Post-Depravity describes a near future in which people are little more than vectors for strange desires -- and yet the increasing ordinariness of strange desires causes a vicious circle, degenerates striving for ever more outlandish forms of sexual gratification. The result, "post-depravity," is an impending state in which perversity and normality become identical.Post-Depravity uses the method of a cross-sectional study, focusing on a representative population at a specific moment in time, to show the emergence of this paradoxical future. At the center of the cross-section is Dr Francis Malenkov, aka Dr God-Damn X-Ray Spex, a self-proclaimed prophet whose predictions are if they prove true, then they really were visions of the future; if they don't, then they were only symptoms of a new type of psychosis. Either way, Dr Malenkov exerts a galvanizing influence on a small circle of debauched followers, and Post-Depravity is the story of how these healthcare professionals utilize their expert knowledge of the human body to devise new perversions. Post-Depravity is a dismembered novel, its parts isolated like organs harvested from a cadaver. To read it, however, is to realize that a meticulously curated set of images and terms is distributed across its vitals. Neologisms, repetitions, trigger words that connect disparate regions of text -- these reverberate and resound in the brain, causing the reading experience to mirror the obsessional mindset of Dr God-Damn X-Ray Spex. In that respect, Post-Depravity is not just a diagnosis but a means of derangement, an effort to use language to induce psychosis.
Supervert is an alias — a nom de plume — a moniker for an individual — a corporation — a brand name. Supervert offers you a unique combination of intellect and deviance. Perversity for your brain. Vanguard aesthetics, novel pathologies.
I wish I could just get over this book. Rate it five stars, shelve it among my faves and fuck everything. But I can't. I feel the morbid need to describe what it is like to read "Post-Depravity" by Supervert, this unknown genius so fiercely determined to achieve the total fragmentation and reconstruction of his readers' mind. Supervert. Whoever you are, you're not a writer: you're an insane prophet floating in the black oily swamp of our soul.
Dr. Francis Malenkov (a wink to Burgess' pseudo-Russian jargon in "A Clockwork Orange"?) is a neurologist gone insane. Utterly insane. After retirement he took possession of a basement lab in an unspecified NY hospital, where he now lives in absolute isolation. Dr. Malenkov is also a web guru ('Dr. God-Damn Ex-Ray Spex') posting videos in which only the white wall of his lab is visible and his background voice announces the coming age of Post-Depravity. In his own words:
'It is not just the moment when normality and abnormality become coextensive. It is also an advanced state of enlightment about the blackest mandates issued by the libido.'
A sadistic psychopath as well as a cold-blooded scientist, Malenkov is exploring the extreme borders of deviant sex, neurosurgery, physiology, psychiatry; he's the prophet of a future in which all pathological sex compulsions are no longer abnormal, a state of the mind in which normality comprises the whole range of our mental and physical possibilities. His 'vlogs' are the chapters of a new Gospel of the psyche, the prophecies of a postmodern Nostradamus who declares himself the first symptom of mankind's pathological future. A future devoid of any notion of sane/insane, normal/abnormal, moral/immoral. As the vlogs keep being posted, the hospital's doctors, nurses and technicians become increasingly obsessed by Malenkov's 'futuropathy' and the deranged medical practice it entails: the exploration of a scientifically detached perversion is indeed a catalyst for the re-enactment of their own depravity and traumas. A Tunisian radiologist keen on erotic self-asphyxiation and female lingerie; a Japanese nurse who relishes in abusing her patients; a mentally unstable young woman; a German surgeon performing grotesque transplants. Such are Dr. Malenkov's apostles, his obsessive voice echoing throughout the book like a narcotic fluid permeating their mind. Ours, too:
'We are amputees in the realm of sex, and depravity is the prosthetic we use to stagger around the pleasure dome.'
The hospital. The setting of this psychodrama is black crater, a bottomless pit of nightmares, paradoxes, hilarious revolting horrors. The hospital is a labyrinth of abandoned basements, underground corridors littered with garbage, operating rooms with leaking pipes, glass-walled modern buildings, empty halls for deviant art exhibitions. Modern architecture as a means to indulge our perversions, encouraging isolation and self-withdrawal: the ideal breeding ground for depravity. Unthinkable events occur in the rooms and labs of this insane microcosm: rapes, abuses, scientific abominations; and Malenkov's all-pervasive, omnipresent voice, obsessive to the point of sounding like our own.
What's bound to happen to the pioneers of Post-Depravity? What will become of them all, once they give up any restraint and put Malenkov's theory into practice?
'We must pursue our desires to their logical conclusion', the radiologist says. The conclusion - for each of them - will be the most logical of all.
Supervert is obviously inspired by "The Atrocity Exhibition" by JG Ballard and "Naked Lunch" by Burroughs, but neither author can compare to Supervert. The obsessive repetitions, recurrent sentences, short paragraphs in which the plot is almost evanescent: the technique clearly reminds of the aforementioned experimental milestones, though neither Burroughs nor Ballard ever reached such a high degree of aesthetics. It's something I won't try to describe. It's beyond description.
This is a philosophical book. It's a horror tale. A hilarious parody. A psychology textbook. A pop-art tableau and a cathartic journey through the mind. It's before and after. Pre and post.
My favorite book by the daddy of depravity. Memorable characters, a strange and wonderful format, and a story you won't easily forget...even if you wish you could.
Post-Depravity shows that Supervert is one of the most interesting transgressive writers working today. His approach to the subject of deviant sexuality is fascinating, thought provoking, and real pleasure to read. I highly recommend this novel.
It's good, but I didn't get the feeling Supervert actually has erotomania or is sadistic like De Sade was. De Sade is the supreme onanist, being that his head represents philosophy and his penis fucking, and together in the act of self-sucking, he charges himself into a fiery armadillo and runs down anything in his way. Philosophy leads to fucking, and fucking leads to philosophy, a looping cycle I can respect.
However, I think Supervert has carried the torch here, while retaining his distance from actual sadism. Premise of the story is, a doctor, Dr. Malenkov, in an unnamed hospitable, dwelling in the S&M R&D lab, falls into a psychosis and vlogs about the post-depraved future. What is post-depravity, you ask? Here's an undesirable tip: "To molest a girl, as Dr Malenkov asserts, is to transform her future into your past." One engages in acts of sex-death using current medical and technological means in order to anticipate the future. Of course, the line gets blurred between what is being anticipated and what is being brought about, people fall for Dr. Malenkov's neosadism, patients at the hospital begin dying gruesomely, etc.
If anything, being one of my critiques, not enough people die however. The few murders contained here can fit in a cupboard, hardly enough to stink up the torture basement. Instead, we have some curious medical procedures undertaken for sexual sadism, but I never got overwhelmed by evil here like I did with De Sade. Sure, the ideas of cloning yourself to fuck it to death or having a hand transplant with your sister's hand for an incestuous solo session is depraved, but I felt very little for the victims here, unlike when I read Justine. De Sade's universe is full of bodies that need to be destroyed, yet he can also get into the victim's mindset and portray Justine as one of the faithful who blindly believes in order to survive against the hostile order of reality. De Sade is an expert at surrounding the victim with evil and enjoys seeing if or when the victim breaks. I didn't get this sense here in Post-Depravity. We do see the continuity of evil in the end of the book, but it takes place in a small medical room. The author is relying on the anonymity of the medical institution to disguise evil within. This is the logical place to extend horror in modernity; we are no longer in the individualistic Enlightenment era of thinking. We are dependent upon vast institutions whereupon we've ceded our individual moral limits for the sake of efficiency and quantitative results.
Yet, the nunnery where you might get a dildo shoved up your ass should be the same, at least in terms of how we think of institutional power, as a medical hospital. Maybe it wasn't as potent for me here because the story primarily revolved around three characters: Kat, Ben Said, and Murasaki, and Justine had a strong narrative element of her against the vicious world, while in Post-Depravity (spoilers) they all die. Which I didn't find too surprising. I got the sense from how Supervert was portraying the architecture and anonymity of the hospital, it made sense to me that evil would nonetheless continue after the main characters gave themselves up to oblivion. The whole medical field would get corrupted by post-depravity, but we really don't get a sense of that here. Things are just starting to get post-depraved, or it may die out entirely in this one hospital, or others where the vlogs begin. That's why I wasn't horrified by anything in this book; the evil of post-depravity never becomes a universal certainty, like sadism is in De Sade.
Still, a good read for interesting tortures and is tight narratively. However, post-depravity still remains an uncertain future in my mind, I didn't get the sense that it would take over the world. In this sense, it remains purely satire, so on those grounds it's pretty good.
mainly read this because I was a horny college student that saw stoya reading necrophlic variations , but it was going for like 800 dollars, so I got this instead. that being said, ended up being super relevant.