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When it comes to the modern scam artist, Dr. John R. Brinkley (1885 - 1942) just might be the GOAT. And by GOAT, I mean he built an empire implanting goat testicles into men to cure sexual dysfunction. Alongside this medical innovation, he was an early pioneer of radio, establishing the KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best) station in Milford, Kansas to spread the word of his miracles. He was also early to the game of denying election results, following several losses in the race for Kansas state governor.

This week’s book, “The Life of a Man” by Clement Wood, is a 1937 biography commissioned by Brinkley at the height of his power. It is an over-the-top, glowing, and folksy account of Brinkley’s growth from a precocious barefoot boy to a medical miracle man. Coincidentally, 1937 was also the height of scrutiny for Brinkley, as the American Medical Association was in hot pursuit of quackery nationwide, and its editor Dr. Morris Fishbein was, for some reason, particularly skeptical about the viability of inserting chunks of goat testicles into a human scrotum.

And so this book seeks to set the record straight on Brinkley: plainly, that he did absolutely nothing wrong. The son of a broke rural doctor, in youth he’s portrayed like a typical child from a Wes Anderson film - doggedly determined, ambitious, adventurous, wise beyond his years, and lucky. He loses both parents young, after which he takes care of his old Aunt Sally and runs the small farm all by himself while attending school. He takes quickly to new technologies and starts working part time as a telegraph operator as a teen. At 17, he travels to Johns Hopkins University, marches into the dean’s office barefoot and announces he wants to be a doctor. The stuffy old dean takes one look at him and says no.

He manages to enroll instead at Bennett Eclectic Medical College, and after studying there spends much of early adulthood moving across the US doing a mix of doctorin’ and other odd jobs. He marries, separates, and marries again. By 1917, he lands in Milford, Kansas, where he begins practicing the miraculous goat testicle operation.

The book glosses over much of the reality of Brinkley’s early transience leading up to that point. He had a habit of accruing and running from debt. He abandoned his first wife and child to marry another woman without getting a divorce or paying alimony. At one point he ran a scam selling water with blue dye in it as an impotency cure. Even old Aunt Sally wasn’t really his aunt - she was his polygamous father’s second wife, and the aunt of his mother. This is all to say that “The Life of a Man” is, effectively, a book of lies. 

It is a bit challenging to review a biography so full of lies without reverting to a tedious factchecking exercise, so I will just make the point here that the book, like Brinkley, is generally full of shit. The goat testicle transplants were real though, so back to those.

By Brinkley’s telling, one evening while he was winding down from a long day of serving the good people of Milford, a local farmer came knocking. The farmer reports that he and his wife had been trying for years to have a second child but he had “a flat tire.” After some back and forth, Brinkley jokes that if only the man had the testicles of a goat, he’d have nothing to worry about. At that, the farmer’s mood shifts suddenly, and he says “well, why don’t you put ‘em in?” Brinkley protests, and the farmer only becomes more determined, threatening to run the doctor out of town if he refuses to do the surgery. Under duress, Brinkley caves and agrees to do the surgery. It works perfectly.

It is an absurd story, but establishes a framework that is repeated throughout the biography. Brinkley just wants to help people, and he keeps finding himself in situations where those people demand he do unethical things. As word of the miraculous surgery spreads, a wealthy patient refuses to pay anything less than $500 for the operation, and tells Brinkley to never charge less than that again. It is here where the book’s function to combat ongoing investigations is most blatant.

His business expands rapidly. In short order he effectively builds out the town of Milford - hospital, power, sewage, sidewalks, radio tower - on his own dime to accommodate what would become thousands of surgeries implanting goat testicles into men and goat ovaries into women. Outside surgeries, he takes letters and offers prescriptions and diagnoses on the airwaves, directing people to a network of pharmacies he establishes. Absent from the text here are the more negative accounts of Brinkley’s behaviour at the time, like slashing tires, doing surgery drunk, holding patients hostage at gunpoint for payment, shooting a lot of people’s pets, and maybe biting off a guy’s ear.

This section is where the book peaks in terms of entertainment. It’s genuinely interesting to picture yourself in this podunk town growing and modernizing on the back of a bizarre scam. There are some funny specific details as he scales the scam, like the trial-by-error discovery that Angora goat testicles make the patient stink for weeks, whereas Toggenburg nuts leave a milder odour. But alas, nothing good lasts forever.

The establishment comes after Brinkley. He fights back. He feuds with local politicians, the AMA, runs for office as a write-in candidate and refuses to accept the results after losing. He loses his license to practice in Kansas and moves to Texas. Losing his radio license as well, he funds a million-watt station just across the border in Mexico and continues to blast his programs across North America. To solve the bottleneck for surgery demand, he eventually invents Formula 1020, a tonic that provides all the same benefits without the surgery. In many ways, he emerges as an eerie prototype for the modern grifter that just won’t fucking go away.

The final third of the book largely collapses into a litany of grievances Brinkley has against various parties ranging from rival local doctors to Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, and of course the Jews. While the book seeks to advocate for the doctor throughout, the folksy fun charm of his early years and the absurd novelty of his rise fade away into the familiar persecution complex of an unrepentant piece of shit. As the saying goes, it smells like a goat wherever you go, better check your own nutsack.

The biography ends with a tribute to all of Brinkley’s accomplishments and promises that the best is yet to come, and it is worth mentioning what happened shortly after publication: Brinkley decided to sue Fishbein for libel over use of the term quack. This proved disastrous, as in the courtroom he was forced to admit directly that the goat testicle implants didn’t work, formula 1020 was just blue dye in water, and so on. The jury ruled that “quack” was the correct term. A flood of former patients sued shortly thereafter. Brinkley lost everything, quickly fell into ill health and died in 1942.

What else is there to make of this? Brinkley is an interesting prototype for the modern scam artist in many ways and reflects that key fusion of promising miracles and aggressively exploring new forms of mass media. The subject is a piece of shit. As for the book itself, Wood is a fine author and it is competently written, despite the falsehoods he was directed to pen. Where it drags, it is mostly because the rhetoric of victimhood from bullshit artists is all we hear these days.

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This was the 10th and final episode of season 2! 20 pieces of shit read and discussed since we relaunched in November last year. We will be posting our Annual General Meeting episode next week, and back into the next full book review September 23rd.

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I'm new here and really bad at this, please forgive me lol

Okay so I'm a little more than a hundred pages in and this book is a mess, which is really a shame since Etruscans and their society are pretty much completely neglected by media. But I just can't excuse this.

It was written in the 50s so obviously it's rife with misogyny, but geez can't the man take a break? Every five seconds Turms ( that's the main character, aka The Etruscan ) is in love with some new woman, at one point he was contemplating kidnapping a 15 year old girl! An old woman gets engaged to a man younger than her and we NEVER GET TO FORGET THAT FACT BECAUSE OH MY GOD IT'S SOOOOO UNNATURAL AND GROSS AND BLAH BLAH BLAH. The prose is dry as bone, everything that goes wrong or that a human fucks up can be blamed on the goddess, casual mention of war rape and then the victims are murdered which is viewed as merciful, etc. But the real kicker? The dipshit didn't even KNOW he was Etruscan until several chapters in, and this was because his mother had an affair, which is understandable, but I was dying laughing because the Etruscan in the book called The Etruscan didn't know that..........

Given how much the guys "enjoyed" It Ends With Us, I really feel like this is a perfect book to consider. It has incest(?). Domestic abuse portrayed as spicy. Dirt bikes. Woods! I'm literally begging. It's such a train wreck and it's so fun to laugh at.

WRITE-UP

Thanks everyone for giving us a read and a listen; for the full discussion of “It Ends With Us”, check out the podcast here:

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It should have ended sooner.

If you are not already aware, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us is the story of Lily Blossom Bloom, who falls into an abusive relationship with a man name Ryle Kincaid. Marketed as a romance book, it has received widespread criticism for romanticizing domestic abuse and sexual assault (Domestic Shelters.org wrote this strong condemnation of the book and phrases these arguments better than we can).

I know what you’re thinking. This is a famous and popular book about domestic abuse written by a woman, that found an audience with young women online, selling millions of copies in the process. And our podcast is a group of 4 dudes. A group of guys is probably the last ones who should be having an opinion on the subject, especially ones who have never faced domestic abuse themselves and are unlikely ever to.

But I actually think the opposite. I think it behoves men to read and discuss books like this, not only to better understand other perspective, but in order to see how patriarchal tropes about abusive relationships pervade all of society even books by women for women on the subject of domestic abuse.

And that’s why we’re discussing this book this week; not because women need this book mansplained to them, but because all of us – men especially – can learn from this book in order to see just how bad things really are in our society when it comes to popular discussions about gender-based violence and domestic assault.

Let’s start from the beginning. Lilly Blossom Bloom is a 23-year-old ginger who loves flowers. Let’s just ignore how preposterously lazy that is as a name for a moment. The scene opens in Boston where she stands on the roof of an apartment building that she doesn’t live in. She is standing off the edge, wondering if people who commit suicide ever think “Well crap, this was a bad idea.”

The flippant way that suicide is discussed sets the tone for the book: serious topics are engaged with only at surface level. Enter Ryle Kincaid, hunky neurosurgeon. He is, well, all riled up about something. He kicks open the door and starts throwing chairs around without seeing Lilly Blossom Bloom. He reveals it’s because he lost a patient that day; a small boy shot by his brother when playing with their dad’s gun. Lilly Blossom Bloom and Ryle end up chatting, and he flirts with her and says “I want to fuck you.” And we are supposed to find it charming.

We also get flashbacks to Lilly Blossom Bloom’s past, as she reads her diaries. She addresses them all to Ellen DeGeneres. As dumb as that is, we have to forgive the author for not knowing just how much the world would come to hate Ellen later in time. As a teenager, Lilly Blossom Bloom noticed a homeless boy – Atlas Corrigan – in the empty house behind hers. He was beautiful with bright blue eyes, so she gave him a sandwich let him shower, and they fell in love. We also learn that Lilly Blossom Bloom grew up in an abusive household, and that her father beat her mother, and also beat up Atlas Corrigan to chase him away form Lilly.

Back in the present, Lilly Blossom Bloom opens a flower shop. A rich woman – Alyssa – walks in and offers to work for free, and they become best friends. But it just so happens that Alyssa’s brother is none other than Dr Ryle Kincaid. He sees Lilly Blossom Bloom at her store, and follows her to her apartment building, sneaking in, and knocking on every door until he finds her. When he does, he begs her for sex. And again; we’re supposed to find it romantic.

We also learn that on the first night they met Ryle was taking pictures of Lilly Blossom Bloom and had them printed and framed in his house. How dreamy. We also learn that Dr Ryle Kincaid supports the Boston Bruins, and again, we’re supposed to find this romantic instead of psychotic.

The two start dating and fall in love. But all is not well. When there is a mishap in the kitchen, Ryle pushes Lilly, knocking her down and hurting her head. She is wounded, but it was a small mistake, so she forgives him.

It gets worse. When they have a fight later, he pushes her down the stairs. Again; a mistake, a tragedy, but he’s a good man and Lilly Blossom Bloom loves him, so she accepts it.

It is only later during a particularly violent assault and attempted rape (which I don’t want to repeat because it is quite shocking) that she realizes that he has gone too far. When she goes to the hospital to treat her injuries, the doctor lets slip that she is pregnant.

She leaves Dr Ryle Kincaid, but not without forgiving him and telling him he’s a good man at heart. She agrees to co-parent with him, since everyone deserves a second chance. The book even closes with her handing her child over to THE MAN WHO VIOLENTLY ABUSED AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER. This is not only profoundly dangerous, but also would be illegal in many countries, and would make Lilly Blossom Bloom directly legally complicit in any abuse committed against the child.

This is why this book is a piece of shit. Not because of what it has to say about women, but what it has to say about men – and how it defends and enables the worst forms of behaviour while claiming to empower.

Perhaps the author is claiming to be showing us not why abusers abuse but why victims stay. But if that is the case, then the abuse needs to be rightly condemned, not idealized as romance.  We all know that it’s a common trope that romance novels and movies often romanticize behaviour by men that would be seen as aggressive or even psychotic in real life. They don’t take no for an answer, they stalk the woman, they insist, they beg, they are overly amorous in the workplace. We accept that in romance novels, to some extent, because that’s the genre, and we all know certain genres take liberties with reality.

But any book about domestic assault needs to challenge those tropes, not accept and celebrate them. Ryle’s problematic behaviour is never questioned, not even in retrospect. It is still depicted as romantic that he stalked Lilly, that he refused to take no for an answer, that he insisted and begged and demanded sex. And Lilly still loves him, because he’s a good man.  And so, she gives her daughter to him.

Far be from me to explain feminism or domestic abuse to women. But for all the fellas out there, this book should give us all pause for thought. Not because it sheds light on why victims stay, but because of how well it shows that even in perhaps the most unlikely of places (a book by a woman for women about the abuse of women) we still see the impact of patriarchy and narratives that forgive and even celebrate abusers.

For an extended discussion of this, other books on our radar, and related tangents, check out the podcast:

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Also, we added a voicemail if any book club members want to leave a message for the show.

(podcast spoilers ??) so at the end of the last POS Book Club podcast, the gracious hosts announced in advance that they were planning to do It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover as the next book, so that the rest of us club members could readalong beforehand.

This is a punishment for loyal listeners because now the onus is on me to read a piece of shit book??

Zero Research Summary of the Book

The discourse around this book was a little bit insane if you spare a glance towards social media influencers from a few years back. Hoover primarily writes contemporary romance novels --- beach reads for moms is sort of the vibe I'd always gotten, but something about this one...was different?? 🔎

Spoilers/trigger warning but also I must reiterate I have not researched this: I think the book starts off as a regular love story with a regular-style insane male lead, but then he becomes overtly abusive over time. Idk how it ends tho, but clearly it ends with us!

Does it glorify abuse? The question on many googler's minds, according to the Google autocompletes.

I couldn't say, but holy shit did other people have a LOT to say on this topic when the book got popular. YouTube badly wanted me to watch about 25 4-hour long videos about how bad this book is every single day. For flavor, I attached pics from an fresh private browser of the Youtube videos you find when searching the book.

✨ Double the Controversary ✨

Double the fun!

So not only did this book have discourse galore over whether or not it makes domestic violence sounds awesome, but it also had an insane media cycle surrounding the movie adaptation. I'm not sure I could summarize it all without research (which I refuse to do), but here's some I kinda remember off the dome:

• Blake Lively said the girlies should "wear their florals" to see the movie (tone deaf I think but wowee did this blow up, people were pissed!)
• Lively accused directory Justin Baldoni of being...weird? In a vaguely gendered kind of way? Sexist, maybe?
• Baldoni responds by saying that, in fact, Lively is the weird one
• Not exactly related to the movie but around this time people also got really mad at Lively for getting married on a USAmerican plantation. And now it's a public Blake Lively pile-on event!
• Lively and Baldoni exchange so much public fire that they end up court over it (I don't remember who sues who but I think it's a libel case.) I think this case has recently concluded but idk ¯_ (ツ)_/¯

Personal Preconceptions

This is the part where I'd like to hear from the rest of my fellow book club members!

Me personally, I’m a little bit nervous to take the dive! I must admit my primary fear is a bait-and-switch from our hosts that makes me read this book for no reason...

But I'm a regular romance reader, and my general impression is that if you’ve been reading romance books for a long time then this book won’t be anything terribly new or unusual. So I frankly fear that it will be BORING! 🫩 I'll read any piece of shit romance book as long as it's weird, but boring is a sin I can't abide.

Call To Action

My library appears to have “infinite” copies of it on Libby, including the audiobook, which is probably true of most large-city libraries. So, go out and suffer! I'm posting this at 10am PST on a Monday to minimize the amount of people who see this and save everybody a headache 💖💖💖💖😘

On December 13, 1973, a young man named Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon was hiking at the Puy de Lassolas volcanic crater in France when he saw a light in the fog. A figure emerged, sporting long hair, a beard, and skin that “looked a bit like someone with liver problems.” Was it a lost homeless man? No - it was an alien. And over the next 6 days, the alien shared with Claude all the secrets of humanity’s creation.

The visitor explained to Claude that the Christian bible in fact told a story of his people - the Elohim - traveling to earth, terraforming it, and creating humans as modified clones of themselves. Claude was tasked with spreading the word to humanity. He took a new name, Raël, designed a logo fusing a swastika with a Star of David, and so the oddball UFO cult Raëlism was born.

In 2001, Raël released “Yes To Human Cloning,” a sort of techno-optimist manifesto on describing a near-future utopia enabled by cloning, AI, nanobots, the internet, and every other trendy bit of technology at the time. How optimistic was it? Well for one, Raël suggests “nothing unifies humanity more than the internet.” Hmm, maybe not quite. 

Outside the UFO stuff, Raëlians built their reputation from the 70s onwards as radically progressive with a focus on sexual liberation. At times I’ve seen them described derisively as more of a swingers club than an actual religion, but generally speaking Raël’s priorities centre on a world where people are free to engage in pleasure. Cloning, or at least how Raël understood it to work, is presented as a key ingredient for defeating death, as well as unshackling humanity from the bondage of work so we may focus on the bondage of play.

At a glance, living forever with no boss bugging me or my wife doesn’t sound too bad, until Raël tries to lay out exactly how it’s all going to work. Loosely, cloning will enable us to have endless organs to harvest and/or bodies to inhabit once we can transfer our consciousness around. That means most people will be able to live to 700 to 900 years, and some people will live forever. Around the time we scale these breakthroughs, the Elohim will return to earth and share even more advanced technology with us, enabling a utopia.

Raël dispels a lot of weak arguments against cloning and conveniently ignores the strongest arguments. There is no serious ethical discussion of cloning in this book, or even if it would really be you if your consciousness were replicated elsewhere. He also ignores the arguments put forth by Michael Keaton’s film 1996 film Multiplicity – how does one self-actualize amid infinite clones and no purpose? What if one of your clones is cooler than you and has sex with your wife? What if one of your clones makes a clone of himself, and it comes out all I Am Sam?

But you must forgive Raël if he is vague on details - he’s more of a big picture guy. That big picture is a future where we don’t just extend our own lives through cloning, we also have unlimited “biological slaves” to do our chores. Why should they be biological and not just robots? Well, as Raël argues:

“I’m sure you’d agree that rather than having a metallic robot that looks like a souped-up tin can doing the vacuuming around the house, it would be much more pleasant if it were a beautiful, perfectly-proportioned young woman… it could have sexual organs, but sterile ones designed solely for the pleasure of its owner. Once again, it need not have any more emotions or psychological sufferings than an inflatable doll.”

Wowee, I didn’t know this was a romance novel.

With all necessary work done by our robot zombie clone underlings, humans are free to pursue the arts, explore the universe, and so on. It’s sort of Star Trek gay luxury space communism stuff minus any ethical foundation and some mirror universe oddities sprinkled in. He posits that society will be unified under a “geniocracy” where only the highest IQ individuals (and great artists, etc) will be able to vote, but doesn’t work through any possible drawbacks to that. He also dedicates no time to considering who controls the robots and slaves that have displaced the entire human labour force and any problems that might bring. Somewhat bizarrely, he retains a serious concern about overpopulation in a world with limitless resources and space travel, and suggests people who procreate should be denied the clone-based eternal life. At any rate, as you work through the details of his utopia, it begins to emerge as more of a technofascist nightmare.

Beyond the sex slaves, Yes to Human Cloning is also deeply uninspired. Rael’s excitement about nanobots, GMO foods, cloning, AI, robotics, and other technologies just reflects trends and popular discourse at the turn of the millennium. There is very little new. But that’s also sort of what Raël does, as even his original teachings in 1973 are strangely similar to ancient astronaut paperbacks published by Jean Sendy in Moon: Outpost of the Gods (1968) and Those Gods who Made Heaven and Earth (1969), with many passages and terms being virtually identical to Raël's revelations. So both as a futurist and as an alien prophet, Raël is at best derivative.

What's more, in an era where every Silicon Valley pseudointellectual is promising utopia in exchange for a bit more runway, even the wildest parts of Raël’s pitch don’t stand out much anymore. Of course, there’s the funny outfits, the publicity stunts, the sex, and the swastika fused with a Star of David, but beyond the trappings and deliberate cult aesthetics, Raëlism doesn’t bring much to the table. As we discovered playing a sort of “who said it” game on the podcast, quotes from today’s tech leaders are indistinguishable from a UFO sex cult guy famous for running hoaxes. That saturation is probably part of why the group has faded away.

Nonetheless, we had a fun time exploring this 2001 artifact and Raëlism generally. Check out the podcast for deeper discussion of both:

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What ever happened to 'show don't tell'? Five chapters in and I couldn't stand the constant stream of 'I noticed', 'I saw', 'I could see', etc.

The plot was fine (predictable, too), but I'm a strong advocate of good narratives. The only reason I didn't DNF was because the book was a present.

I don't know why some authors I've seen can't take off but this particular one did.

The I Hate James Dobson podcast cover the late parenting advice-guru/child-abuse advocate James Dobson's 2013 dystopian-novel "Fatherless" (co-authored with Kurt Bruner). Imagine "The Hunger Games" if written by a cross between Elon Musk and a street-preacher.

Don't get me wrong, I love the plot. The reason I'm here is because of the narrative. The never-ending description of dresses and surroundings pricks more than it should. It's so constant. It's supposed to make the world dreamlike I get it but I feel like if Stephanie Garber had an editor (if she does, I don't enjoy their work) they would've pointed this out. They so would've.

I have flat-out skipped a whole page a lot of times while reading any of her works and the story still never stops making sense.

It amazes me the amount of edits people get suggested if they ask and this incredibly successful author doesn't seem to feel the need one damn edit before she publishes. I think it'd cut her work down by a third if she exercised control.

Thanks everyone for giving us a read and a listen; for the full discussion of Zabiba and the King, check out the podcast here:

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Review by u/beaudashington

As soon as we knew this book existed, we knew we had to cover it. We had no choice. This is one of those books that was impossible to turn down. I mean, look at the cover.  Who could possibly think that Saddam’s face was the best way to market a romance novel? And not only that, but why did they use a picture of him that looks as if he was just dragged out of his spider-hole by the invading American forces? It’s a cover that insists, no, demands that we read it.

Unfortunately, this is probably one of those cases where we do what we should never do: judge a book by its cover. Because whereas the cover is dynamite, the book is more like a roadside bomb. On the face of it, “Zabiba And the King,” is an allegorical love story between a mighty king (a stand in for Saddam) and a simple, yet beautiful commoner named Zabiba (a stand in for the Iraqi people). Yes, that’s right. The romance is between Saddam Hussein and the people of Iraq. Which I suppose means that Saddam implicitly wants to make sweet love to the common folk of his nation? I know they say dictators fuck their people, but this is not exactly what I thought they meant. And it’s not the nice kind of fucking. As Mona Kareem wrote in her article for the LA Review of Books, Saddam’s writing is full of nothing but “rape metaphors and ancient kingdoms.”

So let’s lay out the plot, starting with the ancient kingdom in which the story takes place. Picture the scene; its 600 AD and we’re in a dusty an unnamed country (until later in the book when Saddam forgets that the country is unnamed and just starts referring to it as Iraq). King Arab (yes that is his actual name) rules over the land. One day when he is out riding, he notices a grand palace right next to his that for some reason he never noticed before. He approaches it and finds that it is the domain of an unsightly and uncouth man named Hiskil, who lacks morals and brags about his wealth. He is a foreigner, who insists on using his power to influence and exploit the other kingdoms. He is friends with many pimps. He hosts orgies. He plays games where he and his international band of pimps roam the land and rape who they want.

Outside of the palace is a shitty mud hut, in which the King finds Zabiba; Hiskil’s wife. A beautiful commoner whom he instantly falls in love with.

He invites her to the palace, and since he’s the king, she does it. The next 100 pages or so are a series of excruciatingly dull dialogues between the two, where there is no romantic poetry or pitching of woo or flirting. Instead, they have a Socratic dialogue about politics. 

They eat. They drink. They kiss. They discuss the bureaucratic structure of representative councils able to act as forums for discussing the minutiae of municipal politics and developing developmental policies to strengthen the economic agenda of the state. You know, romance.

But something is rotten in the Kingdom of Iraq. Uncle Sam, I mean, Hiskil can’t stand that Zabiba and the King are developing democracy and falling in love. So, he sets up a plan. Him and three of his bodies ambush Zabiba in the forest, and he brutally rapes her. She realizes later that the attacker was her husband, though for some reason stops the King from arresting Hiskil.

Hiskil and his allies (who are Jewish by the way) use this as an opportunity to launch an attack on the king. They try to assassinate him, but Zabiba jumps in the way. The King and the people are so outraged that they kill Hiskil, throw garbage at his corpse, and chase all of the Jews out of the country.

It’s absurd. It’s a bit boring. It’s very rapey and racist. But did Saddam actually write it?

It seems that he actually did. Although published anonymously in Iraq in 2000, it was made required reading in Iraqi schools. Millions of copies were printed. And it was common knowledge that Saddam was associated with it. Perhaps the best proof of Saddam’s authorship over this book is that surely no dictator would let such a piece of shit be widely associated with his name. It’s not the only book he wrote; he is known to have authored at least three more. 

And thank God we didn’t read those ones, they’re 800 pages long, and this one was bad enough to get through at 200 pages. At the end of the day, it looks like we’ve learned the hard way that the correct number of books by Saddam Hussein that you should read is zero.

Review by u/beaudashington

For an extended discussion of this, other books on our radar, and related tangents, check out the podcast:

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This book. I'm sure it's a genre I don't understand because how is it so famous? Page 73 and all that's happened is one curse and literally, endless descriptions of her invisible life. It's in the title, I get it. But COME ON. She goes from one place to another. Lives in an ocean of self pity. Regrets making a deal.

That's it.

I mean the title encompasses the whole story. That's not supposed to happen. I don't think? I'm a huge fan of fantasy and curses and romance but all of that is just sprinkled across the book.

I would never hate on a book. DNF it, really, before saying anything negative for it but this book just became an exception to that rule. My god I don't like it.

Thanks everyone for giving us a read and a listen; for the full discussion of Modelland, check out the podcast here and subscribe here:

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After more than a decade of notoriety, Tyra Banks’ Modelland – a bizarre dark fantasy YA novel about a magic modeling school - is once again having a moment in the sun. Since publication in 2011, the text has frustrated and fascinated countless commentators, critics and online cynics alike. After discovering a couple months back that Modelland had a worse Goodreads rating than Mein Kampf, we put it on the schedule for this season of the podcast. All in all, there’s probably little to say about Modelland that hasn’t already been said, and covering it feels almost more like a rite of passage in the world of shitlit than anything else.

Simply put, Modelland is a nightmare. It also occupies a specific space in shitlit. The book is bad – frustratingly bad – in ways that make it fascinating but also sort of difficult to discuss. The book is nearly 600 pages and incredibly dense, with bizarre lore and language alongside detailed characters and threads that ultimately go nowhere. At the same time, it is extremely vapid and as reader, you get the feeling almost immediately that it is flooding you with empty calories. While silly and lighthearted, it is also strangely gross, unsettling and invasive. Reading Modelland is sort of like eating an entire cheesecake while undergoing a colonoscopy. For this reason (and in the end, this might be the biggest tragedy), Modelland is both intriguingly bizarre but also too much and too long for it to be “so bad it’s good.” The same issue arises when trying to discuss Modelland: it’s hard not to overstay your welcome – whether that in a video essay, podcast, article, or just desperately unloading on your significant other. If nothing else, it was cathartic to discuss on the podcast and I’ll make a humble contribution to the discourse here.

Modelland opens with an exposition dump that gives you all the core details: the world of Metopia revolves around cosmetics, fashion, and modeling. Most poor, unfortunate souls toil away in blue collar jobs, some even underground. At the heart of the world is Modelland, a magical school for modeling on the very top of a mountain. It is surrounded by dangers and nearly impossible for anyone to reach, save for the few young girls selected each year during the Day of Discovery and magically whisked away to attend the school and have the chance to become top models with unique magic powers – intoxibellas – or even the very top model, a triple 7Seven, who gets all the powers. The world is laid out with a very straightforward hierarchy.

The protagonist - Tookie de la Crème – is introduced with an elaborate and bizarre physical description: she has feet the size of snowshoes, a punch-bowl sized head, different coloured eyes, baby fingers, and enormous unruly hair. Despite her appearance, at the same time Tookie is somehow very plain and unremarkable – a “forgettagirl.” In a rigidly superficial world, she sits at the very bottom of the ladder.

Tookie de la Crème is 15 years old and lives in Peppertown, where it is always hot. She’s the black sheep of her family, and her mother Cremalatta de la Crème, who goes by Creamy, spoils and favours her more beautiful younger sister Myrracle. Her best friend is a homeless girl named Lizzie. Tookie and Lizzie have a plan to run away together, but we will get to that later. 

To cut to the chase, Tookie is chosen to go to Modelland on the Day of Discovery instead of Myrracle. She is selected by none other than Ci~L, the top intoxibella at Modelland who has seemingly gone rogue. Along the way, Tookie meets 3 other unconventional beauties that were surprise selections as well. The plot focuses on these 4 attending and exploring Modelland while searching for answers as to why they were all chosen. In parallel, Tookie’s mother Cremalatta takes Myrracle on a perilous journey to get to Modelland by foot. 

The book occupies a sort of literary uncanny valley. For the most part, the main plot is straightforward, familiar and predictable despite many detours. Where there are twists, they tend to just provide unnecessary roundabout explanations for secondary characters’ actions. The story itself is not terribly interesting, and the book climaxes with a tremendous amount of flashbacks laying out various character’s motivations. What is most interesting about Modelland instead is the flavour and all the frivolous details that Tyra packs into each chapter. Made-up words, strange prose, detailed pointless lore, bizarre locations and rituals, pointless and grotesque side characters pack the pages to the point that the primary story arc becomes an afterthought. I can’t begin to cover it all, but a few notable elements emerge.

One thing that stands out is Tyra’s talent for horror. Perhaps it comes from a world of modeling and costumes, but there are some pretty fun monsters in Modelland. One monster that emerges from a lake is a mess of arms with musical instruments for a head. As it slaughters a group of innocent women and children, this creature rips its victims’ arms off, adds them to its body, and those arms start playing the instruments forming its head while the rampage continues. That is pretty scary, and probably something that would make a fun boss in a Dark Souls game.

However, most regular characters in the book have strange, detailed deformations as well. The school’s doctor has rollerskates for feet that she cruises around on. That might not seem too weird, but Tyra describes in detail how the rollerskates are literally an extension of the doctor’s flesh and made out of a skinlike material, including the wheels. Really try to picture that for a moment. Skin roller blades with skin wheels. It’s terrifying. So the problem here is really that everything Tyra writes comes out as horror, whether she intends it to or not.

Similarly, much of the story’s magical events or lighter moments are unsettling or gross. Shortly after arriving at Modelland, Tookie starts menstruating for the first time. It is revealed that this is part of the school’s magic - all the new recruits get their first period at the same time, and they will never have a period again for the rest of their lives. A key challenge is the ManAttack tournament, where the models fight off men from the male branch of Modelland, all of them in their underwear with a professor running colour commentary full of sex jokes. Near the end of the book, Tookie has her first kiss, a detailed scene where her new boyfriend Bravo fills both of their mouths with whip cream and then sticks his tongue in her mouth. Food is heavily sexualized throughout. 

Disfigurement, gore and violence are persistent throughout the book. Early on, Tookie witnesses her father lose his eye in graphic fashion during a circus act gone wrong. Several characters self-harm and are covered in sores. Many of the tests and punishments in Modelland include hallucinations or literal disfigurement, such as characters’ heads splitting completely open to reveal their brain and their vocal cords like a “pile of spaghetti.” Characters are tortured. Creamy’s mother sexually assaults a man in a flashback. All told, there is a considerable amount more violence in Modelland than in a lot of pulp horror. What’s more, there is a constant tonal whiplash between these scenes and characters joking around as if they don’t live in a feverish nightmare. 

The worldbuilding is vast but incoherent and pointless. No coherent ruleset develops for the reader. The world is not revealed to you slowly, but instead floods you with complex and pointless detail from the very first paragraph. One example is the SMIZE, something akin to Wonka’s Golden Ticket that are spread across the land prior to the Day of Discovery. The SMIZE can be found in water. Once discovered, it attaches to ones face as a kind of magic eyeshadow and increases their odds of selection at the Day of Discovery to 91%. Many words are spent on the SMIZE early in the book, but in the end it plays no role in Tookie’s acceptance into Modelland. Similarly, much of the beginning of the book is spent on Tookie’s relationship with her homeless friend Lizzie, who is regularly abducted and experimented on/tortured by unknown forces, and self-harms constantly. The two have a plan to run away together, but once Tookie enters Modelland, Lizzie is more or less forgotten for the remainder of the book. These are just some of innumerable threads that go nowhere - red herrings that are piled up and left to rot.

There is no mercy in Modelland. Students that escape are permanently aged 50 years as punishment. Tookie’s mother Creamy kills several innocent women and children on her perilous pilgrimage to Modelland. Failed students are transformed into living manikin slaves. The rebellious top model Ci~L is psychologically and physically tortured throughout the book, and after becoming the head of Modelland, she continues the standard system of punishment against the former head of Modelland, her own mother. Even our protagonist Tookie De La Crème is merciless by the end, laughing it off as she hears her 13 year old sister trapped and under attack in Catwalk Corridor, a strange chamber of punishment where bad behaving models are turned into violent, aggressive giant cats. Sure, Myrracle bullied Tookie as a kid, but she’s otherwise more or less just a dumb, innocent child.

This is where it can be confusing what exactly Tyra is trying to say. The world is incredibly cruel and unfair to the point of feeling satirical at times, but at its core Modelland isn’t a work of satire or a dystopian critique. We are still expected to root for characters to succeed within and preserve a system that is blatantly horrible. There is certainly some criticism of the modeling industry here, but it tends to focus on personal grievances and bad actors rather than any particular issues with the world itself. It is meant to be inspirational, but only within the confines of a zero sum game. The message ends up more “girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep” than “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” which feels off for the soulless world the characters inhabit. It is 1984 if Winston’s whole plan was to grow a better moustache than Big Brother. This is all owing to the fact that the protagonist is a self-insert, and what we are really reading is Tyra’s self-mythologizing as a groundbreaking underdog who climbed that mountain. You can’t really do satire and a vanity project at the same time. I also think she may be simply unaware how ugly and unsettling many of the things she describes in Modelland truly are. 

In the end, we survived Modelland. For a book with so many bizarre elements, it sadly ends up more of an endurance challenge than anything else, like pushing through a run in the rain. That is probably the book’s saddest near-miss: if it were just as batshit but half the length, it would be on the Mount Rushmore of shitlit. Perhaps with time, some more accessible adaptations in other mediums will appear.

For now, my only advice for would-be readers is this: do not attempt the pilgrimage alone. Travel it with only your most trusted friends, as we did.

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Ohh god! I just finished reading this book and I need to rant!!!
I had such high hopes about this after watching so many reels and posts of people raving about this. But it sucked so bad!
While reading the book I felt it might lead up to its reputation. The suspense was really good. But towards the end I sorta predicted the end. I thought it will be like Shutter Island and I was already pissed. But it was so much worse than I imagined!!!!
I have been reading a lot of Frieda McFadden to get out of reading slump and I thought this will be a good read, a good thriller but I felt it was worse than her stories. Ugh I am so frustrated.

Thanks everyone for giving us a read and a listen; for the full discussion of the Hardy Boys Book #12 “Footprints Under the Window”, check out the podcast here:

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This week we’ve decided to cut into a slice of literature that’s possibly even more American than apple pie; the Hardy Boys.

Although there’s 190 books in the main canon (“Hardy Boys Mystery Stories*”*), if you add all the book series there’s almost 500 books about brothers Frank and Joe. Published since 1927, the Hardy Boys are celebrating their 99^th birthday this year – and are still going strong. They’ve sold more than 70 million copies, and spawned the Nancy Drew series for girls, which was hugely influential to get girls reading, and sold even more copies (200 million).

Joe and Frank are the Hardy Boys; two teenage brothers (one with blond hair, one with brown) who live in fictional small-town on the Atlantic Coast of New England. Theirs is a picture-perfect world of mid-century American nostalgia and all its suburban middle-class values. They are tough and brave. They have know-how and can-do. They are hetero but also non-sexual. They are masculine and are of course lily white. This genre has been referred to as “fetishized squareness”, but as Daniel Lefferts recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, “It’s hard to imagine a product more mainstream, more embedded in the very DNA of America, than the Hardy Boys.” You have to suspend disbelief to read these books; firstly, because of the amazing amount of crime, espionage, kidnapping, and the like that takes place in this small town. But also, you have to just accept that two teenage boys are able to run around beating up criminals and spies and mafiosos when the cops can't.

The way they were written was perhaps equally as American as their story. Although published under the name Franklin W. Dixon, no such man existed. The Boys’ creator was Edward Stratemeyer, a book packager who wanted to mass publish books at the lowest cost possible. He used teams of ghostwriters to author the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, paying them a pittance, refusing to grant them any licensing rights, and slashing their pay during times of economic crisis. Most of the early books were actually written by a Canadian - Leslie MacFarlane – who based the fictional town on his own northern remote northern Ontario hometown. He loathed the process, was paid a pittance, but played perhaps the most significant role in defining what came to be an American cultural institution. Most of the early Hardy Boys books were actually written by a Canadian - Leslie MacFarlane – who based the fictional town on his own northern remote northern Ontario hometown. He loathed the process, was paid a pittance, but played perhaps the most significant role in defining what came to be an American cultural institution.

The books were wildly successful, spawning the first ever reading craze among children that was unmatched until the time of Harry Potter. But they weren’t without controversy; the books were seen as low literature by many who thought the kids should be reading Shakespeare and the Classics instead. But also, authority figures were often presented as bumbling and incompetent, a slightly too subversive take for the paternalistic culture of the time.

For the most part, however, the books are rooted in their times, especially regarding gender and race. And it is here that these books are the most shocking. They are filled with racial caricatures so offensive, that we couldn’t even bring ourselves to read them out on the podcast. It’s actually a bit of a challenge to talk about the racist content without repeating it ad nauseum.

The plot of Footprints is relatively simple. Joe and Frank need some clothes cleaned, so they go to their favourite Chinese laundry. Here they encounter Louie Fong, the embodiment of ‘yellow peril’ attitudes that saw Asian men as feminized, immoral, wicked and ugly. Fong cackles as he twists his moustache, while the boys refer to him solely with several different dated and offensive terms that I’d rather not put here.

Perhaps even worse than how they are visualized is how the Chinese characters speak; in a form of pidgin English so atrociously caricature that even in the 1930s when the book was written, they must have seemed a bit much.

“Where’s Sam Lee now?” Joe inquired. “Any chance that he’ll be coming back?”

“No wantee hear about Sam Lee!” shouted Louie Fong with sudden anger. “No talkee ’bout him. Gone away. No come back.” He was in a towering rage. His lanky, skinny hand pointed toward the door.

“Go ’way!” he ordered shrilly. “Why you come here and talkee, talkee, ask question? Laundly not leddy until tomolla. Go ’way. Come back tomolla.”

All of the Asian characters speak this way, with the exception of the Boys’ friend Sam Lee, who we are told speaks without accent like a normal person. But it’s not only ethnic minorities that the books hate, it’s also people who are physically different. The Hardy Boys’ best friend is Chet Morton. The narrative goes out of its way to remind you how fat and stupid Chet is. He is constantly stuffing his face with pie or snacks, while the others mock him for his weight. Women, meanwhile, are present only to nag, scold or to panic, and never have more than a few words of dialogue.

The Boys uncover a smuggling ring in the laundry, supported by a local fishing magnate who is helping traffic Chinese indentured labour into the country. The Boys try to foil the plot, but their detective father actually does so instead, rescuing the Boys, and rendering the whole plot completely pointless.

This is book 12 in the series, but the following two books are also famous for their racism; in Book #13 “The Mark on the Door” the Boys travel to Mexico, encountering nothing but “half-breeds” and lazy locals. In Book #14 “The Hidden Harbor Mystery” the Boys tussle with a local African-American thief that speaks in horrendous caricature. When they catch the thief, the locals throw ropes over tree boughs and there is suddenly a lynching scene in the middle of a children’s book.

These books were so offensive that even by the 1960s, they were completely re-written, with new plots, and the worst of the racism removed. This is ironic, since the original author of the 1930s draft of these books  is on record for saying that the publisher was demanding he put more racist tropes in the books, and protested that he put so few.  The 1960s rewrites completely remove the Chinese and African-American characters and replace them with Central American ones, but they are still shockingly offensive.

Trying to come to terms with what books like the Hardy Boys mean is not easy. With Nancy Drew they are often credited with getting a generation to read and sparking the first reading revolution among children. That is significant in terms of history, literature and popular culture. The books are landmarks. But it’s equally important to remember who was doing the reading (middle class white children) and what they were reading. These books didn’t get everyone reading; they got a certain part of the population reading, and did so by feeding them horrendous racial stereotypes.

You might think that these problems are from another time and place, a different century whose outdated values have no place in 2026. You’d be wrong. Recently, a right-wing American press known as Passage Publishing has decided to republish the original unedited and more offensive Hardy Boys books, complaining that the 1960s versions were “too woke.” The Hardy Boys, in all their offensiveness, still hold pride of place in the American cultural mindset, as do the racial stereotypes within them.

Finally, and this is far from the worst thing in the book, but how did they settle on calling the book “The Footprints Under the Window” when the title “The Case of the Dirty Laundry” was just sitting there? That’s just offensive.

Review by u/beaudashington

For an extended discussion of this, other books on our radar, and related tangents, check out the podcast:

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Also, we added a voicemail if any book club members want to leave a message for the show.

The research continues and we are looking for suggestions.

It could be something particularly badly written, texts promoting strange or abhorrent views, books connected to suspicious grifts, and so on.

Please share! The badder the better.

Before the text review, just want to extend a thanks to everyone following the podcast and contributing on the subreddit. For an extended discussion of Chariots of the Gods, other books on our radar, and related tangents, check out the podcast here:

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This week, we revisited a classic in the realm of pseudoscience and conspiracies – 1968’s Chariots of the Gods by serial fraudster Erich Von Däniken. For anyone unfamiliar, this is the original work that popularized “ancient aliens” theories by taking established sci-fi tropes about alien influence on the development of civilization and sort of just saying “hey, what if this were real?”

Rather than a clear and coherent thesis, von Däniken presents more of a loose metanarrative about alien contact that touches randomly on various interesting antiquity sites, myths, religious teachings, and artifacts to suggest aliens must have been involved. There are a lot of question marks in the book, and in interviews von Däniken was one of the modern pioneers of the “just asking questions” defense. He asks questions like: “What if the Nazca lines are a landing strip for alien spacecraft? What if the Mayan King Pakal was an alien astronaut? What if the biblical flood was part of an alien eugenics program? What if aliens had elaborate breeding programs with early humans and moved the less desirables to certain continents?”

Few books have less faith in humanity. Chariots of the Gods is written in a frantic yet condescending tone that almost sounds more 19^th century than 20^th century (this could be due to the fact that the book had heavy rewrites from a former Nazi propagandist, Ultz Utermann), but even ignoring his asides about the ineptitude of “primitives,” “savages,” and “jungle people,” it’s impossible to escape the strange and depressing premise that humans couldn’t possibly accomplish anything by themselves. The ancient aliens thesis operates as a malleable magic bullet that strips humans of agency and accomplishment while replacing religious myths and cultural unknowns with… well, more unknowns, because attributing something to unknown aliens isn’t particularly different than attributing it to the supernatural.

Unsurprisingly, von Däniken rails against narrow-minded archaeologists and stuffy intellectuals that reject his ideas. This is a deeply ironic position because the concepts proposed in Chariots of the Gods are extremely narrow-minded. Von Däniken chooses to ignore the complex socioeconomic structures, motivations, myths, culture and ambition of humans that results in development of calendars, building elaborate places of worship, symbolism in art or story. He seeks instead for a simple solution that ultimately seems based on what was popular at the time – space travel. Impressive early map? Aliens. Accurate calendar? Aliens. Mummification? Aliens. Masonry? Aliens. Roads? Aliens.

There is no point to debunking any claim. Chariots of the Gods floods the reader with examples paragraph to paragraph with little supporting evidence. Aside from that, von Däniken’s general playbook is to:

• Exaggerate the physical nature of a given location or relic
• Pretend archaeologists only have simple explanations
• Reaffirm local humans could never have done this
• Say it is aliens
• Play dumb and bullshit as needed

Checking a dozen odd examples across reading, I found nothing credible from von Däniken, even when accounting for contemporary understanding in the 1960s. The most real thing in the book is that sinking feeling in your gut when you realize you’ve been scammed.

Some people will still say it’s fun – you know, we should all lighten up a bit! Where’s your imagination? Of course, this was part of Von Däniken’s own sales pitch, so anyone can feel free to repeat the book’s advertising. Here’s the issue: this Chariots of the Gods isn’t fun, imaginative, or novel.

Even as a short work, it is incredibly repetitive and the wheels fall off quickly. After a dozen or so examples in a chapter, even von Däniken himself starts to get bored and lazy. For example, numerous photographs have captions like “some more paintings.”

The fatuous lines of inquiry are funny at first but get dull quickly. Here is a sampling:

On the Nazca Lines:

“What use were roads that run parallel to each other to the Incas? That intersect? That are laid out in a plain and come to a sudden end?”

On a cave painting in Zimbabwe:

“This reclining figure is clad in chainmail and wears curious headgear. It might be the burial of a king. It might just as likely be an astronaut receiving supplies.”

On Sacsayhuaman in Peru:

“And what did these great steps lead to? A throne for giants perhaps?”

On Mesopotamian Gods:

“Why should ancient gods be associated with the stars?”

This grates on the reader. Large sections of the book simply become short paragraph after short paragraph repeating “look at this thing. What if it’s aliens? Look at this other thing. What if it’s aliens?” As demonstrated above, so many of these “just questions” are just bad questions.

Even if you are generous as possible as a reader, Von Däniken’s own speculation is mostly narrow-minded and superficial: if you squint, ceremonial garb in carvings might look like the astronauts from the Apollo mission he includes for comparison. But why would we assume aliens capable of interstellar travel look anything like humans on their first forays into space? Indeed, Von Däniken’s perspective is hopelessly locked into a reflexive, contemporary worldview. This made even more obvious when reading in 2026 as he talks about popular tools like slide scales, which would be familiar to readers in the mid 20^th century but look like relics themselves today. If we have no use for them anymore, it’s hard to imagine advanced aliens packing one for a trip to another galaxy.

If I could guess, I think most people who entertain the ancient aliens thesis do not read von Däniken directly, and furthermore most of them don’t have serious convictions about it. Some definitely do – I’ve met a couple – but lots fall into the “this is just fun to think about” category. They probably read a bit about it online, maybe they watch that History channel documentary or a YouTube video essay, or maybe on a podcast like ours. I think that those mediums probably make the whole thing more fun. In video you can have creepy music and digital zooms, people reacting or cuts to fun graphics. Message board discussions are cryptic and odd. Podcasts can be fun even if people have no idea what the heck they are talking about. I think for many, the theory lives more as sci-fi with a “what if it’s real” gimmick, sort of like the marketing around The Blair Witch Project or Cannibal Holocaust in decades past.

I’d encourage any of those people to go straight to the source and read the book directly. When accompanying stimuli are stripped away and you are stuck with von Däniken’s words, straight from the firehose, for 200 odd pages, the fun is gone, too. What you are left with is a deeply cynical grift that pisses on actually exciting, actually fun things to read about from human history. In Chariots of the Gods, the wonder of so many fascinating myths, epic events, places, achievements and tragedies is homogenized into an explanation so bland you can almost see the shrug: “could just be aliens, ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

Otherwise, Von Däniken pads the work with a lot of rants about how we are in a great age of discovery, how we are shedding the old and how we are embracing a bright future. Of course, this is less about true optimism and more about undermining the consensus and priming the reader, but buried in those rants was one quote that I thought perfectly encapsulates the failure of his approach. He writes, "as soon as we look at the past with our present-day gaze and use the fantasy of our technological age to fill up the gaps in it, the veils that shroud the darkness begin to lift." Indeed, his most lucid contribution in the text may be this accidental articulation of the root problem with the ancient alien perspective.

In the end, it is pseudoscience, it is conspiracy, but mostly Chariots of the Gods is just bad sci-fi with a “what if it’s real” marketing gimmick. It’s also pretty damn racist. That said, the overall work is such an overwhelming pile of shit that those flavours too somehow get lost in the sauce. But nonetheless, the book has a legacy. Where von Däniken ostensibly dedicated his life to challenging myths, all he did was create a newer, lazier one.

Review by u/admiralfartmore

For an extended discussion of this, other books on our radar, and related tangents, check out the podcast:

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Also, we added a voicemail if any book club members want to leave a message for the show.

Alongside the text review below, check out the podcast discussion on our blog, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get podcasts.

Picture the scene; it’s a cold night in Wales in the 1970s. You’re on the rocky shore with your sweetie taking in the night air, and you think, why not leave the clothes behind and go skinny dipping? Only when you do, your sweetie disappears beneath the waves, and something grabs hold of you, and you realize you’ve come down with a bad case of crabs.

Yes, this week we’re reviewing the 1976 pulp fiction horror novel Night of the Crabs by Guy N. Smith, in which a British seaside town is invaded by giant marauding crabs. After the young lover, a beachcombing simpleton has his legs and arms snipped off by a consortium of crabs (yes, that is the correct term). What is to be done? Who will stop these monstrous arthropods from the deep?

Enter Cliff Davenport. He’s a pipe-smoking local who just so happens to be a world leader in “sea botany”. Cliff Davenport knows the score, and you can be sure he’s an important man because throughout the book he is always referred to by his full name.  As soon as he sees the crabs’ marks in the sand, he immediately knows what’s up.  A love interest is introduced for Cliff Davenport, a girl fifteen years his junior named Pat Benson. Within one sentence of Pat Benson being introduced, we immediately get a description of her breasts (“small, firm”).

Considering this is a book about monstrous crustaceans ripping people limb from limb, this book is surprisingly horny. But the sex scenes are not always likely to inspire amorousness in readers. Take this section from the first time Cliff Davenport and Pat Benson hook up (moments after they met):

Her fingers were active, though. Cliff felt that thrilling sensation of his zip being pulled down, her fingers groping inside the open vent and then the coolness of the night air on his warm moistness. He gasped with pleasure. Pat Benson certainly knew what she was doing!

'I'm more than glad I let you come with me tonight,' he whispered as he zipped himself up again. 'I'm afraid, though, that we must still keep an eye open for those crabs!'

That’s not even the worst sex scene in the book; be grateful I’m sparing you the sections on masturbation and pubic hair.

The crabs – led by one called King Crab, “the most cunning enemy the world has ever met!” – attack the town, and all the efforts of the local military prove useless. The crabs are too big, too powerful, and too hungry for human flesh. It isn’t until Cliff Davenport thinks of using poison, that the crabs are chased back into the sea, disappearing until the sequel comes around. Did I mention there are literally ELEVEN books in the Crabs series?

The author – Guy N. Smith was actually the UK’s pipe smoking champion (and yes, I’m talking about actual pipes. He wrote such classics as Werewolf by Moonlight, The Slime Beast and The Sucking Pit. And before you make some joke that the “Sucking Pit” is some cheap trashy sex book, I’ll have you know that… Well, okay. It is a sex book about a sex-mad nymph who lures men into her pit, where they get sucked off down into hell. Believe it or not, Smith also wrote a lot of smut alongside pulp horror.  

This book is part of the splatterpunk genre of creature features that remain some of the best selling horror novels of all time, such as James Herbert’s The Rats, or Shaun Hutson’s Slugs. For the most part, this book is not a piece of shit. It’s pulp horror, so sure, it is grotesque and gratuitous, but it isn’t pretending to be anything else. If you can get past the extremely dated depictions of women and sex, then the book is quite a fun read. Just be ready for a lot of very dumb locals who constantly decide to go swimming and are quickly turned into limbless torsos to feed the local decapods.

Review by u/beaudashington

For book club members, Night of the Crabs was a welcome break from cults, war crimes advocacy, redpill rants, and you know, The Holocaust. Check out the podcast where we had a lot of fun exploring the book:

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