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The 5 Worst Books I Read in 2021


 As 2021 crashes and caterwauls its course to a conclusion, I am obligated as a blogger (blogligated, if you will) to reflect on the year in review. I spent more time than usual in the hospital over the last 12 months, and as a result I had a chance to do even more reading than normal! Regrettably, not every book I dragged myself through was a winner.

In fact, because I am doing research for a forthcoming (by 2025 at the latest) nonfiction book, much of what I read was either directly or tangentially related to fascism and harmful new religious movements / cults! That meant an unusually high proportion of terrible bullshit in my literary diet. Consider this post the bezoar removed from one of my four stomachs by a surgeon-priest. For the sake of picking five and not sending everyone shrieking for the exits, I’ve confined myself to books that *are not overtly fascist.* That’s why, say, Julius Evola’s Handbook for Right-Wing Youth or literally anything by Freidrich Nietzsche aren't addressed here. Without further ado: the five worst books I read this year!

 

5) The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, by Jeff Guinn

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this general survey of the life of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple or its description of the nauseating, murderous nightmare of November 18, 1978. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with it; it passes for a proper, well-researched history. I’d taken extensive notes from Guinn’s book and, essentially, trusted that he had his facts right. His solid prose, occasionally morbid and fascinating descriptive passages, and supposed reference to many sources of information made me believe Guinn’s narrative of Jonestown.

This is unfortunate, because (as I found out by reading other Jonestown books) Guinn gets some very basic facts wrong in an utterly damning fashion. What year did Jones move from the United States to the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana (AKA Jonestown)? Not the year Guinn says! What about the chronology of Peoples Temple activities in Redwood, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in California? Or Jones’ relative success or failure in wriggling his way into Bay Area politics? Guinn fucks that up too! I imagine that Guinn’s justification for these errors would be that he was trying to provide a brief, punchy summary rather than an exhaustive retelling.

Well, fuck you, Jeff Guinn, and the big-ass royalty checks you rode in on!

(NOTE: If you want to learn about this topic, there is still no better book than Tim Reiterman’s Raven. Not only was Reiterman there – he was one of the survivors of the airstrip shooting that killed Congressman Leo Ryan and touched off the massacre – he was also one of the few journalists dedicated to figuring Jones out in the years before the disastrous 1978 Guyana visit by Ryan, Reiterman, and company. It’s a hell of a book, one of the best nonfiction accounts of a tragedy I’ve ever read. Pick it up today.)

 

4) Black Magic in Science by Helena P. Blavatsky

Holy cow can Helena Blavatsky go fuck herself! While I consider the entirety of her oeuvre to be noxious bullshit with ruinous consequences for cultures the world over (seriously – from Adolf Hitler to Shoko Asahara, the now-executed former head of Aum Shinrikyo and the mastermind of the Tokyo Subway sarin attacks, you’ll find Blavatsky’s fingerprints on a baffling number and variety of atrocities).

Not only was Theosophy (her creation) responsible for the mainstreaming of the “secret subterranean society” and “ascended masters” myths, the movement also brought the concept of “Hyperboria” (land of magical white people) to Western thinkers, along with Blavatsky’s appropriative, simplistic, and mangled version of Eastern thought. Scratch a New Age cult – any New Age cult – and Blavatsky is likely to be right there beneath the surface.

Black Magic in Science is one of her shorter and punchier offerings (properly considered, it’s more of a longform essay than a book, but I’ve included it here because who’s going to stop me – you?). It’s exactly the sort of snide, intentionally dumb misunderstanding of science and wholesale rejection of same that you’ll find in the subsequent work of assholes ranging from Aleksandr Dugin to top-notch “channeler of ancient spirits and ascended masters” J.Z. Knight. Thanks a boatload, Helena!

 

3) Pale Horse Rider by Marc Jacobson

It’s rare that I feel a book has betrayed me. I think most readers are familiar with this phenomenon. Unless you are aware that what you’re reading is pure poison (which, to be honest, is the case with most of my reading these days), reading is to some extent an act of trust. You let an author take your hand and lead you where they will. I’m not saying that reading means one must abandon one’s critical faculties; quite the contrary, I think the biggest betrayals writers perpetrate involve keeping most of one’s cards on the table to numb a reader’s critical faculties, and then sneaking a nasty surprise out of one’s sleeve at the last moment.

This can be appropriate and, indeed, effective in fiction. Where you don’t want it is in nonfiction books about extremely controversial or toxic subject matter. This is the case with Marc Jacobson’s execrable Pale Horse Rider, a backhanded hagiography of a violent, physically abusive alcoholic, paranoid fool, and destroyer of American democracy named Milton “William” Cooper. Cooper was a pathological liar, unstable weirdo, and UFO / NWO freak, and the best and most accurate summary of him I can give is this: literally – literally – every trick in Alex Jones’ book was stolen wholesale from Bill Cooper. Jacobson’s book touches glancingly on all of these factors while engaging in standard paranoid Boomer whining about JFK and tiresome postmodern “quid est veritas?” sophistry.

Even so, I didn’t expect Jacobson to more or less accurately describe the life of a monster and then conclude the text with (to paraphrase) “so I guess I’m a fan now and it turns out Bill Cooper was a pretty cool dude.”

 

2) A Rage for Revenge by David Gerrold

Weird story! Before this year, I’d read exactly one book in Gerrold’s “War Against the Chtorr” science fiction series. This was the fourth (and, so far, last) volume, A Season for Slaughter. I read Slaughter for the first and only time when I was, I don’t know, somewhere between age 11 and age 13. When I recently decided to re-read Gerrold as an adult, I spoke to my parents and tried to figure out where the hell I might have acquired Gerrold’s book, and none of us have any idea. It’s as though it just appeared on my shelf one day like a sleeve of poisoned Oreos smuggled into a hated enemy’s pantry.

A Rage for Revenge is the third and (so far) worst book in the tetralogy. Sure, the other volumes are chockablock with casual racism and eye-blistering misogyny. Sure, they’re all very poorly written and rife with thunderously unfunny jokes that you can tell Gerrold thought were absolutely hilarious as he wrote them. They all contain abusive pedantry delivered with the subtlety of a brick to the forehead, and they are all obviously modeled (poorly) on noted fucknut Robert Heinlein’s already-objectionable Starship Troopers. But only Rage for Revenge required an actual disclaimer from the author at the beginning saying “no, really, I’m not trying to brainwash you. No, stop laughing. Seriously, I’m not.”

This fixation on indoctrination is too bad, because if Gerrold stuck to the Cthorran ecological invasion of Earth – what the series claims to be about – he wouldn’t be on this list! His ideas on the potential variety of alien life and even his meditations on consciousness are fairly compelling. Those gems, however, lie buried deep at the bottom of a septic tank of weird, half-Scientology half-Erhard Seminars Training propaganda delivered in a Randian shriek. In fact, in the books this cultish claptrap is often delivered literally at gunpoint, which is not a bad metaphor for the experience of reading David Gerrold.

 

1 The King in Orange by John Michael “Archdruid” Greer

FUCK. THIS. BOOK.

I’m used to reading things I hate. Because I have a masochistic tendency to deeply research and/or engage with ideas I think are dangerous or disgusting, books that I detest vastly outnumber those I enjoy on my average reading list. No doubt this is part of why I am such a jolly and enjoyable fellow! Even so, King in Orange was the “mainstream” book I hated more than any other I read this year. Perhaps in the last five years, but let’s not be hasty.

John Michael Greer is a writer who focuses primarily on Western Esotericism and the occult. He’s written several very decent books on the topic, one or two of which I’ve read. He also self-identifies as a “Druid,” which is dumb as fuck, and he ran a blog called The Archdruid Report, which is even dumber (but hilarious – it sounds like the world’s worst investment newsletter. “The runes say tech stocks will make a comeback!”). Trust me, if I have a problem with Gerald Gardner fabricating an “ancient connection” between his invention, Wicca, and a nonexistent centralized European heathenry of the past, I have a much bigger problem with anyone who claims to be a “Druid,” or even to understand what Druidism was or may have been. It’s like claiming you practice the shamanic religion of Australopithecus africanus; it’s meaningless. A claim like “Druidism” is nothing more than a blank screen onto which you can project your beliefs while claiming an ancient lineage that lends them authenticity. Not only that, in theory such pseudohistory forces many people to think twice before stating the obvious: you’re just making shit up.  This is even the case with antique “high magick” (I prefer “ceremonial” or “traditional” magick as nomenclatures go). Much of Western Esotericism and occultism was manufactured wholesale and then fraudulently attributed after the fact to some ancient source, usually appropriated from Judaism. This was, mind you, while these same Westerners were doing everything in their power to make life for Jews impossible and miserable. For more about that, click here.

Let’s leave all of that aside. King in Orange purports to be an exploration of (as the subtitle puts it) “the magical and occult roots of political power.” Sorry, my druidic little friend, but that book is actually called Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen and was written by Gary Lachman, a much more talented and well-read researcher of the subject than Greer. Gary was also the first bass player for Blondie! The title of King in Orange comes from the fact that John Michael Greer is a Trump supporter. He claims that his book examines the role magick (in particular, chaos magick) played in right-wing netroots support for Trump in 2016. Sorry again, friend, but that book is also by Gary Lachman, and is called Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump! In fact, I’ll touch on Dark Star in my “Best 5 Books” post tomorrow!

Greer’s analysis of American politics is intentionally obnoxious, glib, and facile. He starts from a promising enough premise: the idea that class analysis is missing from most examinations of the Trump phenomenon. Greer then demonstrates the most warped misunderstanding of class analysis I’ve ever seen, totally disengaging from any attempt to justify the accumulation of wealth by the top 1% (and top 1/10th of 1%) of people in this country by setting up a mock class struggle between “the salaried class” and “the wage class.” To hear Greer tell it, how much money you have is not nearly as important as how you are paid. According to his calculus, my boss – a person of color earning a salary that can’t possibly average out to more than $25 an hour – is more “privileged” than a white physician’s assistant clearing $40 an hour, but paid by the hour rather than salary. He also makes the laugh-out-loud claim that the investment class has “seen rough times lately” compared to the “salaried class.” I’m pretty sure that’s news to the countless salaried workers laid off to support massive bonuses for executives. He makes no attempt whatsoever to claim that Trump’s presidency benefited this oh-so-precious “wage class” (of which I am a member, by the by). The obvious explanation for this salad of mostly-sarcastic idiocy is that Greer (not acquainted with economics or political science) reasoned backwards from the conclusion that liberals constitute an economic class in and of themselves, one in conflict with the economic class constituted by conservatives in and of themselves. This is complete horseshit.

John Michael Greer is at least half a fascist. He tells on himself in subtle ways. He loves Julius Evola, and treats the fascist intellectual’s writings as charming and cheeky rather than outright calls to the rejection of society (AKA humanity) and an engagement in street violence. He cribs liberally from Aleksandr Dugin’s Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Ideology without crediting the Rasputin-looking motherfucker at all. The only reason I know this is because (Lucifer help me) I’ve read Dugin. I’ll give Greer this much: unlike any other modern fascist I’ve read so far, I believe that Greer has actually ploughed through Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. This is not an accomplishment one should sneer at, subject matter notwithstanding. I’m only 1/3 of the way through Spengler’s vast, pompous, shitty, subjective, and thoroughly factually inaccurate magnum dope-us myself, and it is not an easy read. Then again, a lazy fascist is probably preferable to a hardworking fascist.

All right, those are your top five bad books! Come back tomorrow as I go into the five BEST books I read in 2021!

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