I remember seeing this book laid out on a table of half-price bargains downstairs in the big Easons in Dublin when I was ten or eleven.  I was there with my dad.  I’d already read his tattered copy of Alan and Sally Landsburg’s In Search Of Myths and Monsters so this was right up my street. That was over twenty years ago. I can’t remember why I didn’t buy it, or at least try to pester him into buying it for me.

I’ve had that cover image lodged in my brain since that day and I don’t think a month has gone by that I haven’t thought of it and wondered what it was called.

I found the picture while reading about the sad news of John A. Keel’s death on Cryptomundo.  You’ve probably seen the film based on Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies. I had no idea he’d also written the book that has tormented me for twenty odd years.

But now I know. To ebay!

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

Before this the only Chomsky book I’d (attempted to) read was Fateful Triangle.  That was a bit bloated and dry but this one is excellent.

A close and worthwhile look at the smegma festering beneath the wizened patriotic foreskin of Imperial America.

Steve Aylett’s biography of pulp sci-fi author Jeff Lint. Ye fucking gods, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Three random lines . . .

Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories.

Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.

The cover of that issue showed an oriental magician beckoning some sort of horned kangaroo out a sewage outlet.

It is a masterpiece, worthy of the great man at it’s heart.

This is the cover to the UK edition.