Book Club From Hell

Surprise release! Clive Staples Lewis was a Christian apologist, Oxford don and spanking enthusiast. The Screwtape Letters is one of his many books, an epistolary novel published serially in the (now-defunct) Anglican weekly newspaper The Guardian during the Second World War. The letters are written by Uncle Screwtape, a demon administrator in the bureaucracy of Hell, and addressed to his young ne...

My Miserable Life as an Asian Boy Growing up in America: Humiliation, Forced Feminization, Forced Homosexuality, Castration, Brainwashing, Slavery, Solitary Confinement, Despair (2018) is the (completely factually true) story of author Ling Anderson's life. As an Asian male, Ling explains, his role is to serve white cock as a brainwashed sissy sex slave; this book is an explanation as to how Ling...

Rhymes (2026) is another Tom Will poetry collection from Tom Will, in which he invents the technique of rhyming. It contains plenty of roundels, a form created by Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as triolets, rondels, villanelles, sonnets, englyns, several original translations of French poetry into English, and no limericks. Being a Tom Will collection, there are cats, moons, townies, and some...

Important announcement! Today we say farewell to Levi (BCFH in peace), and welcome new cohost Capitalisimo, who has previously appeared on this show for the Cyclomancy and An Amazing Journey into the Psychotic Mind episodes! Alexander Bogdanov (born Malinovsky) was one of the original members of the Bolshevik Party, eventual opponent of Vladimir Lenin, and active participant in the 1905 Revolution...

Important! Jack has an upcoming novel called 'Audience Capture', out October 2026 through Bonfire Books! Miguel Serrano was a Chilean diplomat who really, really liked Hitler. So much so, in fact, that he spent much of his life communing with Hitler's astral body, promoting Esoteric Hitlerism at home and abroad, travelling the world to find the esoteric hiding places of the Nazis (including Antarc...

William Blake was a poet, artist, and spiritual Yagi antenna, who lived in 18th- and 19th-century England. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (probably written around 1790) is a collection of pictures, poems, aphorisms, and strange prose pieces, all describing Blake's particular religious (that is to say, not Religious) worldview. Joining me is Western Australia's foremost chronicler of men getting w...

Carbon Pages is Daniel Gavilovsky’s new collection of plays. The centrepiece of this book is No Weapon Formed Against You, a semi-historical, semi-speculative impossible-to-stage play about the formation of the National Bolshevik Party by Alexander Dugin, Igor Letov and Eduard Limonov, and all narrated by a forgotten ancient demon. Somehow, Daniel managed to deliver on such a potent concept. In th...

I don't really know what I can tell you about this book that its remarkable title and cover art leave out. Words, as always, ultimately fail to capture what can only be directly experienced. The wonderful Phil Rot joined me to try, and fail, to capture the totality of Ass Goblins. Buy The Moon Is Gay: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6Y2L3WK/ Phil Rot on Substack: https://philrot.substack.com/ VERY IM...

The Stud is an unpublished manuscript by Perth-dwelling life form Liam Blackford. It is set in a near-future, hypernatal Western Australia, and follows the lives of four stylish, elite women and one man in a 'stud house'. That is to say, the man, Luke, is employed by the four women to get them all pregnant as frequently as he can, as well as treating each of them as his queen. A very funny social...

David Moulton wrote an article called 'Towards a Gay Art of Suffering', which was published in Verdurin's collection 'Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual'. In it, he uses the framing of Ivan Illich's concept of suffering, and the works of Péter Nádas, Gean Genet, and more, to talk about all sorts of uncontroversial topics. These topics include the 'state religion' of LGBTQ+, revisionist AIDS...

Limits to Medicine (1975) describes how and why industrialised medicine contributes to an 'iatrogenic society', in which all political grievances are converted into demands for more industrial commodities. Helping me out with this easy and straightforward topic is Lucas Smith, ruling theocrat of Bonfire Books, an excellent small publisher who will be releasing my next novel, Audience Capture , in...

Fedbook is a good book about feds. Less glibly, it's a ton of fun, a gothic espionage thriller about an informant placed in a terror cell, one planning a mass-casualty attack on a university. It's formally inventive, surprising, and, despite the whole mass-shooter thing, it's also very funny. John and I talked about Fedbook, his upcoming book ('Pierce', to be released by Farthest Heaven), Christia...

Prison psychologist Jerry Marzinsky and civil engineer, quantum expert, computer programmer and occasional voice-hearer Sherry Swiney have developed a new theory of schizophrenia. As it happens, the voices one hears are not hallucinations, but instead thoughts inserted by cosmic predators, who feed off the negative energy produced by humans in a state of misery. How did Jerry and Sherry find this...

Morning Glory Milking Farm (2022) is an extremely successful self-published work of 'monster-bait' romantasy. In short, it details the budding relationship between Violet, a human female, and Rourke, a minotaur male, who met at Morning Glory Milking Farm, where Violet is working as a minotaur milking technician. There's a point at which a euphemism becomes more descriptive than that which it seeks...

Emshen joins me this episode to talk about Sacred Heart of the Purple Dawn, a bizarre choose-your-own-adventure novel (kind of) written by a man Emshen once got a Tarot reading from. Starring lesbian vampires, 90s action film comic relief black men, and (most horrifyingly) the Québécois, it was both a much more exhausting and much funnier experience than I was expecting. Sun Cross Publications:  h...

Phil Rot is back! After winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his micronovel The Raft, Phil is gearing up for another Nobel with his newly-released The Moon Is Gay. Besides having maybe the best book title of all time, it is also a brave, timely, elegiac, lyrical, epochal, and moving account of camgirl diplomacy in a fast-paced, competitive, ultra-convenient, AI-enabled Amazon future. It also fea...

I tend to think of phrenology as a 19th-century phenomenon. In 1902, LA Vaught, late to the party, published 'Vaught's Practical Character Reader', a work seeking to (re)popularise phrenology. Mostly charming drawings and advertisements for phrenology ('it's plain to see!' is a commonly used phrase), it's a fun read, albeit one that is so chaotically set out that it's kinda hard to follow. Capital...

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...