The Essential Guide opens the door to the darkly resplendent worlds of the Left Hand Path. Part philosophical treatise, part ontological stand-up comedy, and part magical practicum, this book makes clear what many other books have only hinted at. For people with wit and perseverance, this book is a training manual for super-men and women. Don Webb has been a practitioner of the Left hand path since the 1970s. He is the former High Priest of the Temple of Set, the world's largest Left Hand Path organization, and the author of the best-selling Seven Faces of Darkness.
I have been nominated for and not won very prestigious awards. Last year alone I lost both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Critics Award. I am hoping to not win other awards of note in coming years. I had been cited in Best American Short Stories (as well as 70 other citing in one "best of the year" list or another).
I have had 12 books and about 400 other items published --ranging from poems in Chinese, trucker fiction in Truckers USA, a story in an honest-to-god Norton Anthology, a book on the Greek Magical Papyri, more Cthulhu Mythos stories than Lovecraft himself, a story in a Norwegian anarchist magazine. I have guest-curated at an art museum, shot fireworks professionally, been the head of a pagan religion, and worked in a corndog factory
I was born on Walpurgisnacht (April 30), 1960 in Amarillo, Texas -- a town whose major industry was the assemblage of plutonium enriched parts of atomic weapons. My mother's family had share-cropped at the first ranch in the world to use barbed wire. Mys work has been translated into 12 languages. In 1988 Ie watched a documentary entitled "Satanism in America" --a cheap piece of yellow
journalism that promoted the (now debunked) myth of "Satanic Crime." I was impressed with the calm logical answers of Dr. Michael Aquino and sent him an approving letter. My letter noted that I did not understand how "Working in a group could strengthen individuality." Dr. Aquino humorously
challenged me to join and explain it to them. Eight years later I becamethe High Priest of Set and a Magus (V*) of the Temple. My major Initiator was Dr. Stephen E. Flowers, and I have written four books on Left Hand Path topics for Flowers' Runa Raven Press. In addition to my
prose, I has published a volume of poetry, written lyrics for rock-n-roll songs, and been in a documentary about his home town, _Plutonium Circus_.
My formative teachers include Paulea Patterson, whp taught Latin at Tascosa High School in Amarillo, from whom I gained a love of classics, a high school counselor who told me that because of his ever dyslexia he should not ever even think
of becoming a writer, and Bruce Sterling, Austin Science Fiction writer, who founded the important writers' group Turkey City. I teaches a variety of on-line creative writing classes for UCLA.
