CUPCAKE FACTORY

A raunchy collection of skits, rants and fantasies about American politics and pop culture.

“DJ Ass Maggots” (Poseidon’s Tunnel, 2014, etc.) returns with a third book loosely structured around his Facebook page and its various comments fields generated by a “Council” going under such pseudonyms as Joey G, Neil Armstrong and LPR. These and many other voices are interjected into the author’s own as they tell pornographic stories, relate pornographic personal anecdotes, tell pornographic jokes and occasionally make deliberately provocative observations about events in the news. There’s an open letter to troubled former Hollywood star Lindsay Lohan; a list of “the 10 rules of drunk driving,” thinly veiled excoriations of bad roommates, acidic snapshots of Los Angeles night life and frequent allusions to outrageous conspiracy theories—that rapper Tupac Shakur is still alive, that singer Michael Jackson actually died filming a Pepsi commercial and was replaced by a white actor for the rest of “his” life, etc. More serious events such as the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Boston Marathon bombings are likewise exposed to the paranoid sarcasm of the author and his various “guest voices” (about the latter, for instance, “Night Writer, Esq.” writes, “Those of you idiots who don’t see that the Boston bombing—which was carried out on Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the first shots of the US Revolutionary War—was in fact the first shot of World War III are living in the sweet bliss of ignorance”). This vaguely counterculture tone pervades the book (“are the student protestors here?” goes the rallying cry at one point. “Good. Are all the sovereign citizens here? Anarchists? Check. Anonymous hackers? Good”), and readers who can’t get enough of that kind of thing—fans of the author’s previous books among them—will find much more to entertain them here. Readers coming from a more conventional orientation will find this a toxic, misogynistic, hateful, sneering and tedious mess, and when told at one point “Maybe you shouldn’t have bothered reading this” will for once agree completely with the author.

A relentlessly explicit and deliberately incendiary sendup of modern American society.