Literature at the Labs

Inspired by Petit Muse’s own currently-reading post, I figured I’d share some titles from the bedside table, bookbag, and bathroom.

Fangoria – I like horror movies.  it’s a magazine about horror movies.  Lists upcoming theatrical and dvd releases, interviews with cast and crew, sneak-peeks at cool things from upcoming movies (Hellboy gets a new member to his crew in Golden Army!  I know what kinda new sidekick it is, but you gotta check out the latest issue of Fangoria yourself if you are desperate for spoilers).

The Book of the SubGenius.  So you’re weird and feel like the world is your enemy.  that’s BECAUSE IT IS!  there IS a vast conspiracy helmed by space-monsters that feed off the misery of weirdos, misfits, and other thinking beings, and their human minions are unconsciously acting on their horrific directives!  Also, you’re probably descended from yetis, and for thirty bucks you can be an ordained minister in the yeti-weirdo-church (and the Universal Life Church, a more widely-accepted church that many states will recognize ordainment in so you can actually do weddings and stuff)  and get on the list of people to be rescued by the Sex-Goddesses From Planet X in the event of global cataclysm.  also, you are on the guest-list to attend crazy weirdo parties at campgrounds and nightclubs across the globe, where such delights as Accubeating, Sexhurt, Blood-Wrestling (it’s fake blood, FOR NOW!) and Naked Baptisms are performed.  Yeah, you can buy the SubGenius books off amazon, but if you buy them from the Church directly, you A) get autographed versions and B) are supporting the organization by sending money directly to the crew that edits the books and organizes the Mutant Weirdo Tent-Revival End-o-the-world-parties, so it’s going to a good cause.  (JOIN NOW  GO TO X-DAY!  I’LL BE THERE!)

Crash, by JG Ballard.  – i saw the Cronenberg-directed movie adaptation many years ago, as a tender boy of 16 or so, with Elias Koteas as the car-crash-fetishizing Vaughan, not realizing that it was based on this deliciously grotesque dystopian 1973 novel of a world consumed by suburbs, interstates, and industrial facilities or the weird sexual perversions that arise from living in such a depersonalized environment.  I only got partway into it, but I shit you not when I say that Ballard makes Palahniuk look like Mister Rogers.  I stopped partway in because a mysterious woman lent me….

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.  – it’s gritty cyberpunk about a surgically-modified cryptographer!  Then it’s brooding fantasy!  Then it’s fantasy intruding into cyberpunk!  Then it turns out that SOME of the fantasy is in fact a narrative representation of the unconscious mind of the cryptographer!  It’s what would happen if PK Dick wasn’t so gosh-darn brain-fizzled from years of drug abuse and tried to write a Neil Gaiman novel.  I like it.  Mysterious Woman, aka Miss Terious, referenced in the “I suppose these things happen” posts, received World War Z from me as collateral.  haven’t seen her in weeks, though.  maybe she liked the zombiepocalypse better.  I’m on the last couple pages of this, and then I shall dive back into Crash as well as…

Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk.  to be honest, I’m not impressed with it so far.  I’m a couple chapters in, I already know the gist of it from watching a video of palahniuk talking about it before it came out.  Here’s what the author tells us:  In the porn industry, there is a certain degree of competition for most consecutive sex-acts on film, a game of who can do the biggest gang-bang.  A single porn actress has decided to end this ongoing oneupmanship by making a gangbang movie so long that she dies from exhaustion, so explicit in how physically harmful these things are for the star performer that they are banned (giving her the permanent world record), and so desirable due to it’s potentially legendary status as an accidentally-on-purpose snuff movie that her sole heir, an estranged child she never knew, will get fantabulously wealthy from the proceeds.  like Palahniuk’s last couple things, Rant and Haunted, this is told from the perspective of multiple narrators, in this case three of the 600 men hoping to be part of their favorite porn-actresses’ farewell performance.  I’m a few chapters in, and so far it’s just a bunch of palahniuk-style wisecracking about porn.  nothing impressive, but Palahniuk has a way of using someone’s expectations about a book as a trojan horse to slip in little details that add up to a deliciously twisted suprise later on, so while the first chapters are boring, I strongly suspect they are intentionally low-key to make harder-hitting passages later on all the more impressive by comparison.

Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Volumes 1-3.  haven’t opened this one yet.  I bought it so i could read Midnight Meat Train before catching the movie.  this is vintage Barker, the stuff that got people interested enough in him for the early Hellraiser movies to be possible (I don’t know what evil made everything from Hellraiser 4 onwards a reality, but it is truly horrific in the way it tortures Hellraiser fans), the stuff from back before he was writing epic fantasy.  Not that i have anythign against his epic fantasy.  Imagjica was neat.  his first (to my knowledge) foray into the fantastic, “The Thief of Always,” was the first book to captivate me so much I read the whole thing in one sitting.

so what about you, my droogs and freaky darlings?  what’re YOU reading?

Tags: blood, books, Chuck Palahniuk, Clive Barker, Fangoria, Haruki Murakami, horror, J.G. Ballard, magazine, novels, porn, reading, snuff, stoats, subgenius, toaster pastries, toilet, two girls one cup, UFO abduction