Book Club from Hell

ATTENTION! JACK'S NEW NOVEL, AUDIENCE CAPTURE, IS OUT!
Order here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1764219090/
Or here: https://bonfirebooks.org/product/audience-capture-by-jack-cuthbertson-pre-order/

Aron Beauregard is a prominent figure in extreme horror, a genre of fiction where authors compete to make readers feel as ill as possible. The Slob (2019) is no exception, a story of how a pregnant door-to-door Bissell saleswoman is imprisoned, tortured, raped, undergoes a pummelling abortion, is force-fed rotting human gristle, and more. This is all perpetrated by the titular Slob, a gigantically fat man of questionable personal hygiene. Turns out, he's also...

Jack has a new novel! Friend of the pod and (real life) friend of Jack (me) Felix McNamara comes on the show to talk to Jack (me) about Audience Capture (my new book).
And what is Audience Capture about? I'm (Jack) glad you asked...

Atlas and the Shruggers. Four members, billions of fans. A band so popular as to be world government. The best music, the best storylines. Full spectrum audio-visual domination. Why would you pay attention to anything else?

But nothing lasts forever. The very forces that brought the Shruggers to prominence now...

Levi returns to talk about a milestone in the fitness industry: a book about our coming body-modification future, largely written by an entity without a body (Google Gemini). Dr Michael Israetel, PhD, is a fitness influencer, bodybuilder, and proponent of science-based lifting. His most recent book is interesting for a number of reasons. One such reason is that Hachette Book Group would publish something so obviously AI-written that many of the book's images retain their Gemini watermark; certain chapters are collections of prompted lists. Another reason is the significant overlap between Mike Israetel-thought and blackpill theory. MIke Israetel walked...

Jack has an upcoming novel called 'Audience Capture', out October 2026 through Bonfire Books! Preorder now! https://bonfirebooks.org/product/audience-capture-by-jack-cuthbertson-pre-order/

Mark Brandon Read, better known by his nom du crime 'Chopper', was an Australian celebrity criminal. His portfolio of misdeeds includes robbing drug dealers and pimps, shooting a few people, holding a county court judge hostage with a sawn-off shotgun and demanding the immediate release of a friend from prison, having his ears cut off while incarcerated, and melting people's toes with a blowtorch. Of artistic interest are the fifteen books he published during his life, selling...

I WILL BE READING AT PSEUDO-EVENT 3 IN NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 26TH! PLEASE COME ALONG AND SAY HELLO!
More information: https://redroomnyc.com/event/pseudo-event-3-private-curtain/

Sorry for the long gap between uploads here, have had a few problems in non-podcast life which meant that recording and uploading new episodes has had to (still has to) take a back seat.

Sodomy Punish'd is based on a diary found by English sailors on the island of Ascension in 1726. The story goes that these sailors found an abandoned tent on this island, in which was...

Christian/Christine Weston Chandler is a human feedback loop. Autistic and obsessed with documenting his own life and obsessions - video games, anime, the search for a boyfriend-free girl, etc - he has uploaded countless hours of rambling autobiography onto the internet. This, in turn, has attracted a group of people dedicated to assembling and examining the output of Chris Chan. Now for the feedback loop: Chris noticed that he was getting attention, and certain followers weren't happy to be passive observers. The experience of being observed by a diffuse cloud of anonymous and pseudonymous people - some trolls...

Pierce is a just-released novel by John Jay Stancliff, and you should buy it. Following multiple generations of the Collier family, it is a tightly-paced examination of our contingent place in the world, our inevitable mistakes in forming something fixed in such contingency, and the burden of subsequent generations to repeat our mistakes. It also includes some of the tensest depictions of combat I've come across, family drama, romantic drama, and construction. A lot of construction. Honey from the lion's mouth. 
Come for the carpentry jargon, stay for the military jargon!

Buy Pierce: https://farthestheaven.com/p...

The Columbine High School massacre occurred on April 20th, 1999, in Columbine, Colorado. Perpetrated by high school seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, it occupies a strange, mimetic place in our culture. Aesthetically inspired by media such as Natural Born Killers, Doom II and Duke Nukem 3d, it went on to provide a template for subsequent mass casualty attacks on soft targets, such as Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech. Harris and Klebold both wrote diaries, so, naturally, we read them. I felt quite unclean after this one.

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Contact: [email protected]

Atrocities is an epic poem (of sorts), out soon from Hyperidean Press. In it, Felix McNamara explores the end of the End of History with a great deal of humour (it's a very, very funny poem), insight, talk show panels (starring, among others, Marvin Heemeyer, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and William Blake), ape attacks, and more. I'd really encourage everyone to get a copy!

I will be attending a reading in Melbourne on the 21st of August, at the Bar Lingo, Thornbury, alongside Felix McNamara, Matt Sini, Liam Blackford, Lucas Smith, Jack Norman, Russell Walter, Ivan...

In 1979, Howard Pittman, former policeman and subsequent Baptist minister, suffered a medical emergency and was clinically dead for fifteen minutes. While dead, he was tempted by Satan. Upon rejecting Satan's advances, angels took Pittman on a tour of Second Heaven, kind of like a double of our world, but full of demons. He also got to talk to God (unimpressed with Pittman's life).

Pittman's journey was detailed in his 1999 book, Placebo. As many people who read and enjoyed Placebo wished to know more about the demons Pittman encountered, he wrote Demons: an Eyewitness Account, where he...

Wyndham Lewis was a 20th-century painter and writer, famous for his involvement in the Vorticist movement, his constant feuds with just about everyone who tried to help him, his acidic satire, explosive political tracts, and for calling Adolf Hitler 'a man of peace'. I think he should be a lot more famous for his novels, such as the topic of today's episode: Tarr, first published in 1918 (rushed as Lewis was afraid that he would be killed in WWI and fail to leave behind a novel) and rerelased with significant revisions in 1928. It is aggressively 20th-century Modernist (untranslated foreign languages...

Surprise release! Clive Staples Lewis was a Christian apologist, Oxford don and spanking enthusiast. The Screwtape Letters is one of his many books, an epistolary novel published serially in the (now-defunct) Anglican weekly newspaper The Guardian during the Second World War. The letters are written by Uncle Screwtape, a demon administrator in the bureaucracy of Hell, and addressed to his young nephew Wormwood, an inexperienced tempter. Screwtape offers Wormwood advice on how to lead his 'patient' away from God, so that when he dies he can serve as food for demons. Hell as a gigantic, noisy bureaucracy in which...

My Miserable Life as an Asian Boy Growing up in America: Humiliation, Forced Feminization, Forced Homosexuality, Castration, Brainwashing, Slavery, Solitary Confinement, Despair (2018) is the (completely factually true) story of author Ling Anderson's life. As an Asian male, Ling explains, his role is to serve white cock as a brainwashed sissy sex slave; this book is an explanation as to how Ling reached such conclusions. While he references - among other things - race science, Schopenhauer, the perfidy of Asian women, mathematics, apologia for the Rape of Nanjing, his.personal experiences being sexually abused by a succession of white stepfathers...

Rhymes (2026) is another Tom Will poetry collection from Tom Will, in which he invents the technique of rhyming. It contains plenty of roundels, a form created by Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as triolets, rondels, villanelles, sonnets, englyns, several original translations of French poetry into English, and no limericks. Being a Tom Will collection, there are cats, moons, townies, and some very advanced Spoonerisms.
In this episode, Tom gave us several (long!) descriptions of various poetic forms and their histories, before his phone stopped recording and the last 40 minutes of our conversation were lost. I apologise for this...

Important announcement! Today we say farewell to Levi (BCFH in peace), and welcome new cohost Capitalisimo, who has previously appeared on this show for the Cyclomancy and An Amazing Journey into the Psychotic Mind episodes!

Alexander Bogdanov (born Malinovsky) was one of the original members of the Bolshevik Party, eventual opponent of Vladimir Lenin, and active participant in the 1905 Revolution. A very narrow thinker with limited interests, he studied and wrote on Marxist Revolution, blood transfusions, came up with a precursor to systems theory which he called 'tectology', proletarian art, and, most importantly for this episode, published...

Important! Jack has an upcoming novel called 'Audience Capture', out October 2026 through Bonfire Books!

Miguel Serrano was a Chilean diplomat who really, really liked Hitler. So much so, in fact, that he spent much of his life communing with Hitler's astral body, promoting Esoteric Hitlerism at home and abroad, travelling the world to find the esoteric hiding places of the Nazis (including Antarctica and the Andes), performing Aryan initiation rituals with Savitri Devi in the Externsteine, vibrating out of time and space in the abandoned SS Castle Wewelsburg shortly after WWII, discussing the true nature of...

William Blake was a poet, artist, and spiritual Yagi antenna, who lived in 18th- and 19th-century England. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (probably written around 1790) is a collection of pictures, poems, aphorisms, and strange prose pieces, all describing Blake's particular religious (that is to say, not Religious) worldview. Joining me is Western Australia's foremost chronicler of men getting women pregnant in prose and poetry, Liam Blackford.

I was pretty sick during the recording of this episode, so in the video you can watch the paracetamol, caffeine and phenylephrine slowly wear off, and the light fade...

Carbon Pages is Daniel Gavilovsky’s new collection of plays. The centrepiece of this book is No Weapon Formed Against You, a semi-historical, semi-speculative impossible-to-stage play about the formation of the National Bolshevik Party by Alexander Dugin, Igor Letov and Eduard Limonov, and all narrated by a forgotten ancient demon. Somehow, Daniel managed to deliver on such a potent concept.

In this episode, we talk about National Bolshevism (for the uninitiated, it’s a witch’s brew of Bolshevism and Nazism), destiny, when to ignore history in writing historical fiction, why I have read so much ‘retarded fascism’...

I don't really know what I can tell you about this book that its remarkable title and cover art leave out. Words, as always, ultimately fail to capture what can only be directly experienced. The wonderful Phil Rot joined me to try, and fail, to capture the totality of Ass Goblins.

Buy The Moon Is Gay: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6Y2L3WK/
Phil Rot on Substack: https://philrot.substack.com/

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Contact: [email protected]

Jack has an upcoming novel called 'Audience Capture...

The Stud is an unpublished manuscript by Perth-dwelling life form Liam Blackford. It is set in a near-future, hypernatal Western Australia, and follows the lives of four stylish, elite women and one man in a 'stud house'. That is to say, the man, Luke, is employed by the four women to get them all pregnant as frequently as he can, as well as treating each of them as his queen.

A very funny social satire of surprising emotional complexity, I really enjoyed The Stud and look forward to its future publication; publishers, you might want to...

David Moulton wrote an article called 'Towards a Gay Art of Suffering', which was published in Verdurin's collection 'Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual'. In it, he uses the framing of Ivan Illich's concept of suffering, and the works of Péter Nádas, Gean Genet, and more, to talk about all sorts of uncontroversial topics. These topics include the 'state religion' of LGBTQ+, revisionist AIDS history, the domestication of gay men by gay marriage, COVID-19, LGB without the T, and so on. We talk about similarly temperate things here.

David's writing in Compact: https://www.compactmag.co...

Limits to Medicine (1975) describes how and why industrialised medicine contributes to an 'iatrogenic society', in which all political grievances are converted into demands for more industrial commodities. Helping me out with this easy and straightforward topic is Lucas Smith, ruling theocrat of Bonfire Books, an excellent small publisher who will be releasing my next novel, Audience Capture, in October of this year.

Apologies if the audio in a few sections is a bit scratchy, we had recording issues and I've tried my best to surgically (in a holistic, Illichian sense, one preserving an art of suffering) reconstruct...

Fedbook is a good book about feds. Less glibly, it's a ton of fun, a gothic espionage thriller about an informant placed in a terror cell, one planning a mass-casualty attack on a university. It's formally inventive, surprising, and, despite the whole mass-shooter thing, it's also very funny. John and I talked about Fedbook, his upcoming book ('Pierce', to be released by Farthest Heaven), Christian justifications for violence, /lit/, framing carpentry, and a lot more.

Buy Fedbook: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0BRC7Z2Q9
John's Substack: https://johnjaystancliff.substack.com/

VERY...

Prison psychologist Jerry Marzinsky and civil engineer, quantum expert, computer programmer and occasional voice-hearer Sherry Swiney have developed a new theory of schizophrenia. As it happens, the voices one hears are not hallucinations, but instead thoughts inserted by cosmic predators, who feed off the negative energy produced by humans in a state of misery. How did Jerry and Sherry find this out? By interviewing the voices heard by psychotic prisoners (I am not exaggerating).

Jerry Marzinsky's website: https://www.jerrymarzinsky.com/

Buy An Amazing Journey: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1716919541

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Morning Glory Milking Farm (2022) is an extremely successful self-published work of 'monster-bait' romantasy. In short, it details the budding relationship between Violet, a human female, and Rourke, a minotaur male, who met at Morning Glory Milking Farm, where Violet is working as a minotaur milking technician. There's a point at which a euphemism becomes more descriptive than that which it seeks to soften. The verb 'to milk' has comfortably reached such a point.

Given that I have no experience at all with romantasy or monster-bait, Leigh Cuen joined me to navigate the intricacies of clit-lit.

<...

Emshen joins me this episode to talk about Sacred Heart of the Purple Dawn, a bizarre choose-your-own-adventure novel (kind of) written by a man Emshen once got a Tarot reading from. Starring lesbian vampires, 90s action film comic relief black men, and (most horrifyingly) the Québécois, it was both a much more exhausting and much funnier experience than I was expecting.

Sun Cross Publications: 

https://www.suncrosspublications.com/

Get Sacred Heart of the Purple Dawn: https://www.suncrosspublications.com/product-page/sacred-heart-of-the-purple-dawn

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Contact: jack.bcfh@gma...

Phil Rot is back! After winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his micronovel The Raft, Phil is gearing up for another Nobel with his newly-released The Moon Is Gay. Besides having maybe the best book title of all time, it is also a brave, timely, elegiac, lyrical, epochal, and moving account of camgirl diplomacy in a fast-paced, competitive, ultra-convenient, AI-enabled Amazon future. It also features gay moon werewolves.
Phil and I got to talk about mole people, tunnels, Phil's writing process, why the poor can't produce great art, Phil's real name (Philip Roth), and a whole lot...

I tend to think of phrenology as a 19th-century phenomenon. In 1902, LA Vaught, late to the party, published 'Vaught's Practical Character Reader', a work seeking to (re)popularise phrenology. Mostly charming drawings and advertisements for phrenology ('it's plain to see!' is a commonly used phrase), it's a fun read, albeit one that is so chaotically set out that it's kinda hard to follow.

Capitalisimo joined me for this episode, helping me to phrenologically and physiognomically analyse various world leaders and luminaries.

NB: This episode is probably best watched as a video, as...

Brad Kelly, of the Method and Madness podcast, returns to talk about his new book, The Earthen Dark. It's a work of weird fiction set in a sewer. Turns out, this is the perfect place to set such a tale. We talked about why subterranean places are so spooky, the near and far alien of weird fiction, the Glass Bead Game and LLMs, the effect of having children on one's writing, the provenance of imagination, Brad's writing process, and a whole lot more.

Get The Earthen Dark here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GF67226L
...

Utter Goodness is an upcoming short story collection written by Audrey Lee and published by Farthest Heaven. Its thirteen stories are lovely character studies, various faces of that peculiarly American form of cultural maximalism, and each rendered in very lithe prose. There's a kinda extemporising quality to the writing here, if one could extemporise in full paragraphs with foreshadowing and multiple layers of meaning, etc, etc, ect. It's good!
We spent a lot of time talking about how Audrey comes up with these characters, and how her return to faith influenced the writing of Utter Goodness, both consciously...

Chapters VIII, VIII and IX, titled 'Problems of the Arabian Culture', are some of the most fun in all of Spengler's work. In order to properly illuminate Spenglerian concepts like pseudomorphosis, the Pagan Church, the second religiousness, Islam as Magian Civilisation, and more, Gabe and I did what we do best: talk about gaming in Spenglerian terms. Turns out, Croteam's Serious Sam franchise is the perfect artefact of the coming Slavic soul, the endless flat plane, the erased z-axis of aiming, Siberian Mayhem...

Gabe on X: @ezrarunnaround

Tooky's Mag on X: @tookysmag

VERY...

Andrew Edwards is the author of the novels King of Dogs (2019) and Crowbar (2025), both of which are well worth reading. King of Dogs is a tense action novel, while Crowbar feels like reading Programmed to Kill and watching thirty conspiracy thrillers at the same time during a speed comedown. It's a lot.
For this episode, I softballed Andy with simple questions like 'What is the supernatural?' and 'What is your conception of the soul?' He's a real trooper and actually answered these, as well as a whole lot more.

Get Crowbar: https://www.amazon...

The Regime of the Brother is a book of psychoanalytic feminist theory (particularly leaning on Lacan), explaining why we no longer live in an Oedipal patriarchy, but rather live in a 'sham-Oedipus' regime of the brother. Neo-totemism, the primal hoard, the narcissistic ego as a consequence of failed symbolic castration and, consequently, no entry into the symbolic order. Make sense? Either way, you should listen to me and Stephen G Adubato talk about this book!

Cracks in Postmodernity (very, very highly recommended!): https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/

Stephen on X: @stephengadubato

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Farthest Heaven is publishing some of the most exciting poetry and (soon!) fiction around today. I got to talk to the First Consul (an in-house naming convention) of Farthest Heaven, Bill Ballard, about book design, finding great authors, his approach to editing, what it means to run a small press, and a whole lot more. I was really looking forward to this one, Farthest Heaven has only published winners so far, and I really encourage everyone to check them out.

Farthest Heaven's website: www.farthestheaven.com
Farthest Heaven on Patreon: www.patreon.com/c/FarthestHeaven
...

£, flesh and Femoid are a novella and novel, respectively, written by Aaron Barry and published by McBussy Publishing. Both star poorly-adjusted female leads suffering terminal brainrot, and both are written in a dense, internet-inflected style.

In line with both books' preoccupations, this episode we talked about how to write the internet (and what that might even mean), the childish defences of irony and performative nihilism, nuisance streamers, /r9k/, Cioran, Camus, how Aaron is being sued, and a lot more.

Buy £, flesh: https://mcbussypublishing.org/product/flesh-by-aaron-barry-print-pre-order/

Buy Femoid: https://www.amazon.com/dp...

Pretty Boys Are Poisonous (2023) is a poetry collection written by actress Megan Fox. Mostly focusing on her troubled relationship with professional machine-gun Colson Baker, the poems are surprisingly adolescent for a (currently) 39-year-old mother of four. To assist me in parsing these poems, Aaron Barry, aka Jasper Ceylon, joined me for this episode.

Aaron/Jasper's work:

Echolalia Review: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1738633926

Poundflesh: https://mcbussypublishing.org/product/flesh-by-aaron-barry-print-pre-order/

Femoid: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1738633942

Jasper's Substack: https://jasperceylon.substack.com/

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION
Jack...

Officeparks is a wonderful poetry collection from Noam Hessler, and yet another winner published by Farthest Heaven. Romantic, funny, and shot through with an easy, natural experimentation, Officeparks is a real treat. I'm trying hard not to be too effusive in my praise, in case people think I'm being disingenuous, but these poems really are that good. 
Anyway, Noam and I got to talk about their approaches to poetry, how they manage to make experimentation feel so effortless, how one might write poems as songs versus films, the Russian language, and a whole lot more. 

Find Off...

Quan Millz is a maestro of urban fiction. Since 2017, he has self-published over 70 books and (apparently) made more than $500,000 from titles such as Old THOT Next Door, Pastors Eat Pwussy Too, Pregnant by My Gay Stepdaddy, and, the subject of today's episode, This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib. It's a tale of characters who make remarkably poor decisions, and with a tone veering wildly between slapstick descriptions of triple OG cockroaches and depictions of rape and child abuse.

Helping me out was Slater, aka Simpulacra! Stay tuned for his upcoming novel Becoming.

Slater's Substack...

Like You Have a Choice is the first short story collection from Ivan Niccolai, the man behind the Notes from the Periphery Substack. We talk about Melbourne's inner-north, wogs, JG Ballard, Mark Fisher, Nick Land, bilingual writing, watering the driveway on Sunday morning (wogs), accelerationism, lemon trees in the back yard (wogs), illegal satellite dishes in the back yard (wogs), and a whole lot more.

Get Like You Have a Choice: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FLTHP5MV
Ivan's Substack: https://minorobservations.substack.com/

Ivan's Recommendations
Justin Isis - https://neopasseism.substack...

Eumeswil (1977) is one of Jünger's final novels, and is bizarre, inscrutable, and wonderful. It is, in many ways, a glassy dramatisation of the second volume of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, and also an introduction to Jünger's archetype of the anarch, a series of odd animal metaphors, a collection of fragmented musings by a survivor of two World Wars, and a whole lot more.

Helping me decode this strange book is Brad Kelly of the Method and Madness podcast!

Brad's website: https://www.bradkellyesque.com/

Me...