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Intense Device
Simon Whitehcapel
Headpress/Critical Vision, paperback, 9½ x 3¾ inches, 188 pages, £10.95
Review by DM Mitchell (1998)

Simon Whitechapel wrote The Slaughter King, published a few years ago by Creation Books. It attracted a fair bit of attention, then sank like a stone; a pity, because it was a very promising novel. Intense Device, however, is not fiction, but a collection of bizarre essays on a diversity of subjects whose breadth of scope is matched only by their depth. Whitechapel does his homework and this book should be purchased for its wealth of information if nothing else. There are the usual, predictable subjects: sadism, holocaust revisionism, global catastrophe; but these are handled in a fresh, common sense way with insights I’ve never seen anyone else come up with.

Thrown in with the death and disaster is just about everything under the sun. Whitechapel draws lines between things where you might not have suspected them before. He is a master of analogy and a slick rhetorician. Occasionally you may suspect that he’s gone too far – and then realise that you’ve been taken for a ride. The man has a wickedly oblique sense of humour.

Whitechapel is a clear-headed conscientious thinker and a technically proficient writer. He reveals more about what makes our scabby culture tick than muddle-headed scribblers like Colin Wilson have managed in countless churned-out volumes.