The Devil's Notebook | Anton Szandor LaVey

In The Devil’s Notebook, Anton LaVey appears less as occult pontiff than as cultural vivisectionist: slicing into nonconformity, erotic politics, architecture, kitsch, ritual, artificial environments, occult faddism, and the strange American habit of turning every appetite into either a product or a sin. These essays show LaVey at his most aphoristic and mischievous, a man equally at home among pipe organs, girlie shows, monster movies, forgotten architecture, and the private tyrannies of “normal” people.

This is LaVey’s notebook in the proper sense: observations, provocations, schemes, insults, and bright little blasphemies arranged by a mind that regarded taste as a weapon and personality as an art form. Adam Parfrey’s introduction places the book in its fitting company: among the literate degenerates, forbidden pamphleteers, sideshow philosophers, and anti-humanist humorists who knew that civilization is mostly bad theater performed by people with no stage presence.