2022: Bedlam in Print
The standout books of 2022, as chosen by me
2022: The Year in Bedlam
The latest installment of my annual Year in Bedlam overview
FEMALE PSYCHO WARD!!!
Behold: emerging from the smut book underground of the 1960s, the “latest sellout” by the prolific trash-meister Con Sellers, a novel its publishers predicted was “going to make headlines from one end of the country to the other!”
EXOTICA
The foremost film ever made by Canada’s Atom Egoyan, an elliptical, provocative and altogether fascinating 1994 drama
BAD BIOLOGY
A supremely immature “Godawful Love Story” from Frank Henenlotter
More Illustrated Oddments
Here we have a new batch of Illustrated Oddments, books that deserve some ink on this site, even if I can’t justify writing full reviews.
PSYCHEDELIC SEX
What a great idea: a profusely illustrated guide to pornography of the psychedelic era, put out by the prestige outfit Taschen!
STAR
A dark and idiosyncratic look at the dream factory, drafted in a highly dense and poetic style (“Explosively Hilarious” it isn’t)
THE END OF ALICE
The fascination with deviance that suffused 1990s fiction gave us first person studies of serial killing (AMERICAN PSYCHO), homicidal foot fetishism (FOOTSUCKER) and, with THE END OF ALICE, pedophilia.
RAW MEAT
An ambitious exercise in science fiction themed smut fiction, and, I’m afraid, not a very successful one