REVIEWS, EXCERPTS, & COMMENTS #
Light Reading For The End Of The World: Collected Works 1992-2002 is the first ever print compendium by Trip editor in chief, Scott O. Moore (the 'O' stands for insane!). This stunningly bizarre, intensely hilarious collection is presented as a fund-raiser for The Vaults of Erowid, and features a wide range of psychedelic comedy, surrealism, and satire from throughout Scotto's long, illustrious career as a menace to modern civilization.In Light Reading For The End Of The World, Scotto fights the war on drugs (by taking all of them); meets Timothy Leary at a sci-fi con, and later captures Leary's head when it escapes from the CIA; creates a line of psychedelic action figures and cartoons (because Scotto has always been about the kids); rescues his wife from an evil horde of cyborg pirates from the future; plays Trivial Pursuit with his friends Crank Boy, Beerbelly the Invisible Clown, and the Archangel Gabriel; and so much more! In addition, included in this volume is a brand new novella, Captain Scotto And His Heroes To Be, which tells the strange tale of how Scotto inherited the Greatest American Hero costume and became a superhero, only to have to face a menace bent on destroying every ounce of alcohol in the known universe!
Be the first on your block to own this unique aesthetic anomaly - and support the Vaults of Erowid at the same time! Light Reading For The End Of The World - it's not writing. It's hallucinating with words.
Scotto is a frequent Erowid contributor, including a monthly column, eScottology, was a contributing editor to the dearly departed underground zine FringeWare Review, and is currently editor in chief of Trip - the Journal of Psychedelic Culture. He is the writer/director of Tales From The Trip Side, a psychedelic sketch comedy DVD; his one man shows The 23-Minute Principia Discordia and The Importance Of Being Fucked Up have been performed at Burning Man, in Iowa, and in Seattle; and his radio plays Catastrophic Love Puzzles In Outer Space and Radioactive Blue were broadcast on KPFA public radio in Berkeley.
BLURBS #
"The curious story of the figure known as Scotto is worth further exploration. While on the surface, he seems to have fit the mold of the angst-ridden artist of the time, it is apparent that on another level entirely, the man was quite likely insane. He claimed, at various points in his life, that he was in contact with extraterrestrial beings who predicted the end of human civilization, that the Voices in his head were actual entities and not a product of too many psychedelics, that punctuation marks as a group were an organized faction out to subvert reality, that the characters in his fiction had achieved sentience by way of his writing about them (and were not at all pleased with the situation), that the 'willing suspension of disbelief' alluded to in theatre aesthetics was not simply a metaphor but an actual phase transition in spacetime, that the so-called 'memetic attractor' at the heart of the mystic organization known as Gravity was 'alive and pulsing,' and most notably, that the attractor which eventually yanked Gravity into the Dreamtime and off the planet had reverse engineered Gravity's escape, retroactively, by exerting an influence backwards in time. In light of these maniacal ramblings, it is a wonder Scott O. Moore was never struck by a car while crossing the street."-- from the journals of Dr. Nicholas Solitude, circa 2023 (via the Dreamtime)
"I worked with Scotto, and I know now he couldn't make sense of it all if he tried, which he hasn't, if he cared, which he doesn't."
-- Police Chief William Slade
"y'know, satan spelled backwards and then with a few different letters and then turned back around spells scotto. proof positive."
-- Darren Bauler
"The 'O' stands for insane."
-- rain