Cult Fiction: A Reader's Guide

Cult Fiction

Contemporary Books, 320 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Cult Fiction sets out to list the most important creators of literature "from the margins and extremes ... offering a different angle on social reality." Energetically written, with photographs, topical lists ("H is for Heroin -- 10 Novels About Junk"), and reproductions of book jackets, Cult Fiction is addictive stuff for any serious student of louche, a sort of slam poet's People magazine. All the usual suspects are here: proto-libertine J.K. Huysmans, bottle-killer Charles Bukowski, amphetamine-fueled Philip K. Dick. And Texans fare surprisingly well, with Kinky Friedman, Bruce Sterling, and Robert E. Howard represented. But because Cult Fiction is British, written by two youngish journalists who share an interest in pop culture, the American reader also gets a heaping portion of English, Irish, and Scottish writers. James Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late) and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Ecstasy) are more or less familiar, but try finding Stewart Home, Keith Waterhouse, or Ted Lewis in your neighborhood superstore. The greatest joy in reading books like this, of course, lies in disputing the author's choices. This is especially fun here because Calcutt and Shephard write with a transatlantic astigmatism that practically invites challenge. Sure, bestseller lists in England have little to do with ours. But calling Stephen King a "cult writer," as these Brits do, is like calling George W. Bush a fringe candidate. And William Faulkner? Anyone who's ever struggled through the standard college Am Lit course, with its interminable ladlings of Faulkner, can attest that the Mississippian's following is way too pervasive to be called a "cult." It's more like a "faculty." Once I'd finished Cult Fiction, I thought of several writers it missed. J.R.R. Tolkien. Carlos Castañeda. Douglas Adams. Surely an anthology that purports to celebrate authors "whose walk is as transgressive as their talk" could stand to acknowledge the brilliant Edward Abbey, whose fiction focused the ambitions of monkey-wrenchers all across America. The selection of writers profiled in Cult Fiction says more about the authors' artistic predilections -- tales of hard crime, drug use, and sexual experimentation -- than it does about the continuing importance of marginal, even dangerous, makers of fiction. The fact is, the most important "marginal" writer in America today may well be William L. Pierce, whose reactionary Turner Diaries serves as a blueprint for the social mayhem cooked up by avid young readers like Timothy McVeigh. In America, the power of fiction is greater than Calcutt and Shephard bother to imagine, and the cults it can create a whole lot more disturbing.