he way he tells it, Adam Parfrey—the Ron Popeil offusion paranoia, pop Satanism, bad art, cannibal killers, Jews for Hitler, and fecal black magic (make that brown magic)—had to become America's most mondo publisher. Mainstream houses wouldn't touch the stuff he was drawn to—beyond-the-pale subject matter that makes the minds of most readers curl up like slugs on a hot griddle. "I couldn't really work for other people," he told Salon. "Like, 'Hey, I'll find another Chicken Soup book for ya!' I couldn't see myself doing that."

Since 1987, when he cofounded Amok Press, he's done it his way, beginning with Apocalypse Culture, his omnibus of crackpot scholarship, Spenglerian ravings about the decline of just about everything, and matter-of-fact interviews with an unrepentant necrophile, a connoisseur of child torture, and a devotee of "body play" who cinches his waist to a wasplike 14 inches. Apocalypse Culture reportedly has sold more than 55,000 copies.

It is a bona fide subcultural classic, widely credited with kick-starting alt.culture as we know it, from the zine revolution to the Gen-X vogue for body modification to serial-killer fandom to knowing paranoia in the ha-ha-only-serious X-Files mode (although my nominee for that distinction would go to RE/Search books such as Industrial Culture Handbook and Modern Primitives, avowed Parfrey influences).

Now, Parfrey has inflicted a sequel, Apocalypse Culture II, on an unprepared world.

Like its predecessor, AC II features conspiracy theory, right-wing fulminations, apologias for pedophilia, sympathetic portraits of psychopaths, and the true confessions of a necrophile, plus (at no extra charge!) fascist-flavored kiddie porn, John Hinckley Jr.'s mash notes to Jodie Foster, the Aryan Nations guide to deconstructing Don McLean's "American Pie," and a handy-dandy clip-'n'-save Necrocard ("I request that after my death A. my body be used for any type of sexual activity or B. gay only c straight only c. I do not wish my body to be dismembered or disfigured during necrophiliac sex c").

No Chicken Soup here; AC II is a bottom-feeder's Salmonella for the Soul.

The question on every transgressophile's mind, of course, is: Does the sequel provide all the noxious delights of the first AC? The short answer is: No. It's a better book in almost every way, far broader in scope and more thoughtfully edited, not to mention more generously illustrated with eye-frying images: Shirley Temple in SS drag, hyperreal sex dolls with hermaphroditic genitals.

Apocalypse Culture II Edited by Adam Parfrey Feral House, 492 pp., $18.95 Buy this book

But millennial America's at once a far weirder, more niche-marketed place than it was in '87, when Apocalypse Culture introduced a new generation of overeducated lumpen to the perennial pleasures of tipping every sacred cow in sight. Necrophilia, pedophilia, dead-baby jokes, and sympathy for those old devils Uncle Adolf and Crazy Charlie just don't deliver the cattle-prod jolt they did before Jeffrey Dahmer, JonBenet Ramsey, Columbine, Waco, and most of all, the Web, which has proven hospitable to an algal bloom of sites like Spamgirl.com.

We've been there, pierced that. The escalation of subcultural hostilities and free-floating weirdness, in our age of extremes, has robbed all the old, reliable Satanic verses—acts of "aesthetic terrorism," in Parfrey's words—of their power to outrage. So has the strip-mining and strip-malling of every fringe-culture ritual of resistance, virtually the moment it appears. There's a desperately insistent, methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much quality to recent proclamations that the counterculture is alive and well, whether at the increasingly bobo-friendly Burning Man, in Ann Powers's Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, or at Disinfo.con, the New York festival of transgression where a speaker declared, somewhat unconvincingly, "When they just buy the thing that we really believed in, that's them surrendering to us." (I get it! [cue forehead slap] So, like, when the Gap starts selling leather pants, it means that even the Gap has been infected with the, like, rebellion meme, right?) Ironically, Parfrey, in his role as pitchman on the pathological midway, has greatly accelerated this dynamic. The center is widening; the fringes cannot hold.

If he were simply a buck-hungry retailer of the unspeakable, he'd go down easier. But he insists on a more exalted status: that of a Luciferian Noam Chomsky, speaking the awful truths about The Conspiracy and the dictatorship of political correctness that the lapdog mainstream media dare not utter. Unfortunately, it's well-nigh impossible to reconcile his lofty claims with his mean-spirited "retard"-bashing, his seeming endorsement of wetbrained conspiracy theories about Waco, and his creepy coziness with neo-Nazis. The acknowledgment-page shout-outs to close friend Michael Moynihan, described in a New Times article as a "kind of fascist activist"; the inspirational quotes from Hitler and the National Socialist Liberation Front poster in AC I; the ruminations on "democracy's deification of Victimhood," in AC II, by good buddy Boyd Rice, last seen in brownshirt attire, accessorized with a darling little Nazi knife, in James Ridgeway's study of white supremacists, Blood in the Face: I'm sensing a theme here. And I'm not the first: Former RE/Search publisher V. Vale told New Times reporter Scott Timberg, "Adam is a racist . . . and he's friends with a lot of racists. Here's why he publishes: purely to foment shock value and to celebrate himself. . . . He's just a typical privileged, stunted-growth, adolescent white male."

Parfrey stands unbowed in the face of such charges. "My articles and investigations take me far and wide, and I get friendly with SWAT teams, extreme right-wingers and anarchist bomb-throwers," he writes, via e-mail. "To cull Boyd Rice out of a group of published friends and then do a guilt-by-association trip is sinister McCarthyism." He readily concedes that AC I and AC II "concern the extremes of human belief," but defends his refusal to render moral judgment with the disclaimer "I respect the human consciousness enough not to infantilize it by spelling out moral conclusions. I do admit that I like making people uncomfortable with nanny culture's ideas and expectations. . . . God help me, I'm a pot-smoking Green Party member."

Maybe, but from my sniper's perch on the new, new Left, there are a lot of chinks in the pomo/boho argument that ethics is so over, already, and in the self-serving defense that blowing bong hits at the politically correct is bad-boy fun. Why should we infantilize ourselves by ceding all moral authority to neocon scolds like William Bennett or left-wing inquisitors like Andrea Dworkin? Moreover, chain-jerking the "nanny culture" doesn't have much intellectual frisson, at this point, for anyone besides the Don Imus fan, and New York Press's "Mugger." Parfrey's brighter than that, by far.

Sadly, Parfrey shows no sign of ranging beyond the traditional quarry of all 20th-century cultural vanguards. More's the pity, because he's got a deft, Mencken-esque way with the lacerating one-liner, and a nose for great stories: survivalist nutcake "Bo" Gritz's run for the White House; and the awesome Mr. Awesome, a beefcake legend in his own mind who stalks Parfrey's message machine with scary-funny ferocity. His dark, sardonic postcards from the abyss, in the Apocalypse books and (my personal favorite) Cult Rapture, are toxic good fun. In my dreams, he'll follow Clarice Starling's advice to Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and point that "high-powered perception" at himself and all the unconsidered ideologies in his closet—train the philosophical crosshairs of his mordant wit, his withering irony, and his pitiless cynicism on his own forehead, and pull the trigger.

Mark Dery's latest book is The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (www.levity.com/markdery/).

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