Cover -- Contents -- Foreword: I Must Not Read Bad Thoughts -- Introduction -- AMERICAN MAGIC, AMERICAN DREAD -- Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean? -- Gun Play: An American Tragedy in Three Acts -- Mysterious Stranger: Grandpa Twain's Dark Side -- Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back. On Lady Gaga -- Jocko Homo: How Gay Is the Super Bowl? -- Wimps, Wussies, and W. Masculinity, American Style -- Stardust Memories: How David Bowie Killed the '60s, Ushered in the '70s, and, for One Brief Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip -- When Animals Attack!: An Aesop's Fable about Anthropomorphism -- Toe Fou: Subliminally Seduced by Madonna's Big Toe -- Shoah Business -- The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding -- Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglorious Return of Der Führer -- MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE: Making Sense of the Digital Age -- World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging -- (Face)Book of the Dead -- Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet -- Word Salad Surgery: Spam, Deconstructed -- Slashing the Borg: Resistance Is Fertile -- Things to Come: Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn -- TRIPE SOUP FOR THE SOUL: Religion and All Its Works and Ways -- Tripe Soup for the Soul: The Daily Affirmation -- Pontification: On the Death of the Pope -- The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick's Comic-Book Apocalypse -- 2012 Carnival of Bunkum -- The Vast Santanic Conspiracy -- ANATOMY LESSON: The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark Matters -- Open Wide: Dental Horror -- Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries -- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head -- Been There, Pierced That: Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation of Subcultural Hostilities -- Death to All Humans!: The Church of Euthanasia's Modest Proposal -- Great Caesar's Ghost: On the Crypt of the Capuchins.

Aphrodites of the Operating Theater: On La Specola's Anatomical Venuses -- Goodbye, Cruel Words: On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre -- Cortex Envy: Bringing Up Baby Einstein -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Publication History.