Kooks, A Guide to the Outer Limits of the Human Belief
by Donna Kossy
Feral House
Ah, the folks at Feral House really know how to find ‘em. This one’s a prize catch. Big ol’ paperback job with a killer piece of deranged artwork on the cover. And inside is just oodles and oodles & hmm, that’s odd, spell checker don’t recognize “oodle.” No singular construction. What’s up with that? Nevermind. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, oodles and oodles of really neat stuff. Weird stuff, amazing stuff, scary stuff, and just plain incomprehensible stuff.
250 pages of rants and raves, richly illustrated with black and white photos, illustrations, and photocopies of whatever creed the fruitcake in question has seen fit to lovingly produce and disseminate to us, the woefully uninformed masses.
Donna gives everybody a bit of space, but not too much. Descriptions are terse, humorous, and chock fulla quotes from the sources. None of the pieces are so long as to induce boredom. Pick it up, read a piece or two, and then set it right back down. Just right for our dysfunctional attention span lifestyles.
The book’s broken out into broad-brush sections, each of which contain a shitload of individual items: Religion, Science, Metaphysics, Politics, Conspiracy, and my own personal favorite, Enigmas. I think I liked Enigmas ‘cause right there in the middle of it was a page devoted to a whacko that arrived at our local beach a few years back, living in a school bus, and handing out twenty-two dollar bills. Not twenty two-dollar bills, but individual bills in the denomination of twenty-two dollars each. The local 7-Eleven wouldn’t take ‘em though, so I’m not sure how much they really were worth.
If Love-22 (the guy’s real name, it was even on his Massachusetts driver’s license) isn’t your cup of tea, there’s plenty more in here to tickle your fancy. Psychotically rabid anti-Semitism, psychoösmology, mucusless diets, voluntary human extinction, MIT’s Archive of Useless Research, oh hell… all kinda neato shit in here.
You oughtta get this book, if for no other reason, just to run the sonofabitch through your scanner and have the best clipart collection in your neighborhood. Amaze your friends, and frighten your enemies with this stuff.
It’s priceless. Feral House, 2352 Lincoln Blvd. #359, Venice, CA 90291; http://www.feralhouse.com
