Book Club From Hell

Brad Kelly, of the Method and Madness podcast, returns to talk about his new book, The Earthen Dark. It's a work of weird fiction set in a sewer. Turns out, this is the perfect place to set such a tale. We talked about why subterranean places are so spooky, the near and far alien of weird fiction, the Glass Bead Game and LLMs, the effect of having children on one's writing, the provenance of imagi...

Utter Goodness is an upcoming short story collection written by Audrey Lee and published by Farthest Heaven. Its thirteen stories are lovely character studies, various faces of that peculiarly American form of cultural maximalism, and each rendered in very lithe prose. There's a kinda extemporising quality to the writing here, if one could extemporise in full paragraphs with foreshadowing and mult...

Chapters VIII, VIII and IX, titled 'Problems of the Arabian Culture', are some of the most fun in all of Spengler's work. In order to properly illuminate Spenglerian concepts like pseudomorphosis, the Pagan Church, the second religiousness, Islam as Magian Civilisation, and more, Gabe and I did what we do best: talk about gaming in Spenglerian terms. Turns out, Croteam's Serious Sam franchise is t...

Andrew Edwards is the author of the novels King of Dogs (2019) and Crowbar (2025), both of which are well worth reading. King of Dogs is a tense action novel, while Crowbar feels like reading Programmed to Kill and watching thirty conspiracy thrillers at the same time during a speed comedown. It's a lot. For this episode, I softballed Andy with simple questions like 'What is the supernatural?' and...

The Regime of the Brother is a book of psychoanalytic feminist theory (particularly leaning on Lacan), explaining why we no longer live in an Oedipal patriarchy, but rather live in a 'sham-Oedipus' regime of the brother. Neo-totemism, the primal hoard, the narcissistic ego as a consequence of failed symbolic castration and, consequently, no entry into the symbolic order. Make sense? Either way, yo...

Farthest Heaven is publishing some of the most exciting poetry and (soon!) fiction around today. I got to talk to the First Consul (an in-house naming convention) of Farthest Heaven, Bill Ballard, about book design, finding great authors, his approach to editing, what it means to run a small press, and a whole lot more. I was really looking forward to this one, Farthest Heaven has only published w...

£, flesh and Femoid are a novella and novel, respectively, written by Aaron Barry and published by McBussy Publishing. Both star poorly-adjusted female leads suffering terminal brainrot, and both are written in a dense, internet-inflected style. In line with both books' preoccupations, this episode we talked about how to write the internet (and what that might even mean), the childish defences of...

Pretty Boys Are Poisonous (2023) is a poetry collection written by actress Megan Fox. Mostly focusing on her troubled relationship with professional machine-gun Colson Baker, the poems are surprisingly adolescent for a (currently) 39-year-old mother of four. To assist me in parsing these poems, Aaron Barry, aka Jasper Ceylon, joined me for this episode. Aaron/Jasper's work: Echolalia Review: https...

Officeparks  is a wonderful poetry collection from Noam Hessler, and yet another winner published by Farthest Heaven. Romantic, funny, and shot through with an easy, natural experimentation, Officeparks is a real treat. I'm trying hard not to be too effusive in my praise, in case people think I'm being disingenuous, but these poems really are that good.  Anyway, Noam and I got to talk about their...

Quan Millz is a maestro of urban fiction. Since 2017, he has self-published over 70 books and (apparently) made more than $500,000 from titles such as Old THOT Next Door, Pastors Eat Pwussy Too, Pregnant by My Gay Stepdaddy, and, the subject of today's episode, This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib. It's a tale of characters who make remarkably poor decisions, and with a tone veering wildly between sla...

Like You Have a Choice is the first short story collection from Ivan Niccolai, the man behind the Notes from the Periphery Substack. We talk about Melbourne's inner-north, wogs, JG Ballard, Mark Fisher, Nick Land, bilingual writing, watering the driveway on Sunday morning (wogs), accelerationism, lemon trees in the back yard (wogs), illegal satellite dishes in the back yard (wogs), and a whole lot...

Eumeswil (1977) is one of Jünger's final novels, and is bizarre, inscrutable, and wonderful. It is, in many ways, a glassy dramatisation of the second volume of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, and also an introduction to Jünger's archetype of the anarch, a series of odd animal metaphors, a collection of fragmented musings by a survivor of two World Wars, and a whole lot more. Helping me...

Grendel VVept is a bizarre book that I can kind of describe as Joycean cosmic horror, but that doesn't cover everything. Traveling through time and prose styles, from today to Renaissance Italy to Sumer to ages even more distant, it's disorienting in a fascinating way. Playing God, the other book of Serret's that I read for this episode, is a tight novella set in 1969 America, with a lot of teenag...

Gabe Sinclair and I talk about the 'Cities and Peoples' section of the second volume of Spengler's The Decline of the West. Cities versus nomads, Spengler's particular definition of race, language, landscape, The Elder Scrolls, and a whole lot more. Gabe on X: @ezrarunnaround Tooky's Mag on X: @tookysmag VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazo...

Sleep Capricorn is an absolutely fantastic short story collection by Jack Norman, to be published soon by  Bonfire Books. Formally inventive with some of the best prose I've read in years, everyone should go get a copy from  www.bonfirebooks.org . Jack on X: @Thingol2006 Jack on Substack: thingol.substack.com VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www....

Cyclomancy: The Secret of Psychic Power Control (1966) is a self-help book written to give readers access to their Primal Autoconscious. Why would someone want access to their Primal Autoconscious? Because they want to have psychic powers. And why would anyone want psychic powers? If the examples given in this book are anything to go by, to make sure your wife isn't cheating on you. I reckon about...

I (Jack) am joined by Gabe of Tooky's Mag to talk about the first three chapters of Spengler's best book: The Decline of the West, volume II. This will hopefully be a semi-regular series where we talk about a few chapters of this book in-depth. Prepare for levels of autism never seen before or since the German Conservative Revolution. Apologies for some choppiness with the audio--my microphone kep...

Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) is Slavoj Žižek talking about 9/11 from a Lacanian, Hegelian, Ljubljana-slobber-in-a-stained-Lenin-T-shirt perspective. For this episode, the wonderful Stephen G Adubato of Cracks in Postmodernity helped me navigate Žižek's discursive 'It feels like I'm reading five books at once' style. Cracks in Postmodernity: https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/ VERY IMPOR...

Tom Will is a poet who has, among other things, written Pale Townie (Apocalypse Confidential, 2023), a 999-line poem which keeps the heroic couplet end rhymes from Pale Fire (Nabokov/Shade) intact, while transforming the story into something quite different, very Tom Will. He's also recently published American Cats Are in a Big Country (2024, Farthest Heaven), a collection of 73 poems, all of whic...

Written in prison in 2002, The System's Neatest Trick is an essay from Kaczynski's Technological Slavery. In it, Kaczynski describes how 'the System' - more or less a technological society - redirects the popular frustration caused by its intrusions into human life, and its subversion of the power process. Where does it redirect this frustration? Into 'activist' causes, both as a pressure-release...

Spare Us Yet is a short-story collection from Lucas Smith, the Editor-in-chief of Bonfire Books. Each story is a new examination of Christian faith, human fallibility and our ways of finding meaning, and are all well worth your time. Bonfire Books: www.bonfirebooks.org Wiseblood Books: www.wisebloodbooks.com/ Lucas' Substack: https://lucassmith.substack.com/ Bonfire Books' Substack: https://bonfir...

Otto Weininger, at the age of 23, published Sex and Character, an idealist justification for not trusting the cosmic Woman, as well as an extended rumination on genius, sexual compatibility, Judaism, memory, ethics, and logic, all upon the background of his sexual fears. Shortly after the book's tepid critical reception, including accusations of plagiarism, Weininger rented a room in the building...

The Everlasting is an excellent short story collection by Australia's favourite son, Lewis Woolston. Many of these stories are inspired by his upbringing among Jehovah's Witnesses in Western Australia, addiction, working bad jobs to stave off poverty, and, despite everything, having the fortitude to find a place of stability. This is Lewis' second time on the show - if you want to hear more from h...

Wake in Fright (1961) is an Australian novel about a pushover Sydney city boy's experiences in Broken Hill-inspired Bundanyabba. Here, he loses all of his money gambling, is constantly drunk, knife fights kangaroos, tries to shoot himself, and much more. To help me gush over this sinister and very funny book, I enlisted the help of Matthew Sini and Matthew Fresta of the lovely Getting Lit podcast....

Financed by her husband as a 10th wedding anniversary present and published in 1897, Irene Iddesleigh is a romance story featuring extremely mercurial characters, bizarre pacing, and the most insane purple prose in existence. Really, The Eye of Argon reads like a physics textbook in comparison. VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Towe...