Book Synopsis
The Useful Idiot
By Tony Arnold
Before there was a hashtag, there was a hysteric with a swing chair and a grudge against her father's mynah bird.
From the storm-lashed tin-roof households of Mayport, Florida to the marble phallic annex of a Georgia megachurch, The Useful Idiot chronicles the improbable, scandal-strewn rise of Athena Ortiz — teenage widow, professional invalid, self-taught "authoress," part-time medium, full-time grifter — from squalling infant hysteric to Pastoress Emeritus of her very own Goddesshead-worshipping money-laundering front. Along the way she marries a vernacular dentist, steals her mentor's manuscripts, sics a coven of malpractice lawsuits on everyone who ever loved her, gets her own husband autopsied to prove he died of mental arsenic, and somehow still finds time to copyright the Lord's Prayer.
Drawing on the great muckraking biography tradition — the kind of meticulously-sourced, deliciously vicious exposés that once took down certain 19th-century mind-cure swamis in the pages of national magazines — The Useful Idiot resurrects that format and aims it squarely at a fictional 20th-century cult of "Oracular Revelation," a religion built on malicious male mesmerism, unpublishable manuscripts, and the iron-fisted micromanagement of seven thousand years of threatened female supremacy.
It's got courtroom witchcraft trials. It's got a beheading-for-hire conspiracy. It's got a diamond-encrusted marital aid called the Mother Fucker. It's got Melvin Marable in bondage livery. It's got footnotes that footnote themselves into absurdity, and prose so committed to its bit you'll forget, somewhere around Chapter XIV, that Athena Ortiz never actually existed.
Satirical, sprawling, shameless, and gleefully unfit for polite company — The Useful Idiot is the biography no one asked for, about a woman who never should have been believed, written by an author who dares you to keep reading anyway.
As always: White Devil Press books are not for sale to females.