Mark Dery’s cultural criticism is the stuff that nightmares are made of. He’s a witty and brilliant tour guide on an intellectual journey through our darkest desires and strangest inclinations. You can’t look away even if you want to.

Mark Dery is gifted with sanity, humor, learning, and a prose style as keen as a barber’s razor. He applies those qualities to a trustworthy and entertaining analysis of the lunatic fringe, which constitutes an ever-larger portion of the discourse in America today.

Do not turn squeamish from the many considerations of death that lurk within—vampires, tombs, disease, corruption of many varieties. Mark Dery’s restless and stylish essay is concerned with one thing only—what it means to be alive in America

The bebop rhythms of Mark Dery’s prose reflect an intellectual excitement that is rare among contemporary cultural essayists. Reading him is like ingesting a powerful jolt of espresso.

More relevant than Mythologies, funnier than Travels in Hyperreality, more readable than Simulacra, less gloomy than Living in the End Times, smarter than Hitchens and without the pomposity, Dery’s dazzling collection will, I unhesitatingly predict, become a classic of cultural criticism.

We get delicious slivers of personal anecdote and some mind-blowing facts. Did you know a decapitated head maintains consciousness for 13 seconds? What do you suppose those last 13 seconds are like? Dery has considered these matters, studied the literature, the art and science and history of the subject and he presents it all with razor sharp wit.

What makes Dery such an appealing tour guide through all these bad thoughts of his is that he's right there with us, trying to answer the tough questions, and willing to turn his probing mind and eye on himself, too.

Mark Dery is an intellectually challenging writer. He makes few concessions to his readers. He has high expectations...He is witty. He is amusing. He is stimulating. The essays will force you to examine ideas you more than likely have never thought about before.

Always provocative, often humorous, Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between.

How is it that Dery is able to produce this uncanny feeling of identification? You get the sense that, while the rest of us were living the zeitgeist, Dery was holding a stethoscope to its heart.

At his best, Dery cuts through the bewildering data fog we live in like no one else. These disarmingly frank and funny personal essays function as a welcome reminder that this prodigious brain we’re encountering does, in fact, come in the body of a human man. His whole purpose is to make us work a little harder, to shake us out of the torpor that blinds us to the subtext of our own lives. It’s true that watching his hypertrophied intelligence run frenetic circles around your own can sometimes be as exhausting as it is exhilarating, but his work rewards the effort.

The same laser-focused interrogation and machete-sharp wit that made Dery’s earlier books critical touchstones is here in rapid-fire form. Where his earlier work honed in on one subject or one genre of subjects, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is all over the place, a sniper-perch on the cultural sprawl where no one and nothing is safe. There are too many stand-out, entrails-examining moments to name... No matter the topic, no one puts together a sentence like Mark Dery.

Mark Dery has just published I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, a long-awaited compendium of his oft-brutal, usually funny, and always-brilliant writings on the curious, bizarre, and downright dark crevices of our culture. Look no further than this new book for your next monstrous dose of Dery.

Whether you're starting your spring break or just slacking off work for another week, there's no better way to wile away your idle hours than reading through Mark Dery's new collection of essays I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.

Mark Dery is a forward-thinking-and-looking writer who puts many of the more insane aspects of contemporary life under a magnifying glass and dissects them with fearsome insight and intellect. Dery is an excellent writer, approaching his subject matter with a wry, sometimes uproarious spiketop sense of humor which helps to leaven some of his more serious discussions.

A critical thinker whose razor sharp attacks on American idiocracy are always leavened by dry humor, colorful but precise language and an amused dissection of human perversity. In a better country, Dery would be widely recognized as one of our premier essayists.

These off-kilter essays don’t take themselves too seriously but shine an entertaining and sometimes insightful light on the corners of pop culture.

To Dery’s credit, he is willing to tackle some tough and controversial subject matter—the Holocaust ‘industry’, for example—and examine it with rigor and willingness to upset conventional or comfortable opinion and piety.

It’s a dazzling performance, with Dery compulsively trawling the garbagestrewn shorelines of the U.S. to examine its dark and rancid center: the homosexual panic behind the Super Bowl and George Bush’s cowboy pronouncements . . . He writes in a breathless and witty style, engagingly full of glib word play.

This is a classy collection—cool, quick and quite often simply hilarious.

Dery has made an art form of the short, punchy and polemical screed. Dery is clearly the 21st century’s most compelling and readable polymath of the perverse.

Writing from his own border, Dery’s essays are similarly bracing, sometimes infuriating, and (warning) may become a habit-forming guilty pleasure.

Mark Dery is a great essayist, maybe even a world-class one. I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, a collection of pieces written in the past decade or so for a variety of print and online publications, is a visceral reminder of this.