Welcome to Spooky Season... and the City Limits of CRYPTOPOLIS!

As Spooky Season and an impending Apocalypse descend upon us like deliciously dark storm clouds from Hell, why not take this opportunity to curl up with a tome that PUBLISHERS WEEKLY describes as "not for the faint of heart"? Yes, why not inoculate yourself against the increasing madness of our times with an even greater amount of unhinged lunacy? That strategy seems perfectly logical to me, and I'm sure it'll seem perfectly logical to you as well after you've imbibed a few of the mind-distorting, poisonous treats hidden between the ominous covers of my debut short story collection, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES, released by Lethe Press this past January. The peculiar tales in this volume have been compared to the works of Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Anton Wilson! Here's what a pack of raving maniacs have to say about CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES...

PRAISE FOR CRYPTOPOLIS:

"The stories in Cryptopolis feel like the bloody, star-filled lovechildren of Burroughs and Delany, with each tale ostensibly one part of a greater whole; abstract limbs and organs tethered together by strained flesh. Cryptopolis will take readers on a hallucinogenic journey through worlds fractured by time and place—slipping through liminal dimensions with seamless abandon to unveil unsettling illusions and heartbreaking realities—and totally worth the trip."

--Philip Fracassi, author of Boys in the Valley

 

"If you're tired of the same wines and you're curious about the vintage only just whispered about, have a deep draught of Robert Guffey's Cryptopolis. You don't have to descend with Fortunato to the deepest cellars to find this bottle of Amontillado. Here it is! If Poe collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson...if Borges had a lovechild with Lovecraft, which was subsequently adopted by Kafka...you might get Cryptopolis. I think too that Clark Ashton Smith would admire this collection. Written with the obsessive precision of a mysterious staircase descending into the abyss, Cryptopolis will take you to strange epiphanies..."  

 

--John Shirley, author of The Feverish Stars

 

"Once upon a time, weird and speculative fiction had an underground full of stories that were not written as calling cards or as film treatments or as extended internet memes. Guffey's tales resist genre gentrification; they move into your mind to turn it into a punk house squat!" 

--Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground and The Second Shooter

 

 "In Cryptopolis & Other Stories, Guffey's free-ranging intellect meshes wonderfully with his command of the language."

--John Oakes, author of The Fast

 

"Guffey brings together 25 horror shorts that swing wildly between terrifying mindtrips and gritty realism. Throughout, Guffey’s blunt prose lends a sense of normalcy to the fantastic as his cast of losers from all walks of life face the cruelties of their existence—sexual violence, drugs, war, parenthood, and poverty [...]. Though not for the faint of heart, this bizarre and over-the-top collection is sure to thrill devotees of weird fiction."

--Publishers Weekly

"Cryptopolis may end up being a gateway drug into Robert Guffey’s work. I don’t use that term spuriously. So many of Guffey’s stories in Cryptopolis have a hard-bitten edge and gritty feel to them that I could see him crafting a metatext about an author whose books are physically addictive. Across the collection’s twenty-five stories and vignettes, Guffey displays a range of interests and foci with such depth and heart that I wouldn’t be surprised if he became one of my favorite modern writers [...].

"Affect, the experience of emotional response, seems to be at issue in every one of Guffey’s offerings. From the opening eponymous story (which is the only outright Lovecraftian story in the collection), with its resonances of love as a torturous paralytic, to the last, 'Esthra, Shadows, Glass, Silence,' a parable of alternate lives and lost possibilities, the emotional response drawn from the reader appears to be the crux of every piece. These stories are engines designed to make the reader feel."

--Géza A. G. Reilly, Dead Reckonings

 

EXPANDING FRONTIERS RESEARCH: "1950s Psychological Warfare, Intel Collection, UFOs and Fascism"

What follows is a brief excerpt from Jack Brewer's recent EXPANDING FRONTIERS RESEARCH article entitled "1950s Psychological Warfare, Intel Collection, UFOs and Fascism":

FBI files responsive to Gordon Gray obtained by Expanding Frontiers Research through the Freedom of Information Act contain reports compiled during the course of security investigations spanning some 25 years of his intelligence career. The Yale-educated attorney held numerous positions of responsibility, advising and leading national security personnel at the highest levels of the mid-20th century United States intelligence apparatus. His positions included Secretary of the Army, directing the CIA Psychological Strategy Board, chairing the Clandestine Collection Committee, sitting on the board of the Economic Development Committee, heading the Office of Defense Mobilization, and numerous additional presidential appointments, including serving as Special Assistant to the President and as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

FBI files not surprisingly demonstrate Gordon Gray was involved with psychological warfare offices, propaganda groups, foundations now known to have acted as covert CIA funding conduits, and secret intelligence-gathering operations ostensibly created as international economic relief organizations. A follow-up FOIA request led to obtaining documentation of a 1982 investigation conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office showing it identified many of those CIA initiatives to be of interest in its search for Nazi war criminals.

Records also show that a Robert M. Hanes, then-president of Wachovia Bank and future Administrator for Germany of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), described himself as knowing Gordon Gray since childhood and admiring him very much when interviewed by the FBI in 1948 (see p43). Notably, Gray's grandfather was a co-founder of Wachovia. The ECA was a precursor to U.S. Aid for International Development, or USAID, and has a recurring presence in records obtained and circumstances explored by EFR.

As previously reported, a 1949 letter from then-DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter to the Economic Cooperation Administration provides documentation of CIA use of the ECA as an asset to collect and furnish the Agency classified “economic intelligence information.” Soon after the date of Hillenkoetter's letter, the ECA contracted a Baltimore public relations firm, Counsel Services, to conduct work abroad. This took place as Counsel Services co-founder Leo McCormick became employed by the ECA as a project manager (see p60). Counsel Services officers Mary Vaughan King, who was another co-founder, and Thomas O'Keefe, a State Department man with experience working overseas and designating personnel for foreign assignment, fascinatingly went on in 1956 to assist T. Townsend Brown with the incorporation of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (see p3).

The organization became the largest UFO group ever formed, boasting some 14,000 paid subscribers at the height of its public relations success and assembling a governing board that remained populated with intelligence officers throughout its existence. The implications are intriguing and offer many directions for research, illuminating puzzle pieces about the people who inhabited the murky world of flying saucer tales, even if reliable information on the reported craft themselves remains forever elusive...

To Brewer's entire article, click HERE.

THE PASSION OF DRACULA

If you're looking for the perfect way to kick off the Halloween season, and you find yourself anywhere near Long Beach within the next few weeks, I suggest checking out The Long Beach Playhouse's wonderfully melodramatic production of THE PASSION OF DRACULA directed by David Scaglione. Ben Trotter's portrayal of Dracula combines the ferocity of Christopher Lee with the nobility of Bela Lugosi. Equally standout performances are delivered by James Matthis (as Prof. Van Helsing) and Trevor Hart (as Renfield). Bob Hall and David Richmond's script effectively capture the sadness and loneliness of the undead count as, in Scaglione's words, "an immortal trapped in time, never fulfilled, constantly chained" to his addictive, preternatural compulsions. The show runs until October 19th...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAD MONKEY RUM!

One year ago this month, Planet Bizarro Press published my third novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, which was nominated for a Rondo Award for "Best Classic Monster Fiction" alongside the likes of such luminaries as Tim Lucas (THE BOOK OF RENFIELD) and Craig Russell (THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND)! Why not celebrate this joyous anniversary by purchasing multiple copies of DEAD MONKEY RUM for that hard-to-please Tiki/talking monkey/cryptozoology/Yeti/Stanislaw Szukalski/Easter Island fan in your life? DEAD MONKEY RUM is available for purchase right HERE!!!

(By the way, if you like Joseph Dunn's fabulous tiki-centric cover art for DEAD MONKEY RUM, you should check out his Etsy shop by clicking right HERE.)

PRAISE FOR DEAD MONKEY RUM:

"A remarkable rush of entertainment and thrills."

--Alan Moore (V for Vendetta and Watchmen) 

 

"Robert Guffey's fantastic novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, will at least bring your brain out of a coma, if not get your imagination off the couch. This is a thinly masked tribute/adventure to the late Stanislaw Szukalski and his boundless imagination. This book is a mental gymnasium."

-- Robert Williams (Visual Addiction, Hysteria in Remission, and Through Prehensile Eyes)

 

"A fantastically rich and entertaining piece of work with an original sharp edge."

 -- Jim Woodring (writer/artist of Weathercraft, The Frank Book, and One Beautiful Spring Day)

 

"Stanislaw Szukalski would love DEAD MONKEY RUM. This novel is addictive like a heavy drug. Make space in your calendar to read it all."

-- Irek Dobrowolski (director of the Netflix documentary, Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski)

 

 "Yetis, Tiki Gods, Cryptozoology, and rum-filled adventure! Sign me up and tell me when the ship sails! I'm recommending this Robert Guffey novel to all my friends, family, and foes to take their minds completely off whatever they are thinking about. Wonderful."

-- Loren Coleman (Mysterious America, The Field Guide to Lake Monsters and Sea Serpents, The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Curious Encounters, and 40 other books - Director of the International Cryptozoology Museum)

 
"DEAD MONKEY RUM succeeds at being a pursuit thriller, with suspense and tension as the monkey and Stephanie evade their cryptid enemies, and comedy as the two exchange jabs at each other. It is cinematically fast. DEAD MONKEY RUM should be adapted to a [...] Ralph Bakshiesque animated film where both the zaniness of the narrative and the latent satire would really flourish."

-- Exotica Moderne

 

"One of the weirdest romps you'll ever read."

-- Fortean Times

UNBOXING DEAD MONKEY RUM:

Read SPIES & SAUCERS and Learn the Secrets of UFOs!!!

In light of the resurgence of UFOs in popular culture as well as in the halls of Congress, I think it's time to remind everybody that the most mysterious and numinous secrets of UFOs are available in the pages of my second book, SPIES & SAUCERS, a collection of three novellas released by PS Publishing ten years ago this month. 

Madness, murder and mayhem abound in SPIES & SAUCERS, a collection of three sui generis novellas by ROBERT GUFFEY. Each of these tales explores the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, as well as the flying saucer obsession of that era, while straddling the boundaries of seemingly disparate genres: metaphysical science fiction, espionage, satire, and crime noir.

The first part of SPIES & SAUCERS, “The Fallen Nun,” takes place in 1959. Our protagonist, Kyle Black, wakes up one morning to discover a dead nun lying facedown in the marijuana garden in his backyard. Attempting to solve the mystery of how the nun ended up in his garden leads Kyle to strange encounters with an Irish Cyclops named Finn mac Cumhall, a Devil Bat grown to enormous proportions by a dead mad scientist, two homicidal tabloid journalists, and a sickly extraterrestrial abducted by a time traveling mother superior…

In “Communist Town, U.S.A.,” a young FBI agent named Philip Trowbridge is sent to Wisconsin in 1955 with orders to infiltrate a small town, reportedly a hotbed of underground Communist activity, in which several previous FBI agents have disappeared without a trace…

“Spies and Saucers” is set three years earlier in 1952 and involves a blacklisted, left-wing Hollywood screenwriter named Curt Adamson. Down on his luck after having been dumped by every studio on the West Coast, Adamson is recruited by a covert spy agency to write a screenplay for an unknown reason—unknown only to Adamson, that is. Adamson’s superiors are well aware of the screenplay’s purpose. Though consistently told he doesn’t have a “need to know,” Adamson insists on discovering the truth behind the tale he himself is weaving, uncovering a plot far more outlandish and ominous than the cheap horror and science fiction B-movies on which he’s built his tarnished reputation…

 

PRAISE FOR SPIES AND SAUCERS:

 

"Robert Guffey’s book Spies and Saucers presents three novellas about UFOs, Men in Black, strange creatures and even stranger occurrences. These tales are set in the '50s, but they sound as fresh as any modern story of UFOs and strange creatures. Reading in bed or right before bed is not recommended for the faint of heart."

 

--Tessa B. Dick, author of Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright and My Life on the Edge of Reality

 

"Robert Guffey’s Spies and Saucers is an unforgettable experience. In this book, the three tales are distinct and yet also have clear thematic relationships to one another, all evoking an insightful view of the wonders and the fears of America in the '50s. They also draw upon a rich array of pop culture, ranging from B-horror movies like The Devil Bat (1940) with Bela Lugosi to Irish folklore and the golden age of science fiction novels.

 

"These allusions enriched both occasions I’ve read Spies and Saucers (thankfully I have a hardback, as I’ll be returning to it again in the near future). At the same time, I don’t believe knowledge of the various films and books to which Guffey refers is necessary, no more so than it is for reading and loving Thomas Pynchon.

 

"Spies and Saucers is thoughtful--at times dark, at times darkly humorous--but always enjoyable.

 

"Along with Cormac McCarthy, Guffey is my favorite modern fiction writer. Spies and Saucers provides ample proof as to why I feel that way.”

 

--Gary D. Rhodes, author of The Perils of Moviegoing in America

 

 

"Guffey's extraordinary fictional narrative is an extension of his interest in conspiracy theories and the wild suppositions and events these curious belief systems declare as truth [...]. Spies and Saucers resonates as a reconstruction of that mid-century media and those exceptional, nearly mystical experiences when flying saucers hovered above us and communists, hidden in doorways, watched us with subversive intent. Guffey's novel seems spontaneously generated from the troposphere of fear hanging above us at the beginning of a new, byte-infused century, a literary tulpa expressing the nexus of propaganda, false narratives, and outright lies we experience every day."

 

--The Mailer Review

 

The Day Trump Invaded Earth!

 If you're completely baffled as to why the Harris-Trump race appears to be so razor-thin close, I suggest reading my 2022 book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP, which pulls the curtain back on the covert arsenal of PsyOp dirty tricks that have been deployed against the American people by the Trump Propaganda Machine for the past eight years.

You can buy a copy of OPERATION MINDFUCK right HERE!!!

By the way, back in 2022 I wrote the script for an OPERATION MINDFUCK radio commercial, which aired almost every night throughout the summer on NIGHT DREAMS TALK RADIO. You can listen to the entire commercial directly below...

Announcing... THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK!

I'm very proud to announce that Madness Heart Press is publishing my latest book, THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK, just a few days before Halloween (on Oct. 27th). Clocking in at 406 pages, this is the longest book I've written to date.

What is THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK? It's nonfiction! It's fiction! It's a novel! It's a collection of short stories! It's all of these at once! Can such things be, you ask? Well, if you doubt me, I suggest pre-ordering this extremely peculiar book asap! You can do so by clicking right HERE!!!

By the way, I'd also like to offer an extra-special tip of the hat to Gavriel Quiroga, who created the HANDBOOK'S striking cover.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK...

"Robert Guffey’s The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook is weirder than parthenogenesis, weirder than the Republican Party, weirder than the fetishizing of pregnancy that suffuses our culture, weirder than all the back issues of Weird Tales combined. You will laugh, gasp, and scratch your head in pleasurable bemusement. I can’t recommend this tongue-in-cheek tour de force too highly."

—James Morrow, award-winning author of Only Begotten Daughter and Behold the Ape


"Here it is. THE perfect baby-shower/gender reveal party gift. Forget all the binkies, blankies, cute little onesies, and diaper-service subscriptions. Those are so overdone and boring. Want to make a REAL impact? This book. This book right here [...].

"Well-written, lively, engaging, easy to read, and tons of fun. If I were a truly evil imp with plenty of money, I’d sneak copies into every OB/GYN office and ‘Parenting and Family’ bookstore section in the country."

--Christine Morgan, award-winning author of Spermjackers from Hell and Lakehouse Infernal 

 

________________________________________________________

The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook is part novel, part fabulist encyclopedia. It’s academic research that’s shockingly close to the truth. The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook is a cabinet of wonders disguised as an informational guide for expectant mothers. Backed up with scientific-sounding footnotes from imaginary obstetricians, this book threatens to raise the paranoia of postmodern motherhood to a new level of absurdity.

In the pages of this handbook you will learn about such chimerical illnesses as the Quantum Singularity Syndrome, Symmetrical Child Syndrome, Involuntary Dimensional Transits, Spontaneous Infant Combustion Syndrome, Black Hole Syndrome, Polyinfantalia, Shrinking Brain Syndrome, Muppetitis, Midwich Disease, and Oneirokyesis (known to some pediatricians as “Dream Baby Disease”). But fatal diseases are not the only purview of The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook. You’ll find out about the dangers of allowing your fetus in utero internet connection, how to use your child as an assassin, the growing problem of terrorism in the womb, in utero phone sex, the high weirdness of Origami Babies, the little known fact that Shakespeare created pregnancy, the mystery of the fetus-abducting Comprachicos, and a rare in-depth interview with Dracula about his attitudes regarding child raising, among many other illuminating tidbits of obscure but vital historical data.

Ultimately, this book is a scathing satire on the unthinking commercialization of motherhood, fatherhood, and procreation in general.

BEHOLD!!! TRUMPY TROUT

NOT A DREAM! NOT A HOAX! NOT AN IMAGINARY STORY!

BEHOLD!!! TRUMPY TROUT

NEWSWEEK: Alien Warning

From Tom Howarth's 9-4-24 NEWSWEEK article entitled "Alien Warning: Growing Belief in UFOs Is Dangerous 'Political Tsunami'":

In a recent study accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, Tony Milligan, philosopher and senior research fellow at King's College London in England, said that the belief in alien visitors has evolved into a widespread societal concern.

"When you're dealing with populism, or this highly specialized variant of populism, you're dealing with a wave—a political tsunami," Milligan told Newsweek.

The shift in belief has gained such momentum that it is now influencing political discourse, particularly in the U.S., where the topic has garnered bipartisan attention.

"You don't worry about this stuff when it's 2 percent of the population... but you don't expect it to be reaching the floor of Congress," Milligan said.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

THE VERGE: "No One’s Ready For This"

From Sarah Jeong's 8-22-24 THE VERGE article entitled "No One’s Ready For This: Our Basic Assumptions About Photos Capturing Reality Are About To Go Up In Smoke":

Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule.

If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes.

This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Jonathan Chait on Donald Trump & Epistemic Closure

From Jonathan Chait's 9-11-24 NEW YORK MAGAZINE article entitled "How J.D. Vance and the Online Right Sabotaged Trump at the Debate":

The worst moment of the presidential debate for Donald Trump was likely the point when he began ranting about the imagined epidemic of pets being kidnapped, murdered, and eaten. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats, they are eating the pets of the people who live there,” he shouted wildly.

ABC moderator David Muir gently noted that the Springfield town manager reported nothing of the kind had taken place. “I’ve seen people on television,” Trump replied feebly. “The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’”

The term presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era, its meaning has been stretched out like a pair of pants worn around for a week by a man 20 pounds too heavy for them. Yet, even by the distended contemporary standards, Trump’s claim about the dogs was weird, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.

There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the sealed-off information ecosystem that produced and sustained his political career.

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.

The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels...

To read Chait's entire article, click HERE.

HOW TO THINK IMPOSSIBLY

Here's a brief excerpt from Tim Adams' 9-1-24 GUARDIAN interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of HOW TO THINK IMPOSSIBLY:

ADAMS: Let me ask about, for example, your thoughts on UFO sightings. You suggest they happen more frequently to people who’ve had near-death experiences, because, I think you argue, those people’s hold on “normal” reality is weaker?

KRIPAL: I think the normal way of thinking about a UFO as some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship is naive. I think something’s going on that is much more related to our spiritual histories in ways that we don’t understand. We interpret it in this technological way: it’s a spaceship. It can’t be, you know, the world of the dead. God forbid.

To read the entire interview, click HERE. 

Trump at Arlington National Cemetery

From Robin Abcarian's 8-30-24 LOS ANGELES TIMES Op-Ed piece entitled "Why Donald Trump’s Politicking at Arlington National Cemetery Should Disgust Every American":

The Army, which oversees the cemetery, forbids any sort of political activities on the grounds. It is, as the Trump campaign was informed, against federal law and Defense Department policy. The Washington Post reported that Pentagon officials were “deeply concerned” that Trump would turn the visit into a campaign stop but also wanted to accommodate him.

During the visit, a cemetery official tried to enforce the rules against outside cameras in Section 60, the area devoted chiefly to soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two Trump staffers physically pushed her out of the way, according to news reports.

The official declined to press charges because she feared retaliation from Trump supporters, according to an Army statement. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung promptly slimed her as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”

Trump had smiled broadly and given a jarring thumbs-up as he stood at the grave of Marine Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, one of those killed in the bombing. He wasn’t there just to pay his respects; he was there to exploit the tragedy that occurred at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in 2021 by blaming it on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who has soared in recent polls.

The frenzied withdrawal and terrible loss of life occurred on Biden’s watch — as did the abandonment of at least 78,000 Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and continue to live there precariously.

Nonetheless, Trump crassly ignores his own role in the debacle. A deal he himself struck with the Taliban locked the United States into a withdrawal timeline. Military intelligence was profoundly mistaken about the Afghan government’s ability to defend Kabul, which fell to the Taliban with lightning speed.

To read Abcarian's entire article, click HERE.