Book Review: Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader (2026)

In the early 1980s, after serving a two-year penance in Detroit, I returned to Nashville and landed in a rooming house in the Belmont area near downtown. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, but it was surrounded by pockets of dodgy housing that stubbornly refused to be gentrified into over-priced apartments for the university crowd. The tenants largely kept to themselves – Philly Tom, Vic the Dick, and others whose fleeting appearance and subsequent departures were barely worth remembering. 

One warm summer evening, I strolled down the block to the 7-11 store for a package of Slim Jims and a beer, walking in on an armed robbery. A young black man was holding the lily-white teenaged cashier at gunpoint with what appeared to be a .357 Magnum revolver. He looked at me, in my greasy biker garb, and asked “you don’t see nothing, do you brother?” “I’ve been blind since birth,” I replied, and walked right back out the door. A year later, at the same store, I walked in on the same guy, robbing a different cashier. “You again?” he asked. “Still blind,” I replied, and stumbled back out the door… 

Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader 

That’s the world that writer and publisher Adam Parfrey inhabited. A world of petty criminals, prostitutes, junkies, killers, gamblers, hustlers, otherworldly religions, free thinkers, fringe artists…the flotsam and jetsam of waning capitalist glory, all provided a glimmer of dignity via his words, a consideration not provided by the police blotter or with newspaper ink. I knew Adam – we conversed by phone, by email, and he offered some helpful publishing tips – but I didn’t really know Mr. Parfrey. For that you’d have to turn to the written word, and even then you’d have questions. 

Feral House, the independent publishing house launched by Parfrey in 1989, recently published what may well be the culmination of nearly four decades of the founder’s intellectual obsessions in Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader. A monster 456-page trade paperback, the Omnibus collects the best of  Parfrey’s writing from previously-published tomes like the notorious Apocalypse Culture (1987, Amok Press) and the even more controversial Apocalypse Culture II (2000), Cult Rapture (1995) and Ritual America (2012) as well as various assignments for publications like Penthouse, Hustler, and the Village Voice. 

After co-founding Amok Press with Ken Swezey in 1986 in New York City, Adam moved to L.A. after splitting with Swezey and formed Feral House. Parfrey had gotten a taste of intellectual freedom when Amok published Michael, a novel by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbel, which was reviewed by The New York Times and sold well enough for the imprint to follow it up with the Parfrey-edited Apocalypse Culture, which became an underground cult classic resulting in multiple printings. The Manson File, an anthology of writings by Charlie Manson, considered “one of the last true heretics of our time,” followed in 1988. Amok’s last book was 1989’s Rants and Incendiary Tracts, which was edited by Parfrey and anarchist Bob Black (who actually introduced me to Adam) and co-published with Mike Hoy’s libertarian-leaning Loompanics Unlimited.* 

Feral House Explores the Taboo

Parfrey launched Feral House with much the same sort of free speech philosophy that he pursued with Amok. Feral House titles included The Satanic Witch, and other books by Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey; Bob Black’s Beneath the Underground (typeset by yours truly); Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History (later turned into a documentary film); and Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, a 1998 book by Michael J. Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind that was also adapted to film. Sometimes Adam’s interests eerily paralleled real life; the Parfrey-edited 2001 anthology Extreme Islam: Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism sold exceptionally well in the wake of the September 11th attacks of that year.

Protestations that he wasn’t really a writer aside, Parfrey’s Apocalypse Omnibus offers up some very good writing, indeed. Adam brought the same level of zealotry and intellectual curiosity he expected from Feral House’s books to his own work, and it shows throughout the book. Aside from pieces from the aforementioned Amok and Feral House books, the Omnibus includes his scandalous 1992 “Citizen Keane” essay from the San Diego Reader, Parfrey’s reporting the basis for his book of the same name that was later made into the 2014 film Big Eyes by director Tim Burton. Chapters on “Satanic Panic” and “Fascists, White Supremacists, and Their Friends” largely reprint some of Adam’s best work from the two Apocalypse Culture books and Cult Rapture, as well as interesting articles from various publications.

The “Killer Correspondence” chapter reprints letters and postcards received by Parfrey, sent by notorious figures like Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, and Ted Kaczynski, the “Unibomber,” while the chapter “At The Margins” dives deep into the wild and wooly worlds of Russian mail order brides, the cosmic religion of Unarius, the dubious celebrity of “Mr. Awesome,” and the manufacturer of lifelike sex dolls. Another chapter compiles various interviews with Parfrey by people like comedian Marc Meron, Tamra Lucid, and Stephen Lemons  which provide a bit of insight into Adam’s thoughts, history, and interests. 

Feral Man In A Feral Land

The most interesting chapters of Parfrey’s Apocalypse Omnibus are, to my mind, the book-opening “Feral Man In A Feral Land” – also the name of a painting by artist Joe Coleman included at the end of the book – and “HelL.A.,” a collection of columns written by Adam for almost five years circa 1991-1995 for the San Diego Reader, which itself comprises better than 1/3 the book. The first chapter includes early 2010s blog posts that tell of Parfrey’s years in the Big Apple, as well as essays on larger-than-life figures like filmmaker and bull fighter Budd Boetticher and director Don Siegal (Dirty Harry). I found the 1992 interview/article with Boetticher to be particularly fascinating, a glimpse into the über-masculine Los Angeles based film industry of the 1940s and ‘50s.    

The “HelL.A.” columns showcase Parfrey’s deftness with the written word, and an immense skill at conveying a story in a mere few hundred words. Writing a weekly column is hard (don’t ask me how I know) and doing it well even harder, yet Parfrey makes it seem effortless. Over the course of a couple hundred columns, Adam writes of long-gone but fondly-remembered celebrity watering holes, street hustlers, strip-mall preachers, notorious racists, and various crackpots that comprise the seedier side of Hollywood. He also writes of uniquely Angeleno characters like poet/novelist Charles Bukowski, former L.A. mayor Sam Yorty, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, and the Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin, among others. What makes the columns so interesting is not only the insight that Parfrey brings to each, but his ability to whittle each story down to a core principle that reaffirms the humanity of the subject. 

And that, friends, is the basis of Adam Parfrey’s writing, his ability to imbue his subjects, no matter how sleazy, taboo, or controversial, with a shred of redemption (yes, even punk rocker G.G. Allin). Although Parfrey has long been accused of far right sympathies, I found the man to be more complicated than a bumper sticker slogan could convey. The one aesthetic found throughout Adam’s writing is the authenticity – no matter the charlatan, crackpot, hustler, or conman he may be writing about, they were real in a way that modern celebrity fails. 

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Parfrey may have been the free-thinking inspiration for contemporary podcasters and “influencers” but, unlike these so-called acolytes, Adam possessed a truly open mind that he constantly challenged with both his written words and with the books he published. Parfrey didn’t always agree with the most controversial and despised figures he wrote about or published, but he was a free speech absolutist that felt that a diversity of ideas – no matter how disdained by the mainstream – deserved an honest hearing. It was this perspective that makes Adam’s writing so fascinating, and helped make Feral House the most daring and interesting book publisher in America.

Feral House’s Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader perfectly showcases its late founder’s ever-churning thoughts and obsessions (Parfrey passed away in May 2018), creating a living tribute to one of America’s foremost underground documentarians. If you want comfort, look elsewhere; if you want to challenge your pre-conceived notions of the world, Apocalypse Omnibus is the book for you! (Feral House, published July 21st, 2026)

Buy the book from Amazon ‘cause I get human monies from your purchase: Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader
  
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* Back in the 1970s, libertarians were “live at let be” styled semi-anarchists that valued personal responsibility and the freedom to live without government interference on issues like drugs, guns, and speech. When some of ‘em got together later and formed a political party, they evolved into the headline-grabbing racist asshats we despise today. Parfrey certainly had libertarian leanings, as did many of Feral House’s authors.