Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Stories of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox and Unusual from the Magazine Morbid Curiosity

Featuring first-person nonfiction essays that celebrated the absurd, the unusual, the morbid, and the grotesque, MORBID CURIOSITY was a magazine that was published once a year from 1997 to 2007. MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES is a collection of forty essays, handpicked by editor and publisher Loren Rhodes, from the magazine's ten-year run. The essays are arranged in five categories--childhood, travel, money and employment, death and the afterlife, and a catchall category--and range in tone from the gruesomely humorous to the truly horrific. As a lover of things that are morbid, bizarre, or horrifying, I found it nearly impossible to put down this book before I'd read it from cover to cover. As with any anthology, there are a few stories that don't quite hit the mark, but the bulk of them are sure to entertain and engage anybody who is interested in real-life tales of the unusual and the bizarre. Among my favorite of the essays contained within are "The Barbie Wrecking Yard," a man's recollection of how his female cousin used Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls to both awaken his sexuality and haunt his dreams; "Souvenir of Hell," the story of a disturbing tour through what remains of Auschwitz; and "Blood Gags," one man's memoir about faking "bloody" hardcore S & M videos in the 1980s. If you like true stories about truly unusual people or the genuinely bizarre side of modern life--or even if you just have a morbid curiosity about such things--you'll enjoy MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES. And if you're like me, you'll wish you'd known about MORBID CURIOSITY magazine when it was still in print...and you'll start hunting down the back issues.

Odd how things are. I, like the editor and creator of the magazine Morbid Curiosity, was raised a country girl in Michigan with a family of farmers. I used to have to drive an hour to the Big City, which isn't really that big of city, just to go to cool record and bookstores. A few of these had Morbid Curiosity on their shelves. As a gothling, I was attracted to the concept. A lot of late 80's/early 90's magazines were linked to this idea of morbid true story telling (Johnny Marr from the Smiths had a similar zine in Murder Can Be Fun). I ate it up, especially at a pre-Internet time where my small town living tried to hold me back from anything morose, primitive or obscure. Upon reading this volume in the present, parts sound outdated due to the internet, now you can buy betel nuts online instead of traveling to Asia to do so (though now older and wiser, I think that modern primitives that go to other countries to sample herbs in other to travel to alternate realities of the mind are just as bad as tourist who stay in hotels, if not worse). The true excess of morbid images and stories via the Web almost destroys the pure idea of this magazine which was to be a forum for those who wanted to share experiences that were dark or horrible to them, to either exorcise them or share...of course the Internet makes this easy, but the quality of someone throwing something on a blog quickly can be compromised over someone slaving over a typewriter, making sure the story reads excellently. I loved this magazine in the past and I am happy to own this book, since most of the copies I had were gobbled up by my friends, who had similar interests in all things dark and bizarre. I don't think the magazine was meant to shock, more than soothe. That is why I like it. Inside this volume of the best articles of the magazine are stories about terrible childhoods, visiting Holocaust camps with the hopes of understanding and stories of self-discovery through the strength of both the human body and mind, to travel to places hardly seen and to emerge with knowledge of those areas in life people don't want to touch, like their own inner mortality and death as well as the evil that men do. A lot of the articles have life changed the writers and it shows. I highly recommend this book, even for people who get most of their morbidity off the Internet. There is something to be said for holding this volume of almost forgotten lore and feeling the paper pages, perhaps by candlelight and getting the full feel of what darkness is, comforted by people who feel the way you do about life.

I read Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues without ever having read the magazine Morbid Curiosity or ever having heard of it. I absolutely love the stories in this book, if I had known about the magazine I would have subscribed. Loren Rhoads shares true stories that focus on disturbing or unusual events that people live through. In my opinion everyone can relate to at least one of these stories, and know how these morbid events may have made them feel or act. It can help you to understand others and yourself better, you will really look within yourself, you may be repulsed but you might understand.

I have to confess that I enjoyed this book for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it made me feel profoundly, deeply normal. I can't tell you if that's because some of the stories made my peculiarities seem really benign, or if it was recognizing that other people are just as strange in the same ways as I am. No matter, it's a comforting volume, or was for me. What surprised me, though, was how incredibly human and even humane these stories are. This isn't shock journalism, these are stories about people who find themselves doing things most people can't even imagine doing. They do them, not for the hell of it, not because it seems cool or perverse or wicked, but because they need the money, or because they find that there is something compelling them, some need to understand a thing which remains so incomprehensible to most people that they avoid thinking about it at all. The visit to the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz is a fine example of the latter, and it's a well-written and thoughtful examination of one man's confrontation with a past that remains so painful, so horrific that some people refuse to believe it could have happened. Honestly, if you're looking for some kind of perverse sexual thrill here, don't bother. These pieces will provoke you to use a wholly different organ. If you want to give some serious thought to the human condition, this is a wonderful resource.