"ACII" bears out Parfrey's apocalyptic musings. The more lively pieces include a fable penned by Ted Kaczynski; the strange tale of the Japanese cannibal and celebrity Issei Sagawa, who dined on the flayed buttocks of a young Dutch girl in France; a hilarious essay by Crispin Glover in which he discusses the boon to mankind if Steven Spielberg were to be erased from existence; the Aryan Nations' official literary analysis of the Don McLean song "American Pie" and a detailed examination of a female necrophiliac's sexual practices.

If corpse-screwing is not enough to make you retch, there are other articles guaranteed to get your flesh crawling. Among these: a collection of "recipes" for cooking human babies, such as "Stillborn Stew" and "Oven-Baked Baby Back Ribs"; a piece by zine pioneer and convict Jim Goad describing the assault on his girlfriend that landed him in the pokey; and a series of articles and paintings examining society's preoccupation with pedophilia, including a truly sick piece by writer Peter Sotos in which he relates his sexual fantasies concerning JonBenet Ramsey.

"What's up with this guy Sotos?" I ask.

"Sotos is a well-published author, and he's venerated by people like Dennis Cooper. The reason he's in the new book is not so he can get off on his fetishistic, violent, misogynistic, misanthropic pornography. But I found it fascinating for a true pervert like Sotos to make the case for the absolute perversity of the media itself. He has a major collection of JonBenet Ramsey stuff and drew from that. A pervert knows a pervert best," Parfrey says.

OK, but why so many articles about kiddie porn? And why include paintings such as the one of Adolf Hitler getting a blow job from a little girl in a field of dandelions or another showing Little Red Riding Hood enjoying cunnilingus as performed by the Big Bad Wolf?

"Pedophilia's a major contemporary taboo, a hypocritical taboo," responds Parfrey. "It's a hysteria about children and taking care of kids. The way I see it is some weird backlash against something everyone's talking about and making money off of by promoting in the mass media -- a sort of return of the repressed. They say, 'Oh, this is a bad thing.' But they're selling this bad thing. They're selling JonBenet Ramsey every minute of the day. This is a catering to perversion, obviously, that many millions of people are succored by. Artists or mothers taking photos of their children in a bathtub have become the pornographers. But the real pornographers to me are Geraldo Rivera and Globe magazine."

Parfrey had a good deal of trouble finding a printer to print "ACII" because of all the racy illustrations of little girls. Finally, one agreed to take the work if six of the images were blacked-out in key areas. But if you look closely enough you can see the outline of what's going on beneath some of those black rectangles. And Parfrey has posted all six works by artists Blalla Hallmann, Stu Mead and Beth Love on the Feral House Web site.

"To me, they're not pornography," Parfrey says. "They're innocent practically -- very innocuous works. I'm not for child pornography. I think it's a crime. But I do not believe that an idea in an artist's head is pornography or should be considered so. The whole censorship thing sort of proved the point we were making."

Strangely, it's not the articles on pedophilia that have garnered the most ire so far. Rather, an obscure advertisement Parfrey found on a lamppost in Berkeley, Calif., promoting a Web site called clonejesus.com has earned Parfrey a number of death threats from pissed-off Christians. The ad explains that relics of Jesus' blood and body (including, it says, the Messiah's foreskin) are preserved in churches throughout the world. Clonejesus.com is soliciting funds to extract the DNA from those relics and artificially inseminate a young woman, thereby instigating the Second Coming.

"So many observant Christians are just losing it now," he says. "Many have e-mailed me and threatened my life. I don't know why, but it really pushes their buttons in a bad way."

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