Part I: American Magic, American Dread
- “Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?”
- “Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts”
- “Mysterious Stranger: Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side”
- “Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back: On Lady Gaga”
- “Jocko Homo: How Gay is the Super Bowl?”
- “Wimps, Wussies, and W.: Masculinity, American Style”
- “Stardust Memories: How David Bowie Killed the ‘60s and Ushered in the ‘70s, and, for One Brief, Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip”
- “When Animals Attack!: An Aesop’s Fable About Anthropomorphism”
- “Toe Fou: How I Was Subliminally Seduced by Madonna’s Big Toe”
- “Shoah Business”
- “The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding”
- “Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglourious Return of Der Fuhrer”
Part II: Myths of the Near Future: Making Sense of the Digital Age
- “World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging”
- “(Face)Book of the Dead”
- “Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet”
- “Word Salad Surgery: Spam, Deconstructed”
- “Slashing the Borg: Resistance is Fertile”
- “Things to Come: Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn”
Part III: Tripe Soup for the Soul: Religion, and All Its Works and Ways
- “Tripe Soup for the Soul: The Daily Affirmation”
- “Pontification: On the Death of the Pope”
- “The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse”
- “2012: Carnival of Bunkum”
- “The Vast Santanic Conspiracy”
Part IV:Anatomy Lesson: The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark Matters
- “Open Wide: Dental Horror”
- “Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries”
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head”
- “Been There, Pierced That: Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation of Subcultural Hostilities”
- “Death To All Humans! The Church of Euthanasia’s Modest Proposal”
- “Great Caesar’s Ghost: On the Crypt of the Capuchins”
- “Aphrodites of the Operating Theater: On La Specola’s Anatomical Venuses”
- “Goodbye, Cruel Words: On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre”
- “Cortex Envy: Bringing Up Baby Einstein”