Off the Bookshelf

Apocalypse Culture II

Feral House, 468 pp., $18.95 (paper)

Parfrey has been obsessed with "far-reaching and extreme societal tendrils" for years now. Apocalypse Culture II is his roundup of sociopathology for the new millennium. It's all in here: Ted Kaczynski's rambling myth-laden manifesto, tales from the Real Doll factory where they make-to-order lifelike sexual companions, a sympathetic account of a Parisian cannibal's journey from art student to killer and then reviled monster to media clown. Some of it is frankly hilarious. One organization set to bring Jesus back by cloning him from relics insists, "We must have a fertilized Jesus zygote no later than April of 2000." But in most of the articles there is little to laugh at. Nothing is sanitized, and while that's welcome in some of the counterculture rantings against advertising, when it comes to the tales of child pornography, it gets pretty brutal. Regardless, all of it is to be taken with a grain of salt. In form and content, Apocalypse Culture II is prime (if creepy and discomfiting) bathroom reading.