It’s infernally hard to develop a working aware of one’s own personal taboos. The obvious ones are easy: the prohibitions handed to us as prohibitions, ropes in the hammock of consensus morality. The hard ones to ferret out are assumptions never experienced as assumptions, only as comforting, easily ignored background music. These are the unknown knowns.

Every so often an arrangement of words breaks the spell: Oh. I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to think that. Side effects include nausea, hypertension, and feeling kinda fucked up for a full day. You notice the ropes, then reckon with the fact that somebody must’ve tied them. Maybe everybody tied a little. Maybe you helped.

Some mediation is unavoidable. Sometimes that particular medium is the only thing that can effectively bring that particular the message to life. Nobody can investigate everything firsthand. But over time, one version often hardens into what happened. It seems so obvious that there’s not much to discuss about it. You’re not sure where you picked it up, and you rarely notice how readily you pass it along.

Some curators of information make big bets short-selling consensus interpretations. Here is the primary source. Have at it. It won’t kill you, and it could damage you in ways that become essential. This sort of work takes the instincts of a librarian and a crime-scene investigator, plus the stomach of an alpine goat. It means stripping unknown knowns of their anonymity. The better it’s working, the more hate you get.

For thirty years, one of the stranger American institutions built on that wager was a fearless, polarizing publishing house, founded on five grand, initially sustained by selling the works of the vaudevillian Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, and dedicated to the art and science of using primary sources to interrogate unknown knowns.

I fell in love with primary sources as a journalism student at the University of Georgia. For a large Southern state school, our library harbored some genuinely subversive and deranged books. My obsessions always seemed to coalesce around one small press: Feral House, founded in 1989 by Adam Parfrey, son of the character actor Woodrow Parfrey and a man with a piercing eye for what lies behind the fog of conventional morality and its attendant taboos and consensus cringe. The industrial noise musician, performance artist, and ur-controversialist Boyd Rice supplied the name. Parfrey supplied the premise: the poison people are most eager to protect you from is often the medicine you need to become who you are.

The obvious objection to this idea is serious enough to take seriously. Why give those people a platform? Some ideas hurt and kill large numbers of people. Sunshine is the sort of disinfectant that can also roast you alive. 

Parfrey’s wager cuts the other way: not knowing what your enemies actually think and believe can be significantly more hazardous. If someone has picked out the seeds, added comfortably predictable moral cues, and assured you the specimen is anesthetized, that doesn’t really count. You haven’t butted heads with the thing itself; you’ve encountered somebody else’s encounter with it, often the sort of person who would cut the crusts off your PB&J sandwich without asking you first. You’ve been protected from reading the monster’s diary yourself, but now it’s just you and the monster, with no one around to properly congratulate or scold you for forming an acceptable or unacceptable opinion. 

Do me a favor. Next time you’re procrastinating or have nothing better to do, pick one of your most somatically charged areas of interest, and go straight to the source. You know the one. Crack the monster’s diary. Not because the monster is always right or the world is always wrong, but because misunderstanding the monster could be lethal, and the Bad Book itself may tell you something true about the house that the guardians of decency and sanity conveniently forgot to mention.

The first definitive book to spring from the Feral House ethos was an “outsider” literary anthology and feat of brutal postmodern mindfuckery called Apocalypse Culture. Parfrey assembled the pieces at Amok Press in 1987 and expanded the book for Feral House in 1990, just in time for the ascendancy of fin de siècle paranoia. J.G. Ballard called the book “the terminal documents of the twentieth century,” which carries some weight, considering.

Apocalypse Culture has sold more than a hundred thousand copies to a hundred thousand people who privately wanted to look at what everyone publicly agreed would make them go blind. The doorstop of a sequel, Apocalypse Culture II, goes even deeper, with pieces on cannibalism, various strains of mind control, and all manner of transgression, from vulgar nihilism to rococo conspiracy theories to incendiary tracts that light up corners of the Escape Room no one noticed before.

Transgression can function like a laser drill or, in more self-involved hands, a solar ping. Did I gross you out? Nifty. That means I exist. It can look rebellious to college students while relying entirely on the audience it needs to antagonize and horrify and will never control. 

Early Feral House wasn’t exactly allergic to bottom-shelf store-brand transgression. But even this stuff, at its best, can lead you to a fenced-in thing and leave you to figure out what it is and why the fence is there, which can bring up some challenging ideas about why you’re there. Indeed, people have all sorts of different motives for building fences. It’s one of the things we do best, and a reliable, well-constructed fence sometimes gets promoted and becomes an unknown known.

For a particularly illustrative and unsubtle example, let’s take Extreme Islam, a masterpiece of renegade curation. Parfrey was already assembling an impressive collection of radical Islamist propaganda (speeches, pamphlets, manifestos, and primary texts) while the modal American was preoccupied with whether or not the president got his helmet shined on company time. When the Twin Towers fell, Parfrey rushed the anthology into print, a bet that paid off well. The book generated significant light and heat because the country suddenly, urgently wanted to understand, and Feral House was prepared to serve as a Misery Chick for a confused and terrified nation.

Parfrey got credit for foresight, but as he would readily concede, all he did was look and point where others wouldn’t, or at least didn’t. When everyone relies on the same incestuous cliques of narrators, the raw document can hit like a grenade of clairvoyance, even when it was sitting there with the pin pulled the whole time. I’ve always thought “hiding in plain sight” sounded like a very stupid strategy, and yet, here we are, again.

As its ethos matured, Feral House made this sort of cultural forensics its main concern. By the late aughties, the company looked less like a Videodrome-style shock operation and more like a unique and robust cultural archive of crucial documents no one else would touch. 

You got Love Sex Fear Death, a history of the Process Church that Parfrey built carefully and intentionally with his partner Jodi Wille and the movement’s surviving members. When the book was released, I had the pleasure of attending a sublime mock Process Church ceremony hosted by Parfrey and Willie. At the end, when they asked the audience if we had any more questions, someone blurted, “Can we do this every Sunday?” to a healthy round of applause. To effectively critique something, the critic must have at least a notion of what it can feel like to revere that thing.

After Apocalypse Culture, the hits kept coming. Lords of Chaos became the definitive primer at a Scandinavian metal scene that refused to separate life and art. Beautiful coffee table books treated mid-century men’s pulp magazines and gore-filled Mexican tabloids as crucial, complicated cultural artifacts rather than as tacky kitsch for hipsters, which could have been much more remunetative.

This wasn’t a pivot so much as Parfrey’s original vision coming into tighter focus. Shock was the crude early technology, the lead magnet for the beta version. The deeper impulse was documentation as mindful reverence: refusing to cop a stance while flatly insisting that this happened, these people existed, they still affect us, and their artifacts belong to history whether those in power want them there or not.

Young transgressionistas often start by knocking down walls to prove to others that the wall is permeable while convincing themselves their anger matters. If they’re lucky, they grow up, explore what’s on the other side of the wall, and maybe drag poor Fortuna out of the catacombs. As Parfrey’s interests evolved, his big idea stayed the same: sometimes maturity looks less like calcified moral certitude and more like an unsettling new appreciation for complexity.

Parfrey died in May 2018, but Feral House kept on rockin’ in the free world. Christina Ward took the editorial helm with Parfrey’s sister Jessica, relocated the operation from Los Angeles to Port Townsend, and kept publishing underground history, morally agnostic true crime, and cultural flotsam and esoterica. A press built around one man’s Hollywood-sized personality and unique instincts for provocation survived his passing, something similar independent operations almost never pull off. Feral House became an institution without becoming a “legacy.”

There’s a bit of folk allegory I often return to that pops up across various cultures and the Pixar film Coco: the final death. The first death, the one we imagine we know, is the body ceasing to function. But when the final death darkens your door, it means the last person who remembered you has died or forgotten. By that heuristic, Parfrey is alive and irreverent as ever. 

Every time someone decides to check the narrator’s citations, Parfrey is in the room. I can picture that reader because I was one: a moody small-town introvert getting off for the first time on the vertigo of the unknown and unknowable. Not as revelations, but as moments of direct, unchaperoned contact. Meeting something on its own turf before some jerkoff with a lavalier mic has dictated what it means.

At the time I was devouring every Feral House title I could get my hands on, I was quite optimistic about the internet as a force multiplier for this sort of intrepid courage. What happened wasn’t quite what I’d expected. There were some big Ws, like the moment the buzzing digital swarms finally breached the omerta that protected pedophile priests for centuries. On balance, though, the internet mostly just replaced stuffy institutional gatekeepers with cynical mercenaries and careless, destructive vigilantes. In that world, going straight to the source becomes a much heavier cognitive load, one that more often requires painful self-interrogation.

Most of us avoid that, understandably, at least most of the time. But the source doesn’t go away when we stop looking. 

So. Fix a drink. Put on a record. Crack the forbidden tome. Sit with the sensations of having it in your hands. Notice what happens in your nervous system before anyone tells you what should. You might find the narrator was right. Or more often that the story is stranger, uglier, more human than the summary allows. Worst of all, you might recognize yourself somewhere you’d hoped not to. Some books do that: they kick your ass into the street and leave you less certain than when you opened them, and therefore more responsible for whatever you decide to do next.

That’s the load-bearing component of intellectual freedom. Not flailing adolescent rebellion. Not the noble quest for smug certainty. Responsibility. The horror.

If the story means something to you, go to the source. If you start to get queasier the closer you get, you’re probably headed in the right direction. The source may be scary. It may not conveniently facilitate ritualistic scapegoating or self-satisfied moral grandstanding. 

Truth hurts, but the fact that something hurts doesn’t necessarily make it true. It means now you have to find out.

Feature drawing by Daniel Knox

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Spooky Issue Fall 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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