This is the third book in the series of “Demons” comics by Hyena Hell. The first one, No Romance in Hell, I reviewed for Razorcake back in 2020. It’s about a gooney demon named Bug who is fed up with the romance with the assholes in hell and she decides to check out what kind […]
For those unfamiliar with the author (and Razorcake contributor) Keith Rosson, the best way to describe his writing is it’s what would happen if Stephen King and Philip K. Dick had a baby that grew up to have exceptional writing talent influenced by his fathers. Rosson’s latest, Fever House, is his fifth and heftiest novel. The book begins with […]
Your housemates can either become your best friends, your worst enemies, or your best friends who you end up despising fifty percent of the time. You typically avoid them at home while you try to live your own life. Until one of them interrupts your day-to-day life by having their multiple boyfriends on the floor […]
When I was growing up outside of pre-internet Boston, I heard about SS Decontrol through fanzines (mostly Al Quint’s Suburban Voice). They were the first hardcore band from Boston, heavy into straightedge. All these rumors swirled around the band: they travelled in a windowless van from city to city, playing shows, smacking drinks out of […]
This is a striking account of grassroots and uncompromising antiracist activism, mostly in Portland, Ore. from the 1980s and ’90s. Made up largely of interview material with the participants, it’s a whirlwind of different perspectives, with decades of hindsight. As someone who grew up involved with hardcore, punk, and metal scenes in and around Cleveland, […]
This smaller-than-digest-sized book collects nearly a decade’s worth of Billy McCall’s zine recounting his adventures as a casino employee. It’s fun to see how the writing improved over time, with the earlier issues in the collection focusing on fun but fairly shallow observations about casino life, such as frustration over having to wear dress shoes […]
In 2004, Robert Newman published the U.S. edition of his novel The Fountain at the Center of the World, a political book, by an unmistakably radical writer, about climate change and the global economy (among other things), but first and foremost: a novel—I remember the two main characters as clearly as if I’d read it […]
When I was a kid, the only access I had to new underground music was from the “import” section of the music store in the shopping mall. I scored plenty of great stuff there: MDC, the Subhumans (U.K.), and Minor Threat, as well as stuff like the Meatmen and the Butthole Surfers. One day, my […]
Rubymusic was a pioneering radio program that played women’s music and only women’s music. When I say “women’s music,” I mean music of all genres—pop, punk, rock, folk, country, soul, R&B, what have you—performed by women, starting in the 1960s with artists like Lesley Gore, Patsy Cline, and Aretha Franklin. When Rubymusic first went on […]
The main action of The Same Dead Songs takes place on a Saturday night and as the odometer flips into Sunday—and the book is written two days later. And that action is Newman getting home to find a friend named Anthony at the house “holding a half-snorted bag of cocaine, his only collateral, his last […]
According to his website, John Dishwasher dropped out of “mainstream” society about thirty years ago and started traveling, working odd jobs, and writing about the people he met along the way. In 2017 he wrote his first zine and since then he’s thrown himself headlong into this passion, writing on art, sociology, literature, his life, […]
I first got into Shining Light Press when they anthologized the crucial fanzine Hardware a few years back, full of commentary and attitude aplenty. In this anthology, we get the collected issues of New York City’s Bullshit Monthly, written by Mike Bullshit of SFA and Go! between 1984 and 1991. I had always heard about […]