traveling” to the main characters’ obsession with coffee:

“Like what? Gold? There was enough gold and silver in the asteroid belt of your former solar system to make every house, car, building and road on Earth out of the stuff. Diamonds? Shiny pebbles. Fiat currency? Don’t make me laugh. Utility is what creates value for the meta-traveler. Food, meta-vehicles, water, or at least whatever fluid solvent is necessary for continuing your biochemical reactions. Of these, the scarcest is good coffee. It rarely evolves, and only naturally evolved coffee has the right flavor. Only coffee grown in its native environment will please the palate. Few universes have the right cosmological constants and physical laws to even create good coffee. Good coffee only grows in narrow bands of subtropical climates and only at high elevations that aren’t cold. Coffee is portable, dividable, consistent in mass, and quality can be tested with common olfactory senses. Every brew is a little different; the permutations of the coffee experience are endless. For most meta-traveling humanoid species, coffee is consistently satisfying. It is the only true currency.”

The book kicks into high gear when Tricky Dick himself enters the plot. Many of the chapters are also bookended with excerpts from the “real” Richard Nixon’s Guide to the Multiverse, adding context to the nonstop action of the book. Andrade’s dry humor is also a hoot and will sail over your head if you aren’t paying attention.

In fact, I’d argue that in many ways, Andrade’s book is superior to Douglas Adams’, mainly because Andrade deftly avoids annoying geek humor and quips that only make sense to nerdy shut-ins.

Where I’d fault Multiverse is that the pace is too fast. Andrade constantly throws scenarios and events at you, rushing you through the book so quickly that you can’t keep things straight. Despite the length of the book, I managed to breeze through it in a couple days… or at least I would have if I hadn’t felt the need to double back on some of the chapters to make sure I understood everything. Additionally, Andrade would have benefited from developing a more coherent plot instead of imitating Adams’ disconnected storytelling structure.

Still, these issues don’t distract too much from the book. If you’re looking for an amusing, satirical sci-fi novel, Richard Nixon’s Guide to the Multiverse is a pretty good read.

Click here to buy Richard Nixon’s Guide to the Multiverse.

Read Next: Donlak’s Guide to Girls (How to Pick Up) by Robert Donlak

The Weimar Republic is a name that is synonymous with degeneracy. The decade between the end of World War I and the rise of Adolf Hitler played host to some of the most insane bacchanalia since the fall of Rome. The Roaring Twenties had nothing on the end-of-days orgy that was republican Germany.

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber will give you a taste of what this degeneracy was like.

Anita Berber was an actress and dancer who rose to fame in the first half of the 1920’s for her shocking and uninhibited “naked dances,” her torrid affairs with men and women, and her complete lack of decency or shame. Her fall was just as rapid: following the Great Inflation of 1923, Berber’s brand of erotic dance was no longer popular, and she spent the remainder of the decade trying to stay relevant and feed her cocaine addiction before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1928. In spite of Mel Gordon’s overly academic prose, Berber’s story makes for an interesting read.

That’s a far bigger detail than you would think, given the raciness of what The Seven Addictions is about. Gordon takes us not only through Berber’s life, but explains the context in which her brand of decadence rose to prominence. Interwar Germany had seen its culture completely destroyed. The Kaiser had abdicated, Deutschland’s vast colonial empire had been dismantled and a large chunk of its territory seized, and the Versailles treaty had reduced the country to a vassal of Britain and France. A great cultural vacuum had opened up, and Anita Berber and her contemporaries rushed to fill it with sleaze and sex:

Walter fidgeted at the invitation. It was an eerie and disturbing challenge more appropriate for his lust-smitten characters than its real-life neurotic creator. The big-eyed girl kicked off her shoes and waited for his response. The pudgy novelist hesitated, then leaned over to kiss her softly on the neck. Anita sprang to life. In a flash, she shed her dress and sauntered naked to his bedroom. Walter meekly followed. There the child-vixen unbuttoned the writer’s jacket and shirt. She spread her china-white body over the bed and he covered it with a row of kisses. But before the unlikely Lothario sexually embraced Anita, taking the willing 16-year-old’s virginity, she made him promise to bring an armful of flowers to her ballet debut. Walter agreed. The Swiss writer of historical romance fell into the ballerina’s net.

The Seven Addictions takes us from the “Dresden Madonna’s” childhood origins, her initial entry into Berlin’s arts circles, and the scandals she was constantly kicking up. The book also includes a wide variety of racy photos from the various stages of Berber’s career.

Unfortunately, this is where Gordon’s overly cautious approach fails him.

A story like this really has to draw the reader in with violent and energetic prose. Gordon’s consistently detached tone makes it seems as if he was as bored as if he’d been asked to recite names in a phone book. It’s only the sheer weirdness of Anita Berber’s story that kept me engrossed in the book:

As the evening’s petty flirtations turned to suggestive whispers and drunken groping, Anita stood up and enacted a passionate tango with Mia, an attractive strawberry-blonde and the partner of a notorious lesbian named Ellen. While the crowd gathered around the inebriated dancers, Anita methodically palmed the girl’s nipples until the giddy blonde nearly collapsed in orgasmic surrender. Ellen rushed to support her unsteady lover and commanded Anita to sit down. The air crackled with tension and sexual provocation.

Additionally, Gordon takes some bizarre detours from Anita Berber’s story, detracting from the overall narrative. For example, he devotes an entire chapter solely to the exploits of one of her lovers, Sebastian Droste, with whom she terrorized the theater scene in Vienna for a short time. Additionally, the final section of the book is taken up by English translations of some of Berber’s and Droste’s poetry and dances, and frankly, they’re awful.

The Naked Dance loses its allure when you’re reading it on a piece of paper.

Aside from all these issues, though, I was compelled to keep reading. Whatever her faults, Anita Berber was at least interesting: the tales of her run-ins with the Berlin press, her revolving door of lovers, and her self-destructive end make for a good bedtime story. If you’re interested in learning more about the culture of Weimar Germany or you just like tales of sex and sleaze, The Seven Addictions is worth your time.

Click here to buy The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity.

Read Next: Narcissist Bum Fights: Anita Sarkeesian vs. the Basement Dwellers

How exactly do you write an erotic short story collection starring characters who really don’t seem to like having sex?

That’s the conundrum Andy Nowicki faces with This Malignant Mirage. Much like his previous novella Heart Killer, This Malignant Mirage is an erotically-charged work, a collection of short stories revolving around his usual cast of dejected male losers, barren housewives, and teenage girls who are just a teensy bit more mature than their idiot peers. Unlike Heart Killer, where the sex took a backseat to other elements in the plot, This Malignant Mirage shoves eroticism—and the characters’ distaste for it—front and center.

Effectively, this book is an anti-sexual sex story.

It’s also worth reading if you’re a fan of Andy Nowicki or fiction in general. While some aspects of the book are weak, as Nowicki tests the upper limits of his storytelling abilities, This Malignant Mirage shows that he’s willing to venture into new literary waters, bringing his unique sensibility along for the ride.

The first story, “Motel Memento Mori,” establishes the mood of the book pretty well. A tale of a secret tryst between a college professor and his student in a sleazy motel, the story’s prose sets up a motif of death and destruction, as shameful lust and lingering discomfort with the material world collide:

With that last word, “thrust,” he tapped her hip three times, and she, as if by instinct, knew exactly what he wished; feeling a delicious little shiver of anticipation, mingled with a no less urgent rush of nervous apprehension, she strode to the room’s dresser, placed her hands over the surface of the top shelf, and bent over, arching her back, flexing her knees, and sticking her bottom in the air. He lifted her skirt and fingered her inner thighs; she inhaled ardently at the touch of his smooth, dexterous hand, as his finger crept along the border of her panties, by now grown supremely wet with excitement from her lubed-up crotch.

Nobody with a functioning cerebral cortex would ever describe Nowicki’s writing as arousing, but he does a good job of depicting the discomfort his characters have with their lives and actions. This Malignant Mirage is shot through with a decidedly Catholic sensibility, in spirit if not explicitly, doomed people living doomed lives of desperation. I find Nowicki’s use of certain terms to be a little annoying after a while—for example, his insistence on using “maidenhead” as a synonym for “hymen” gets tiresome—but the writing remains strong throughout.

Indeed, This Malignant Mirage has a pyramid-like story structure, each chapter heightening your senses, setting you up for the nuclear bomb at the end. You’ll finish one story, think to yourself, “Jesus, this book can’t get any more fucked up,” and proceed to be proven wrong again. Standouts include “Natalia,” about a spineless husband who is guilted by his wife into having an affair, and “Collette’s Dream Man,” about a Catholic high school affair gone disastrously wrong:

“I’ve never told anyone this before,” he began. “It happened after I got in trouble back at Notre Dame. I had just gotten back home to Savannah and I was feeling, I don’t know, awash with despair. Yes, poor, poor me. I had truly fucked myself good and proper… Blew a promising academic career, and all because I just couldn’t stop feeding my addiction. Too many fresh-faced freshmen girls, and randy hot-to-trot graduate assistants. They wanted me, and I wanted them, and seduction has always been an activity at which I’ve been hideously adept. But it finally caught up with me. Word got around… I’m not sure who tattled on me, but it was probably someone who got jealous. ‘Hell hath no fury,’ and so forth. Anyhow, I was quietly dismissed. Mother and Dad intervened, of course, as they always have whenever I’ve indulged my desperate depravations in the past… They keep praying for me, thinking that somehow, some way, I’ll transform like Saint Augustine, who in his young and licentious days prayed, ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not yet…’

Unfortunately, it’s moments like this where Nowicki’s ordinarily razor-sharp dialogue unravels. This Malignant Mirage features too much monologuing; admittedly not as much as some of the other books I’ve read, but even a little bit of monologuing is a bad thing. Every so often, one of the characters will spit forth a loogie of exposition, which not only sounds completely unnatural, it works against the atmosphere that Nowicki so painstakingly tries to establish. People don’t talk like this in real life.

Additionally, for all its innovation, This Malignant Mirage recycles tropes of Nowicki’s that are seriously starting to get old. “The Rape of the Therapist,” for example, is yet another tale of a therapist/psychiatrist becoming involved with her “sad-eyed young man” of a patient, a theme that Nowicki has already covered in Lost Violent Souls and The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories. It’s not a bad story, but at times This Malignant Mirage feels like the literary equivalent of a remix album, with Nowicki trying to wring every drop out of his hit singles before moving on.

How long can one man play the same song over and over before people get bored?

In pointing out these problems, I don’t want to seem too critical. This Malignant Mirage is a great short story collection, a nice palate-cleanser for those who can’t stand traditional erotica. Nowicki also deserves a great deal of credit for being willing to step outside of his comfort zone; while This Malignant Mirage has stylistic similarities with Heart Killer, the book is a clear jaunt in a new direction. It’s precisely because of this that the creaky old tropes that Nowicki reuses seem even more out of place than usual.

Ultimately though, if Nowicki can write like this, I can guarantee you that his future work is only going to get better.

Click here to buy This Malignant Mirage.

Read Next: Heart Killer by Andy Nowicki

If someone were to write a book The 100 People You Must Meet Before You Die, Trevor Blake would be on the list.

A fixture in underground and alternative publishing for over two decades, Blake’s zine-cum-blog OVO is a repository of heretical thought and just plain weirdness. I had the privilege of meeting him when I lived in Portland; actually describing the experience of hanging out with Trevor is difficult. He’s not a particularly imposing man. His voice is on the soft side. But when he speaks, his thoughts are so concrete and well-articulated that I can’t help but hang on every word.

I’m half-convinced he isn’t even human, but has been sent to examine the creepy, bizarre inhabitants of planet Earth before reporting back to his masters in Dimension X.

Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays is a difficult book, not because it’s hard to understand, but because it gives no leeway to anyone. With surgical wit and wisdom, Trevor deconstructs every pretty lie of modern America, even the pretty lies that he himself is susceptible to. Organized religion and atheism, feminism and patriarchy, anarchism and statism; nothing is off-limits. Like a modern-day Socrates, Trevor Blake chucks dynamite at sacred icons just because, because one spoonful of truth is worth a bucketful of lies.

If you enjoy scorching prose and left-field opinions, Confessions of a Failed Egoist is a necessary addition to your collection.

What sets Trevor apart from his intellectual forbears (H.L. Mencken, Robert Anton Wilson and other anti-collectivist writers) is his willingness to critically examine his own beliefs. The eponymous essay kicks off the book, a logical defenestration of the worldview closest to Trevor’s heart:

Egoism builds a shanty, not a shelter, on the plateau of heresy. Egoism stakes a claim and keeps moving. Most people muddle through the day. A minority seek to rule the muddle. A smaller minority still seek to reform the rulers, and a smaller number seek revolution, and a very small number repudiate the revolution, the reform and the rulers alike. Egoism is in that smallest minority, the imp of the perverse and the bur under the saddle, nobody’s friend and its own worst enemy. Egoism isn’t the boy who laughs and points at the naked emperor, it’s the boy who laughs and points at a naked empire.

This excerpt also captures the delightful prosody of Trevor’s writing. His prose has a whimsical, poetic feel to it, winding through alliteration and developing a meter all its own. It’s worth noting that his writing isn’t as strong in some of the book’s older essays (some of the works in Confessions have been recycled from previous issues of OVO), but the book remains an enjoyable read throughout thanks to Trevor’s dry humor and laconic approach.

Another example: “The first Objectivist I met was in college. Now he’s doing hard time for statutory rape.”

Confessions of a Failed Egoist is organized in what some might think is a haphazard style. While the initial essays have a sensible layout—Trevor includes a review of The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, that long-despised demolisher of libertarian golden calves, as well as the free speech missive “My Crowded Fist Theater Shouting Fire at the End of Your Nose”—some of the essays seem wildly out of place. For example, “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous,” an entertaining profile of Baltimore artist tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, doesn’t seem like it fits. “Infinite Material Universe,” another essay, reads like something out of The Law of One:

The universe is the sum of all the partially overlapping and contradictory regions of space and time. What is impossible in one time and place is common in another time and place. Infinite possibilities includes those possibilities where what is possible in one region and impossible in another will overlap. The marvelous will meet the mundane. Gradually. Suddenly. Just once. Today, tomorrow.

The second half of Confessions is where Trevor truly hits his stride. “Really,” one of my favorite selections, takes a sledgehammer to the pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis that passes for debate today (ex: “If you’re acting like a man you must be a misogynist.”). “Why Should I Speak of Them?” discusses one of Trevor’s past jobs as a used book dealer and the bizarre characters who frequented his shop, from a homeless Nazi to a guy who walked around with an “influencing machine” in his pocket. The crown achievement of the book is “Triumph of the Wilt,” a blistering attack on everyone from socialists to feminists to the idiots on both left and right (though as Trevor points out, one of the crucial differences between the two is that “the left can make a joke, but the right can take one”):

You must never think of a woman as a baby machine, and you must never forget that a woman is a baby machine. Women need public funding to go to college but if they drop out to be mommies, that’s okay too. Women are the same on the job as any man but if they need time off to be mommies, that’s okay too. Put it all together: women need access to all academic fields to gain the specialized knowledge needed for specialized careers involving heavy investment from employers, but if they want to have it all to be mommies, that’s okay too.

What’s the endgame of all this idol destruction? Does there have to be one? The truth is an animal all its own, one that serves no man or ideology, though some of both come close. Everything that mankind touches is tainted, and a nice takedown of the freaks is necessary to keep the social digestive tract working.

That’s what Confessions of a Failed Egoist is: an enema for the mind, with a side of Vicodin to keep the pussies from screaming.

It’s only after you’ve finished Confessions that the seemingly off-topic essays such as “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous” and “So You Want to Meet an Alien?” (about The Skin Horse, a documentary on the sex lives of retards and cripples) make sense. Trevor seeks to celebrate the individual, the person who strives for excellence in a world where mediocrity dominates. A guy like tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE may be a total weirdo, but you can’t deny that he’s unique or that he hasn’t succeeded at his life goals. Yes, egoism might have its issues, just like every other belief system, but the will to succeed and achieve is certainly real.

You just need to get off your ass and do something.

For these reasons, I highly recommend Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays. While you may disagree with it—in fact, it’s all but guaranteed—it’s a book that takes a taser straight to your brain. In a world where upholding pretty lies is a lucrative endeavor, Trevor Blake’s book stands as a ray of sunshine peeking down from the clouds.

Click here to buy Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays.

Read Next: OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia by Trevor Blake

Down Where the Devil Don’t Go is a remarkable achievement: the first fictional work that captures the zeitgeist of the Bush years.

Ah yes, you remember those happy days? The nauseating Baby Boomer leftism of Bill Clinton’s America has been hashed out to death by countless GenX prophets: Jim Goad, Mark Ames, Hollister Kopp, the list goes on. And while Dubya’s America was a continuation of Boomer degeneracy, it was of a decidedly different strain. In contrast to the slap-happy PC Stalinism of the nineties, the oughts were defined by the “silent majority” of right-wing Christian Boomers who thought shoving their heads into the sand would make the reality of America’s decline go away. The sly psychopathy of Clinton gave way to the bombastic stupidity of Bush, a man who sunk the U.S. into two pointless wars and tanked the economy just so he could bribe Latinos into voting for him.

To me, the defining moment of that era’s zeitgeist was when John Ashcroft covered up the exposed breasts of statues in the Department of Justice. Ashcroft, a man so pathetic that he lost reelection to a corpse, hid the statues from view because looking at boobies is sinful, a view that none of the Founding Fathers or traditional leaders before him would have held. No incident better elucidates America’s divorce from reality, a divorce only accentuated by the weepy response to 9/11, the militarization of the police and civil service (TSA, CBP, NSA etc.), and the election of a stuttering community organizer to succeed the smirking chimp.

For a blistering, dark look at this psychosis, read Down Where the Devil Don’t Go.

The latest release from thoughtcrime repository Nine-Banded Books, Paul Bingham’s short story collection reads like a mashup of a Coen brothers action movie with one of Andy Nowicki’s novels (indeed, there’s a glowing quote from Nowicki on the book’s back cover). Interestingly, though, my favorite story was the one that didn’t involve much action: “Population I.” The tale of a pretentious Barton Fink-esque “literary” author, the protagonist struggles with writer’s block and his resentment towards his nymphomaniac roommate Rose (a successful erotic novelist), all the while ignoring the truly interesting but declasse characters around him:

His arms are firm all over, and his skin has a delicate chocolate-brown pallor. We are friends now. Neither of us are homosexuals, but if I were sentenced to the penitentiary I would allow Jamal to fuck me; I would bend over and let him fuck me in exchange for protection and the right to touch his muscled biceps and to let him know that someone other than his mother cares for him.

Bingham’s prose has an understated energy, a slow-moving violence, like a fat guy lumbering over to you and socking you in the jaw. Stylistically, his writing has commonalities with the graphic intensity of Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger, though Bingham’s sensibilities are more cinematic; you can almost visualize the ultraviolence of “What the Dead Men Fear” and “I Feel Alright” happening on the big screen. Additionally, Bingham’s stories lack the Catholic/antinatalist undertones of those writers’ works. In his world, there are no lessons to learn, no transformations to be had, no gold at the end of the rainbow.

Stupid people do stupid things right up until the moment it kills them.

“What the Dead Men Fear” is the portion of Down Where the Devil Don’t Go that will probably receive the most attention. A tale revolving around a slutty, Taylor Swift-esque country singer, the story is teeming with hilarious viciousness at the contemporary country scene (Bingham has stated that he was in part motivated to write it by his hatred of Kenny Chesney) and riveting action:

The scene was tight, drifting, surreal. Anything Goes, said a neon sign. On the stage flanking the bar was Sheldon Anson V at his psychobilly best, backed by the Fucking Band and twisting out Brazil’s favorite song. “Redheaded Fuckslut.” It was his favorite because he hadn’t heard it in some time. It was his favorite because he’d never liked it, because absence made the heart grow fond.

“Protocols of the Learned Elders of Hollywood” is a blistering look at our advertising- and image-centric media. It focuses on Mort Schnellenhammer, a TV executive with a comically Mitt Romney-esque inability to understand the tastes of the people he’s trying to cater to. The story’s theme of dehumanization caused by media exposure reminds me of Network, while Schnellenhammer’s interactions with his misfit Palestinian protege Hasan are absolutely hilarious:

“God,” Hasan rhapsodized, still only dimly aware of Schnellenhammer’s presence, “is great, and Mohammed is an asshole. Look at him. Look at the fuck there on TV speaking bullshit for the CAIR this minute. They talk of Zionist oppression while they kill Christian children and collect the moneys for them, because it is a democracy and we are the minority too minor for anyone to care. God, I hate the fucks. They speak in platitudes and fuck democracy in the ass.“

That’s the closest that Down Where the Devil Don’t Go comes to having a message: we’re all getting—and giving it to each other—in the ass without Vaseline. America is a great big mosh pit of venal retards seeking to exploit each other for stupid and petty reasons. Not only that, our society is so large in scale that no one person can be blamed in anything more than a minor way for the cesspool that it is becoming. It’s just one great big orgy of pointless cruelty, millions of morons adding up to a collective of Infinite Idiocy.

But hey, at least we can still laugh at it.

Bottom line, Down Where the Devil Don’t Go is a blisteringly good debut from Paul Bingham. If this is his first published work, I wonder what he’s going to be putting out in the future.

Click here to buy Down Where the Devil Don’t Go.

Read Next: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

Language is a tricky thing in our leftist world. Not only are leftists obsessed with inventing words out of whole cloth (“transphobia,” “cis,” “rapey”), they are engaged in a constant struggle to alter the definitions of existing words. This subtle warfare is part of why they have been so successful in implementing their program; people support them because they seemingly support things that everyone wants, such as “justice” and “equality.”

As a tongue-in-cheek guide to leftist terminology, Mediocracy is a worthwhile read.

Fabian Tassano is a satirist in the Swiftian bent; his book begins with a tale about a land called “Telluria” descending into leftist degeneracy and failure. “Mediocracy” is Tassano’s term for the social and economic environment fostered by leftism, in which the individual is subsumed into the collective and everything is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator:

In a mediocracy, we are required to think of ourselves as products of society. The concept of innate ability is considered threatening, as it implies an area that society may not be able to control. A simple way of minimising the significance of intrinsic differences between individuals is to stress those aspects of the person common to everyone, e.g. physiology, aging, sex.

To this end, Mediocracy offers up nearly 200 pages worth of satirical definitions, related in Tassano’s clinically comical prose. Each segment is about a page long, consisting of the mediocratic definition of a word contrasted with its real definition, along with quotes from real-world personalities like Bono and Tony Blair to back up Tassano’s explanations:

A mediocracy likes to take pride in its supposed tolerance. But what exactly is it tolerant of? Sexual activities, rudeness, brutality in movies, certain types of crime, resentment of inequality, other cultures if their membership is large enough.

On the other hand, there are things mediocracy tolerates only grudingly if at all: capital accumulation, celibacy, non-egalitarian theories, non-proletarian versions of masculinity, private medicine, business, Christianity, hierarchy, aristocracy.

Mediocracy covers the gamut from “sex” to “tolerance” to “diversity” to “depression” and more, not only explaining how leftist language manipulation distorts reality, but showing the twisted logic that connects all of these points. Tassano shows that the obscurantism of the left is a feature, not a bug; only by mutilating concepts such as “society” and “culture” can the left survive and thrive in our world. Indeed, he closes the book out with a quote from Orwell’s 1984 concerning Newspeak and thoughtcrime.

I don’t know if Tassano considers himself a reactionary, but his book makes a fine addition to the neoreaction reading list.

My problems with Mediocracy are two. One, Tassano doesn’t go into quite enough detail to fully flesh out the logic of mediocracy, instead counting on the reader to fill in the blanks. While this is fine for those of us immersed in reactionary thought, Mediocracy is a bad book for beginners as it will leave them scratching their heads. Two, a number of the definitions, such as “sacking,” seem like filler and probably could have been cut out.

Aside from these points though, Mediocracy is an amusing and illuminating book explaining just how leftists distort reality and confuse us all.

Click here to buy Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture.

Read Next: Brains & Brawn: A 30-Day Challenge by Robert Koch

What is the nature of beauty?

In many ways, extreme beauty can be terrifying, mainly because beauty is inhuman. The human race is ugly to average; obese Section 8 baby mamas, moralizing Baptists, drugged-up gays plugging each other in public bathrooms. When a man sees a beautiful woman, or a person in general sees a virtuous individual, their instinctive reaction is fear, fear of something that is rare, uncommon, and potentially dangerous.

Man is not a learning animal.

Beauty and the Least, Andy Nowicki’s latest work, is something of a departure from his usual oeuvre. A brief novella with elements of philosophy, it’s about the terror and reverence that beauty inspires in men. While it’s not his best work, Beauty and the Least’s crisp prose and daring approach to its subject matter makes it worth a buy.

On the surface, Beauty begins in familiar waters for Nowicki: the tale of another creepy yet compelling loser. The unnamed protagonist in Beauty is a middle-aged teacher who becomes smitten with a teenage girl, eventually moving to outright stalk her… at which point the book becomes something stranger:

Now it so happened that, with beauty’s poison surging under my skin, inducing a mounting malignancy of madness, I somehow hit upon this notion of name-knowledge as the one thing needful. It was this quest for nominal quarry that set me off on my initial act of fanatical imprudence. Seized by an idea, I carefully trailed my love after she departed from Mass one Sunday. It happened that she and I were both unattended on this day, her boyfriend being out of town for a weekend playoff game in another state; her parents having attended an earlier Mass; my children being home with my wife. It was an opportunity that I seized upon with wild, unthinking eagerness. In the narthex, I lurked unobtrusively, pretending to scrutinize a church bulletin while my target chatted with a few friends; then I peeled away as she made a beeline for her vehicle, a silver Mercedes minivan which surely she shared with her parents. Carefully, keeping my eyes at a level position, I glanced casually at the car’s license plate, excitedly memorizing the swirl of digits and letters as I strode to my own vehicle with excitement charging through my feverishly pounding heart.

Nowicki has a remarkable gift for taking self-pitying, deluded characters and playing them in such a way that their mishaps become high comedy. Beauty’s protagonist praises his obsession in ways that would be dramatic were they not played against the pathetic reality of his life. The book is brief (only about 30 some-odd pages once you exclude publisher Ann Sterzinger’s note at the beginning), yet it hits with you with the gravitas of a longer work, as Nowicki hurls scenarios at you and avoids wasting your time.

On a technical level, Beauty and the Least is on par with Nowicki’s prior works. It’s told from a first-person perspective, hearkening back to his first novel, the epistolary Considering Suicide, though this book is considerably more focused and impactful. Beauty also lacks Nowicki’s typical penchant for disturbing (albeit meaningful) violence, making it a good introduction for those who might be turned off by the more extreme elements of his work:

To be sure, I have long felt drawn to that which is beautiful. Indeed, how can one not do so? Beauty is all that one has in this bleak world; it is our only taste of heaven; yet beauty, far from being life-giving, is instead cruelly toxic. One must somehow take it into one’s heart without actually ingesting it, for absorbing beauty—that is to say, attempting to draw it into your bosom and make it your own—leads to death. I committed this crucial error. I presumed to take beauty into my very being, and now I am dying, for beauty is indeed poison.

While I won’t give away the ending, Beauty and the Least raises some scintillating questions about the nature of beauty. Our intrepid protagonist pursues beauty like a moth drawn to a lamp: mesmerized by it, he doesn’t realize how it can destroy him. Indeed, as his obsession with “Eve” (as he calls his beloved, casting himself into the role of the serpent) consumes every aspect of his life, the protagonist’s impotence gives way to action… of a sort.

In particular, the way the story concludes surprised me, mainly because it wasn’t as… gory as I’ve come to expect from Nowicki.

The one area I’d fault Beauty and the Least in is length. While, as I said, it gets to the point and doesn’t waste your time, in many ways it feels incomplete. When I finished it, I couldn’t help but feel that it would have made a good centerpiece to a collection of thematically linked short stories. That’s just the impression I got, though.

Otherwise, Beauty and the Least is another quality release from Andy Nowicki and definitely worth your time.

Click here to buy Beauty and the Least.

Read Next: Under the Nihil by Andy Nowicki