John Szpunar’s hefty brick of a book Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine takes you on a gloriously sticky memory lane trip to the golden era of Horror- and Sleaze film fanzines. It’s massive (800 pages!), packed with interviews with writers and editors and creates a longing back to an era of a relentless will- and passion-driven love of movies. As such, an invaluable book. Early 80s up until the internet buds of the early 90s. Postal networking and printed matter. The dawn and heyday of cassette culture and home video. VHS collecting and fanzine devouring. Tape trades and xeroxed xeroxes. Every little scrap of Entartete information and outsider esthetics was regarded as gold and jewels in a mainstream 1980s culture that was tasteless and truly horrible beyond belief. Sleazy diamonds in the rough buried deep in the pastel-colored and Stock-Aitken-Waterman-sounding fields of normality manure. It’s hard to describe what...

Mere frat clubs or real deal-changers on the grand and global scale? Murky conspiracy strategists or beacons of individual liberty? Esoteric dreamers or intelligent architects of human development? The Feral House book Ritual America (by Adam Parfrey & Craig Heimbichner) presents a wonderful and quirky peek into a freemasonic world most of us can only fantasize about. Or… Perhaps you, dear reader, are a mason? Even so, this book is amazing in its abundance of radical and sensational(istic) tidbits and images from a world of secret handshakes and initiatory mindquakes. Perhaps there is an inherent human need to be a part of an order structure, ie a collective with very set rules and regulations that are more concrete than those of society in general? If you have a structure like that, some esoteric bling to dazzle with and promises of something revelatory higher up on the initiatory ladder, you’re in for success. The interesting thing about fraternal orders is that they often claim...