BOOK REVIEW: PORNOGRAPHY FOR THE END OF THE WORLD BY BRENDAN VIDITO

in this case, one can, in fact, judge a book by its cover. Vidito’s newest release presents his readers with a buffet of weird tales that are at times batshit crazy but consistently eerily fascinating.

Pornography for the End of the World by Brendan Vidito

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Weirdpunk Books (31 July 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 148 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 195165823X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1951658236

Book Review by Rebecca Rowland

The owner of Weird Punk Books is a genius. The cover art of Pornography for the End of the World, a haunting image of a female torso encircled by giant, antennaed flatworms, had me hitting the preorder button before I’d even read the book’s synopsis. Fortunately, the content lives up to the painting’s premise. Brendan Vidito’s short fiction collection is comprised of nine tales ranging in length from three to twenty-plus pages, tackling subjects such as isolation within a group, pre- and post-apocalypse, and sex without limitations, all served with a generous helping of the grotesque.
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“Apate’s Children” first appeared in the mini-anthology Teenage Grave, and when I reviewed the quartet of dark tales a year and a half ago (here), it was my favorite of the four. The story depicting a partner’s penance after an admitted transgression holds up and is one of my favorites in Pornography as well. The other eight stories are also reprints. In “Church of the Chronically Ill,” Cameron joins his mother in a religious ceremony that doses creepy cult ritual with both a heavy hallucinogen and a fistful of dread. In “The Living Column,” Leland is a lonely traveler, a stranger in a strange land, who is passed a business card promising companionship. What he gets is something beyond both his expectation and his wildest erotic nightmares.

“Glittering Guignol” is set in an island mansion whispering of Jeffrey Epstein seediness but offers enough delirium-fueled vengeance to leave the most feminist of readers satisfied. In another bizarro horror entry, “Nostalgia Night at the Snuff Palace,” friends traveling together, animal pack-like in a post-apocalyptic world, stumble upon a movie theater where the line between viewer and participant is frightfully obscured.

Much of the collection incorporates body horror; more specifically, it employs the motif that the body is fluid and malleable. In “The Human Clay,” Liam Hedland is a “trafficker of illicit biological material.” When his sleazy employer offers him an evening in his brothel, a “playground of flesh and metal,” in gratitude for a particularly difficult transport, Liam discovers there are no limits to scientific imagination…or an artist’s experimentation. In a futuristic society, a woman manufactures life in the form of a fully-grown man. Her reasons for doing so and the scientist’s reaction to her creation are revealed in the witty and feminist piece of flash science fiction titled “Mother’s Mark.”

A Cassandra character is one who warns of future disaster but is ignored, much to the detriment of those who do not heed the warning. In “Walking in Ash,” an entry more psychological than splatter or weird—and my other favorite story of the nine, an anxiety-paralyzed man senses that something terrible is coming but cannot put his finger on what it is, even as the rapidly-building panic threatens to consume him. Finally, in “The Chimera Session,” Jillian and Michael’s “relationship had reached the terminal stage of its existence [but]…it seemed wasteful to simply discard five years of hard work and co-habitation.” In order to repair their bond, the pair decides to take “extreme measures” and that step comes in the form of the story’s eponymous exercise. The activity promises to renew the couple’s passion to what it had been in its initial infatuation stage, and their journey is a plummet down the Carrollian rabbit hole in the very best way.

In one of the author’s stories, there appears a prominent image of “a woman’s torso devoid of head and limbs…its skin was porcelain, unblemished, and inviting to the touch.” In others, worms subtly (or not so subtly) wriggle in and out of scenes and viscera. These symbols combine in Pornography’s cover art by Wieslaw Walkuski; in this case, one can, in fact, judge a book by its cover. Vidito’s newest release presents his readers with a buffet of weird tales that are at times batshit crazy but consistently eerily fascinating.

Pornography for the End of the World 
by Brendan Vidito

The end of the world demands a new form of pornography... 

From Brendan Vidito, the Wonderland-Award-winning author of Nightmares in Ecstasy, comes nine tales of apocalyptic body horror. 

A young man is initiated into a cult that worships sickness and disease. 

Survivors of a nuclear holocaust make a pilgrimage to the last movie theater in existence. 

Premonitions of disaster haunt a loving couple doomed to watch each other die. 
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Each story pulsates with Vidito's characteristic dark humor, atmospheric tension, and visceral prose. This is pornography for the devotee of horror, the morbidly curious-pornography for the end of the world.

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