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Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros
The thesis of Apocalypse Burlesque is it proposes that sex is where we can take the pulse of an era that has increasingly come to resemble the end times. We now know that the conditions to maintain life on earth are fragile. The ways to end life are many. Our impending doom makes us turn to pleasure yet our pleasures are the very tortures that Satan used to inflict on the damned. We no longer believe in the arch fiend but we keep up his memory in the sex acts we perform. Erotic asphyxiation is what we are into. Regardless of whether we practice it in our personal lives, we have our hands around the throat of the planet.
Apocalypse Burlesque uses satire and slapstick to zoom in on the details of hell. A child dominatrix, an old man in a retirement home for perverts, a world leader who undergoes gender reassignment, a star fucker who sleeps with conjoined twins, a coward who participates in a fisting contest, a rape victim who mistakes prurient interest for social approval, a husband who gets a surgically implanted "man womb," a woman who laughs when she orgasms, an activist who believes hate sex can change society for the better -- this is our world in a funhouse mirror. This is the garden of earthly delights when the earth is in peril and the delights involve pain. Ladies and Germs, God is worse than dead. He is impotent. Hubba hubba. Va-va-voom. It's the crack of doom in the boom-boom room.
Apocalypse Burlesque uses satire and slapstick to zoom in on the details of hell. A child dominatrix, an old man in a retirement home for perverts, a world leader who undergoes gender reassignment, a star fucker who sleeps with conjoined twins, a coward who participates in a fisting contest, a rape victim who mistakes prurient interest for social approval, a husband who gets a surgically implanted "man womb," a woman who laughs when she orgasms, an activist who believes hate sex can change society for the better -- this is our world in a funhouse mirror. This is the garden of earthly delights when the earth is in peril and the delights involve pain. Ladies and Germs, God is worse than dead. He is impotent. Hubba hubba. Va-va-voom. It's the crack of doom in the boom-boom room.
- GenresFiction
153 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 26, 2018
7 people are currently reading
112 people want to read
About the author
Supervert
10 books179 followersSupervert 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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 3, 2019
On the eve of 1000 AD, the crowds throughout Europe went nuts.
As a matter of fact, the world was about to be destroyed by the Second Coming, the Parousia, the Day of Judgement: fire, flood, brimstone rains, plague were in store from the Almighty's revengeful hand and, basically, mankind was fucked.
Seeing themselves on the verge of death and everlasting torment in the depths of Hell, our ancestors were not going to stand there, arms crossed, waiting for Doomsday to incinerate them and their secret lechery. The few literates who witnessed those frantic months were indeed appalled by the madness and the wild debauchery that took place among the urbanised classes as well as the dwellers of the rural waste lands: orgies, alcohol, killing sprees, bloody rituals, Flagellants... absolute terror and insane elation turned the end of the high Middle Ages into a devilish circus.
Either through expiation or ultimate satisfaction, nobody was willing to go without getting a last kick out of it.
Now, let's have a look around.
2019 AD: climate change, religious extremism, wanton terrorism, statesmen gone cuckoo and dictators juggling nuclear weapons, pollution, social alienation, artificially induced psychopathy... mankind is once again on the verge of destruction, only thing we couldn't care less. We just don't give a shit. We're not looking for any sort of salvation nor compensation, for the very simple reason that we believe in neither.
Our society has got rid of the fear of both God and the Fiend, and that's precisely what the latter has been planning from the beginning: anonymity. His torture devices are no longer the picturesque fires and icy ponds, or the dusty (and vaguely erotic) paraphernalia of the Holy Inquisition. Nowadays the Devil tortures the living, not the dead, and his instruments are our own desires and depravity.
"Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros". The title says it all.
Supervert's latest book is the equivalent of those medieval reports of Millenarian mayhem and insanity: a mystery play in which nameless characters act out the deranged eroticism of our age, in an atmosphere of impending doom they're totally unaware of.
Tales of aberrant sexuality, psychology, technology and politics; violent, grotesque, revolting, hilarious tales in which Supervert takes a further step beyond the limits of decency and good taste... thus reaching a new apex in his status of intellectual.
Because Supervert 32C, based in NYC and author of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, Perversity Think Tank, Necrophilia Variations and Post-Depravity is more than a writer: he's a thinker, a crypto-philosopher, a seer and (alas!) a prophet. And needless to say, his latest work was up to my highest expectations.
Let's face it, our world is doomed. There's no way out and we'd better get used to the consequences of our evil stupidity and desperate ferocity. Survival: that's what it's all about. Survival at any cost.
Unfortunately, we seem utterly uninterested in surviving. What we really crave is (self)destruction, and sex is but a means to perpetrate it.
The internet allows what was unthinkable only a couple of decades ago: lunar relationships, online sex ('sexting' as a surrogate of real-life intercourse), camwhores, hookers delivered like Amazon packages, Wi-Fi sex toys... we can hardly discern between reality and fantasy when everything seems to be possible - or at least conceivable - at affordable prices. Moreover, the social media thrive on the shameless display of what we've been taught to fear or despise: browsing through any porn site is enough for any layman to realise how any aberrant sex practice, from zoophilia to gerontophilia, urolagnia, 'vore' is now available and rigorously catalogued... and therefore tolerated or totally approved.
What Supervert does here is not a parody of all this: he stages a grand-guignolesque freak show of our times instead, like the German painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit portrayed the Weimar republic and its monstrous ugliness.
A sadist who founds the kingdom of Sodom Nova in a US park; a six-year-old dominatrix who becomes a celebrity and dreams of destroying the world; a man who indulges his wife's feminism by having an artificial womb implanted in his body and sharing a pregnancy; a retirement home for decrepit perverts; a man suffering from a brain tumor who loses all inhibitions and engages in a revolting cult of his own excrement; the first female President of the US who undergoes gender reassignment when her popularity is falling and sets off on a war of conquest, God suffering from erectile dysfunction and wiping away the whole universe out of rage... such are the nameless, faceless impersonators of our age's obsessions. Desperate, sick, insane; enslaved by technology and loneliness, at the mercy of natural compulsions and artificial boundaries.
Hard not to burst out laughing while reading these stories... they're just too weird, crazy, paradoxical not to laugh out loud. But it's a guilty laughter in which we can't help but feel unease, called into question.
However, Supervert doesn't depict the world as it is now: he tells what the world is going to be, and the way our own desires are being turned against us. Pornography, advertisement, human exploitation, de-humanisation have replaced the H bomb as the ultimate weapons of mass destruction... precisely because we like them so much. Once again we're on the eve of Doomsday... and having a great fun.
It's too late, guys: we enjoy it too much to quit. That's the message between the lines of this book.
Until a laughter will bury us all.
As a matter of fact, the world was about to be destroyed by the Second Coming, the Parousia, the Day of Judgement: fire, flood, brimstone rains, plague were in store from the Almighty's revengeful hand and, basically, mankind was fucked.
Seeing themselves on the verge of death and everlasting torment in the depths of Hell, our ancestors were not going to stand there, arms crossed, waiting for Doomsday to incinerate them and their secret lechery. The few literates who witnessed those frantic months were indeed appalled by the madness and the wild debauchery that took place among the urbanised classes as well as the dwellers of the rural waste lands: orgies, alcohol, killing sprees, bloody rituals, Flagellants... absolute terror and insane elation turned the end of the high Middle Ages into a devilish circus.
Either through expiation or ultimate satisfaction, nobody was willing to go without getting a last kick out of it.
Now, let's have a look around.
2019 AD: climate change, religious extremism, wanton terrorism, statesmen gone cuckoo and dictators juggling nuclear weapons, pollution, social alienation, artificially induced psychopathy... mankind is once again on the verge of destruction, only thing we couldn't care less. We just don't give a shit. We're not looking for any sort of salvation nor compensation, for the very simple reason that we believe in neither.
Our society has got rid of the fear of both God and the Fiend, and that's precisely what the latter has been planning from the beginning: anonymity. His torture devices are no longer the picturesque fires and icy ponds, or the dusty (and vaguely erotic) paraphernalia of the Holy Inquisition. Nowadays the Devil tortures the living, not the dead, and his instruments are our own desires and depravity.
"Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros". The title says it all.
Supervert's latest book is the equivalent of those medieval reports of Millenarian mayhem and insanity: a mystery play in which nameless characters act out the deranged eroticism of our age, in an atmosphere of impending doom they're totally unaware of.
Tales of aberrant sexuality, psychology, technology and politics; violent, grotesque, revolting, hilarious tales in which Supervert takes a further step beyond the limits of decency and good taste... thus reaching a new apex in his status of intellectual.
Because Supervert 32C, based in NYC and author of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, Perversity Think Tank, Necrophilia Variations and Post-Depravity is more than a writer: he's a thinker, a crypto-philosopher, a seer and (alas!) a prophet. And needless to say, his latest work was up to my highest expectations.
Let's face it, our world is doomed. There's no way out and we'd better get used to the consequences of our evil stupidity and desperate ferocity. Survival: that's what it's all about. Survival at any cost.
Unfortunately, we seem utterly uninterested in surviving. What we really crave is (self)destruction, and sex is but a means to perpetrate it.
The internet allows what was unthinkable only a couple of decades ago: lunar relationships, online sex ('sexting' as a surrogate of real-life intercourse), camwhores, hookers delivered like Amazon packages, Wi-Fi sex toys... we can hardly discern between reality and fantasy when everything seems to be possible - or at least conceivable - at affordable prices. Moreover, the social media thrive on the shameless display of what we've been taught to fear or despise: browsing through any porn site is enough for any layman to realise how any aberrant sex practice, from zoophilia to gerontophilia, urolagnia, 'vore' is now available and rigorously catalogued... and therefore tolerated or totally approved.
What Supervert does here is not a parody of all this: he stages a grand-guignolesque freak show of our times instead, like the German painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit portrayed the Weimar republic and its monstrous ugliness.
A sadist who founds the kingdom of Sodom Nova in a US park; a six-year-old dominatrix who becomes a celebrity and dreams of destroying the world; a man who indulges his wife's feminism by having an artificial womb implanted in his body and sharing a pregnancy; a retirement home for decrepit perverts; a man suffering from a brain tumor who loses all inhibitions and engages in a revolting cult of his own excrement; the first female President of the US who undergoes gender reassignment when her popularity is falling and sets off on a war of conquest, God suffering from erectile dysfunction and wiping away the whole universe out of rage... such are the nameless, faceless impersonators of our age's obsessions. Desperate, sick, insane; enslaved by technology and loneliness, at the mercy of natural compulsions and artificial boundaries.
Hard not to burst out laughing while reading these stories... they're just too weird, crazy, paradoxical not to laugh out loud. But it's a guilty laughter in which we can't help but feel unease, called into question.
However, Supervert doesn't depict the world as it is now: he tells what the world is going to be, and the way our own desires are being turned against us. Pornography, advertisement, human exploitation, de-humanisation have replaced the H bomb as the ultimate weapons of mass destruction... precisely because we like them so much. Once again we're on the eve of Doomsday... and having a great fun.
It's too late, guys: we enjoy it too much to quit. That's the message between the lines of this book.
Until a laughter will bury us all.
January 8, 2021
A return to form by a genius author. ❤❤❤ Marry me please Supervert, if you were on a stage I'd throw you my bra. For starters.
December 16, 2018
Wish I could powerdrill memories of this book from my skull to enjoy it all again. #hatefuckamerica
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February 19, 2023It feels almost nostalgic that people are still making transgressive erotic art, now that it's so easy for them just to splurge their fantasies online without that faintest veneer of craft. But Supervert* is very much on the de Sade/Louys/Bataille tip, intent on using obscenity to satirical ends – with the interesting wrinkle that this is clearly intended to irk the perverts too, and not just the pearl-clutching prudes. Witness, for instance, the tendency for the sadists in these stories not to be hobbyists operating within a sphere of consent, but people bent, like de Sade's monstrous libertines, on whatever atrocity they can perpetrate on whatever scale. How many veils of irony are in operation there? I suspect not knowing is part of the point. Obviously there's still plenty to épater le bourgeois aussi, but where a book featuring similar outrages released by eg Creation around the turn of the millennium would have presented as terribly serious and probably a little Satanic in tone, here the mode is more an exhausted and very online wry/sigh. There's an obvious Ballard echo in the determination to invent new deviancies for a jaded age, and if I'm not sure any of these have quite the same cultural crossover potential, well, nor do they wear out their welcome like his sexy car crashes did. And indeed, nor are they likely to have time to become an overfamiliar metaphor: as per the conclusion of one story about visions of bestial congress, "In her dreams the future of homo sapiens was a man who could only oink. In reality the future was even worse."
*Reliably misconstrued by predictive as 'Supervet' – though of course, he was alleged to be the inspiration for Britney's Toxic, so who knows?
*Reliably misconstrued by predictive as 'Supervet' – though of course, he was alleged to be the inspiration for Britney's Toxic, so who knows?
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews