The Scopophiliacs' Manual: Vol I.

The Scopophiliacs Manual is a cycle of novellas with prevailing themes it begins with How Television Replaced the Appendix about a protagonist who is called The Viewer an angry loner who watches a VHS tape of bloody performance art/ animal sacrifice and goes home to his slum apartment to philosophize about the half-dismembered inanimate body he keeps in his basement.The next story The Void is about Jake Deddrole a 29 year-old New Yorker of seldom employment and too much time on his hands who falls for a young scenester Tiffanie who works at a sex shop. He spends his time thinking about pretentious French literature films and Tiffanie who turns out to moonlight as a fetish sex worker. He happens upon a club in Queens where he watches her from a dark room have sex with another man and nonetheless becomes dangerously convinced that he and Tiffanie should be together.The third story Two Men is about two repressed German homosexuals in the early 00s Armin and Bernd who meet through a gore-filled Internet Web forum devoted to cannibalism a taboo theyre both intrigued by. The two decide to meet at Armins house engage in and film the ultimate sadomasochistic relationship climaxing with Armin eating Bernd.The fourth is called Inflictor Inflictor a story about two high school students in Colorado who are social outcasts: Clay who is obsessed with ultraviolent online video games and a foreign and androgynous heavy-metal recording artist and another Christian who is a sometime fan of violent movies but with a much shorter attention span is more intrigued by real guns and actual death. Together they engage in murdering small animals in the woods surrounding the trailer park Clay lives in and target practice in a field off the highway with a shotgun and semi-automatic Tec-9 theyre able to acquire. They take their resentment for the bullies who have wronged them out on a massacre that occurs at the school.The fifth and final story is Komodo is about Jeon a young Korean-Canadian man in an isolated patch of Alberta who frequents a web site dedicated to gore suicide and murder photos and videos floating around the Web. He abducts a blonde girl outside of Edmonton and then begins to broadcast a torture murder and disfigurement video via a webcam in his basement on a World Wide Web alternative platform. The broadcast becomes increasingly popular despite the cliquish platform its on gaining Jeon and the Web-alternative international renown.