The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker

by Jack Skelley, Sabrina Tarasoff (Afterword), Amy Gerstler (Introduction)

The first complete edition of this notorious novel which maps the 1980s anarchic underground of Los Angeles.

Published in excerpts over almost four decades, Jack Skelley’s “secretly legendary” novel is at once an homage to the thrillingly inventive spirit of Kathy Acker’s cut-up novels and a definitive history of LA’s underground culture of the mid-1980s. 

Composed in bursts, Fear of Kathy Acker depicts Los Angeles through the eyes of a self-mocking narrator. Shifting styles and personae as he moves between Venice and Torrance, punk clubs and shopping malls, Disneyland and Dodger Stadium, Jack Skelley pushes the limits of language and identity while pursuing—like Kathy Acker—a quixotic literary mix of discipline and anarchy. In this adrenalized, cosmic, and comic chronicle of Los Angeles, Skelley’s “real life” friends make cameo appearances alongside pop archetypes from Madonna to Billy Idol. 

This first-ever complete edition of the book includes new essays, playlists, and a map of the 1980s Los Angeles in which its manic protagonist lives and loves.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, 20th Century

136 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2023

About the author

Jack Skelley is author of the novels The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023), and Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West Press, 2024). Jack’s other books include Monsters (Little Caesar Press, 1982), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press, 2021), and Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX, 2022). He contributes fiction and non-fiction to many international publications. Jack’s psychedelic surf band Lawndale released two albums on SST Records, and has a new album, Twango.

Reviews

[David Kuhnlein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Jack Skelley's The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker feels like listening to John Maus's "Don't Be a Body" ("Sex with car/ Sex on top of car/ Sex inside of car/ Sex with movie star/ Sex with Ringo Starr") while coming up on LSD with William Blake as your trip sitter.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun! Chaotic relic of the 80s underground. Sounds a bit like the tone of an artist friend I know today.. Skelley’s gross and horny spirit lives on

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review/commentary on Jack Skelley's "The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker" here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me n all my friends are strange horny men who have read a little too much and dream of meeting William Blake, Hawaiian shirt clad, appearing out of your spaced-out friend’s garage. These are some of my favourite people on the entire planet. Worried about the state of the world, the state of the universe and spiritual decay, worried about their hangover. I sent the page with William Shatner’s cum to one of them and he ordered the book at 3am. The mudman is psychically harassing in on your childhood play plaguing in inherited Catholic guilt, to wind up and down seeking a god-bound transcendence in perversion, or parties-u-wish-u-weren’t-at, or that special category of perverse party perversions (tits) (ass) (and the like) while completely napalm noided trying to figure out if you actually suck or was it just that bad trip where they pointed and laughed. Long live the freaks, the weirdos, and the Kathy Acker enthusiasts!

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simultaneously a tribute/homage to the experimental cut up techniques of it's title subject and first person account of the underground punk and poetry scene in Los Angeles of the 1980's. Absolutely essential for those addicted to both.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is read best when you are listening to music & pace dancing around a room. And also: no book that is less than 100 pages needs a foreword and an afterword. Like bruh. No I did not read either of them because I do not care

But anyway - the gratuitous sex in this book even though it was straight actually made me really enjoy it, like the way he describes it manages to be erotic & gross at once. This is one of the funniest books I have read, i love how referential it is, how much it jumps around, the voice is actually perfect. Manages to be so annoying but knows exactly what it is & so becomes really charming

So funny, fun, romping, disgusting, & clever!

[Florence S-A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Horny, cool, relevant!

[George Bidwell]

A slippery, deceitfully honest descent into a mind shaped by environment, that in turn is shaping that environment back at it - like a time looped vision of pot and sex. A deconstruction of itself as it comes to life. A vision of what language can open up; a myriad of weightless encounters that form a very clear map of a soul.

Major chaos in the forms of page-long sentences that give way to brief declarations like “The city is a greasy, hungry dragon that shits itself and eats its shit.” The multi-clause diatribes of confusion, and arousal, and regret are sickening in their excess but undeniably comic in their execution. Occasionally, rambling gives way to sharp, breathy pages of anxiety and self-degradation that call to mind your worst comedown, or days of lowest mood. In this sense, a book that would be wonderful as a one-note experiment in opening up a mind and a city at once becomes something multi-faceted, something important, something that speaks to a grander human experience in a way that the book’s namesake has done time and time again.

Long live Kathy Acker.

Long live Jack Skelley.

Long live sexy literature.

[Jake Lomas]

A dear friend recommended this to me as “you find sex stuff funny you’ll love this”. Sufficed to say I did. Didn’t know what to expect but took each chapter as it’s own singular moment/performance(?) and really vibed with it when sat on my roof with after few pints and listening to some Kraftwerk.

- Very relatable passages ?!?!?
- shoutout My hero William Blake
- what’s happening/who cares let’s go

[Eric Subpar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of brilliance. A book I will be returning to continually throughout my life.

[Chanel Chapters]

A counterculture depiction of 80s LA drenched in sexual fantasies and social commentary with Kathy Acker as the muse.
Aren’t we all just trying to satisfy our “vortex-hole-vacuum-infinite tunnel of gratification?”
Jack’s brain is horny cosmic drugs.

[joe]

I’m writing this review in the UK, on Saturday 29th July, as the city of Liverpool’s annual pride march takes place mere feet away from me. I’ve zoomed through this book in one single sitting while this has taken place, and the sensory overload feels incredibly apt.

The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, written by Jack Skelley, follows a young narrator called “Jack” as he walks us through his life in the struggles of 1980s Los Angeles. Stream of consciousness paves the path for our narrator to dive into a psychosexual fever dream of rants and ramblings as we dip from social commentary and critique of capitalism, into sexual fantasies and celebrity encounters that you can’t even think possible. Saying that, the narration blurs the lines so perfectly from the outset, that who’s to say what is and isn’t possible or real in this book?

Something I enjoyably picked up on immediately was the use of TV in the novel. The narrator begins with a critique of television, saying that “TV is the lowest common denominator”, and then we have him describing the switching of channels as he moves from one mindless show to the next. Things begin to switch up at bullet speed after these first few pages, as our narrator then drifts into the immediacy of describing whatever comes to him. This switching, this absence of structure and lack of attention feels exactly like the mindlessness in the changing of tv channels that we are so used to. This can be taken even further with modern technology. The short and zippy attention spans of young people today, due to the affects and influences of social media platforms, meshes perfectly with the zipping from experience to experience in this book.

I particularly loved the play on form and format in certain sections of the writing, as we are led down into caverns of writing as it begins to narrow. There’s a particularly experimental section around the midpoint of the novel, as our narrator begins by describing his need to be let out of the tunnel he’s in; this need for escape. As this section plays out, we seem to be emerging from the tunnel that he describes, only for the format then to narrow. The writing matches this as we read the narrator going back into his sordid tunnel of impulse and the writing gets narrower and narrower, as we fall back into the tunnel, where we are left with this - “that’s the way you love me in the pinch, make me sing about it, wow!”. This felt like a very creative way of writing and a clever immersion technique to bring the reader into the experience.

The use of 1980s cultural icons and terms could be seen as dated, and many may feel that they’re not particularly needed and are only placeholders for the fantastical elements of the narration, but to me it felt more purposeful and important to the story. Take the use of the tv show “Bewitched” for example. I’ll try to avoid any spoilers in only saying that we come back to this tv show throughout the book, and the word “bewitched” plays a vital role in how the narrator feels, as explained towards the end of the work. All celebrity appearances feels pointed and meaningful throughout, you need only to dig deeper into the text.

Language like that of a venus flytrap carpets this wonderfully experimental piece of writing. Holographic scene-switches work to befuddle the reader into a dreamscape of sexual indulgence and fantasy, while incorporating elements of LA life and the eventual enervation of living in a rat-race city. The potential to lose oneself in this city life is portrayed boldly by Skelley, as he lifts from first-hand experience of living above and around the Beyond Baroque Literary Art Centre of Los Angeles. A flash grenade of a book that wears it’s influences proudly on a multicoloured, glow-in-the-dark jacket.

[Luca Dubroca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fking insaneee, read this shit 3 times back to back to back

[rat · Rating 5 out of 5]

every once in a while a man can be a sex pervert and i'll let it slide

[Suburban Cutie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious, fun, surreal and gritty. Thanks for reading at Car Crash Collective Skelley!!!

[Cleo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinda deathtrip genius, kinda edgelord stupid. Read it on the train. Liked the bits about Madonna

[Gianluca Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of an example of my aesthetic ideal - a demonstration of what I seek from literature in regard to both creation and appreciation.

I kinda disagree with the idea that the title is wholly disconnected from the goings-on in the book as I'd argue the sparse few times Kathy Acker is mentioned (particularly the instance of her walking in cowboy boots) all act as symbolism for the sort of culture that the main character is immersed in as well as the emotional heights that work such as Acker's can take you to. Thus, the title can mean both the fear displayed by the main character of the intensity of his emotions and the constantly shifting nature of his world/environment as well as both the fear of being wholly truthful and the slight fear displayed by the forces that seek to crush the artistic culture depicted in this book. But then, the excellent thing about this book is how it refuses to uphold easy binaries and shows how capitalistic incentives and underground art can influence one another. It's not so much a breaking down of the barriers between pop culture and myth as well as reality and dreams so much as a space where there's no distinction between these things - they can all exist on the same plane of truth.

The mythologisation of one's real friends as well as the surreal nature of the world reminds me of how Henry Darger's work has been described.

Honest, poetic, hard to categorise, beautifully written and perhaps more relevant than ever regarding today's image-saturated and hyper-fractured culture.

[Connor Girvan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 / 5 stars

girl...what did I just read?

[lia 🐩 · Rating 2 out of 5]

punk jack kerouac

[Dana Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh

[Mary Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

??????sure wth

[Michael Kunz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book's title and introduction are almost entirely a list of the author's literary influences. Initially this comes off as pedantic. But a few pages in, it feels more like a preemptive defense of the book's adolescent indulgence.

Throughout the work -- compiled from passages first published in 80s punk zines -- Jack Skelley indulges in exaggerated sexual fantasies about Samantha from Bewitched, the nurse tending his grandmother, the DMV, a taco stand, etc, etc. The primary unifying thread is the author's cartoonish sexual appetite.

Along the way we get the occasionally profound critique of American mass media and consumer culture. Much of the book's pessimism has become passé, but it's worth the glimpse into yesterday's American underground, more free-wheeling and willing to offend. Some of Skelley's observations are prescient, more true in the social media age than during Reagan's basic cable empire.

Ultimately, the callow sex stuff and societal critiques are beside the point. Here we have a young man eaten alive by Los Angeles. Intimidated by the celebrity jet set and the ultra hip art crowd. Holding onto his dick for dear life. The end result is hit or miss. Great passages are followed by big cringe. You can feel the author's youth. He hasn't yet lost the ability to get drunk on his own creativity. Sometimes this is radiant. Sometimes it's tedious. I feel almost obligated to check out Skelley's subsequent works, to see how he's evolved.

[Lilian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Respectfully - wtf was this fever dream of a book? An anarchic, horny literary rodeo!

[Daniel Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

“OK William Blake, I’ll talk to you later!”

[jesse slater · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastically drippy and lewd. mind incantations.

"What the fuck? Her brown eyes narrowed and her white teeth dove for my face... Ouch! She bit my ear off!" (p. 90)

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had palpable anxiety inhabiting this man’s psyche but i enjoyed every minute of it

[Viola V · Rating 4 out of 5]

And I shudder with things about Love, strings of inarticulated signs and sounds,

[Maeve de Bordons Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun and critical gonzo descent into the madness of media and American culture. What a ride

[Matt Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird, wild exploration of ego death and how big and disorienting the world is with a layer of appreciation for how unique LA really is (in both good and bad ways). Written like Less Than Zero meets Larry Kramer on drugs. Some really interesting writing- especially loved some of the sexualizing of the cityscape and the Bewitched motif- and I think I’ll actually think about this book a lot and maybe read it again. It’s written like the way your brain works. I wish I was cool enough to have truly enjoyed it more, some of it felt like an exercise/study to comprehend.

[meow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Disneyland bumpkin from SLC is Freaked Out by Los Angeles!! That Skelley Libido is Hot to the Touch OUCH… giving Molly w the kinda psychedelic joie de vivre. But clearly! Exactly the kinda prayer that I get down w