Book notes

Via Booksprung comes word of a novel called The American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum. Here is the blurb from Amazon, which I think explains why I mention it here:

Eugene Myers is working on a novel about the end of the world. Meanwhile, he discovers his daughter doing porn online and his marriage is coming to an end. When he begins dreaming about people who turn out to be real, he wonders if his novel is real as well. Which isn’t good news: the radical and demented President Winchell is bent on bringing about worldwide destruction. Eugene Myers may just be the one to stop the apocalypse.

This history of the future covers every conspiracy imaginable: UFOs, secret societies, and World War III, as well as theories on life after death and human evolution. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson, The American Book of the Dead explores the nature of reality and the human race’s potential to either disintegrate or evolve.

The Kindle version of this book costs just 99 cents and it appears to be self-published. The Amazon page, however, does include this endorsement from Philip K. Dick's former wife, Tessa Dick: “If you read Lolita or A Clockwork Orange without drop-kicking the book out into the garden on a rainy day, this novel is for you.” The Amazon page says it also won "Best Fiction at the DIY Book Festival" and "The Gold IPPY Award for Visionary Fiction."

So it might be worth checking out. I plan to try it when I get time. I've been a nominating judge for the Prometheus Award for a couple of years, and some of the self-published books submitted to us have been pretty bad. On the other hand, the nominating committee is giving serious consideration to a self-published novel called The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry and I'm enjoying it myself (I'm 100 pages into it so far.) So you never know.

A search Mr. Baum's blog reveals that he is indeed a RAW fan.

Meanwhile, the Unusual Book Blog features Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter, which as I mentioned earlier has a long introduction by Robert Anton Wilson.