In the summer of 1950, Ray Bradbury chanced upon novelist and literary critic Christopher Isherwood in a Los Angeles bookstore, introduced himself, and gave Isherwood a copy of his first novel, The Martian Chronicles, which had been published earlier that year…
Though it was Richard Nixon who declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, it was Ronald Reagan’s “zero tolerance” policies in the 1980s that led to a massive spike in incarceration rates for nonviolent drug offenses: from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997…
By Richard McKenna and Michael Grasso
Not many books have actually changed my life, but The Uninvited is one of them. Somehow, it coalesced the long-accumulating supernatural- and UFO-related ephemera I had been cramming into my eyes and ears at every opportunity and weaponized it against me…
Edited by underground writer-cartoonist Leonard Rifas and published by Denis Kitchen’s Kitchen Sink Press, both issues of Corporate Crime Comics present a “collection of corporate atrocity stories” written and illustrated by a variety of prominent voices in the underground comics scene…
Two years ago at Christmas, I parlayed a then-recent obsession with the weird, haunted media of 1970s Britain and the field of hauntology into an Amazon Wish List. When my wife and I were in the UK visiting family, I found most of that list waiting for me under the tree. A king’s ransom, for me the Yank, of barely-remembered and never-seen British television series…
By K.E. Roberts
The idea that alien astronauts visited the Earth at some point in primitive human history, endowing us with imagination and ingenuity—and possibly our genetic code—has become the cult religion of a hyper-materialistic Western world that consecrates nothing beyond its own egomaniacal gadgetry…
By Brother Bill and Mikey Walters
Compute!’s Guide to Adventure Games is one of a series of small, spiral-bound books intended for home computer users and programmers, produced by Compute! magazine, at the time a major reviewer of hardware and software…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
It ought to be easy to be glib about After the Bomb. A “young adult” book from the mid-’80s about nuclear war is surely bursting with pastel-clad teens exchanging Valley Girl dialogue and adjusting their melting shoulder pads in the white heat of international brinkmanship…
In the rapidly changing, highly prosperous world in which they found themselves after the Second World War, American parents began to seek more modern sources of information regarding the best way to rear their offspring…
By K.E. Roberts
Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller and Roman Polanski’s meticulously faithful film adaptation of 1968, seeded the American consciousness with infernal terror at precisely the moment the country was supposed to be suffering its most desperate crisis of faith…
