Salt City Sinner

  Steve paced the halls of his mansion, hands bunched behind his back.

  In two previous posts at Madness Heart Press (“Cops, God, and Stephen King,” posted in one chunk here ), I delved into my long history as a Stephen King fan and touched on a few of the misgivings I’ve had about his recent forays into vaguely horror-adjacent detective fiction, especially his stories featuring the irredeemable Holly Gibney. Holly is, in fact, the name of subject of his newest novel (due on September 5 th ). When I wrote those posts about King and cops/PIs, his cuddly relationship with murderous police officers and self-appointed snoops struck me as a (forgive the pun) novel development. Having now revisited some of King’s 1980s-1990s oeuvre, I now believe that this has been the case all along.

  I’ve finished writing a new novel (stay tuned for details) in which the massacre at Jonestown in November 1978 plays a pivotal role. Both to research it and because the phenomenon interests me, I’ve read more than a few books on cults and cultic ideology over the last year.

  As 2021 slides gently into oblivion like a moonlit funeral barge on a wine-dark sea, let’s reflect! 2021 was a complicated year for me but even in the midst of the madness, books were – as they always are – a tremendous comfort. Let’s have a fond look back at the cream of the crop; the five best books I read this year!

  The strongest point in favor of reading  Icebreaker , the first novel in the Interloper trilogy by Steven William Hannah , is also a warning. I started reading, and ten pages became 50. Within 60 pages, I knew I had to purchase the other two books in the trilogy. The book is wonderfully written. Hannah’s prose is rich and evocative, and his writing paints a wildly well-imagined universe full of complex characters. Icebreaker is a ceaselessly compelling journey, one which encompasses both simple survival and a deeper comprehension of Hannah’s larger world.

( This is part two of my review of Them: Adventures with Extremists, by Jon Ronson. You can read part one here .) Posted on 11/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Two decades are sprawled between our present moment and the time period captured by Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures with Extremists . That represents a pretty substantial chunk of data that we can use to assess Ronson’s analytical prowess in profiling extremists. What did Ronson tell us about the Klan, about Alex Jones, and about Omar Bakri Mohammed? The edition of Them that I read contained a forward by Ronson, penned in June of 2002, that attempted to answer this question in the period just after 9/11, a time period in which billing one’s self as “bin Laden’s man in Great Britain” may not have been the wisest move (Omar was eventually arrested, released, deported… It’s a long saga, but it ends with him in a prison cell in Lebanon, where he languishes as of 2019). Ronson recalls a conversation he had with Mohammed...

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones, in happier times Posted on 11/13/2019 by the Salt City Sinner It’s telling that the debate over Bill Clinton’s conduct found the majority of both conservatives and liberals arguing not about consent, not about sexual harassment or workplace safety, but about libertinage. This allowed both tribes of elderly white men (with some younger white men and a few white women) to sidestep a number of thorny questions. Consent, workplace harassment, and the ever-hungry male gaze (a gaze not bounded on the left or the right, we discovered) – all of these issues were obscured by the prurient details of Bill Clinton’s sex life, the tawdriness of it all. Conservatives got to clutch their pearls, and liberals got to feel contempt for the prudes who did the pearl-clutching. That was always bullshit, of course, and both liberals and conservatives knew it. Conservatives never gave a toss for personal probity or morality in any real sense – only for the advanceme...

posted on 11/29/2018 by the Salt City Sinner (You can find part one here ) Why does Robert Lifton’s Thought Reform matter? It was written in 1959, based on interviews conducted between 1954 and 1959, and first released in 1961. Is it still relevant? It is, for better and/or worse. “Better” because what Lifton documented – and what the Chinese Communist Party developed through experimentation with Stalin-era Soviet tactics – is a form of applied political psychology that to an extent works , and can be used for good or ill (like any other tool). Now, as Lifton himself has been very careful to point out, there are enormous caveats to what thought reform can achieve and on whom it is effective (for example, thought reform is a mixed bag at converting religious believers). Caveats or no caveats, its effectiveness means that some forms of thought reform-adjacent manipulation are more widely used in 2018 than you might think. Thought Reform Is Still Going O...

posted on 11/26/2018 by the Salt City Sinner Hello, and welcome to the first installment of what I hope will be an ongoing series; the Sinner’s $.25 Psychic Self Defense and Literature Review ! Now: what on Lucifer’s black earth does that pretentious appellation portend? For reasons that will be revealed over the course of these segments – like my hairy, enticing body parts appearing from behind fans during a fan dance – I have developed an interest in political psychology. More specifically, I’ve been mulling over applied political psychology, or what I’ve been whimsically calling practical psychic self-defense. Now, a good jumping-off point for such ruminations is Dr. Robert Lifton’s 1961 psychology classic, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism; A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China . Lifton interviewed American, European, and Chinese men and women who had been imprisoned in the People’s Republic of China and subjected to totalitarian communist “thought r...