This Is Your Final Warning!

by Thom Metzger

Fiction. Thom Metzger writes anarchist horror fiction like "Big Gurl" and "Shock Totem" - Shotgun weddings of high art and low culture. This volume contains the complete rants and the nasty little religious tracts of his Ziggurat Press. Along with other horror fragments of high-rictus humor and post-gnostic disgust.

182 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first encountered Thom Metzger’s work in college, when I was publishing a Discordian zine and trading with others for their creative products. His little tracts would appear in the mail, disguised as bargain-rate religious pamphlets, and once you started reading you would be thrilled and offended repeatedly as you zipped through a few hundred words sprinkled with odd collage images.

While that experience was fun, I can’t say that it really holds up all that well in book format. Most of the pieces in this book are meant to be experienced as one-off bursts of illumination, and the edge is taken off quickly by repetition. The four chapters (or sections, or whatever they are) that divide the text don’t seem to categorize anything, although the pieces are organized sort of by length, so that the shortest stuff is in the first two chapters, and the later chapters have longer pieces. I think some (all?) of the chapter “Big Gurl speaks” later appeared in Metzger’s novel, “Big Gurl,” so perhaps these bits were conceived as part of a bigger whole, but they wind up fragmentary in this collection. My favorite pieces in here are actually the ones with the most illustration, especially “Ziggurat Boys” and “Der Metzger.” The title piece is also good, but it was better as a tract.

Themes Metzger plays with include sex, drugs, rock/jazz lingo, race/ism, apocalypticism, and napalm. He quite purposely pushes buttons, especially with regard to race, daring you to see him as pushing a racist agenda when he’s actually poking fun at it. A lot of his style derives from the Church of the Subgenius and other religious parodies, but he eschewed any talk of “Bob” or other saviors and went right to the end of the world as a gimmick. Each piece is more poetic than narrative in nature, often with the tinge of ranting to keep it off-kilter. It’s definitely the sort of thing I was into when I was younger, but I don’t come back to it very often anymore.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one crafts a modern rant like Thom Metzger (the Moor, NOT the white supremacist). This little book is overflowing with pineal ejaculations that make little or too much sense. It's an art form with precious few practitioners these days. Erotic, apocalyptic, silly, sublime and addictive; this book of mad excess and dangerous prophecy will light up your synapses like dynamite to a pinball machine.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exercise in post-modernism. It is often amusing, often intriguing,
often confusing. Metzger (the east coast author, not the racist pig in Idaho), so I was told by a professor who knew him, used to pass out pamphlets on the streets with his weird post-modern texts. This would cause bewilderment in the masses, and this alone is a good reason to buy this book :)

[Bob Fingerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired lunacy from one of America's most underrated crackpot geniuses.