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Turning Taboo Into Titles

Feral House's catalog reflects owner's penchant for the bizarre

by Adam Bregman

On Spring Street in a beat-up section of downtown Los Angeles sits an old pillared office building that evokes Raymond Chandler and his fictional hard-boiled private-eye character Philip Marlowe. With its marble interior, large wooden doors and loud, screeching elevators, it's easy to imagine various low-life personalities drifting through its corridors pursuing some unseemly business. Despite a remodeling job on some floors, the building still gives off that vibe of low-rent, noir-era crime.

Up on the seventh floor, in a cluttered office and behind many shelves of books, is Adam Parfrey, a rumpled maverick in the same mold as Marlowe. Parfrey, 45, who smiles like a Cheshire cat and peers out from behind the thick-rimmed glasses of an avid reader and researcher, may very well be L.A.'s oddest publisher. Releasing nonfiction books on subjects ranging from the unusual to the obscure to the altogether unsettling, Parfrey's small company, Feral House, operates according to the mercurial whims and obsessions of its owner.

In the Feral House catalog you'll find books on Hitler's Jewish clairvoyant, Erik Van Hanussen; the dark history of prepubescent pop; and various strange ideas about the origin of humans, from ancient astronauts to aquatic apes. There's an investigation into the marketing, art, history and consumption of pills, a survey of X-rated outtakes from the Bible and numerous titles dedicated to Parfrey's favorite book topics: Satanism, anarchism, death, serial killers, punk rock and paranoia.

In a day and age when publishing often succumbs to the bottom line, Feral House is purposely uncommercial. It would be difficult to fill a small room with people interested in some of the exhaustive books Parfrey has published on obscure subjects. However, with nearly no advertising at all, Feral House has managed some successes. The company grosses about half a million dollars a year and is successful enough for Parfrey to employ a small staff.

Parfrey's first release, 1989's Apocalypse Culture, a collection of essays about the most demented fringes of outsider society, has become an underground classic of sorts, selling about 70,000 copies. (Parfrey put together that collection and a few other Feral House titles on his own, though most are penned by others.)

Additional Feral House hits include several books from Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey; the exploitative Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook; the definitive work on the Scandinavian black metal scene, Lords of Chaos; and the book that was the inspiration for the Tim Burton film "Ed Wood," Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr.

"When there's not one advertisement or major review, it shows that it absolutely must be word of mouth that sells these books," Parfrey says as he tears through a heap of mail. "A book is seen at somebody's house, or a manager at a bookstore finds one of our books interesting enough to put at the top of the table. It's mystifying to me how it works. You just put things out, because the usual promotion methods don't really work for a house like mine. I'm very bad at marketing, so I spend all my time dealing with the creation of the book."

Though it doesn't happen very often, occasionally, one of Parfrey's books has benefited from some media exposure.

"'The Howard Stern Show' really helped out the book Lords of Chaos," says Parfrey. "The author, Michael Moynihan, was on that show and the day after it went to No. 21 on Amazon.com. So, I could see the direct relation there. Also, Art Bell's radio show, this midnight to 6 a.m. show of conspiracy and UFO info, on a couple of occasions has had our authors on and that has helped sales on Amazon. We got a big advance once for foreign rights with the Ed Wood book after the Tim Burton movie came out. But often foreign publishers pay in advance and then abscond."

Feral House's U.K. distributor is Turn Around, which handles most of their titles. For a while, Feral House was hooked up with a distributor in Australia and New Zealand, but things fell apart when some Christian representatives at the firm decided they didn't want to have anything to do with Feral House. Otherwise, Parfrey gets offers from foreign publishers and often sells the rights to certain Feral House titles, but rarely get more than an advance out of them.

"The Anton LaVey books sold well in Portuguese and Spanish," says Parfrey. "I've also sold books to Sweden and Italy. Italy did Apocalypse Culture. I've sold rights to two different German publishers for Apocalypse Culture, but they never put out the book, and also Russian rights. And the Japanese have put out several books. It's hard for me to tell if any of them have done well. You get a small advance and then they never give you any other information. There was a German publisher of Anton LaVey, who was righteous about it. But usually, they cheat you. Sometimes, you get ludicrous sales reports. I got a sales report from a publisher that said they had sold one copy of the Ed Wood book in three years. With these deals, it's money that doesn't cost you anything because you're not printing the books, but I've rarely come across a sales report or royalties from a foreign publisher." Domestically, Publishers Group West handles Feral House's distribution and is responsible for about 70 percent of their sales. "Surprisingly, I have found that Barnes & Noble and Borders have ordered more adventurous titles than some major independent stores have, which are often strictly about families and don't want to upset anyone," says Parfrey. "They are more oriented to the Oprah Winfrey world. Not to say, that the chains aren't. But they have a wider array of titles. That's not a very widely known or acknowledged thing. There are exceptions to this like Powell's in Portland, Tattered Cover in Denver and St. Marks in New York. They are big stores and they order our books regardless of their fear of insulting a buyer. But a lot of large independents don't order a lot of titles. They order some, but not most."

Critical acclaim has come in the form of awards, such as the 2000 "IPPY" Award from this publication, for Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History & Consumption in the Popular Culture category. Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground won a Firecracker Award and Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons won a Book of the Year award from The Anomalist.

Parfrey entered the book business in San Francisco in 1980 when he discovered a Goodwill store that had dumpsters filled with donated hardcovers and first editions to be thrown out.

"I convinced the manager of the Goodwill to drop all those books in a dumpster I rented," says Parfrey, "and I bought a pickup truck for $200 to haul them away. I found all these bizarre old medical textbooks that I was enamored of and these psychiatric case histories that were astonishing. There are so many interesting books published that you wouldn't know about ordinarily if you didn't go through thousands of them daily. For a while I became the biggest Bay Area used-book wholesaler. I intended to open up a store, but I noticed all the used bookstore dealers in San Francisco were very sour, grouchy men, and I was fearful of becoming that. So I sold all my books and moved to New York."

After working a minimum-wage job at Strand Books, Parfrey worked for a publisher for a short time and later formed Amok Press with associate Ken Swezey. In 1989 he moved to L.A. and started Feral House.

"I was going to do a magazine called the Journal of Unpopular Views," says Parfrey. "And I had collected a lot of material, from writers like [Jean] Genet, [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline and Wilhelm Reich," whose works covered such topics as outlaw sexuality, psychiatry and anti-Semitism. "But then I found this really freaky, far-out stuff, and I was able to put it together in some way that made sense. That was 'Apocalypse Culture,' which came out first on Amok Press. But Feral House started with a business decision to do books that were inexpensive to produce. If they remained a successful backlist item, then I would be assured that money would be coming in, so that more offbeat projects could be supported."

For someone who wants to start their own publishing house, Parfrey advises, "Just do something that you love because you're going to be putting a lot of time into it. Another thing is there should be a core audience of some sort that can be recognized. My biggest mistakes have been doing things without having a core audience that I knew would pick up the book. Some of the ideas have been too obscure."

Recently, Parfrey hired Christina Chokas to help him with getting the word out about Feral House. "Most people that I have spoken with know about us," says Chokas, who has been putting together press packages and calling up book buyers. "But a lot of media people haven't covered a lot of the topics in our books. I'm trying to get Feral House out to the world. I talked to someone at Time magazine and he said that our books are great, but he just can't put them in the magazine. I was specifically trying to sell him on 'Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin.'"

Parfrey's office is stacked with paraphernalia from various completed and future book projects. There are Osama bin Laden T-shirts proclaiming "He isn't Terrorism He is Fighter," brought back from Indonesia. Parfrey says Bin Laden is as popular there as Britney Spears is here. The shirts, along with a map of Afghanistan and a shelf of Islam-related books, were used for research for his recent book Extreme Islam, a somewhat random collection of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda.

"I think fundamentalism is frightening wherever you encounter it, Judaism, Christianity or Islam," says Parfrey. "That to me is the biggest evil in the world."

Parfrey is currently immersed in a project on men's adventure magazines from the early '50s. "There's never been a book on men's adventure magazines," he says. "They were meant for vets and have a patriotic fever that is similar to the time we're in now. I found that Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman edited and wrote for these magazines. It's a fascinating and forgotten part of American culture. It went from G-rated magazines like True to spicier ones like Men and Man's Adventure to truly fetishistic stuff like evil Nazis torturing women. So they were catering to a fetishistic element in society using World War II as a basis for it. The book is a lot more interesting really than when it began, because I got three of the original illustrators and some of the writers and editors involved. It's pretty amazing. I'm very happy about that one."

Recently released Feral House projects include a book about Sidney Reilly, who was involved in all sorts of espionage and was the inspiration for the James Bond character; the story of Russ Columbo, the crooner who died a mysterious death in 1934; and there's an upcoming book from Reynaldo Berrios, the creator of the Northern California magazine Mi Vida Loca, which will be a look at the cholo gang culture from within.

Parfrey plans to continue pursuing subjects that get very little play in the mainstream press. "Just because something is not written up in the New York Times or the Washington Post," he says, "doesn't mean it's not relevant."

* * * * * *

Adam Parfrey on the State of Publishing:
"People speak gloom and doom about what's going on with Random House and other big houses. But the demise of good material from big houses means that people will have to look elsewhere for interesting things. And since I started, back in 1987, it seems there are far more underground/alternative publishers now than ever before."

"It bothers me that the NY Times Book Review has never seen it fit to review one Feral House title. The NY Times is used more or less as a template for other review sections in the country, and as independent publishing gets better and more exciting, the Times gets more conservative and exclusionary. This conservatism is primarily due to classist corporate behavior."

"With regards to review action by major magazines and daily newspapers, I've had far better luck in the UK. We're reviewed by major publications and written about by the BBC. About a year and a half ago, Parliament tried to pass a Son of Sam law due to a book we published: The Gates of Janus by Ian Brady."

"It's true that when Feral House takes on a subject, it's often considered too obscure, both for review attention and bookstore orders. But a number of our books sell, eventually, and kick off cultural phenomena, like the '90s exotica/tiki/bachelor pad thing (from Cad: A Handbook for Heels), 'zine culture (Apocalypse Culture, Kooks, Rollerderby), the Ed Wood film (Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" movie was based on Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.), and weird conspiracy theories (Secret and Suppressed, Psychic Dictatorship and Apocalypse Culture)."

"So are we really too obscure for attention by the major media? The Los Angeles Times kicked in with two major pieces back in August '02. One in the book section, and the other in the Living section. A heartening thing, and it was weird to see major columnists for the NY Times ordering books off our website, strangely, the same books we had mailed them before. And I wonder what happens to review copies in the mailrooms of major magazines, when they claim never to have received them. Actually, Playboy, who's been very good to us, requested many copies of Voluptuous Panic and Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin. And who are we to say no?"

"On another positive note, I just met with producer Don Murphy of Angry Films this morning, as he optioned Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons from us, and gave me a copy of the script he commissioned for the movie version. Other Feral House books that are now theatrically optioned: The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, Lexicon Devil, and it seems that we just got an offer for Hanussen. So, yes, film culture is getting better all the time!"

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