Tag: books

The horrors of the LGBT household

Lifesite profiles Moira Greyland’s autobiographical memoir:

The daughter of famed science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley has written an autobiographical account revealing the horrors of growing up in a home raised by LGBT parents who repeatedly sexually abused her and her brothers.

“I have heard all the customary protestations. ‘Your parents were evil because they were evil, not because they were gay,’ but I disagree,” writes Moira Greyland in her new book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon.

“The underlying problem is a philosophical one that is based on beliefs that are not only common to gay culture but to popular culture. And this is the central belief: All Sex is Always Right No Matter What,” she wrote.

“I had both biological parents in the home, but both refused to act like traditional parents,” writes Greyland. “I needed my father to protect me and to see me as a girl instead of refusing to protect me and seeing me as an amorphous nothing who competed with him for boys. I needed my mother to love me and hold me and comfort me instead of being a terrifying, angry dictator. Worse than that, I was expected to not want them to love me and protect me, or to act like normal parents. I was supposed to be happy that they were doing their own thing, no matter what they did to us.”

The Last Closet has been an Amazon bestseller for weeks as a Kindle e-book, and is scheduled to be published as a print book this month. Over one hundred readers have reviewed it, and virtually all have given it five stars.

The book recounts Greyland’s life with her mother, who was the author of The Mists of Avalon and many other famous works of science fiction and fantasy, and her father, Walter Breen, who was a world-renowned authority on numismatics. Both identified as “gay,” both abused drugs and were involved in occult practices, and both were pedophiles, Greyland says, a claim that has been confirmed by her only surviving brother.

Man people desperately want to believe homosexuals Are Just Like Everybody Else. But they are not. Just ask a policeman. Or ask a child of gay parents. Once an individual decides that he no longer has to abide by traditional morality because he has certain urges, it becomes considerably easier to violate even the most outrageous moral norms when he feels the need or even just the desire.

That doesn’t mean that gays can’t abide by traditional moral standards, or that all straights do, only that the probabilities observably differ. A gay man is 14 times more likely to abuse a child than a straight man. Even worse, gay priests are 198 times more likely to abuse children than straight men. One of the ugliest aspects of The Last Closet is the way in which Moira’s parents intellectually rationalized even their most abhorrent behavior. They were not unique in their ability to do that.

You can shriek “bigot” and “homophobe” if you like. But reality doesn’t care. No amount of denial will eliminate the logic, the probabilities, the statistics, or the pain of the abused children.

Stupefying Stories #20

The Original Cyberpunk is giving it away today on Free Release Friday:

To celebrate the release of STUPEFYING STORIES #20, we’re giving away the Kindle edition FREE for the cost of a click—but only for the next 24 hours, beginning at Midnight tonight, West Coast time.

Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell people you know who aren’t such good friends but still like to get free ebooks! Share the news!

But share it soon, because at midnight tomorrow night, this book goes back to normal price.

» DOWNLOAD ISSUE #20 RIGHT NOW

STUPEFYING STORIES #20 features the gut-grabbing cover story, “Zombie Like Me,” by Clancy Weeks, along with a terrific mix of fantasy, light horror, demons, abominations, vampires, old family secrets, very nasty little fairies, and Bo Balder’s remarkably strange but charming story, “Alien Whispering.” If nothing else, read “Endeavor to Dream on Broken Wings,” so you can someday tell people that you were reading AJ Finley before anyone else had heard of her.

CONTENTS:

  • THEIR NOSTALGIA WILL BE VERY MUCH LIKE OUR NOSTALGIA • by Eric Cline
  • HOW TO BUILD A TRAIN • by Brandon Kempner
  • ENDEAVOR TO DREAM ON BROKEN WINGS • by AJ Finley
  • PILES OF DUST AND BERRIES • by Sadie Bruce
  • ALIEN WHISPERING • by Bo Balder
  • LUCKY FIND • by Lance Young
  • SECRET SEED • by Shannon Norland
  • ZOMBIE LIKE ME • by Clancy Weeks

HAMMER OF THE WITCHES by Kai Wai Cheah

The terror is daimonic. The sorcery is real.

But enough bullets will kill even the most dangerous supernatural operator.

The Hexenhammer underground has aided the operators of the Nemesis Program in their war against the global supernatural terror campaign, but now Hexenhammer is accused of being the terrorist group responsible for carrying out a spectacular massacre in Greece.

Now Luke Landon must decide if Eve and her fellow underground members should be put down or if they have been set up for destruction by a conspiracy so big and powerful that it may have penetrated Nemesis itself.

HAMMER OF THE WITCHES is the second volume of The Covenant Chronicles, the supernatural Mil-SF series by Kai Wai Cheah, Hugo-nominated author of Flashpoint: Titan.

From the reviews of its predecessor, NO GODS, ONLY DAIMONS.

  • This is an excellent fantasy/MilSF book. Fast paced; excellent battle scenes.
  • Cheah does a great job at building this world with lots of details and complexity. It’s a good read and one I had a hard time putting down.
  • Fans of books by Larry Correia and Jim Butcher should find themes in this book that they will enjoy. Character development is stronger than Larry’s earlier but not as strong as his current work.
  • Call of Duty meets Grimnoir Chronicles. If you like Larry Corriea’s Grimnoir series, and the world he has created, you will like the world this book inhabits. 
  • This book came out of nowhere. It’s… very different than anything I’ve read. The author has done some amazing world-building, where magic has been introduced to the ancient world, and changed the course of ancient Persia, Greece and Rome, and the modern world follows from there. 

Appendix N in audio

Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons is a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the various works of science fiction and fantasy that game designer Gary Gygax declared to be the primary influences on his seminal role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. It is a deep intellectual dive into the literature of SF/F’s past that will fascinate any serious role-playing gamer or fan of classic science fiction and fantasy.


Author Jeffro Johnson, an expert role-playing gamer, accomplished dungeon master, and three-time Hugo Award finalist, critically reviews all 43 works and authors listed by Gygax in the famous appendix. In doing so, he draws a series of intelligent conclusions about the literary gap between past and present that is surprisingly relevant to current events, not only in the fantastic world of role-playing, but the real world in which the players live.

Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons is narrated by Brandon Porter and is 10 hours and 22 minutes long. This is a deep and fascinating dive into the fantasy and science fiction literature behind the landmark role-playing game.

Free Stupefication

The Original Cyberpunk has an announcement:

To celebrate the release of STUPEFYING STORIES #19, we’re giving away the Kindle editions of both our latest book (issue #19) and our oldest book that’s still on Amazon (issue #12) FREE for the cost of a click—but for today only.

Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell people you know who aren’t such good friends but still like to get free ebooks! Share the news!

But share it soon, because at midnight tonight, these books go back to normal price.

» DOWNLOAD ISSUE #19 RIGHT NOW
» DOWNLOAD ISSUE #12 RIGHT NOW

STUPEFYING STORIES #19 features the remarkable cover story, “Communion,” by Fi Michell, along with  a terrific mix of fantasy, light horror, superheroes, alien invasions, space adventure, and I don’t know what to call “More Crackle Than Music” but I love it. The book ends with Harold Thompson’s dark but charming story, “Dogs and Monsters,” which I’m hereby going to go out on a limb and christen an entirely new sub-genre, “post-Human steampunk.” Clifford Simak would have loved it.

Lawdog in audio

LawDog had the honor of representing law and order in the Texas town of Bugscuffle as a sheriff’s deputy, where he became notorious for, among other things, the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. In The LawDog Files, he chronicles his official encounters with everything from naked bikers, combative eco-warriors, suicidal drunks, respectful methheads, prison tattoo artists, and creepy children to six-foot chickens and lethal chihuahuas.

The LawDog Files range from the bittersweet to the explosively hilarious, as LawDog relates his unforgettable experiences in a laconic, self-deprecating manner that is funny in its own right. The audiobook is more than mere entertainment, it is an education in two English dialects, Police and Texas Country. And underlying the humor is an unmistakable sympathy for society’s less fortunate – and in most cases, significantly less intelligent – whose encounters with the law are an all-too-frequent affair.

Narrated by David. T. Williams, The Lawdog Files are 4 hours and 29 minutes of genuine Texas hilarity. You really have to listen to the audio sample. His voice is just about perfect for Lawdog.

Blowing the lid off

An article entitled New Book Blows the Lid Off the Dark World of Child Sex Abuse in Sci-Fi Fandom is now trending on PJ Media.

Moira Greyland is the daughter of famous authors Marion Bradley Zimmer and Walter Breen. She has written a memoir about growing up in a “queer” family and suffering hideous child abuse. In The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, Greyland details the horror of being a helpless child trapped in a far left fantasy world. The world constructed by her mother, author of The Mists of Avalon, and her father, author of Greek Love (a book literally detailing why pedophilia is fine and even good) was a dark and frightening world. Unfortunately, though many saw how unhappy Greyland and her siblings were, no one stepped in to stop it and, in fact, turned a blind eye.

Greyland’s description of her family’s philosophy is chilling. “All sex is always right no matter what.” This philosophy forced her to endure being raped by her father at the achingly innocent age of four and molested by her mother throughout her childhood. Both her parents insisted she was gay because they believed that every person is naturally homosexual and will be homosexual if not corrupted by heterosexual experiences. Through the exposure to two gay parents and relatives and their friends, Greyland developed a theory about homosexuality that is very unpopular.

“It is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are,” she explains in the book. “To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.”

This, of course, is not allowed to be discussed in the age of the Gaystappo, which must be praised at all times. But do we not owe it to the children raised in these environments to hear their experiences? Does the #MeToo craze include the children of gays who did not have idyllic experiences?

Read the whole thing. It’s a remarkably in-depth article about Moira Greyland’s The Last Closet.

Defense doesn’t win

Not when it comes to the media. The God-Emperor needs to remember this and go back on the attack:

President Trump defended his mental health again at a press conference on Saturday, saying his Ivy League education, television fame and 2016 election win are proof he is more than competent to run the country.

Responding to claims in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury that White House insiders worry he is suffering mental decline, the president fired back and said he was never interviewed for it – hours after declaring himself a ‘very stable genius’ on Twitter.

‘It’s a disgrace that he can do something like this,’ said Trump said of Wolff, who he called a ‘fraud’ as he attacked the libel laws in the United States at a Camp David press conference attended by GOP leaders.

‘Libel laws are very weak in this country. If they were stronger, hopefully, you would not have something like that happen,’ said Trump who had defended his intelligence just moments before. 

‘Only because I went to the best colleges, I was an excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars and became one of the top business people, went to television and was a tremendous success, as I am sure you all know and ran for president first time and won.’

‘And then this guy who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know me at all. Who said he interviewed me for three hours in the White House, it didn’t exist, it’s in his imagination.’

‘He was never in the Oval Office,’ said the president who blamed ‘Sloppy’ Steve Bannon for bringing him into the White House.

Trump then dubbed the biography ‘a work of fiction’.

Earlier on Saturday, Wolff, who is a contributor to the Hollywood Reporter, gave that publication a follow up interview on Saturday in which he said he knew Trump was apoplectic with rage over the book.

‘I hear that the president is very angry, or, let me be precise: I hear that he is truly bouncing off the walls,’ said Wolff to the magazine.

The journalist’s book – ‘Fire and Fury’ has already shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller’s list and portrays Trump as an imbecile who never believed he would win the 2016 election. The book also severely questions the president’s ability to carry out his job and casts aspersions on his mental acuity amid suggestions from White House sources he might be losing his mind.

This is a classic gamma attack on an alpha. The gamma doesn’t have any actual power, so he lies about the alpha, thereby angering the alpha, and provoking him into a response that the gamma then smugly claims to be a victory. And you know this guy Wolff is a total gamma by the way he asserts that no one in the Trump White House reads books because they hadn’t heard of him. I read, edit, and write books and I’d never heard of him either. That’s a phenomenal example of gamma posturing combined with self-serving gamma logic.

The problem that Trump has here is that it doesn’t matter how intelligent and mentally stable you actually are, or how accomplished you are, you’re never going to look either smart or mentally stable by stating the obvious. It always comes off as a angry, bewildered, overmatched unfrozen caveman claiming “me am too smart!”

It’s considerably more effective to call out the gamma directly, openly mock him, and engage in direct conflict with him by utilizing objective measures. Trump should have a) compared his SAT scores with the journalist’s own scores while b) having the Secret Service dig up Wolff’s history of mental health issues and calling them into question. The chances are very high that Wolff, who is a known fabricator, has been on some sort of medication for depression for years and is doing little more than projecting his own mental instability onto the God-Emperor.

Gammas always, always, always rely upon nebulous insinuation and provocation, and they always, always, always retreat from any form of conflict that can be objectively measured by outsiders. For example, this is why the site traffic comparison is so damaging to Scalzi; there is simply no amount of dancing, twisting, redefining, or obfuscation that can permit him to credibly claim victory somehow which his gamma nature psychologically requires.

This also demonstrates why a knowledge of socio-sexuality is crucial in understanding how to appropriately respond to attacks. Wolff is absolutely delighted with being angrily denounced in general terms. That, to the gamma, is exactly what victory over an alpha looks like.

We know Trump isn’t a sigma because he didn’t simply smile and publicly ignore the book while having both Wolff and his publisher audited by the IRS and investigated by the DEA.

Why THE LAST CLOSET matters

More young women than you would probably believe were heavily influenced by the twisted psyche of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I still cannot imagine anything more perfectly aligned with my thirteen-year-old sensibilities than Marion Zimmer Bradley’s masterpiece. Bradley opened my eyes to the idea that, when we look at the past, we are only ever seeing a small part of it — and usually, what we are seeing excludes the experiences of women. Encountering the vain, self-serving, diabolical Morgan le Fay transformed into the priestess Morgaine compelled me to question other received narratives in which women are to blame for the failures of men. The Mists of Avalon also gave me a glimpse of spiritual possibilities beyond male-dominated, male-defined religions. In retrospect, I can see that it gave me ways of seeing that helped me find the feminine even within patriarchal systems while studying religion as an undergrad. The impact of this book lingers in my feminism, certainly, but it also influenced my scholarly interest in folklore, and it still informs my personal spirituality.

But my primary reaction to The Mists of Avalon, when I first read it, wasn’t intellectual; it was emotional. Like The Once and Future King, Bradley’s novel follows its protagonist from childhood into old age. I sympathized with the girl Morgaine, and her adolescent experiences hinted at frustrations I was just beginning to feel. The moment when Morgaine and Lancelet are, finally, about to become lovers — and then Gwenhwyfar, blonde and fair and lithe and helpless, stumbles into Avalon… No matter how many times I revisit this scene, it still crushes me. This isn’t a story about the pretty girl, the princess. It’s the story of the smart girl who becomes a powerful woman. Even so, Bradley brings nuance to these characters. She shows us Morgaine doing foolish, selfish things, and she shows us that Gwenhwyfar’s position is an impossible one. Doom hangs over Arthur’s glorious reign, just as fate rules many a legend and fable. There is no happy ending for anyone at Camelot — there never has been — but Bradley shows us real people struggling against their destiny, and she shows us that it’s not just impersonal fortune to blame for their inevitable downfall. Instead, it’s systems of oppression. By the time I left home for a women’s college in 1989, I’d reread The Mists of Avalon several times. I arrived ready to smash the patriarchy.

It’s easy to claim that the book is not the author, because that is true. But in cases such as this, it is impossible to separate the theme, and more importantly, the message, of the book from the beliefs of the author. There are those authors who are intellectually ruthless enough to accurately represent beliefs they do not hold, but there are not very many such others and Marion Zimmer Bradley was certainly not one of them.

Her personal ideosyncracies not only informed, they dictated the nature of her works, which amounted to pure feminist propaganda. This is readily apparent in even her earliest writings. You cannot read The Mists of Avalon without realizing that it stems from the bitterness of a plain little dark-haired woman who cannot attract the handsome warriors and hates the tall pretty blonde girls who do. It’s essentially a medieval female Revenge of the Nerds. No wonder it was popular in feminist and proto-feminist circles.

And it was popular despite its twisted sexuality and its infamous scene of ritualized child abuse, a scene that its fans still defend as “a description of people who have passed beyond the normal world and into the sacred time of a fertility ritual.”

But the abuse of children is no more justifiable in that context than it was at Greyhaven, especially when there is absolutely no anthropological basis for it. And that is why The Last Closet is important, because it exposes the lie behind which so much evil hides itself.