The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth, 1913-1935

Los Angeles: Feral House, 2006. First edition. First edition. (Paperback original, first printing with full number line on copyright page.) xxiv, 286, [2] pp. Very light shelf wear, else Fine and unread. The rare, out-of-print autobiography by the author of the seminal conspiracy essay "King-Kill/33," which first appeared in Feral House chief Adam Parfrey's anthology Apocalypse Culture. In that essay Downard argued that the assassination was a sort of Masonic occult rite or "working" by pointing out a proliferation of symbols and seeming coincidences. This memoir only covers Downard's early years but contains enough hair-raising events and strange conjectures (truncated) to keep devotees of The Downard Mystery (to take a page from Richard Shaver) entertained. (Inventory #: 140945045)