Apocalypse Culture

Item Details

New York, Amok Press, 1987, Softcover

First Edition, First Printing, Fine

8vo., 272 pp. Bios and contacts, index, ads at rear, black-and-white photos and illustrations throughout. Cover art by Joe Coleman; photography by Boyd Rice. True first edition, first printing.  

Apocalypse Culture is the book that launched Adam Parfrey's career as chronicler-in-chief of American fringe culture, and it remains a touchstone of underground publishing. First issued by Parfrey's own Amok Press in 1987 — three years before the better-known, substantially revised Feral House edition — this original printing gathers essays on extremism, apocalyptic belief, and taboo behavior from contributors including anarchist theorist Hakim Bey and journalist Thomas McEvilley, alongside voices from far more disreputable corners of the culture.

The range of subject matter is part of what made the book notorious: an opening essay linking werewolf mythology to Charles Manson and modern violence; James Shelby Downard's conspiracy-minded reading of the JFK assassination through Masonic symbolism; body-modification pioneer Fakir Musafar on ritual body art; essays treating nuclear war and Christian end-times prophecy as forms of secular apocalyptic religion; and pieces touching on Wilhelm Reich's orgone theories, mind control, UFO belief, and anti-civilization critiques of art and agriculture. It's a deliberately disorienting tour through 1980s fringe thought, assembled with a seriousness that unsettled as many readers as it delighted.

Provocative from the outset, the book was alternately dismissed and hailed as "the most important book of the decade," eventually selling more than 100,000 copies and achieving true cult-classic status; it was even banned in Russia in 2006. The Amok Press first edition — with its striking Joe Coleman cover art and Boyd Rice photography — contains material dropped or substantially revised for the later Feral House printing, making it the edition serious collectors of transgressive and outsider publishing seek out specifically.

Item #706202505