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Join My Cult! [Paperback]

James Curcio (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

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Book Description

November 1, 2004
Religions. Philosophies. Advertising campaigns. Gurus. Prozac. All of these drugs are sold as answers to our deepest questions: Why are we here? What truly has meaning?

For a group of young adults desperately searching for meaning in the bleak McMansion sprawls of Suburban America, these questions are of the essence. When none of the accepted avenues of thought or behavior make sense any longer, they wander into an unknown territory of magick, drug use, and shamanic exploration.

Through satire and drama, Join My Cult takes you on an inward initiatory journey and a deeply hypnotic experience.


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Editorial Reviews

Review

Join My Cult is an invitation to chaos, treading the thinly veiled landscape between madness and genius. --Devon White

About the Author

When James Curcio (a.k.a. Agent139) isn't secretly mind-controlling impressionable youth, he poses as the creative director of a number of media companies and projects. He is currently working on developing Fas Ferox, a multimedia graphic novel project with a team of artists including creative consultant Neil Gaiman. He resides in Upstate New York when he isn't traveling.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: New Falcon Publications; 1 edition (November 1, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1561841730
  • ISBN-13: 978-1561841738
  • Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,951,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Curcio is a multi-media artist, writer, and theorist, who has spent most of his adult life exploring modern myths. This exploration has taken the form of collaborative novels, essays on myth, culture, the occult and sexuality, "round-table" musical albums, soundtracks, podcasts, live performances, and installations. He will sleep when he is dead. http://www.jamescurcio.com

 

Customer Reviews

13 Reviews
5 star:
 (8)
4 star:
 (4)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Join My Cult! Please!, May 2, 2005
By 
C. Arkenberg "agent 1123" (Santa Cruz, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Join My Cult! (Paperback)

When confronted with disorder the brain will attempt to overlay some
form or pattern to make sense of the chaos. The meticulous geometries
often accompanying psychedelic hallucination are one example of this
phenomena, as are the covoluted Jesus complexes of some schizophrenics.
The brain, it seems, is an organizing device that recoils
at disorder and attempts to subdue it with it's own imposed
sensibilities. Such is the experience of reading James Curcio's
mindwarping novel, Join My Cult!

Alexi and Ken are two teenagers in suburbia trying to cut through all
the normalcy and order of their lives by investigating the arcane and
occult. Their deepening investigations into the nature of reality and
the hive mind begins to reveal the seeming existence of an enigmatic
cult: The Mother Hive Brain Syndicate. Johny, another teen trying to
sort his way through a world increasingly inconsistent with what he's
been raised to believe, also discovers the fiendish machinations of
MHBS. Meanwhile, Agent 139 and Jesus (and later, Agent 506) are
clearly agents of MHBS hell-bent on completely eradicating the status
quo consensual reality through an increasingly severe rash of pranks
and thoughtcrimes, culminating in the destruction of a Lenny's diner.
Behind them all looms the mysterious mystic Aleonus de Gabrael - sort
of a younger, more vital Alan Moore, or a more overtly revolutionary
Aleister Crowley  -  guiding and educating the whole lot, possibly as
the head of MHBS and it's affiliates.

What are the aims of this counter cultural eso-terror organization?
Curcio never makes it quite clear and it's uncertain whether or not
they even exist, but that's all part of the game. The narrative is
fractured and hallucinogenic, veering from coherent tales of Alexi and
Ken's experiences guiding their group into uncharted waters, then
diving into unhinged dreams, alien/entity encounters, psychedelic
journeys, schizophrenic agitprop confrontations by Jesus and Agent
139, then swinging back into deeply revealing and compelling
thoughts on magick and reality. Indeed, the most astounding current
within Curcio's work is the depth and practicality of his
understanding of those technologies commonly referred to as The
Occult. Within the more sober dialogues Curcio presents an ontology
that reaches into the soul and reveals to the reader the error of
history and the path to its redemption. These insights are the
unshakable foundation of a house that's quickly falling into the
ground.

The work, above all, is Abyssal. It's fractured like the mirror of Self
that recurs throughout the novel, plunging into the depths of madness.
The sober voice of Aleonis is the only light through the dark night,
impelling us to break the mirror but also telling us how to put it
back together again. Solve et coagula. The characters are at once
illusory and amorphous, difficult to pin down and understand, then
suddenly and surprisingly rich with inner turmoil and suffering,
deeply human and alive against the howling wind. Amidst the chaos, the
heartfelt moments of confession and intimacy anchor the characters and
remind us that they're human too, in spite of the extremity of their
divorce from the consensus. And it's this intimacy, this thirst for
community and a sense of one's tribe, that Curcio is begging us to
acknowledge within ourselves and to make manifest in an increasingly
lonely and fragmented world.

At times the story hints at science fiction or some alien technology
wielded with possibly sinister motives by the Mother Hive Brain. As
all visions do, the narrative continuously fades from dreamscape to
hallucination to schizophrenia, so any real attempt to follow some of
these literary devices ultimately fails. In other words, don't expect
Join My Cult! to answer as many questions as it raises. Seemingly
important elements of the story that  are introduced early on are
completely abandoned in the later half. Diverse characters begin to
overlap and appear to be the same, possibly all of them only a single
being reflected through multiple selves. Maybe it all happened, or
maybe it was all a hallucination of Alexi's. Like Wilson & Shea's epic
Illuminatus! (to which Cuciro's work has already been compared by
Peter Carroll) the
journey is more important than the destination.

Join My Cult! will surely baffle many readers and annoy others, but it
should nevertheless be standard reading for anyone questioning the
world they've been told is real when their experiences plainly
contradict it. Consume it like a drug or a hypersigil. Just take it
in, don't get too caught up in finding patterns, and let it seep into
your blood and work it's magick. Join the cult, but know that, as
Gabrael says, "the real order that doles out initiation, that creates
the kind of synchronicities that brought you here and will carry you
on to the next step of your mission, is the Universe itself."
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The same dark night awaits us all., June 14, 2006
This review is from: Join My Cult! (Paperback)
At the time this book came into my life, I'd just been diagnosed
with cancer. I had also been re-reading Joseph Cambell, and
reading both Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna for the
first times. Extremely tired and dealing with satori-like small
seizures, I began reading this book at night as a dalliance.
An amusement with which to end the day.

As it turned out, the book was instead a compendium of
every single thing that was going on in my life. The information
in the book is dense and the effects were profound. I'd read a paragraph or three a night, and just go to sleep thinking about them.
It was as if I'd stumbled on a primer for chaos theory, hidden in
a mirror passing itself off as a book. It is not possbile for me to recommend this book highly enough to psychonauts, cyberpunks, and misfits of all shapes and sizes. It's a real hoot. A great trip.
Tune in, turn on, abandon hope, and welcome to the Mother
Hive Brain. Enjoy!!!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A bootiful train wreck, April 15, 2005
This review is from: Join My Cult! (Paperback)
...In a sentance, Join My Cult! is a beautiful trainwreck. If the reader is patient, and opens themselves up, it can have long-lasting effects. On the other hand, I'm not sure if every reader will have the required patience. This comes from lackluster editing, which lets the bombastic monologues of the author lose a little of their edge. This is common with first novels, especially first novels of young, talented and audacious authors... For those familiar with Alternative Reality Games, a lot of this book seems like reading about an ARG gone awry... The boundary between reality and cultural games is an ongoing theme in the book, again one which I think gets slightly muddled. All in all it'll rock your world. I anticipate the sequel.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
My first waking impression this morning was a hazy glance through frostbitten glass at an overturned trash can. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
hive brain, mystery cook, pig flesh
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Black Osiris, Aleonis De Gabrael, Crazy Fingers, New York, Order of the Hidden Path, Secret Chiefs, Devon Lenny, Doctor Harold Fein, Fourth Ward, Jimmy Buffet, John Doe, Nissan Maxima, Random Yes Man
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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