Born with a Tail
The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, Founder of the Church of Satan
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
A provocative, irreverent biography of Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, BORN WITH A TAIL chronicles a time when Americans welcomed a macabre showman into their living rooms via TheTonight Show, before a ginned-up hysteria known as the Satanic Panic would put a target on his shiny, shaven head.
When Anton LaVey burst onto the San Francisco scene right before the Summer of Love, he parlayed his eerie obsessions into a philosophy and lifestyle that capitalized on a New Age rage. With his signature cape, horn-studded hood, and Ming the Merciless beard, LaVey was a media-savvy provocateur who took what he did seriously, but was always in on the joke.
From a spooky old house on an otherwise unremarkable street, he founded the Church of Satan, where young women squirmed nude on the mantel of his ritual chamber as he delivered a doctrine of self-deification and indulgence that combined the writings of Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Aleister Crowley with the pulpy fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
Later, his bestselling book The Satanic Bible (still in print since 1969) struck an ominous chord with both the hip and the alienated—the fringe dwellers who were goth before there were goths. But LaVey’s influence could be felt far beyond his flock, namely in the nightmarish and supernatural entertainment that dominated pop culture in the 1970s and continues to make an impact today.
He was a musical prodigy who attracted a cluster of stars into his orbit, including Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr. But living like a real-life Gomez Addams, complete with a full-grown pet lion, came at an awful price.
Deeply researched and featuring dozens of new interviews, as well as recently unearthed personal correspondence and church records, BORN WITH A TAIL: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, Founder of the Church of Satan separates the facts from the fabrications of this uniquely American character’s extraordinary life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Brod (They Just Seem a Little Weird) provides an entertaining if thin biography of the fabulist who founded the Church of Satan and claimed, among other things, to have been born with a tail. Born Howard Stanton Levey (he changed his name in his teens), Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997) grew up in Chicago and was drawn from an early age to the "fantastical and the macabre"—he read Dracula by age six and was soon schooling himself in hypnotism—and developed a scorn for traditional religion. Launched in 1966, the Church of Satan "rejected the Holy Trinity... and allowed its congregants to indulge in their lust for life"; its scripture was a manifesto LaVey published in 1969, which blended the "rational self-interest of Ayn Rand with the godless self-realization of Nietzsche." The church soon spread across the U.S., though its popularity is hard to quantify—LaVey claimed that by 1970 it boasted between seven and ten thousand members, a number he almost certainly fabricated. Brod's portrayal is appealingly colorful and eccentric, if somewhat underdeveloped—he spends little time examining LaVey's legacy or his movement's cultural significance. The result is an energetic yet superficial portrait of a bizarre figure in American history.
