Sound negative? That’s only because you didn’t get the treatment early.

It wasn’t necessarily a pleasant pill to swallow, but it sure beat being bluffed by the white washed climes of suburbia into thinking that the world was anything but a flaming charnel ground of suffering and madness. Both books served to show that suburbia was one step away from the open pits of hell, and no sense of safety was possible after that deep dive into necrophiliacs, pop culture pederasts and raw reality. One of my early gateways beyond the paranoid fringe were the Feral House classics Apocalypse Culture and Apocalypse Culture II. If you’re stuffed with the sugar sweet seduction of the mainstream or alternative media what Parfrey offers up can often be a shock to the system, but it is a shock that goes a long way in waking up the sleeping realization that this happy land of techno-parasitism isn’t exactly as secure and serene as it may seem. There is no denial that the construction of careful social rituals at times dips into the dark domains of more occult influence, but the fact is, most people have no concept just what is meant by ‘occult influence’ and all too often are left hyperventilating having breathed in the miasma of some hypothetical puzzle piece that in all likelihood was an accident accompanying the accumulation of everyday information. Parfrey and his co-author Craig Heimbichner bring out both the mystery and the mundanity of secret societies, and the book serves as one of the best introductions, that I’ve come across, to esoteric influence as it emerges in everyday life. By the end of the book you are very much left to your own devices to figure out how it all fits together. An excerpt from an anti-Masonic pamphlet talking about their nefarious influence is quickly juxtaposed with a ridiculously mundane image from some bit of Masonic kitsch. The images included on each page serve to highlight the nuances of a complex social phenomena like secret societies with a careful sense of sanity that secures the experience from becoming over excited by such a rush of intriguing information.

If a hint of that pops up in the book, it is immediately cut at the root and there’s not a trace of any paranoid parade of cherry picked possibility that might let the reader plummet into some inane rabbit hole from which they might not return. Earlier this year, while reading through Feral House Books’ 2012 masterpiece of fraternal lore, Ritual America, I was once again awash in respect for Adam Parfrey’s ability to allow an open flow of information to mutilate any muddy concepts of concise conspiracy or curdled culture.

Ritual America by Adam Parfrey