Contents
Foreword: I Must Not Read Bad Thoughts Bruce Sterling
Introduction
Part I. American Magic, American Dread
Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?
Gun Play: An American Tragedy in Three Acts
Mysterious Stranger: Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side
Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back: On Lady Gaga
Jocko Homo: How Gay Is the Super Bowl?
Wimps, Wussies, and W.: Masculinity, American Style
Stardust Memories: How David Bowie Killed the ’60s and Ushered in the ’70s and, for
One Brief Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip
When Animals Attack! An Aesop’s Fable about Anthropomorphism
Toe Fou: How I Was Subliminally Seduced by Madonna’s Big Toe
Shoah Business
The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding
Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglorious Return of Der Führer
Part II. Myths of the Near Future: Making Sense of the Digital Age
World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging
(Face)Book of the Dead
Straight, Gay, or Binary? HAL Comes out of the Cybernetic Closet
Word Salad Surgery: Spam, Deconstructed
Slashing the Borg: Resistance Is Fertile
Things to Come: Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn
Part III. Tripe Soup for the Soul: Religion and All Its Works and Ways
Tripe Soup for the Soul: The Daily Affirmation
Pontification: On the Death of the Pope
The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse
2012: Carnival of Bunkum
The Vast Santanic Conspiracy
Part IV. Anatomy Lesson: The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark Matters
Open Wide: Dental Horror
Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head
Been There, Pierced That: Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation of Subcultural
Hostilities
Death to All Humans! The Church of Euthanasia’s Modest Proposal
Great Caesar’s Ghost: On the Crypt of the Capuchins
Aphrodites of the Operating Theater: On La Specola’s Anatomical Venuses
Goodbye, Cruel Words: On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre
Cortex Envy: Bringing Up Baby Einstein
Acknowledgments
Notes
Publication History
