I Read Odd Books

Book: The Carnivals of Life and Death

Author: James Shelby Downard

Type of Book: Conspiracy theory, occult symbology, Masons, utter insanity

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, the whole thing sets off my oddometer, but by the time the young Downard claims he saw Alexander Graham Bell involved in sex magick rituals on Jekyll Island, the odd credentials of this book were no longer in question.

Availability: Published by Feral House in 2006, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh god. This is one of those moments where in I suspect I am in way over my head. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I fear the Masons and loathe the Ku Klux Klan as much as any self-respecting conspiratologist should. I think there is a level of “street theater” in our economic and political processes, a sort of active public facade that, if the veneer were ever pulled away, would show us far more sinister than it would positive. I think the banking industry and the political system in America are all corrupt beyond belief and that those who operate behind the scenes in these systems are people whose interests in no way reflect the well-being of the American people.

That having been said, I need to make it clear I think that “mystical sex circuses,” “witchcraft sex magick orgies,” and “sexathons that aim at nothing more than racial blood mixing” are neither really part of the secrecy of the economic system behind the economic system, nor are they things that most people really need to worry about in the course of their everyday life. I also suspect that I don’t lean towards believing that

…the mythology of Revelations will be followed like Tinker-Toy instructions: a time of tribulation will come first, after which survivors will be made “one” via a post-tribulation “rapture” spawned by the technical sorcery of having their brain pleasure centers titillated magnetically so that all will cum together.

But then again, a lack of genuine belief in the mystical has always been my Achilles heel.

I suspect there may be rabid disagreement with my above assertions and I’m okay with that because I am relatively sure that a very young James Shelby Downard didn’t witness a man called Cock Robin blow Alexander Graham Bell on Jekyll Island. Knowing that James Shelby Downard likely didn’t exist and was, perhaps, the brain child of three different men doesn’t play as much into my declaration of “Pants!” at the notion of Bell, just, you know, having sex magick orgies in front of kids as you might think. This is The Parable of the Whackjobs, and none of this ever happened but was written to illustrate certain points, like mystical toponomy, symbolism of names and an uneasy sense that things are not entirely as they should be. Call me naive if you must.

But whatever you call me, you need to read this book because it is a hoot. Purportedly the autobiography of one James Shelby Downard, who was born in 1913 and died in 1998 before he could finish his tale. He is most famous for his essay, “King/Kill 33: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” I read that monster years ago but had no idea the full body of ideas Downard (or whomever) brought to the table.

This book reads like those Home Alone movies, you know the ones. A precocious kid with questionable parents keeps finding himself in violent situations wherein he bests his attackers. Imagine those movies except Kevin gets stalked and attacked by Freemasons and the Klan and you pretty much have the gist of this book. According to Downard, he was set up as a scapegoat (pharmakos) or symbolic whipping boy, presumably by his criminally negligent and downright weird parents, and spent his entire life standing up for the American Way by thwarting attack after attack after attack and witnessing unspeakable acts while besting the worst evil there is.

I’m not saying Downard doesn’t have interesting ideas. Some fascinating conclusions are drawn in this book and to be completely frank, at times, some of the scattershot in this book that hits the target is a little eerie. But in order to appreciate that you have to read the rest of the book for what it is: a fictional story, a parable, that through extremes tries to show things the author believes are buried from our sight. These are myths for the paranoid, bizarre, over-the-top fables meant to tell a larger story through unbelievable detail. Or Downard was really a plucky young man who foiled that Joe Pesci time and time again. Believe what you want, but it is undeniable that this book is interesting and a fun read.

You get pushed off the deep end fast in this book, starting the very second Adam Parfrey finishes his introduction. Here’s a small taste of the paranoia and weird associations Downard presents in his own introduction:

…I got a glimpse of frightful memories from the long-dead past and, perhaps more importantly, recognized the past for the corpus mysticum that it is. When my mystical past revealed how it had really occurred, it became a horrendous thing cloaked in iniquity, that old now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t that preserves the criminal mysteries of Masonic oz art (M oz art).

Get used to that, those interesting little connections in Downard’s head. He sees connections in ways that will change how you look at things, synchronous connects that, for some, lead to sinister conclusions.

Of course, there is mention of cats, burning them in fact. I bring this up only because I am beginning to despair of all the mentions of dead cats in all the books I read. If I traipse down the primrose path that Downard stomped, I would begin to think there is something connecting all these dead cats mentioned in every damn book I seem to pick up these days. For now I’m just chalking it up to bad luck.

The book begins with young Downard being secured spread-eagle in his bed on Christmas Eve. He was five. He was unpinned in the morning only to find switches and coal in his stocking. We move from there to a shootout with Masons wherein the tot escapes and blows stuff up. His mother made him dress like a girl. There’s the above-mentioned trip to Jekyll Island where he saw all kinds of things and was almost killed in some sort of magick theater ritual. He gets abandoned and lives like a dog until he is reunited with his mother. He is almost killed countless other times. He thwarts the Klan, he finds Million Dollar Gold Certificates the way I find cat hair on my chair. He is nailed to a tree by the Klan but only the size of his small anus prevents him from being sodomized. He liberates a white sex slave. He finds all kinds of bizarre “grave goods” from the tomb of a Mason only to have FDR offer to purchase them and when he gets the check for a million dollars, his parents talk him out of cashing it. His wife turned out to be a mind-controlled sex slave. He explains the symbolic meanings of dunce caps and bull whips. He finds all sorts of parallels between innocuous ideas, discussing usual ringers like Disney and Proctor & Gamble, but also making the average person aware of why it is we should be alarmed if we see a man curse a pig and then touch our water faucet. This is, like, maybe 5% of the insanity in this book. To discuss it in depth would require far more time than I have and more gin than I am willing to drink.

The best part of this book is how through it all, Downard never gets a clue. I mean, after the third time the Masons tried to kill me, after the Klan had nailed me to a tree, after I’d almost been choked to death by Cock Robin while everyone chanted, “Non Person, Non Person,” I’d be suspicious of anyone who asked me to fish around in an old family tomb. After I noticed the tomb had been booby-trapped, I probably wouldn’t have gone on in. Not Downard. If this man existed, we need to find his grave and take some of his bones to have him reconstituted when DNA technology catches up with my imagination. We need more Downards – clever, foolhardy, indestructible, paranoid yet open to adventure. An Army of Downards? Hell, America would be restored to her old glory in no time.

So yeah, read this book. Home Alone combined with Masonic paranoia and more mystical esoterica than you can absorb in one reading. I highly recommend this fine lunacy.

Okay, I have to admit I buy the bulk of my books online. Not only do I find what I am looking for but I also don’t have to deal with disapproving glances from hipper-than-thou clerks who can barely restrain themselves from sighing as they see if they can order David Icke from the distributor. There are locally-owned book stores in Austin, Texas, but I’ve come to dislike BookPeople because they harass me to check my purse every time I go in (I could be naked and carrying a change purse and I’d be asked to check all my belongings at the front desk). Ever since FringeWare died a decade ago, I haven’t had a local store that I really like, a place where I can get my odd topics on without being subject to snerts for displaying a lack of intellectual pretension or apparently being such a crime risk I have to leave my wallet, check book and car keys with a stranger in order to have the privilege of shopping.

So when Mr. Oddbooks discovered that Brave New Books has been operating in Austin for 4 years, I was annoyed that I had not heard of them, but I am also a hermit so it comes as little surprise. Dubious, I agreed to check the place out and am glad I did. In fact, I was so pleased that I may start trying to visit other small book stores around Texas and beyond. Or I may not. I’m a notorious flake. But you never know.

Brave New Books stocks titles that would appeal to those of us with interests in the fringe, lunatic or otherwise, as well as maintaining a nice little DVD section. The store also runs films in a back room, and hosts discussions on relatively diverse topics. On Saturday, July 24, there will be a discussion about the Templars and Christopher Columbus. Leaving my home two weekends in a row seems arduous to me because the only thing I hate worse than leaving my house is leaving my house, but I may well try to attend.

I asked the owner, Harlan Dietrich, to tell me what book in the store he felt I needed to read. Because he is not the indiscriminate conspiracy nut that I am, he recommended The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin. I had heard some buzz around this book but am sometimes mentally lazy, preferring to read easier, more salacious sorts of books (evidenced by the ones I selected on my own and by the bulk of what I review here) and likely would not have purchased it had he not recommended it.

I also purchased:
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black
The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction by Mark Dice
Apocalypse Waiting To Happen, The Plagues That Threaten Us All by Dr. John Coleman
Liquid Conspiracy: JFK, LSD, the CIA, Area 51 and UFOs by George Piccard
And, best of all, the last copy of 9-11 Descent into Tyranny: The New World Order’s Dark Plans to Turn Earth into a Prison Planet by local hero, Alex Jones, whom I sometimes mock, but love nonetheless.

And though I am linking to my Amazon account via some of the above links, I only do so when the book I purchased there is not on Brave New Books’ online ordering system or if I know I got the last copy and linking to it could cause the store some hassle. So you can shop there even if you don’t live in Austin – browse the site’s selection as well as their events section. It appears that this store, unlike some of the other independent book stores in town, is contributing to the community with free lectures and a space to watch films. Though I am laughably the worst person to be encouraging community involvement since my own community mainly involves simply the two levels in my own home, I think such engagement is to be lauded and supported. There was a lively political discussion taking place around the front desk while we were there, and the whole vibe of the place just suited me. I encourage you to shop there.

Book: House of Houses

Author: Kevin L. Donihe

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It is bizarro. And pretty gross. But mostly the former.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2008, it is still in print and you can get a copy here:

Comments: One of the main problems with being a reviewer when you were once a sort-of-writer yourself is that there will come a time when you will read a book in which a writer had an idea similar to something you wrote about and goes in a completely different direction with it. You will read the book and think, “No, that is not right at all. This would have been so much better if I had garnered the huevos to get my own riff on this idea published.” Then you give your head a shake, realize that maybe the ideas were not so similar after all (and in this case, the similarities are superficial at best) and do your best to judge the book on its own merits. Even after coming to my senses, I still had some issues with this book but ultimately, it was a book worth reading, even if I know deep in the core of my blackened, wannabe heart that I could have done it so much better.

The plot of House of Houses, like so many other bizarro books, is not easy to encapsulate, but here’s my attempt: A man who loves his house so much he wants to marry it wakes one day to find that every house on earth has collapsed. He goes in search of an explanation and meets some interesting people, including a Superhero named Tony, and eventually finds himself in House Heaven, where houses go when they die and people have a fairly disgusting role to play in the construction of new homes. I was made genuinely uncomfortable at times, reading the descriptions of the human work camp, and that’s no small feat with a reader as jaded as I am. Carlos eventually finds his beloved house, Helen, but it doesn’t end well. Like a lot of bizarro books, there is some content in this book that is relatively nauseating. This book, more than some other bizarro I have read recently, is a very good combination of the horrific, the foul, the surreal, and the fantastic. And for sensitive readers with aversions to scenes of extreme human degradation, this book walks a fine line between bizarro and extreme horror. There is often something surreal about the violence in bizarro books, but as outrageous as the plot line in this book, the violence and gore had a very real, human feel to it. So squeamish readers, be aware.

Sometimes bizarro harbors weaker writers whose extravagant imaginations make up for a lack of skill, and that isn’t necessarily a criticism. I feel some of the most admired writers, Tolkien for instance, could tell a unique story but were not so amazing technically. This is not the case with Donihe. His words are well-chosen, his plot familiar yet bizarre, and his treatment of characters absorbing and interesting. The transformation of Carlos, from hopeful lover to quest-taker to mentally defeated cog in a brutal machine, is what makes this book so superior to many of the books I have read recently, including mainstream novels. It is no small feat to make a character so sympathetic and understandable in the midst of the chaos Donihe creates. So the bulk of this discussion/review will be me recounting passages in which Donihe makes us understand the mind of a man who loves his home like a wife and who descends into incredible, frightening and violent situations.

Carlos’ reaction to the devastation of all the homes is not only a look into a mind where the non-human becomes anthropomorphized in the saddest way possible, but it is foreshadowing of what is to come for the humans in this novel.

I feel sad for these homes, but only because they are (were?) Helen’s brothers and sisters. I never knew them like I knew her, never got to experience their unique essences. Seeing them in this state is akin to seeing the corpses of human strangers at a mass funeral.

Carlos is mentally and emotionally tied to houses, beyond and above his romantic love for Helen, and Donihe makes that clear in an expected way.

We pass another person trying to build a replacement house out of what appears to be Twinkies, another from tiny twigs or maybe matchsticks. I’m glad the bus does not stop for them. What they’re doing is a mockery, and I hate it (and them).

A mockery is an interesting way to look at the situation of desperate, deranged people trying to make shelter. Of course to a man like Carlos such actions are a mockery of the real wood and brick houses he loves. (Also, I wonder if there is a bizarro trend in using Twinkies inappropriately. Not long ago it was the President wearing a suit made of Twinkies, now someone is using them to build a house.)

After a while in House Heaven, Carlos’ perspective begins to change. After a confrontation with Manhaus, the head honcho in Heaven, Carlos begins to understand that his love of houses is not necessarily returned, that many houses hate humans for their behavior inside their walls. Carlos uses the word “shack” in front of Manhaus only to learn that is is akin to a racial slur, a word that should never be used in front of any sort of dwelling. He eventually escapes from his dreadful job in House Heaven and as he surveys all that is around him, it is startling how quickly his perspective changes after his time in what is for him a living hell.

The cityscape is stunning, but I still hate it. I want to tear the whole place down with my hands, brick by brick, and then defecate on it. It doesn’t matter how many house souls I harm in the process. Even those who haven’t directly harassed me are guilty, even those who hold no grudge against humanity or even sympathize in private with our plight. Fuck them. Let everything in their lives burn.

Except for Helen, of course, whom he is desperate to find in House Heaven, and a plot line I won’t discuss too much because it’s too important a part of the book to spoil. Just know this insane element: Houses in House Heaven resemble creatures from the old show H.R. Puffinstuff. Yeah. Somehow, that was the most distasteful part of the book. Gah, that show affected my id when I was a child.

Carlos ends up back in the house building industry of House Heaven, and it is an emotionally wrenching, tiring job, converting human beings into bricks in a gruesome, mechanized process. He watches the worst sort of depravity until he goes numb.

Shit happens.
And shit continues to happen, but it concerns me less and less until I notice nothing outside myself. The lever is a part of me, totally indistinguishable from flesh. When others sleep, I pull. The foreman likes my performance. I’m his best employee, but, in truth, I don’t give a royal rat’s ass what he thinks. A lever thinks and cares about nothing, you see. It just opens a door, closes it, opens again.
I want to be more like a lever. That’s all I think about.
And so–with a little time and practice–a lever is what I become.

The ending closely mirrors my own story, which sits on my hard-drive, gathering ether-dust, so almost needless to say, I approve. There were some tricks in this book, like the way Donihe handles the fact that everyone can understand and read things in House Heaven – the language and print are actually in another language but the listener/reader is perceiving it in their native language. There were other small problems with the book, personal to me and not worth mentioning. Ultimately, the reason this book is good, better than than sum of some of its parts, is because of how Donihe handles Carlos, his love for Helen, his mental decline. Carlos could be the hero in any number of war stories: the GI who falls in love with a foreign girl, is taken captive, realizes his captors could not care less if he likes them because of entrenched feelings that have nothing to do with him. It’s a story that is not wholly new but in Donihe’s bizarro universe, it feels fresh.

Overall I liked this book and found Donihe’s writing style vivid, engaging, weird and meticulous. I definitely plan to check out more of his work in the future.

I gave a humorously bad review to Sebastian Horsley’s book Dandy in the Underworld.

Someone left a comment on the review that he died of a heroin overdose on June 17. A Google confirmed this as fact.

You know, I never felt bad taking him to task for being a self-absorbed artiste because I know he ultimately knew he was sort of a poseur as well. His memoir is dripping with jabs at himself, a careful balance of grandiosity and self-loathing. He is not a man who would want to be remembered fondly so much as he would just want to be remembered, period. In fact, one of the reasons people think he died accidentally rather than a suicide is because he would never have missed the chance to write a fabulous suicide note.

But a heroin overdose? God dammit. Just… No. No. He needed to die an old man, tottering around in a dusty, baroque mansion, in a velvet waist coat and shoes with buckles on them, hair dyed defiantly black, a slightly more fabulous Quentin Crisp. But he wasn’t just a dandy. He was a dandy in the underworld. So I guess an overdose isn’t so unexpected, really.

But mostly, I just hate the fact that he died in such a clichéd manner.

Dandy Warhols – Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth found on YouClubVideo

I will also never know if he is the person who left this delightfully insane comment on my review. I kind of think it was. I sort of hope it was.