I don’t know. I ask myself that question, too.

But my goal is to have two book discussions online each week and I will probably have to start next week. But I promise more consistent content is coming your way, my beloved readers.

But here is why I failed you yet again, dear friends. I got hammered with a migraine on Friday. I hadn’t had one in years – so long, in fact, that I no longer had any of the medications that help me with them. I think the last time I had one was in 2007? Maybe?

Not sure, but I do know I should have gone to the urgent care center and got one of those shots that stops migraines, but I told myself it had to be just a bad headache. Nope. It was a migraine. So I did what migraine sufferers were forced to do in the past – I slept it off, in a dark, silent room, with only occasional moments of lucidity. Today was the first day since Friday wherein I felt sort of human.

But on the bright side, I didn’t end up puking AND Mr. Oddbooks got lots of peace and quiet this weekend.

So just stick with me a little bit longer, Oddbookers. I still have energy and a ton of books to discuss. I just need to catch up from these lost few days.

Again, in the pipeline, I have Wrath James White, an Edward Gorey biography, Jim Goad’s sex book, writings from insane people, and an autobiography from a Warhol Factory member that made me feel very… unsettled as I read it. Stay tuned, 2012 is totally the year I will suck less!

And it means I want to write here more, even when I don’t have book-related content. I will have book content Monday – a discussion of Wrath James White’s Population Zero – but until I post it, I want to discuss the music/noises I have been obsessed with lately. I’ve been resurrecting old writing of mine, looking at it and seeing if it is worth salvaging. Some of it is and one of the pieces I want to work on is deeply disturbing. When I work on disturbing stories, I cannot listen to my usual music. I find myself listening the most discordant, horrible sounds because my usual tastes may cause me to think of old friends, old activities and I end up reminiscing more than working. I need things that jangle my brain in an anonymous way.

Nothing I share below is new, though some of it is new to me. I’m sharing it anyway because I feel like sharing, dammit. And it’s not like this site is devoted to the latest in media anyway.

I’ve always been very interested in numbers stations. There’s just something very creepy and intense knowing that you may be listening to a coded order for a spy to kill an enemy agent or to take the cyanide pill. Yeah, none of that probably happened, but it’s still unnerving to listen to a form of communication and know you cannot now and will never know what was being communicated. So I’ve been listening to numbers stations recordings.

When that gets tiring, I listen to the Siberian Sounds of Hell. Anyone who has ever listened to Art Bell knows of them. Utter bunk, but distressing noise is distressing noise. I most often listen to a 20 minute loop of this I have on my computer, but this little video gives the “origin story” of these sounds.

And if you were an Art Bell junkie for any length of time, you probably already know of the call Art Bell got from a supposed frantic man who claimed to have worked at Area 51. Tool turned the call into a song called “Faaip De Oiad.” There’s something about this one that sort of messes with me if I listen to it long enough. I have absolutely no idea why.

Then there is this little gem. I found this one several pages back on a Google search for “horrible noise.” I’m not really into noise rock so that may explain why this has been out for two years and I never heard of it until recently. I play this one in a loop for hours as I think. And again, for whatever reason, there is something about this noise that is troubling to me. Much of the this song is distressing, especially the line, “Our bones won’t grow in the dirt.” That was enough on its own to be unsettling, but then I looked up the band and found this video. Now I associate all of the noise surges with screaming and the line about bones has a more sinister meaning. And then there’s the whole story in the video. Is the victim a girl or a boy? How long was he or she held in captivity, because the smeared make-up and dirty socks convey the idea of a lengthy abduction. The madman is in his underwear. Did the victim thwart a sexual attack and flee? Is the camera pan comparing the legs of the running victim and the madman telling us something? How about the manner in which the victim knew the exact place to hit the femoral artery? What does that tell us? Anything? Nothing? In a way this video encapsulates all that is amazing in story-telling – giving enough information to draw us in and leaving out enough so that we are forced to think. This one is gory as hell so if you are easily freaked out by such things, don’t watch.

I never really liked Aphex Twin but this was part of my background noise when writing long before I saw the video.

And then there is the always horrifying “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide. The screaming, oh the screaming. The relentless drum machine. This is madness in the form of a song.

There’s more but six videos for one entry is more than enough, I think. Please share with me the music that helps you work, the music that terrifies you or the music that fills you with nauseated dread.

Author: Mac Tonnies

Type of Book: Non-fiction, speculation, metaphysics, aliens

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it posits a theory that the little green men, I mean grays, are not from outer space but really live on or in Earth and have been deceiving us for years.

Availability: Published by Anomalist Books in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I had planned to do an “Alien Intervention Week” here on IROB, but at some point, I think I realized  that discussing all of the books I read on the topic in the space of one week would kill my spirit for months.  Most of the books spoke of a mindset that challenges my love of the odd, steeped in strange science and spurious proof that if challenged would result in months of unsettling e-mails sent to me from people whose sense reality would make it hard to respond, yet their earnestness would demand a response.  So I am going to spread these books out – it may take me years to discuss the handful I read – so that I can distribute the agony in such a manner that I don’t get emotional cramps every time I need to check my e-mail.

Plus I’m not that “into” aliens as a whole.  Discussing aliens has become not unlike discussing religion for me – a tiresome argument that no one can win. Yet the idea that aliens have intervened in the human race for assorted reasons falls into this category of “fringe” for me so of course I am drawn to it.  So it’s not like I can’t read it even as every bit of my common sense tells me to leave the topic alone.  It’s maddening.

You know how it is.

But this book was a reasonable breath of fresh air where odd theories of aliens meddling with humans beings go.  Mac Tonnies wrote a fascinating book of speculative ideas and  it was disheartening, to say the least, to learn that this interesting book was published posthumously, for Tonnies passed away in 2009 at the age of 34. If you have some time one day, comb through Tonnies’ blog, which I link to above. His ideas on transhumanism are engrossing.

In a way, this book is a perfect example of the sorts of ideas that made me a fan of the odd.  When I was a kid, books on Forteana were not so insistent.  They posited what happened (fish falling from the sky), posited a few potential answers (waterspouts drawing water and fish from streams, or an angry god), and left the reader to wonder and maybe discuss the topic.  Now the book on fish falling from the sky has spurious science to prove a particular point of view, all other points are dismissed, and the discussion becomes entrenched and adversarial.  Tonnies’ book made the fun of Forteana real again.

So Tonnies puts forth the idea that aliens are not from other planets but may be “cryptoterrestrials.”  Humans or near-humans or humanoid-like creatures that live among us.  Those who see little green men or little gray men are not seeing creatures from other planets but instead are seeing creatures that have lived among us on Earth.  Hidden creatures that may or may not be our genetic brethren, but that have nevertheless been with us for millennia.

This is an interesting idea and Tonnies goes about discussing it using a calm erudition that was thrilling (and appalling in a way because he is gone and there will be no more from him).  His prose is very crisp and delivers complex ideas in manageable bites so that readers like me don’t choke.  But I think the best way to show you this book is to give you snippets that resonated with me, examples of an excellent mind and an excellent book.

When you know a book is encouraging you to think, and is not an example of someone making a case for strange beliefs that are antithetical to science and history, it becomes a lot easier to just let your brain go and “what-if.”

This book is more or less an attempt to reconcile little people of myth – fairies, elves, etc. – with a hidden species of humanoids on Earth.  The book does not state, in that irritating manner that makes me despair of most books on this topic, that he had found the real solution, etc.  He was just trying to get us to think about what the experiences of those who have “seen” little people or grays could mean if one was not actively trying to dismiss at all using current standards of rationality.  Here’s the premise of the book:

I propose that at least some accounts of alien visitation can be attributed to a humanoid species indigenous to the Earth, a sister race that has adapted to our numerical superiority by developing a surprisingly robust technology.  The explicitly reproductive overtones that color many encounters suggest that these “indigenous aliens” are imperiled by a malady that has gone uncured throughout the eons we have coexisted.  Driven by a puzzling mixture of hubris and existential desperation, they seek to perpetuate themselves by infusing their gene-pool with human DNA.  While existing at the very margins of ordinary human perception, they have succeeded in realms practically unexplored by known terrestrial science, reinventing themselves at will and helping to orchestrate a misinformation campaign of awe-inspiring scope.

Though Tonnes does not try to invoke “science” and “history” (the oft-repeated insistence that aliens had to have built the Pyramids because no human could have done it never fails to make me sad), he does use reason to explain some of the experiences people have with the psychology that could be behind the way aliens may present themselves.

For one, they pass themselves off as aliens because they know alien interaction claims are dismissed.

By utilizing our innate fascination with interplanetary visitors, the cryptoterrestrials have ensured that any accidental sightings of their craft will be ascribed to the ETH [extraterrestrial hypothesis].  The mainstream media, quick to “debunk” for fear of inciting ridicule, thus ignores credible sightings and inadvertently assists the cryptoterrestrial agenda.  And if by some chance the sighting is undeniable, its cultural connotations will almost certainly relegate it to our collective fortean attic.

And even as I am certainly not a True Believer in aliens, I can sort of see the logic in this but only in so far as we are encouraging discussion and not an advocacy.   But most interesting to me was Tonnies’ discussion about the pageantry behind UFO sightings.

In a related vein, I don’t think it’s accidental that so many UFOs are adorned with mesmerizing flashing lights.  While one can always argue that conspicuous lights indicate the presence of some truly unearthly propulsion system, it’s just as possible that they’re a deliberate (and relatively low-tech) attempt to make a rather ordinary conveyance look unearthly, thereby eliciting the excitement of the very ET enthusiasts whose sightings are certain to be ignored… or, at best, published in some obscure journal or website.

The antagonist in me says that of course it would be relegated to the unimportant or ignored because most UFO sightings are pants but Tonnies had a point. Several, in fact.  The spectacle of the ships makes the mundane seem fantastic and that which is fantastic is dismissed.

Tonnies had an interesting explanation behind SETI’s inability to find a message from ETs:

Maybe one of the reasons we have yet to make irrefutable contact with extraterrestrials is because ET civilizations tend to reach a point of terminal decadence, an erotic cul-de-sac that precludes exploration.  (Compare and contrast such an implosion to the “Singularity” many of us are waiting for with bated breath.)  Sufficiently advanced ETs may while away the millennia in a hedonistic stupor, brains (or their equivalent) melded to pleasure-generating devices.

When statements like this are made outside of a need to “prove” them, they are delightful to a person like me.  Just speculating that the aliens are in their version of some Orgasmatron and have no desire to answer our call or call out to us is fun to think about.  It’s only unsettling when the things ancient peoples painted on jars is used as evidence of the theory.

But then again, one can wonder if SETI really wants us to know if they have had contact with aliens:

In paranoid moments–and there can never be enough of them–I have to wonder if SETI has any real plans to disseminate the discovery of an ET message.  After all, acknowledgment of the signal, while certainly  hard-won vindication for many scientists, could conceivably trigger the end of the search–and with it the end of the SETI Institute as we know it.

This is the ET version of “they have a cure for the common cold, man, but the doctors won’t let them share it!”

I think I liked how he dealt with some of those who want to debunk the experiences of those who have had contact with aliens (for the record, the only story I have read that ever struck me as true was the Travis Walton story).  In this passage he is addressing the notion some hold that the “UFO mystery” is wholly unrelated to the claims of those who think they have encountered aliens:

For the most part, the ufological landscape remains a sparring ground for entrenched notions of of dispassionate ET visitors and equally tenacious claims of popular delusion.  Consequently, we’ve gone about attempting to “debunk” a phenomenon that continues to defy definition.  While many–if not most–well-known abduction narratives are indeed fallible, disquieting findings from emerging (or suppressed) disciplines promise to reframe the debate.

I suspect the truth, if we can find it, will be considerably weirder than “mere” extraterrestrial visitors or sociologically induced fantasy.

I think this is important, the notion that things that have yet to be credibly defined as a unified phenomenon cannot really be debunked as a whole.

(And if it matters, Tonnies tends to believe as I do that many people who report alien interaction may well have been suffering from sleep issues, hypnogogia, and other organic brain altering situations.  Not all, but some.  He also addresses the common forms these interactions take, from the infamous probes to the wide belief that aliens are using us for DNA, involving all kinds of sexual interaction and hybrid babies.)

I rather enjoyed Tonnies’ explanation of why it is that the aliens don’t just show themselves already.

There are a multitude of reasons a visiting civilization would refrain from “landing on the White House lawn,” foremost among them the potentially debilitating effect open contact might wreak on terrestrials.  History shows that relatively advanced sea-faring cultures topple less developed cultures, in part by collapsing defining assumptions and rendering cultural self-hood obsolete.  If we’re of any research value to a visiting civilization then interfering at the macro-sociological level might threaten to destroy years of patient work.

Interesting, but there’s more:

It’s possible that UFOs would like to initiate something like formal contact but are restrained from doing so by the physics of perception, as Whitley Strieber has suggested.  So the pageant in our skies might be an ongoing indoctrination, an attempt to become more substantial (in our universe, at least) so that a more meaningful dialogue can be reached at some indeterminate point in the future.

And this next part was just awesome.  Why?  Because quantum physics gets invoked, which in and of itself sort of renders this sort of speculation little more than Schroedinger’s Alien:

If UFOs are attempting to breach our universe, our ingrained sense of disbelief might be preventing them in some arcane quantum mechanical sense.  Strieber has argued that official denial of the phenomenon is designed to thwart a potential invasion of non-human intelligence, in which case it seems an enduring stalemate has been reached (with occasional power-plays made by both the UFOs and earthly officialdom).  This idea is similar to the citizens of of the Planck Brane in Rudy Rucker’s science fiction epic Frek and the Elixir.  In Rucker’s novel, the inhabitants of a parallel universe must accumulate a critical level of prestige and notoriety or else cease to exist.  The ruling class consists of six individuals who are so well-known and casually accepted by the other Planck Braners that they persist with their individuality intact while their fellows vanish during periodic “renormalization storms”; only when the main characters deride and purposefully ignore them to [sic] they fade into the quantum background.

You need to be really smart or really stoned to groove on the above.  I’m just moderately smart and utterly sober, but there was a time when I found this sort of thing more likely than, say, Jesus rising from the dead.  Rather than invoking quantum mechanics, I just think of it as the “Tinkerbell Syndrome.”  Wish really hard or she’ll die.  Believe really hard and the aliens can finally show themselves.

The only really new thing I picked up from this book was the idea that abduction experiences can be the result of excessive exposure to electromagnetic waves.

If we’re evolving faster to meet the demands of an increasingly compromised planet, I suppose it’s not out of the realm of possibility that our brains are being forced to adapt to the ubiquitous electromagnetic fog spawned by the telecommunications industry.  Maybe some UFOs are a way our minds have developed to make sense of the onslaught of radio and microwave radiation that permeates modern culture.  Radio inundation might be ripping holes in the collective unconscious, leaving conspicuous voids to be filled.

This is all very “woo,” to be sure, but there’s more:

Albert Budden has speculated along similar lines; he describes “abductions” as the psyche’s way of  maintaining identity when faced with acute allergic distress.  I’m actually quite interested in the esoteric neurological effects of EM exposure.

Of course anyone who has watched one of those ghost hunter shows knows that electromagnetic waves can cause paranormal-like activity, but I had never heard of the idea that abduction tales can be explained via fugue states brought on by allergic responses to electromagnetic waves.  This is all very speculative and, in a way, silly; but in a way, it’s not.  Even the silliest idea in this book is no more than an invitation to think.

As you look at this discussion, you may notice that I paid very little attention to the idea of cryptoterrestrialism.  In fact, it makes up only a small part of the book, as Tonnies explored the way we interact and interpret the idea of aliens of all kinds.  I may be wrong as my sole knowledge of Tonnies comes from this book and parts of his blog, but I get the impression that the cryptoterrestrials were not the real purpose of this book.  The purpose of this book was to lay forth a new interpretation of what we see in the skies and what we see in our nightmares, ideas posited so that we continue the discussion of what is out there and what could be happening.  This book, full of strange ideas that if asserted as truth I would snert at, is a collection of interesting ideas and an exhortation to join the conversation.

It’s been a long while since a book on UFOs or Forteana did not insult my intelligence or force me to believe that which is unbelievable.  This book does not violate science or history to make a spurious assertion.  It does not force the reader to take sides.  It just asks us not to close our minds while thinking of the supernatural, and it does so with eloquence, humor and intelligence.  It is a fine book and a slightly melancholy read knowing it was the last book Tonnies wrote.

But still, even as I did not get as much done in 2011 as I would have liked, I still got enough done to have another end-of-year list. My end-of-the-year lists aren’t “best of” lists. Rather, my list discusses the things I read in 2011 that resonated strongly with me. Good, bad, horrible, normal, weird – this list discusses all I read in 2011 that stayed with me, for whatever reason.

1) 2083 by Anders Behring Breivik
I discussed this monster in four verbose parts. It kicked my ass and continues to do so. It caused the dissolution of a long friendship (I am too liberal, it seems), it caused neckbeards to send me sickening messages regarding feminism (hint: I needed to make them a sandwich), and the articles remain the most-read articles on my site. This surprised me because I am a book blogger, not a political blogger, but after a while it made some sense. As far as I know, Jim Goad and I are the only damn people who read the thing in its entirety. Every discussion I read online about 2083 invariably contains the phrases, “Well, I didn’t read it, but…” or “I only read part of it, but from what I read…” So I suspect just the simple fact that I read the thing ensured some curiosity on the part of people who ordinarily wouldn’t read IROB and accounted for some of the traffic.  It’s a curiosity thing – let’s see the cow with three heads and the dumb chick who read all of Breivik’s manifesto.

But amongst the race-hate and assorted nonsense, I met some very interesting people, and I count in those numbers even those I disagree with. I had a very interesting discussion with Baron Bodissey from Gates of Vienna, an e-mail exchange that, devoid of the repellent posturing I have come to associate with Islamophobia, explained much to me about the mindset of those who associated with Fjordman. But most important to me, I met many people from Norway who were deeply affected by the events of 7/22. Their stories humanized the whole nightmare for me, showing the direct impact of the 1518 pages. It became all too real for me.

In the midst of this, my words were translated into Norwegian, I was referenced a few times on MetaFilter, I was mocked and praised on endless discussion sites (the guys on Reddit think I am verbose, to which I cannot help but say, “No shit, Sherlock!”), and received so many e-mails I am surprised I managed to answer them all. This was the most intense experience of my blogging life.

2. Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin/The Tao Shoplifting Crisis by Canarsie House
Until I dared speak of mass murder in Norway, this review caused the most furor I had experienced online. The book stinks, I stated my case very plainly and with more words than the average Tao Lintern felt comfortable reading, and at the end of it, I wondered if I had stumbled into a cabal of neoists too bored by life even to be able to sneer properly. Many were appalled that I derived an opinion of Lin’s character from the thinly veiled autobiography he published as fiction.  Oh the outrage I received from various people online followed by umpteen e-mails from people stating variations on the theme of, “Holy crap, I hate Tao Lin too but please don’t use my real name if you post this message.” But as terrible as this book was, it should not have been surprising that the experience of talking about it was more important than the experience of reading it.

Then I received a copy of a book containing e-mails between Tao Lin and the author Richard Grayson, who is also a lawyer, as well as being an excellent writer. I have not discussed this book yet and may not because it is very short, but you never know. In this exchange, my assumptions about Lin were more or less affirmed. Yet at the same time, I began to feel a sort of pity for the young man facing court over shoplifting charges and not knowing what to wear, needing to borrow money from a sibling to engage a lawyer, and more or less behaving as if he had no idea of how the world worked around him. It’s hard to reconcile the young man in those e-mails with the jaded asshole in Shoplifting from American Apparel.

3) Population Zero by Wrath James White
I plan to discuss this book on this site and here’s a review spoiler: It’s a very good book. It’s the tale of a vegan social worker who breaks with reality and begins to engage in aggressive population control methods. The characterization is excellent and this is no small feat because slipping into caricatures when dealing with a vegan is par for the course for too many writers. It also engages in some really extreme content without it ever coming across as exploitative.

But aside from loving this book, White’s tale had more punch for me because it proved that on some level my instincts about him were correct. I had first encountered White in the book he wrote with Edward Lee, Teratologist. Any attempt to describe the book must, by law, include the word execrable. I found White’s blog and grew to love his extemporaneous writing and wondered what the hell happened, how did Teratologist happen when he is clearly an interesting and erudite man? On the basis of his blog, I went ahead and read The Book of a Thousand Sins, a collection of short stories I discussed on this site. I didn’t give it a rave review but the strengths of the collection seemed at odds with the hot mess that was Teratologist. The problems in his writing struck me as the sort of things writers work out as they get better, and Population Zero proved that feeling was on the money. This book ensures that I will be reading a lot more of White’s work.

4) In the Eyes of Mr. Fury by Philip Ridley
Another book I plan to discuss here. A hauntingly beautiful book of local legends, family secrets, and confrontation, with deft touches of magical realism. I read this book on a lark, buying it online off my wishlist because the cover was appealing. It took me a long time to read it and when I finally did, it was one of those books that forced me to look up everything Ridley has written because I was appalled I missed out reading him for so long.

5) Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
I plan to discuss this book here as well. This book was a nice, charming read that sort of fell flat for me. I appreciated the cleverness of the pictures and the story itself was sort of interesting but there was a definite lack of tension and the ending was not really an ending. I left it feeling like the book was jadedly setting up a series and therefore the book did not need to end in a substantively clear manner. In the wake of really absorbing young adult books, like the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series, this book was just… flat. Something was missing. I don’t know exactly what it is and it’s been niggling at me. It’s strange that a mediocre book would stay with me this long just because I can’t put my finger on why it’s mediocre, but there you go.

6) Sleeping Beauty III: Memorial Photography: The Children, from the archives of Stanley Burns, MD
Death photography, children… It should be clear why this book haunts me. This book also inspired Mr. Oddbooks to buy me an excellent piece of art for our anniversary. I display it with the book. This might seem morbid to some, but for me it was a perfect gift. Art often inspires connections with books, but it’s not often for me that books inspire connections to art. So that makes that tiny book of dead children all the more important for me, I think.

7) Hunger by Knut Hamson
This is one of the few books I read criticism about before I read it and it’s been a thorn in my side since I read it. My opinions on this book were at odds with the opinions of those who read this book and loved it. Auster, Bukowski, and Bly are likely better judges of the content but I will discuss how I deviated from their ideas when I discuss the book.   I ended up feeling tight in the chest as I read. I wanted to yell at the protagonist, to tell him to just be reasonable, but of course such an artist cannot be reasonable. I had a similar feeling when I first read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I don’t know if closer examination will show any correlations between Lily Bart and Hunger‘s hero, but when my brain feels up to it, I will see if the two have anything in common. This book is definitely odd enough to discuss here, which I will do in the fullness of time.

8. Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini
Mr. Oddbooks got me a relatively inexpensive copy from Italy for my birthday and this book is a mindbend. I made it to the part I call “Weird Insects on Obstacle Course Islands” and had to stop. At times I have a tenuous hold on reality and this book challenged that hold. Honestly, this is a seriously odd book. Once I can finish absorbing all of it, I will discuss it here. This is a relatively expensive book, but you can have a look online. This is one of those books that really needs to be experienced in paper form but ultimately if you can’t shell out anywhere from $100 to $500 for a book, online is better than nothing.

9) The Ends of Our Tethers by Alasdair Gray
Definitely odd, definitely a book I will discuss here eventually, this book is one of those collections that seemed like it was written specifically for me. A character with a nasty skin condition, a clever but dissolute weirdo who gets the better of some teen punks, poets engaging in mind-fucks… This book was crammed with one-liners but was erudite enough in its execution that I did not feel like I was being forced to witness someone else’s cleverness as he showed off with words. This book may be the catalyst for me to start writing again. Experiencing that strange thrill when you read someone whose words show that there is someone on the planet whose mind sort of works like yours is a heady experience.

10) Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue
I was skeptical at first because this book seemed like a “ripped from the headlines” sort of read. Such books can be fun to read but are seldom amazing. This was an exception, which should not have been surprising to me, as I have enjoyed Donoghue in the past. But even though this book seems very much inspired by actual crime and could have been a trashy read, it isn’t. Not close. This book is narrated by Jack, a five-year-old boy who lives in a room with his mother, who gave birth to him after her abductor imprisoned her for years in a small shed. Jack’s acquired language deficits seem strange given he was raised by a mother who spoke to him and read to him often, but that is a small criticism. This book was heartbreaking and gripping. There is a tense scene in the book so tightly written that my pulse accelerated reading it. This book was not strange enough to discuss here, but it is definitely worth a read.

I had a lot of strange stuff happen this year, Tao Lin and Norwegian killers notwithstanding. I managed to piss off a black metal god, as well as an author I really liked and whose work I discussed in depth on my site that predated IROB. I managed to do both without any intent to upset anyone.  Also, this happened. Yet despite the haze of negativity that seemed a part of my online experience in 2011, this was actually a pretty good year. I read less than I wanted but I also managed to add significantly to my book collection, obtaining several rare or expensive books that I had wanted for a long time. I met some very interesting people (Ted the Romanian, Edward Sung, Evil Gringo, Iskwew, Omine, Bad Tara and so many others), and had a chance to start writing for other blogs, and though I did not take advantage of those opportunities the way I should have, perhaps in 2012 I will be more focused.

So let’s all have an excellent year in 2012 and if you feel so inclined, tell me of the books that made an impact on you in 2011. You guys lead me to the best books so don’t be shy or brief.

Author: Amelia Gray

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, flash fiction, bizarro, gently weird

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the stories, if not technically classified as bizarro, are bizarro nonetheless. And when they aren’t bizarro, they are gently weird.  Sometimes outright weird.

Availability: Published by The University of Alabama Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I have a favorable disposition toward women named Amelia. I knew a girl in high school named Amelia Beebe and she was one of the most interesting people in high school, but whitebread suburban high school experiences being what they are, I don’t think she and others realized it. I also have a favorable disposition toward those who love cats and the first entry I saw on Gray’s blog was a discussion of losing a kitty to feline leukemia. We lost a kitty to the dread disease and my heart bled for her, reading that entry.

Lest you think I am going to give this book a favorable review because of my various favorable dispositions, please note that I did not know about the cats before I started writing this review, and already had my opinion about the book pretty well formed. Of course I knew her name is Amelia before I began discussing the book, but since I can find it in myself to detest writers with my own name, her name played into my decision calculus hardly at all.

It is her writing that ensured a rave review. Fanciful, strange, unsettling, oddly sweet, vaguely sickening, amusingly awkward, Gray has a writing style that ensured I went back and reread a couple of stories immediately after finishing the book, just because they were that good.

There isn’t a bad story in this collection, and my innate hypergraphia is taking a nap at the moment, so I will just focus on the best of the bunch.

Let’s begin with “Waste.” This was one of those stories that, as I read it, made me feel like I was going a little insane. It’s a strange piece that I found compelling despite the fact that I find eating pig horrifying. Perhaps I liked the story because Gray’s characters explore the whole, “when does it stop being pig and become pork.” A man who works collecting medical waste from doctors’ offices shares odd culinary experiences with his neighbor, a woman with lovely collarbones who works as a line cook in a vegetarian restaurant. Olive is an exotic foodie, creating culinary experiences out of the strangest meats, making a sickening but sweet sacrifice that Roger may not wholly appreciate but at least his experiences with medical waste gave him the stomach to cope. As a woman who loves to cook, is meat-shy, and given to feeling deep disgust for any body process that would require a medical waste pick-up, it was unusual how much I enjoyed this story. Sometimes I enjoy having my disgust pinged, I guess.

Food horror actually played a significant role in this collection. In “Dinner” a woman finds herself with the unenviable task of eating a plate of hair in order to ensure her relationship continues smoothly, even though no one particularly knows why the plate of hair is on the table or even why it is important. A short, short story, this read more like the retelling of an unsettling dream than a story, a dream I have not had myself yet understood.

This dream-like element to storytelling continues in “A Javelina Story” wherein a hostage negotiator finds himself paired with five javelinas at a hostage scene wherein boy scouts are tied to chairs. The pigs just want to eat, the hostage-taker misinterprets their actions and everyone learns an odd lesson.

Many of the stories are flash fiction, so short that you don’t really process the punch until you feel the bruise on your psyche. Take “Unsolved Mystery.” Very short piece about the investigation into a serial killer with a bonesaw. These are the last two lines:

What I don’t say is, God’s a clever bastard and I do respect him. He’s everywhere.

“Thoughts While Strolling” does what it says on the tin. This story spoke directly to my particular sense of humor.

Jim Hale better train his dog.

That dog runs the perimeter of Hale’s yard, treading the ground until he makes a ditch. Dog says, “Hey, come over here.” When you do, that damn dog gives you a recipe for lemon bars which omits egg yolks and disappoints you sincerely. 

Later in the story:

Frogs croaking.

Turn them over and tickle them, the young boys say to the girls. After much conversing and screeching, one brave girl picks up a slick frog, green as a fig. She flips it over so delicately in her small palm that the boys stop their shoving and feel strange for watching. The girl extends one slender finger and runs it slowly up and down the frog’s exposed belly. When the frog urinates on her, she looks at the boys with loathing. She will later go on to swallow two goldfish alive.

“Diary of the Blockage” made me nervous because I can all too easily see this story happening to me. After a particularly upsetting incident involving a large iron pill, Mr Oddbooks can tell you that I will likely die from a foreign matter lodged, “it seems, between my esophagus and windpipe.” The narrator of the story tries to get the substance to come up but cannot. And much like me, she finds it hard to seek help for her problem:

DAY 2

I did not call the doctor. I went so far as to find my insurance card, but I could not imagine the remember Miss Mosely, well she has had a thing lodged in her throat all within range of anyone with half a mind to be within earshot of the the office window. I feel very sincerely that bodily functions have their place, but why would the toiletries and makeup and personal privacy industries all be such multimillion dollar successes if the place for those bodily functions was in public? To say otherwise is to disrespect culture.

This story was really on the mark for me, a neurotic who is determined to stay well enough that I never need to avail myself of a bedpan, though I did once vomit on one of my cats because I was  slow moving due to leg surgery and had stomach flu. I sense this story may be a pregnancy nightmare, too, for the lump in the throat later takes on a life of its own, in a way. All I know is that it was very important to the paranoid part of me that now takes my evening pills in far smaller clumps.

The best story was “The Darkness.” A penguin and an armadillo meet at a bar. The penguin has Fought the Darkness and can speak of little else, and the armadillo has spread vegetable oil on her shell in an attempt to look pretty and shiny.

“You are a penguin and I am an armadillo,” the armadillo said. “My name is Betsy.”

“That’s a beautiful name,” murmured the penguin, who was more interested in the condensation on his glass. “I fought the darkness.”

“You did not.”

The penguin swiveled his head to look at Betsy. He had very beady eyes.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Ray,” said the penguin,

“That’s a nice name.”

The penguin explains what he means by The Darkness and Betsy really wants to stay on track with flirting, changing the subject, but Ray demands his due.

“I suppose you think I’m some sort of lesser penguin, just because I fought the fucking darkness and tasted my own blood, because I haven’t protected a stupid fucking egg.”

Betsy felt tears welling up. Don’t cry, she said to herself. It would be really stupid to cry at this moment.

“I honor your fight. I did not mean to disrespect you.”

Ray sank back. “It’s no disrespect,” he said. “I’m just a penguin in a bar, drinking my gin out of a fucking highball glass for some reason.”

“I was wondering why they did that,” the armadillo said.

“Doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” said the penguin.

And it really doesn’t make any sense but the story is delightful nonetheless, encapsulating all that is so banal about so much of human interaction in these unlikely beasts as they attempt and perhaps succeed just a little at making some sort of connection. I read this one aloud to Mr. Oddbooks one night, unconsciously slipping into the redneck accent of my youth that I repress as second nature.

This collection was just too wonderful for me. A letter from a woman to her apartment complex complaining about the year’s Christmas decoration contest. One story told the strange tale of a man married to a paring knife and another married to a bag of fish. A man takes up residence in his suitcase, much to the dismay of his girlfriend. Vultures come and loom over an entire town. Bizarre, magical, strange, nauseating stories, all crafted from a mind so focused on my own nightmares and uneasy dreams that I felt myself becoming paranoid at times. Luckily, Gray is such a talented storyteller that her gift was greater than my nervousness and I highly recommend this book to all who find themselves wondering what would happen if one was able to splice Garrison Keillor, Bradley Sands and Raymond Carver into one writing force.

If anything sounds good to you, leave a comment claiming the book(s). Then send me an e-mail at anita at ireadoddbooks dot com with your address. For the love of all that is sane, do not leave your address in the comments. Just claim the book and send me the e-mail and it’s yours.

Here are the books I want to unload on y’all:

Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food by Eric Schlosser CLAIMED

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman CLAIMED

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris CLAIMED

The Almost Moon: A Novel by Alice Sebold CLAIMED

13 Steps Down by Ruth Rendell CLAIMED

All are either new or so close to new that it sort of doesn’t matter.

I’d like to say this will not happen again but we all know it will. Thanks for taking them off my hands.

Author: Whitney Robinson

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir, mental illness, psychiatry

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: In a way it is not odd because psychiatric memoirs are thick on the ground these days. But in a sense this book is very odd because being given an invitation to look into the mind of a person actively suffering from schizophrenia is in and of itself a strange, unsettling experience.

Availability: Published by Process Media in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Just warning you now, dear reader, that this discussion is going to be one of my trademarked Very Long Discussions with Lots of Quotes from the Book, coupled with a very personal reactions to the text. For those who find a 8000 word or so discussion excessive, here is the tl;dr version: This is a very good book written by a very good writer and you should buy it and read it.

I read a lot of mental health and mental illness memoirs and this was the first one I ever considered odd enough to discuss here. I very nearly missed reading it. I had run into a spate of memoirs that left me cold, and had the online acquaintance who recommended the book to me and then sent me a copy offered it two weeks earlier than she did, I would have declined. But just before she discussed the book with me, I had finished a very good, very honest mental illness memoir, Stacy Pershall’s Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl. The offer to read the book came at the right time after the right book.

It would have been a shame to have turned down this book because of the often sorry shelf-company it is forced to share. And I don’t mean to demean the genre because people gets all kinds of help in all kinds of ways that I may find less than helpful. It’s just that lately some of the books I have read wore very thin for me. It seemed like the authors, mostly women, had romanticized their illness. To paraphrase Elizabeth Wurtzel, patron saint of fucked up women of a certain age, they had fallen in love with their illness. The devastation the disease wreaked on their bodies, their education, their relationships – it all was a back story to a fabulous disaster narrative.

Also there is a current theme in mental health studies that posits that mental illnesses, or neurodiversity, are a form of genetic selection for arts, letters and speculative science and therefore celebrate the conditions. I can see the logic. Not only is there a long record of acclaimed people who created great art and propelled science, but as a person with mental illness, I like to think that there is a purpose behind my at times terrible brain chemistry. But I am made uneasy by some of it because even though Van Gogh left behind astonishing paintings and Virginia Woolf left behind masterful prose and John Nash was a great boon to speculative physics, would any of us really want to live their lives? It’s all well and good to see the up side of having appalling brain chemistry, but I often fear that people who are suffering will read such examinations and decide that their affliction should not be treated, should not be seen as a disease that needs to be addressed in order for them to live the best life they can live. As much as I adore Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, and I have no real way of knowing how much his deep depression truly affected his writing, thinking about the sorry end of his life makes it just a little harder to enjoy the beauty and truth of his words. Art that comes from a truly suffering person will always have a pall cast over it.

This book does not engage in the sort of celebration and art uber alles justifications for mental illness that I have encountered as of late. Whitney Robinson’s memoir gets everything right. She shows the wreckage. She shows how mental illness swooped down into her life and changed everything. A natural writer with a near-intimidating intelligence, Robinson tells the story of her illness, the demon that came into her brain, and how she came back out the other side. It is an erudite, honest, and at times darkly humorous look at what it feels like to have your brain behave in ways you have no control over. Schizophrenia is one of the hardest mental illnesses for people to truly understand, and Robinson writes a fascinating book that is never once a freak show. It is never an attempt to glorify conditions that can ransack a person’s life. This book is never a voyeuristic peephole into the at times salacious subject matter of mental illness.

It is a rare invitation to understand.

I don’t suffer from schizophrenia, but a voice in my head landed me in a locked psych ward when the voice told me, in very specific detail, to kill myself. I had been given medication that made me psychotic, and once my mind cleared from the toxic influence, it seemed hard to believe that such a thing had happened to me. Surely I had not heard a voice talking to me, a voice that sounded so much like my own, a voice I could converse with. But it happened. Luckily my husband prevented the worst from happening, and I don’t think such a thing will ever happen to me again.

But even taking all of that into account, I was shocked at how much this book seemed at times like it was speaking directly to me: the weight gain from the medications, the change in how her family regarded her, a sickening suspicion that even as she respected her psychiatrist, he may not know the best way to handle her illness. And though almost all mental health memoirs can make a reader wonder if they have the specific affliction discussed in the book, Robinson’s narrative at times gave me pause because some of my mental glitches showed up in her prose. It was unsettling at times, actually.

Robinson, who is still in her 20s, grew up in rural Massachusetts, a much-loved little girl with atypical parents. Her father she describes as an eco-fascist, her mother an artistic Christian. She was home schooled and lived a relatively solitary existence until her teens. It is hard to know if schizophrenia showed early signs in some of her childhood behaviors, like her tendency to collect small animals into glass jars without regard for their capacity to survive the experience, but I think such attempts to backtrack are ultimately futile. Many children interact oddly with animals when very young and it is something they grow out of. Robinson grew out of it, but the impact of her innocent collections haunted her later, causing her to to think herself a monster in the depths of her illness.

Robinson began attending her freshman year of college just as schizophrenia really began to take hold of her mind. She withdraws into a strange existence that leads to two psychiatric hospitalizations. Robinson’s attempt to make sense of her disease using the intellectual arsenal available to her – philosophy and religion – lead her to call the voice that plagues her mind a demon, though she certainly does not see it as a demonic possession, as some might infer from the title. And she never once shies away from telling hard truths about herself, using a prose style that seems at odds with her youth, but like I said earlier, Robinson is a natural writer.

Robinson was an unusual little girl but she rang utterly true to me in some respects. Here is an early passage in the book. Robinson was at a body of water near her home, capturing some sort of amphibian in a bucket when a man began to speak to her in an alarming manner. Robinson, still a little girl when this happened, somehow sensed the man meant her harm and she instinctively ran from him. But that survival instinct was tempered by a strange affinity to darkness:

Did he want to kill me? A delicious shudder ran through my body. Here was my Dr. Lecter, the closest thing I might ever have. It was late at night, when I found my first love object. My friend asleep beside me on a cot that smelled like cat pee, the television playing out the terrifying and blessed confirmation that I was not alone in seeing the world as I did, full of words like scalpels and jars of eyes and freezers full of human hearts. Sometimes I’d wonder, what if I’d been born into a different body, cast into a different life? What if I’d not been a little girl with golden hair whose mother read her fairy tales? What if I’d been a boy with crooked teeth and a slimy nose, a bastard child no one wanted? What if I’d had an excuse.

That fascination with very bad men, the desire to be both harmed and to be a person who harms is something I am uneasily familiar with. My first love objects were Ted Bundy, whom I saw as a force set to obliterate feminine beauty, and Clint Eastwood, an icy-eyed assassin who meted hard justice. At its core, this fascination with darkness for me was and still is a strange desire to obliterate myself combined with a need to know that if I must, I can do harm. Of course, like the author, I have no excuse to be a person who does harm, which makes the fascination with bad people all the more unsettling.

There were moments, however, when even though I felt a strong kinship to Robinson, her mind showed itself wholly unlike mine. Rather unique, really. These are Robinson’s thoughts as she is getting ready to go out on a first date with her college lab partner:

Don’t get me wrong, I want to form some meaningful connection with the people around me… It’s just that talk across genders forms expectations and bodies are a problem for me. Pale, quivering sacks of blood and bones – they do not compel me to perpetuate the species, or pretend to. Animals have poetry in their shape and motion, but people never really stop looking half-formed, still fetal, even as they begin to decay. There are many words in English for dead bodies, yet none to distinguish one that is specifically alive. I think that’s telling.

I think it might be tempting to file this interesting passage under the tab of “she was becoming ill.” I don’t think that is accurate. What I think this shows is that Robinson would have had a very interesting mind even had she not developed schizophrenia. It is not her illness that makes her sui generis. The illness gave her the topic and focus to write this book but the way she processed being ill is indicative of the mind she had before she fell ill. But the atypical way of looking at the world was there all along, I think. The little girl who captured animals and kept them in jars did so because they had a certain poetry to her and she grew into the woman who linguistically found support for her idea of humans as half-formed. That is the power of this particular narrative – Robinson’s mind never becomes secondary to her disease even as she expresses ideas many would consider odd or strange.

The date does not go as well as Robinson would have hoped, though Scott, the lab partner, as later evidence in the book shows, is clearly smitten with her. Robinson’s conversation over coffee shows her interests to be quite different than those of other people, or at least the very normal, seemingly average boy sitting in front of her.

“The only blood and guts I like are in zombie movies, and I’m pretty sure that stuff is all fake.”

“Actually, it’s probably pig viscera, too. Pigs are physiologically similar to humans. You can even fool the experts sometimes. Like snuff films, you know, where they supposedly kill someone on camera? There have been a lot of fakes, Some were so convincing that the FBI got involved, but they were uncovered as staged in the end. I think it turned out that the blood and guts were mostly from pigs.”

Scott is looking at me oddly. “And you know this how?

“I dunno, some documentary on the Internet? Haven’t you seen it?”

“Actually, no,” he says, and I realize that snuff films are one of those subjects you are supposed to avoid on the first date.

Again, I appreciated how much of Robinson’s mind I got to see reading this book. Because even though this is a mental illness memoir, it is also Robinson’s memoir of being a highly intelligent, awkward girl. It is the awkward, intelligent girl having this conversation, not the demon-plagued young woman. That is what made this memoir so appealing – commonality with this unusual mind, unusual even without illness. As Mr Oddbooks can attest, there are many young women who do not avoid such subject matter on a first date.

It is subtle, how Robinson lets you into her unusual mind and then slowly begins to show you the disease. If you have ever wanted to read clearly what it feels like to have schizophrenia, Robinson will show you. This next passage occurs when the disease is really making itself known to Robinson. Her mother has rousted her from her college apartment to force her to go to the dentist, and the experience she has in the waiting room is horrific. This also shows some of Robinson’s dry and at times dark humor.

I grab an issue of Highlights for Children and take a seat. Inside, I find a garden in which thirteen butterflies are hidden.

Can you find the butterflies?

Can, or will die trying.

But the butterflies begin to take on strange meaning to Robinson as her illness causes her to begin to misperceive her environment.

A shadow passes across the hallway door, gone by the time I look up. Maybe it was my imagination, but the figure that crossed my peripheral vision seemed furtive and distorted. It might have been carrying some kind of sharp instrument. Possibly one with a gleaming metal blade. Something in the room seems to curdle. The receptionist clacks at her keyboard with her back to me. The tapping has an unsettling rhythm, mathematically wrong. I am fairly certain that if she turns around she will have no face. I glance warily down at the magazine. They are liars; there are only twelve butterflies. The last butterfly is a fabrication to make small children go insane. The fish tank gurgles in amusement, a wet, choking sound.

This scene make my skin prickle because I have moments of strange paranoia and begin to perceive things that are not there. I will see strange connections in books to specific events in my life and will become convinced that my husband knew of the links when he gave me the book. When the strange cloud passes, I can see how irrational I was, but in the middle of one of the episodes nothing can convince me otherwise. I’ll develop strange aversions to textures, seeing lunar surfaces on pizzas, recurring faces in brick patterns and sponges, and then it goes away. I read this and could feel the uneasiness and fear Robinson experienced as she realized there may be meaningful pattern to the typing, that the book was deliberately misleading children. That there was a sinister purpose behind it all. And if you have never had moments like this happen in a sober brain, this passage is an excellent step in beginning to understand certain brain misfires.

I have no idea how much of the carelessness and at times deliberate violence Robinson exhibited toward animals was affected by or caused by her mental illness, but I can say her experiences in this regard were uncomfortable to read. As I have mentioned before, I cannot abide cruelty to animals and cannot read about it. But I forced myself to power through it and read sections that upset me because this was not just some attempt at a gross-out. Rather, reading about Robinson’s actions with animals was important to understanding this book and her illness.

In her teens, after watching a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer, Robinson decides to kill a fish. She and a friend had an unspoken competition as to who would obtain the most exotic and pretty betta fish. Her friend had bested her and obtained a lovely fish and full of a strange anger, Robinson decides that if she cannot possess the fish, no one will possess it. She spills a bottle of perfume into the bowl:

The perfume spread through the water in a floral atom bomb cloud, and the fish ricocheted from corner to corner in search of safer waters. After a minute it hung listlessly, fins trailing down in ragged strings. Gradually it began to list to one side until finally it floated on the surface of the water, its lovely fins fanned out like flower petals, now translucent and drained of color. The gills were motionless, dilated and bloodshot, and it soon became clear it was dead.

[...]

Dizzied by a sudden vertigo, it seemed like there were physically two of me in the room and my perspective was trapped between them, a bodiless observer torn between possible selves. One of these creatures was filled with a terrible sadness and the other blazed with savage joy, and I could not have said which one was real.

It seems as if the dark other, the demon that comes to haunt Robinson’s mind, is present, if not understood, long before her diagnosis. As I read this, I recalled once reading about people with forms of OCD who overcompensate because they are certain they are destructive or a killer in disguise. There can be a fine line between those who pour perfume into the fish bowl and those who do all they can to avoid even reading about those who pour perfume into the fish bowl. The voice in her mind brings up over and over all the things that Robinson believes she is – a killer, a torturer, and someone to be feared. Despite her collections of animals in jars and killing the fish, I do not believe Robinson’s schizophrenia fuels cruelty. Rather, I think her fascination with cruelty when twisted by the demonic voice of her illness becomes something far more sinister than it was.

Here’s a passage wherein Robinson did nothing wrong but the disease twists her mind into thinking she is a person capable of doing grave harm. This passage comes from when she babysat some children when she was a teenager. One of the children pretended to be dead and Robinson’s brain went to a place wherein the child was really dead and she was responsible, a dark fantasy of herself as a killer.

The girl who was supposed to be keeping them safe locked herself in the bathroom and confronted a demon that happened to look exactly like herself. She called out for the children to go to bed, and for once they listened. She waited for headlights in the driveway, collected her twenty dollars, and never went back.

It was then that she… that I began to consider the morality of my continued existence. Clearly there was something fundamentally broken in me – in whatever way the brains or souls of Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer were missing some key element, I seemed to have been set down similarly unfinished, a half-formed clay fetish that was animated with the breath of life and the power of speech but not fully human. There were moments when I felt empathy and sorrow and perhaps even love, but they flitted in and out of their own accord – I could not call them up at appropriate times, and in most situations I found inside me only an unsettling blankness, or sometimes the opposite of what I ought to feel. Wires had crossed somewhere, that much was clear.

She contemplates suicide but without meaning to, she finds a salvation of sorts in animals, for they see her by her actions, not the contents of her mind:

It came to me then that as far as this horse was concerned, I was a blank slate. Just one of a dozen teenage girls who rode him in circles each week. I hadn’t yanked on his mouth and now I was possibly going to give him a carrot, so life was good. He didn’t see me as a dangerous carnivore, he didn’t smell the ferment of evil in my blood or psychically sense my black thoughts. His entire concept of me was predicated on how I had treated him so far, a contract extending into indefinite future.

I feared what was going to happen next, that perhaps Robinson was going to harm the horse, but she is not a monster – just a young woman with mental illness:

I finishing untacking the horse, fed him a carrot, curried his sweaty saddle spot, and shut him safely in his stall for the night. I went home and did not shoot myself with my father’s guns. It seemed like I could still feel the horse’s eyes on me, calm and trusting. All of literature’s meditations on redemption might not have convinced me that my soul was salvageable, but in the wordless gaze of an animal who knew not my sins, nor cared of them, I found some sort of peace.

Robinson ends up under the care of a dedicated psychiatrist, and under his care Robinson goes psychotic and slashes her arms. She ends up in a psychiatric ward and feels the same sort of… relief? blankness? that I felt when the drugs began to come in ever increasing dosages and the voice that was mine yet was not mine went away:

To have a drug encamped in one’s brain is not so wrong as having another ego there. It acts with no malice, no free will. I close my eyes and am not so sad to have lost my mind. If I can’t have it, no one should.

This was very interesting to me. Her brain, the fish – her life is a black and white slate of possession. It’s almost too tempting to jump from her desire to possess her mind to her decision to regard the voice symptom of her schizophrenia as a demon. But that’s exactly where my mind went when I read this.

I suspect that in addition to the sheer appeal of Robinson’s prose, I loved this book because it was the first time I think I have read anyone whose hospitalization experiences seemed like mine, or at least mirrored elements of how the experience went down for me.

Though my first instinct is to struggle and flail and shatter things until I am free, I force myself to remain calm, not give them further proof that I’m part of the natural scenery of this milieu. Besides, whatever they’ve given me has possibly had some sort of toxic effect on the… thing. The voice. Don’t give it a persona. The disease of mind.

I swallow the pills.

Yes, I took the pills and they made the voices stop almost immediately, but I was still shaky and afraid. And, yes, this is exactly how I got out of inpatient as quickly as I did. I  realized that normal to those people in charge meant disengaged, quiet, unaffected, and I took enough drugs to fell an elephant and told the psychiatrist I wanted out so I could vote. A brief political conversation followed, she agreed to let me go home as soon as she could arrange the paperwork (voting and civic duty evidently seemed extremely sane to her). I think many of us fake it until we are released.

Robinson has a startling clarity of how she sounds and reacts, an awareness that I had and that I think many would never suspect the deeply mentally ill to possess.

Worse still I’m a biased narrator here, with a vested interest in sounding rational and far more clever than reductionist doctors with Mafia-dark eyes and dark suits worth more than my soul. Maybe I’m not as smooth and logical as I’m trying to sound, maybe my syntax isn’t as crisp as all that and my voice is lost among my words. Maybe I sound like every other frightened mental patient…

I was acutely aware of how I looked and sounded. I don’t like remembering it. It is very dehumanizing to have a sense of your sanity but know there is no way anyone will hear you because you are Mentally Ill.

And just more of the shocking commonality of experiences…

I had thought my release would be momentous, the free world rushing back to greet me as the vault doors open like the hold of a submarine. But once I’m outside, the return of normal context makes me realize how abnormal I feel inside. I had hoped this might be solved with clove cigarettes, poetry, and strolls in a peaceful garden. A civilized nineteenth century rest cure. Not with horse tranquilizers and unspeakable labels that start with schizo.

Once I was out of the hospital I had a brief, charmed existence because I was so happy to be out. But nothing had changed, really, except I was full of chemicals that would later become their own horrible problem to be dealt with, and people all regarded me differently. I too had some sort of belief in the idea of a sedate, Victorian rest, but really the locked ward was a place wherein no one could sleep, constant noise would have made the completely sane edgy and everyone was freaked out as their med doses changed. One of the nurses had told me to look at it like a vacation. Others cooked my meals, so I guess it was a rest in that regard. Sort of…

And here’s the passage that made me worry that these commonalities render me unable to see the whole of this book as others see it but I also know that these common experiences show me the truth of her life in a way that some may miss. This somewhat funny passage as Robinson returns to the hospital for the second time could have come from own hand:

“What are you reading?” asks the nurse, glancing down at the book after I’ve emptied my pockets and relinquished my Swiss Army knife, which I’d forgotten was there.

“Twilight of the Idols,” I tell her.

“My girlfriend said those books are good, but I’m not really into vampires.”

“Neither was Nietzsche, as far as I know.”

The nurse shuffles through my chart. “Are you hallucinating now, Whitney?”

“Um, no…” These admittance conversations are always uncomfortably direct, and one never manages to answer poetically.

“Do you feel like hurting yourself or someone else?”

“No.”

“What’s written on your shoes?”

“Words to live by.”

“I’m afraid I need to take them. The laces.”

“What about them?”

“They could be dangerous.”

“Because they’re long enough to choke someone?”

The nurse doesn’t answer, just waits while I take off my shoes and hand them over.

I hated having to give up my shoe laces. I also had to pull the drawstrings out of my hoodie and my sweatpants. But then again, a girl found a way to pull her shower curtain down and tried to hang herself with it so I can see why they take away all things that can be used as a strangulation device. But as Robinson shows in her memoir, when her roommate tries to kill herself using a CD, there is no way to prevent all the ways people can kill themselves. I had my own Twilight moment, as well. I was reading Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, an historical bibliography of books that have been lost to history. A nurse asked me what the book was about and I told her.

“How do they even know about them if the books were lost?” she asked, with near contempt in her voice.

“Other writers and historians read and referenced the books before they were lost,” I explained.

“Referenced,” she replied, as if the word was somehow a curse word.

Shoe laces and nurses who don’t get our books…

People who know that I often write down “take a shower” on my list of things to do will understand why I so liked this passage explaining life when Robinson is out of the hospital for the second time:

Each day, I write down a series of small tasks to be performed: Buy groceries, make dinner, twenty pushups, fold the laundry. It seems vulgar to break one’s life down into a series of mundane accomplishments – surely everyone of consequence has lived a continuous and poetic existence, no need for daily goal sheets – but it succeeds in filling the hours so that each one passes relatively smoothly into the next, so maybe I have learned something from my Life Skills Training after all.

There is something heady about being a person who just one week/month/year ago was so ill that I had to be in a mental ward and being the person who can now write a list with a pen on paper and cross items out. It seems mundane, or “vulgar” as Robinson puts it, but appealing nonetheless in the face of potential disruption.

And even when there was no commonality of experience, there was Robinson’s astonishing story-telling skills (and the “he” in this passage is the voice, the demon):

In my room, I face the surrounding walls with the intensity of an FBI agent sizing up a group of murder suspects. But the one will not confess its secret, and the others will not capitulate and give up the fourth wall. There is a charge in the air now that tells me he could say something if he wanted to. This, perhaps, should signal me to take another pill, diffuse the potential. But maybe it’s better to have a mind and an adversary than to be empty and alone. It seems to be a question of Which is Worse from those girly magazines Alexis is so fond of. Hair in your food or food in your hair? To burn alive or suffocate in silence? I don’t remember that one in Seventeen.

I did not stay on the sorts of drugs Robinson was put on for very long, but I do know that so many who have prefer not to take them report that it was better to burn alive than suffocate in silence. People who have never ingested anything like Geodon, Risperdal or Clorazil have no idea how much more preferable it is to be completely mad than to be completely numb, unable to think, living mentally in a block of ice. Such people wonder why those who have severe mental conditions stop taking their medications, as if it is some sort of perversity that makes people choose mental illness over the treatment. But it’s indeed because it is better to have a mind than to be empty.

I think Robinson wholly won me over with this next passage because while it may seem like she is engaging in the sort celebration of mental illness that I find worrisome, she isn’t:

They say that mental problems plague philosophers. John Stuart Mills had a nervous breakdown around my age, and Nietzsche spent most of his twilight in an institution. But maybe this isn’t permanent, just an object lesson of a breakdown. Maybe I can still go to one of those old-fashioned asylums where you write in a journal in a walled garden until you are well enough to join the world. And then I’ll become a thinker, a writer, something of value. I’ll justify my existence somehow.

This is not a trainwreck celebration of the artistic side of mental illness. Rather it is the attempt of a young woman in dire mental straits to find some meaning in what is happening to her, an escape hatch wherein she can find purpose despite her illness. I cringe when people tell me I have an artistic personality because what it means is that I have so many strange mental issues that they assume all my creative endeavors are fueled by my mental tics. The truth is that anything I manage to do I manage in spite of my brain chemicals, not because of them. I may know the mental conditions that plague every artist I admire, but I suspect they justified their existences as well, rather than deifying the chemicals that often interrupted their flow, their fire, their talent.

But as I mention several times throughout this discussion, Robinson is a gifted writer, borne from an astonishing intellect. In this passage, she is speaking to her psychiatrist, Dr. Caspian, who is trying very hard to get her the sort of help he think she needs but she uses her intense intellectualism to process what is happening to her in a disturbing way:

“Well, the other day there was an incident that troubled me. While I was sitting in my philosophy lecture, I was overwhelmed by the certainty that I would truly be able to see if and only if I cut out my eyes. Except don’t worry, I’m not quite that far gone. But he likes vivid images and desires to make them actual. It’s an aesthetic thing, he’s hopeless that way. Yet I’m not sure if it was he or my body itself that willed this action so deeply. It felt obligatory, like I had to do it, as opposed to supererogatory, which is just like a nice thing to do. But it wasn’t so much a matter of deciding what is morally right, but an overwhelming knowledge of what I needed to do next, combined with the physical sensation of being choked by some sinister plant. It reminded me of the categorical imperative, which, um, Immanuel Kant developed as a formula to determine right action.”

This passage is important because this is such a fine example of Robinson’s invitation to understand. Her description of her mind as she discusses the philosophical importance behind the voice telling her to cut out her eyes is… Well, it’s unsettling to see such potential for harm made sense of. Or perhaps this won’t make sense to you and it is a sign of how my mind works that this makes perfect sense to me.

During another argument with the well-meaning Dr. Caspian,Whitney demands to label her experience as she sees fit, even as her brain shows how all over the place she is:

“Yeah, I’ve read Occam too, except you probably haven’t. And to be perfectly confessional, neither have I, but that’s beside the point. I get what he was trying to say: Why posit a demon when some faulty wiring will do the trick? But did you ever notice how fond the great minds are of hypothesizing demons? Nietzsche, Descartes, all those physicists. Supposedly they’re just to illustrate, but with so many diverse sightings, might it not be more parsimonious to make them real? All the hypothetical demons existing in some realm of universal truth, drinking their blood-laced wine and playing dice with the universe?

There is such a thin line between when the disease is fueling her intellect and when her intellect is parsing the disease. And I think this is why Dr. Caspian ultimately decides he cannot treat Robinson and refers her to another doctor. There are not many patients who can analyze themselves so clearly and to a doctor who has seen the ravages of the disease, the inability to corral Robinson’s mind in such a way wherein she relinquishes control of her mind had to have been terrifying to him.

I’ve never much cared for Nietzsche but Robinson finds much truth in him:

My demon offers me the world and in return asks only for my soul, that gemlike point of light we imagine lodged in our meat-based hearts, the only thing that’s every really ours to give. And when I offer this, I will be pure, because what is done for love is always done beyond good and evil.

It’s so tempting to argue with this, isn’t it? But if one of the world’s most revered philosophers’ words can so easily be used to describe the bargain in her fractured mind, what exactly is sane and what is not.

Some of the most compelling writing in this book comes when Robinson shows exactly how schizophrenia affects her. Interestingly, this scene happens on the way home from one of the hospital stays, and again, the “he” is the demon, the voice in her head:

On the ride home, the world passing by the window looks like an alien planet. People walking dogs, chasing taxis, striding along with briefcases and self-important airs. Through a tunnel, I see my face reflected in the glass, pale as a cave-dwelling frog with eerily reflective eyes, unreadable even to myself.

What have I done. What can I say? Unless I’m deceived, the girl’s gone gray.

Tell me you do not speak in rhyme now.

No no only when I’m happy. Veryvery happy. Proudly preening on my pretty perch. Prediction is matching up beautifully with the collapse sequence. Barely a trickblur when laid across one another. You’re destined for great things, softsoftsoft as butter.

My head spins with his bright bursts of repetition, helium pitched and unlike anything I have heard from him. Isn’t he angry?

Angry? Certainly not. His voice regains its knife-edge composure.

You came back to me.

What can you even say to something like this when you know it is not fiction?

Robinson shows also the impact the disease has on her family. Holiday gatherings are strange and strained. Her parents seem almost betrayed by her illness, as if it is a referendum on them that their daughter has mental illness. But most of all she shows the strange guilt that comes from realizing that which you cannot control has the potential to harm those around you.

I’m sorry,” I say finally, my eyes still trained on the unicorn fleeing the urban wreckage. Silken and swift and silver they streak, they have galloped through yesterday into next week…

“Sorry for what?” My mother’s eyes search my body for new signs of damage.

I close my eyes. “Everything.”

They have all disappeared to the back of beyond and into the flowering moment of dawn…

“Do you want me to call Dr Caspian?” says my mother, alarmed because I have probably never apologized for anything before. “Do you need to go back to the hospital?”

“No,” I say, taking a few steps back. “I’m fine.”

Buddhists say that certain souls are incarcerated together into families to force each person to confront lessons unlearned in previous lives. I hope my purpose here is not to teach my parents about the pain of attachment, how all things leave us before we are ready to let them go.

That last paragraph broke my heart a little.

Robinson considers her changed relationship with her parents and the world:

The knowledge that I have become a person with whom it is not safe to be alone is like holding some wicked medieval weapon I don’t know how to use, or want to, but can’t set it down. Once you’ve crossed that line of being a danger-to-self-or-others, are you allowed to come back? Is it a painted traffic line you can cross whenever you’ve got the nerve, or does a razor-rimmed fence spring up behind you as soon as you’ve entered the wrong lane.

Here, at least, they give me an excuse for what I’ve become. They say, your brain is broken. These pills, for as long as you take them, will keep you safe. They are vehement: You must take your medication. Your enrollment in the program is contingent on your cooperation. In theory, I agree. Do whatever you must to maintain order. I’ve violated the social contract in the worst possible way, not in action but in mind and in heart. You’ve earned the right to tinker with my chemicals. More to the point, they have made me slow, unimaginative, too literal to be seduced by demons or other creatures of poetry and dreaming. Indeed, I am closer to being an inanimate object than I have ever been in my life.

Being mentally ill and having it manifest as violence against yourself should not be a sign you are dangerous to others, but it is. My roommate at the hospital, upon learning I had attempted suicide (in a particularly bloodless manner, using pills), said, jokingly I think, that she hoped I was not going to hurt her, too. But I eventually rejected the idea that they had the right to continue to experiment in my brain, especially since their experimentation caused the suicide attempt in the first place. Robinson eventually comes to similar conclusions as she exercises her strong will against the demon and engages in therapy that enables her to cope when the unreality of her disease descends upon her. But this passage of how being mentally ill renders a person thing-like, an entity to be controlled rather than a person helped to live, is an important message to those who have never had to make the choice of whether or not they are such a danger to themselves or others that they may have to become a thing to repair the broken societal bonds, bonds that they never meant to break.

But she also shows so clearly why it is she is, at least in her own mind, someone to be feared as a bond-breaker. Take this scene with Scott, the lab partner whom she likes and who likes her. The demon won’t permit her to have a relationship with Scott and reminds her of the worst fears she has about herself.

No, I will not. I will not give in to you. I will grab his hands and kiss him here in the middle of everything. I will fall into his arms as I lose consciousness, and when I wake up, you will be gone.
His eyes are pretty, aren’t they?
They’d look nice in a bottle of formaldehyde.
You could have them to look at whenever
forever
You’re good with a scalpel.
Scott stares at me in alarm as I stumble and claw ineffectually at the base of my throat. I am sure a tentacle of vine is going to burst through my trachea at any moment, like in that movie.

If you know this is what is happening in your brain with a voice that seems like it knows everything about you, how can you really feel safe?

Later Robinson attends church services, and a young priest performs a mild, church prayer sort of exorcism for her. I wondered for a moment if faith was going to save Whitney from her brain, primitive that I can so often be, even as I claim atheism. I genuinely believed for a moment that this might silence the demon.

I stand stupefied before the the stained glass saints, not even pleading. Agnes, holding her lamb, is serene. In my mind, there are lights shining down on a metallic surface and my scalpel is touching a spongy wad of tissue, trembling because I could not separate it from myself in my mind.

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow, he burbles as I relive the perforation again and innumerable times again.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
I never paid enough attention in Sunday school to know whether it’s faith or grace I lack, but I end my stint as a born-again Christian by throwing a piece of baklava against the side of the church. It hits Saint Agnes between the eyes.

But the failure of the tepid exorcism prayer to expel the voice does not mean it is not a demon. Increasingly, I sense that the demonic is too personal to be absorbed into or dealt with using faith.

But there is something to be said for being open to strange or atypical ideas. Robinson attends an alternative health “expo” and views the crystals and amulets and anti-science methodologies on offer, and comes to the following conclusion:

I’ve heard more coherent worldviews expressed in an actual mental hospital, and the Babel of voices surrounding me has the ring of a hundred false prophets crammed into a room that, next weekend, will be full of computer geeks or sadomasochists or aestheticians. I leave for my shamanic healing an hour later with a rose quartz pyramid, a sample of carrot-mangosteen juice, and three books that promise to tell me what this all means, each filtered through their strange, implausible, and yet not perfectly improbable lenses.

I include this passage mainly because I found it amusing and an excellent example of Robinson’s wit and her capacity to see all kinds of truths even as her rational mind finds it strange. Robinson eventually finds a measure of peace with her condition using Eastern medicine and non-traditional therapeutic methods. The girl who asked a priest to exorcise her is the same young woman who explores all avenues available to her, taking a uniquely strong responsibility for her mental health.

Robinson writes a paper about her experiences with schizophrenia and wins first place in a competition, a feat that many would have found impossible for a person with her disease. She is going to be honored in a ceremony and her parents take her shopping for new clothes.

We go out to dinner afterward, to some restaurant with candles melting down the necks of old wine bottles, and little dishes of withered olives on the table. It seems like a fancy sort of place, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to eating from trays. My parents keep telling me how proud they are, but they look perplexed too. I can’t really blame them, because so am I. What was I thinking? I’ve never told anyone, not even Dr. Caspian, some of the things I put in that paper. When my steak comes, it bleeds red juice onto my plate and I hear malicious laughter sizzling in the hot fat. I look down at the knife in my hand, and suddenly I can’t eat a bit. I’ve made a terrible mistake, letting this thing called desire have its way with me. There’s no telling what it will want next, what kinds of dangerous freedoms it will demand.

I cannot imagine the fear she must have felt. To reenter society. To be the girl who, even after having the mettle to write a paper and win an award, still hears malicious laughter from beef fat has to be terrifying. Just another look into her psyche, a short but meaningful look at the brain of a schizophrenic.

Still, that paper is the beginning of better times for Robinson. She manages to find some stable ground and returns to school and sees Scott, the young man who had been so interested in and concerned for her, with a new girlfriend:

I kept my head down as I passed. The world is full of others, after all, and in the end there is only so much we can explain to them when their eyes are so close to ours and so full of reactions, like chemistry sets changing their color and acidity in response to every word. Everything is changing, changing, falling apart, putting itself back together again. Suddenly I’m afraid, and I want to go home. I want to have a disease, to be exempt. If I said I can’t take this, I can never be one of these bright and normal creatures, if I were to collapse and fetally regress and watch the world pass by from a room that still holds too many mementos of childhood, people would understand. It’s shocking how easily everyone accepts excuses from me now. But after all this it just wouldn’t be a very poetic ending, and I don’t know of any better criteria by which I should determine how to live. So in a fairly inconsequential action that nonetheless requires more of me than anything yet, I enter the room and find a seat among my classmates.

Reentering the fray when those around you may know that you are ill is hard. Everyone, even if they are not kind enough to offer you excuses, certainly will not be surprised if you decide to sit life out. People have an idea of what it means to be mentally ill and it has been informed by film, books and other media that paint the most dramatic picture of people who are afflicted. Bipolar girls in mania rushing about in a delicious haze, broken men at the mercy of Nurse Ratched, Angelina Jolie in a New England psychiatric hospital – all images of the disease as it affects people, but no real story of how people deal with their mental illness. We need more memoirs like Robinson’s. We need more people to tell us exactly what mental illness feels like without all the Hollywood trappings that have been assigned to illness. We need more proof that being ill does not mean one cannot learn, live and move about life, that the cure does not mean that the ill suddenly are well, but rather that even the ill can prosper in their own ways as they find their footing and the treatment that gives them the most hope in their own lives. This was one of the best such memoirs I have ever read, with quiet hope, intellectual resolve and a refusal to pander. I cannot recommend it enough.

Less awesome is the sort of malaise I feel since writing it. I’ve had e-mails that, were I the snitching sort, would have given FBI agents a twitch in their loins (I’m only exaggerating a little here…).  A friendship ended (I think) over my liberalism.  And I am still getting e-mails from people who just wanna talk about the pros and cons of mass murder based on race hate.  All of that sucked and the sheer weight of all that hate and misery has stayed with me longer than it should have and it has made me reluctant to blog, to discuss books, or even to read much aside from little snippets here and there online.

I seem to be coming out of it though, and the sort of crankiness borne from being reminded that half the world will always want to kill the other half is lifting a bit. The weather is cooler, my mind is focused on more positive ideas and I’m avoiding politics until the last bit of black rage that came from people telling me that teenagers deserved to die at the hands of a madman subsides. As of this moment, there is not much left and I can feel the desire to discuss books returning.

So come back next week. I plan to discuss a fascinating book about schizophrenia called Demons in the Age of Light by Whitney Robinson. It will be another of my long, quote-laden discussions, and in a way I could not have expected, writing about the book is helping me clear out a lot of the angst writing about Anders Behring Brevik caused.

So until 11/2 or 11/3, give me a comment about what you’ve been reading. Let me know if there are any books you’ve been anticipating. Any other media you’re into? I myself have been caught up in Boardwalk Empire and have been reading Richard “Tin Man” Harrow and Jimmy Darmody fan fiction because that sort of user-generated madness is strangely reassuring to me at the moment. It never does anyone any good to compare lunacy but it helps to know I am not the craziest crazy online.

So share, and tune back in after Halloween.

Authors: Rodney Perkins and Forrest Jackson

Type of Book: Non-fiction, true crime, cults

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It was a look at the Heaven’s Gate suicide when events were still relatively fresh and mass cult suicide is always a bit strange. The book is also listed as a source in the amazing book Strange Creations by Donna Kossy and would be a honorary odd book on that merit alone.

Availability: Published by Pentaradial Press in 1997, you can get a copy here:

Comments: When I began reading this book I thought there would not be much that was new to me. I had already read quite a bit about the Heaven’s Gate cult, those strange, asexual computer geeks in California who killed themselves en masse to be able to board the spacecraft they were sure was traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet. And in a way, I was correct. The book tells very succinctly the story of how two lost souls – Marshall Applewhite and Betty Lu Nettles – met and fed off each other, creating the New Age death cult that became Heaven’s Gate.

All the details that caught the public’s morbid imagination are there. The androgyny of those who took their lives, the voluntary castrations of some of the men, the presence of Nichelle Nichols’ brother among the suicide victims. It all made for very tawdry television.

The case interested me for a couple of reasons, above and beyond the strange details of the suicide and Art Bell phone call that some believe was the genesis for the belief that there was something following behind the Hale-Bopp comet – later interpreted as a space craft by Heaven’s Gate members. By killing themselves, they thought they would meet up on the space craft with Betty Lu Nettles, who had died, and achieve what they called T.E.L.A.H. – The Evolutionary Level Above Human.   All of that was sort of interesting, but strangely bloodless in a way. The way the cult killed themselves was orderly, calm, and without the sort of horror I associate with mass suicides.

And the calm bloodlessness of it all was actually very fascinating to me because despite knowing that few people who are wholly emotionally sound enter into a cultish situation, and even though the cult took its followers from the their families and held their money, the manner in which these people went to their deaths seems to belie any real coercion or desperation. They died because they genuinely believed they would achieve a better life once they were dead.

I’ve never been one to think that people who kill themselves are cowards or that they owe anyone any explanation as to why they take their lives. Of course, I always hope that people who have mental illnesses that make death seem better than life get help, and I hope that people who find themselves in tough situations decide to ride out the situations and see the other side. But I also think that a person whose mind will not clear and whose body will not heal has the right to die without condemnation. I also think that if people have the belief that there lies beyond this world a far better place for them and they want to go there, it’s not unethical to let them go where they want to be.

I was able to maintain the idea that people should be able to go where they want even if it involves death because Heaven’s Gate was not a heavy recruitment cult. In fact, the book shows that at one point the cult shut down recruitment entirely. So if a suicide cult wants to commit suicide and it’s all adults involved who made the decision to die, however twisted that may seem to more well-adjusted people, I had no problem with it.

Except this book shows the cult engaged in some recruitment that I found decidedly unsettling, that gave me some pause and pretty much wiped away any sense that I could look at the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide the same way. Jackson and Perkins, who pulled together a surprising amount of research about the cult very quickly after the suicides (the bodies were found in March of 1997 and this book was released in July of 1997), got their hands on a really creepy recruitment attempt, a chat log wherein a member of the cult was doing his solid best to get a young man to come and work for the web-development company that funded the cult.  This is important because the cult members all lived together and all worked together.   A job offer was invitation to join the cult.

A chat between a cult member called “CandlShot” and an 18-year-old man named Jason Bolton on IRC was, in retrospect, chilling. CandlShot began by offering Jason some help with his web site and after looking at Jason’s site, begins to praise him and offers him some work. Jason thinks CandlShot is thinking about contract work, but alas no… I’ll reproduce parts of the chat log, and it was creepy beyond all measure, from the sort of language CandlShot used to his refusal to take a hint when Jason shoots him down to his refusal to answer any questions Jason poses. Bold parts mine, and all errors in original:

CandlShot: Do you like what you see?

Jason Bolton: Holy crap… the graphics on here alone are worth money…did you go to school for this?

CandlShot: Not exactly. As I was saying, if you’re interested in work, we may be able to accommodate.

Jason Bolton: Where are you located?

CandlShot: California.

Jason Bolton: Whoa..that is kinda far.

CandlShot: Well, if you agreed to work with us, we would like to have you live here with us, but we could accomodate you where you live. Where do you live?

Jason Bolton: In the COLD state of Michigan, ;)

CandlShot: Actually, if you could no relocate, we are looking for associates in that area.

Jason Bolton: Well, I couldn’t relocate.

CandlShot: That is understandable. However, you can still meet our needs. Do you live with family or friends?

CandlShot: Actually, this is a conversation we should be having over the telephone. May I have your number so I may call you?

Jason Bolton: Um…well…no. You know how it is…you don’t give out your number over the Net, besides…I just met you.

CandlShot: You will not succeed unless you trust. Do you trust me enough to give me a set of numbers?

Jason Bolton: No, I’m afraid I don’t. Sorry… how about this…I’ll call you? I couldn’t talk long, but we could get something done.

CandlShot: No, I’m afraid that we cannot really have calls coming at this time.

Jason Bolton: Well, you can e-mail me

CandlShot: That would be feasible. Your address?

Jason Bolton: xxxxxxxx@xxx.net

CandlShot: Thank you. I’m sorry that you are not more trusting. If we have need of you, we will send you mail.

Jason Bolton: I’m trusting, I just know the rules on here.

CandlShot: If you must follow rules..

Jason Bolton: Dude, I don’t have time for this. If you were serious, you’d understand my reluctance. Beside it seems as if you guys do far better work than I.

CandlShot: we would teach you what you would need to know, and make you far more productive than you expect yourself to be.

CandlShot: but I’m afraid I must go. It has been a pleasure. Take care.

Man, this is twitchy stuff. Very twitchy, and all the more so because CandlShot was so robotic. It puts the cult into a different perspective realizing that they did engage in blind recruitment (or relatively blind since CandlShot did at least know Jason was a computer whiz of sorts and might have the sort of mindset that would make people fit into the cult).  CandlShot tried his best to find out about the kid’s home situation, tried to make the kid feel like a hide-bound rule follower for not giving out his number and revealed little about himself in the process.  It’s one thing when a disenfranchised person seeks out a cult. It’s another when a cult is preying on teenagers online.

The book also looks into the Heaven’s Gate cult toward the end, when all the members adopted extreme androgyny and were planning their deaths. The cult’s food habits and movie selection were… also unsettling. This book ended up far creepier than I expected.

This is a short book, 128 pages with the appendices and index, but it offers more than just an overview into the cult and the lives of many who lived and died in the cult. A fast read, it was one of the first books about the cult suicide and in spite of its brevity, it gives a complete look at the cult and for a novice looking into the Heaven’s Gate cult, this book is the best place to start. Highly recommended.