Terrible Book Club

Our Patron Signe chose this book as her once-per-year reward! Check out our Patreon here to get this and other rewards for yourself. In addition to our usual barnyard language, Content Warnings this week include: abuse/assault, captivity, cannibalism, murder, and generalized violence. At long last, we've read another book that we actually didn't hate! I think we're at a rate of liking a book approximately every 18 months or so. The stream-of-consciousness style of writing throughout much of the story could definitely turn people away from the book in addition to the many puzzle pieces it leaves for the reader to assemble themselves. It's honestly a refreshing take on the whole "New-England-Puritan-witches-in-the-woods" concept that's been really overdone. Hunt managed to make something interesting AND didn't spoon-feed the reader, which Paris really appreciates. Chris wanted more clarity from the author, but we would both still recommend it to anyone who is looking for a dark fairy tale that you have to work

Our Patron Greg chose this book as his once-per-year reward! Check out our Patreon here to get this and other rewards for yourself. In addition to our usual barnyard language, Content Warnings abound this week: abuse/assault, murder, racism, rape, sex/pornography, sexism, and violence. Our patron Greg really made us work for our Patreon dollars this week. Bruce Dickinson sings for Iron Maiden but is also a pilot, professional fencer, and even rescues sea turtles occasionally - a true renaissance man. In 1991, he decided to add "author" to his already impressive resume with ... mixed results. This book is intentionally farcical, so the situations are intended to be shocking and graphic in an effort to critique the rich and powerful in Britain in the 1990s. The writing itself is actually fairly decent, but conceptually it just ends up being tone-deaf finger-pointing.

This week we learn how to (not) defend ourselves with objects through a book infamous for its imagery! Thanks to our friend Chris H. for posting some images from this book on Facebook, which inspired Paris to do a reverse image search and discover this lost treasure from 1991. We're joined by special guest Paul Lowe to guide us through the world of martial arts. Paul has studied Muay Thai and MMA for most of his life and now works at Sityodtong Muay Thai Academy, a world renowned fight sport gym that has produced many successful MMA and Muay Thai fighters. Whoops! The book does actually recommend you put analgesic ointment primarily into the eyes and then maybe the genitals if you have the opportunity. Links! Images from the book Sityodtong What Were You Wearing? Survivor Art Installation Art Exhibit Powerfully Answers The Question ‘What Were You Wearing?’ RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network)

April Fool's! Tomorrow you'll get your regularly scheduled TBC episode, but for today we're switching episodes with The Short Stories of Augie Peterson as a fun April Fool's Day exercise to expose our respective listeners to something new. Augie's playing one of our episodes on her feed today while we bring you Augie's review of the social media horror movie Friend Request. We recommend you also check out her Choose Your Own Adventure episode where you can play along with the adventure by jumping to certain timestamps in the episode.  If you're curious about Augie's other work, want to check out her podcast or writing, or become a patron of hers, head over to her website: The Short Stories of Augie Peterson. You can also find her on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads. Lastly, thanks to Moxie LaBouche of the Your Brain on Facts podcast for pairing us up with Augie and orchestrating the great April Fool's Day switcheroo of 2019!

Somehow we're reading another Christian-leaning, dog related book with strange authorship. We really don't know how this happened again. Thanks to longtime friend of the show Elisa for recommending this one! Content Warning: In addition to our usual barnyard language, we've got: inter-species breastfeeding and menstruation (brief mention). Apparently we were wrong about inter-species breastfeeding and it turns out it's actually fine for mammals to just do that for each other. Uh, neat? The person listed as the author isn’t actually the author, but a compiler/editor of sorts. Yet, there's also an additional person credited as his editor AND the actual author was also assisted by one of his children, so we’ve got about 4 people responsible for this thing: 1. BG Michael “Runt” Makepeace: Man who wrote memoirs and also took notes and pieced together what he believes was an encounter with an immortal dog breeder who has an immortal dog best friend. 2. Raymond N. Dombkiewicz: Listed as the author, but actually a fr

Our Patron Lynn chose this book as their once-per-year reward! Check out our Patreon here to get this and other rewards for yourself. No substantial Content Warnings this week - brief mentions of death and terrorist attacks/shootings, and discussion of an infamous scene from the movie Blue Velvet but otherwise you’ve got nothing but our usual barnyard language to be concerned about. Armed with our own childhood experiences of playing Nintendo games and Super Mario, we felt plenty prepared to dive into Bob Chipman's Super Mario Bros 3: Brick by Brick. Part text walk-through, part memoir, and part video game history retrospective, this book tried to do too much in its 208 pages. The author should've committed to one of these paths in a shorter form or found a better way to weave all three into a much longer, much more detailed narrative. Chipman misses the opportunity to connect with his audience by avoiding deeper discussions of his own life and feelings. Strangely, the few times he does get more personal, he

This week, we're simultaneously in both the years 1953 and 1692. Luckily our friends D & Ken from the Antiques Freaks podcast have arrived to help us interpret The Crucible. Ken has more sticky notes than pages inside his copy of the play, D teaches us about the House Un-American Activities Committee, Paris is perfectly sober unlike the last time the Antiques Freaks were guests on the show, and Chris is possessed by the ghost of Arthur Miller and reveals his plans to hunt witches with his arsenal of ... water. Many thanks to the following podcasts and books that helped us understand the political and cultural climate of Salem Village (Danvers) and Salem Town in 1692 and just how inaccurate Miller's play was: Podcasts: The History of Witchcraft Iconography Unobscured Books: A Storm of Witchcraft by Emerson W. Baker P.S. Listen to the album of the same name by the band Malleus if you're into black metal The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F. Karlsen The Devil

We received an anonymous recommendation to read this book. It is easily one of the most concentrated forms of delirium ever put to text. The Sunny Films website: https://sites.google.com/site/sunnyproductionfilms/ The interactive flash 'game' linked on the Sunny Films site that Paris found and got way too into later in the episode: http://htwins.net/scale2/ GIF of Paris trying to read the sentence around 15:15: https://i.imgur.com/BSzD6vz.gif This book is supposedly written as a screenplay since the author wants this to be made into a film. This screenplay/book suffers intensely from never being spell-checked or edited for content, style, or even basic English grammar and syntax. Additionally, the descriptions of rather basic things are just incredibly bizarre (e.g. a factory called Society Office Supply somehow produces electric chairs, hypodermic needles, AND nuclear weapons). A short sample of what this book contains includes: eternal life batteries; scene shifts so abrupt that they induce motion sicknes

This time, we’re dead and trying to figure out just what to do with these incorporeal forms of ours. Luckily, a copy of David Straume’s Beginner’s Guide to Sex in the Afterlife was waiting here for us when we arrived in Purgatory.  This book certainly seemed like it was going to teach us about having sex in the afterlife. It did no such thing. Instead, the author just told us a whole lot of things that he thinks are true - namely, that everything in life is sexual. Painting? Sex. Playing music? Sex. Hydroelectricity? Sex. Atoms? Sex. Computer coding? Definitely sex. Masturbating? Sex that produces astral babies. Oh, and you better develop a positive relationship with the sun because it's the source of all sexual energy and you should maybe tan a lot (or something). Mostly, we felt like this book was a slurry of very surface-level ideas from a guy who maybe took Philosophy 101 and got really into the concept of chakras. Plus, it seems to really push the masculine/feminine binary, "find-your-other-half-and-atta

Ah, cats - who doesn't love a good cat video or cat meme? The world is full of cat-themed things, so it's only natural that a cat fantasy series would eventually appear. If you really love cats, the collective corporate consciousness that is Erin Hunter has got you covered! The Warriors series (more commonly known as the Warrior Cats series) has cat nurses, leaders, queens, fights, and enough compound cat names and cat vocabulary words to make you question your sanity within minutes of starting the first book! Sure, this series is for kids/tweens, but when things like Redwall, Mousegard - or, hell, even Animorphs - already exist, there's just no room for a cheap, fantasy-by-committee series of 81 god damned books about how glorious cats could be if they found religion through ghosts. P.S. Check out the Helpless Romantics podcast if you want to mix it up with reviews of a terrible TV show instead of a terrible book!

A guy who reviews cartoons and is really invested in creating a cartoon series himself wrote a children's chapter book in the universe that he's been creating for a few years. There's nothing wrong with this concept on the surface. Peer deeper into the chocolate puddle, though, and you'll find a horrifying interpretation of reality where children run the entire world and the unintended consequences of this arrangement smother any potential this thing might have had. Imagine Hellraiser, but instead of Pinhead offering you the heights of pain/pleasure, it's a cute child luring you into her world of candy, ponies, and endless playtime. Rather than being flayed alive, dismembered, or otherwise horribly tortured in a physical sense, you're instead damned to be your child's canvas for humiliation. Enslaved by your child masters, you are crippled by the fear of displeasing them. Thanks to our listener Letty for recommending we read Growing Around: Party Panic! by John 'Enter' Rozanski. Content warnings: Discussion o

No real content warnings this week except for one off-hand misogynistic statement by a single character! There IS a weird scene that could be interpreted as being uh...dendrophilic, but unless you're really freaked out by a little tree kissing there's nothing too off-putting in this episode. We partake in some mystical bright bud and wander into the trippy wastelands with Brixia and Uta, the adventuring companions at the center of this fantasy novel plucked from a random cart of old sci fi/fantasy books for $1.00 at Amoeba Records. Can wrongly interpreted illustrations, sudden slut shaming, and hand-wavey plot points mar our journey with Brixia? ... ... Not really! It was good! This book wasn't terrible! We want to read the other books in this series now. Thanks, Andre Norton. While we were quite relieved to read something for the show that we both really enjoyed, listeners may not find this episode as entertaining as a result. We had very little criticism for this story, and we even enjoyed most of the art,

Fritz Leiber may have coined the term "sword and sorcery" and he may have written some legendary stories, but this book is not to be counted among those same accomplishments. Content Warning! Drugs, generalized violence, racism, sex, slavery, & weapons (guns/knives). Line-to-line, the writing is actually pretty good and the dialogue is believable in the world of the book. There's even some great satire in this book (the whole vision of Greater Texas), but it doesn't really end up doing much besides producing a few laughs. Plus, the sexism is laid on a bit too thick to really convince us that it's part of the satire and the main character is an annoying, arrogant, and naive jerk who just wants to have earth sex at the expense of far more important things. A Specter is Haunting Texas is far from the worst thing that we've read on TBC, but it does little besides holding up a caricature of America and pointing at it.

Don't be fooled! Darrel Day didn't write this - or even edit it, apparently - he just put it on the internet for his friend, Terry Bandemer. Which is fine! It's nice to help your friend put out their book - but why put your name on it as the author when you didn't write it? This is Terry's autobiography. It's generic non-fiction; just a look at a random man's life as a K9 officer in Minnesota between the 1960s-2000s. It's written in first person perspective and would be fine if Terry had gotten a real editor and had consulted a second person to assist with writing. Unfortunately he didn't do either of those things. This book should never have been published as it is. It's stream-of-consciousness brainstorming at best, with lists of names, incoherent sentence structures, lots of spelling errors, and no sense of chronology or order. We had to make a spreadsheet just to keep track of all of the people/dogs mentioned in this book. It's a little over 350 pages with about 200 named individuals (this isn't including

Happy Halloween! Enjoy this episode one day early as a treat from the Terrible Book Club. Crabs - The Human Sacrifice was suggested by reddit user dickdastardly and voted on by listeners as a spooky book for October. Content warning! This episode contains discussion and graphic descriptions of: blood, bleeding, crabs, cutting, disease, dismemberment, drugs, masturbation, ritual sacrifice, sexual assault, regular 'ol consensual sex, generalized violence against human and animals, & weapons (such as guns, knives, & swords). Welcome to the shallow, diseased pool of sex and crab murders that is Episode 43! We forgot to mention this on the show, but here's some crab music for this crab book: Clutch - Hot Bottom Feeder "Never mind that stuff, they sell from Vietnam Get it from the Chesapeake, but never from the can Follow my directions, it's an easy recipe Strictly by the pound. Adjust accordingly 100 million years old Transcendent creature No bones about it Hot bottom feeder Don't bother with the lump, i

Far away and 40 books ago, we read Marked, the first book in the House of Night Series by mother-daughter duo Kristen & P.C. Cast. It was the second book we read for the podcast and the first book we threw across a room (that's not an exaggeration). Today, we've decided to return to the House of Night for a second helping of outrageous caricatures of teenagers trapped within a love rhombus - just in time for the Halloween season! This time, our main protagonist has the option of THREE cardboard cutouts of men ranging from ‘a basic 7th grader’s idea of the perfect boyfriend’ to ‘needy but he does what I say’ to ‘older creepy guy’. Content Warnings: alcohol/alcoholism, bloodplay, bombs, car accidents, cutting, drowning, kidnapping, masturbation, sex, and some mild violence (and also vampires, zombies, and teenagers if those are problematic for you, I guess). Although the authors and their publishers have distanced themselves from their old book trailers, they're still clinging to life over on YouTube for yo

Our Patron Veronica chose this book as her once-per-year reward! Check out our Patreon here to get this and other rewards for yourself. We've got a real intro now! Let us know what you think. Things get serious on TBC this week. This episode is not terribly funny and we've got some content warnings for you: eating disorders (anorexia), exercise disorders, alcohol, weapons, violence, & sexual assault/rape. Luckiest Girl Alive tries to expose the nuance and neurosis of growing up as a woman in America. It reveals some glimpses of reality into a life steeped in consumerism, sexism, and abuse, but is a bit of an extreme take on all of it. Unfortunately, we've also got another case of a Mary Sue, writing that sometimes ends up feeling like someone trying to be cool in a 90s chat room, and a stable full of characters who are just as hateable as the protagonist.

This book feels like the author created a massive dartboard where each section was a completely random idea or topic, put on a blindfold, threw darts, and chose what she would put in the book based on where those darts landed. If any of you are or know someone who is an expert on Old Norse, Old English, or Middle English, Paris wants to talk to you because she has some linguistic bones to pick with this book. This is a haphazard tale of time travel, chefs, vikings, angels, vampires, demons, ISIS (yes, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), scents, awkward relationships, sex, lots of food, and menus of that food. Despite having SO MANY ELEMENTS, this story doesn't have a whole lot of action that inspires suspense or wonder - readers may die from the drama famine. Nothing in that above list is a joke - it's all in there, like the vague and numerous ingredients of those 90s Prego commercials.

This time, we read an X-Files novel sanctioned by Chris Carter and it was just as pulpy as we expected. If you miss Mulder, Scully, and their crazy case files, you should check out this episode. Topics include nanotechnology, a very particular form of animal testing, and a special segment about Paris's dreams!

Since this book takes place 200 years in the past, we figured we needed some experts on old stuff! D & Ken from Antiques Freaks join us this week to read Johnny Tremain. D helps us understand silversmithing while Ken defends his doctoral thesis on Johnny's homosexuality. Throughout it all, Paris is inebriated and at the limits of functionality; Chris wishes this episode ended 30 minutes ago.