How to Raise an Adult

What if love, lust, death, and horror were bound together in ways that defy reason or morality? Wrath James White’s Like Porno for Psychos asks this disturbing question, and then refuses to let you look away. Across a series of unapologetically graphic vignettes, White exposes the darkest drives that lurk beneath human desire—the need to consume, control, mutilate, and become one with another body, even if that unity demands annihilation.

Through meditations on sex, violence, and psychological torment, White constructs a universe where eroticism and death are twin faces of the same impulse. This book is not an erotic thriller in the ordinary sense—it’s an autopsy of the erotic, a dissection of the human yearning that wants not merely to possess but to destroy. It is both a celebration and condemnation of desire as a disease, a divine madness, and a mirror of our species' obsession with domination and transcendence.

The Core Argument: Eros and Thanatos Intertwined

White’s stories all circle the same philosophical claim first articulated by Freud and echoed by Bataille and de Sade: the sexual instinct and the death drive are one and the same. From a pimp’s hallucinatory descent into cannibalistic worship to a woman’s divine vengeance rooted in sexual mutilation, each narrative explores the meltdown of sanity at the intersection of lust and mortality. These aren’t horror stories about monsters preying on humans—they’re explorations of humans becoming monsters under the intoxicating imperative of desire.

A Tour Through the Periphery of Sanity

The book opens with stories like “Like Peyote for Pimps,” where a hustler’s drug-induced hallucinations lead him to join his father in ritualistic cannibalism of prostitutes. The premise isn’t just grotesque—it’s spiritual. Sex becomes communion, the consumption of the female body a desperate attempt at achieving divine power. Later, in “Shana’s Story,” female rage and generational trauma manifest as supernatural revenge. Every act of horror is also an act of revelation.

Other tales, like “Jeff’s Necrophile Awakening” and “Sandy and the Lions,” unravel with the precision of modern-day morality plays twisted by perversion. White invites you to witness how human bodies become vehicles for cosmic punishments or pleasures gone feral. The supernatural operates less as a genre device and more as metaphor—what happens when physical appetite consumes the soul.

Violence as Revelation, Not Spectacle

Unlike splatter fiction that indulges gore for shock value, White’s violence serves a psychological purpose. The blood, dismemberment, and sexual desecration are mirrors to our moral decay. His characters aren’t victims of circumstance; they’re mirrors of societal rot. White’s villains—pimps, abusers, addicts, and hypocrites—represent archetypes of power and corruption. When they meet their grotesque fates, the horror reads like rough spiritual justice.

And yet, there’s empathy buried in the decay. Shana, the woman brutalized by patriarchy and cultural superstition, finds agency only through supernatural wrath. The horror doesn’t mock her suffering—it monumentalizes it, forcing the reader to confront the horror of survival itself. In this way, White turns grotesquery into grim poetry, reminiscent of Clive Barker’s fusion of flesh and transcendence in The Books of Blood.

Why It Matters: Horror as Social Mirror

Behind the viscera, Like Porno for Psychos exposes recurring cultural wounds: misogyny, hypocrisy, poverty, racism, addiction, and the commodification of bodies. The angry pimp who consumes women, the suburban housewife murdering her adulterous husband, the anorexic cutting herself to pieces—all are metaphors for a society eating itself alive with consumption and repression. White’s book dares to ask whether “love” itself is just another socially acceptable disguise for domination and death.

More than a carnival of transgression, it’s a mirror—a violent, feverish mirror. If you can look past the shock, White’s message is clear: the true terror isn’t what’s done on the page, but what already lives inside us. The human mind is the horror. The body is its battlefield. And sex—raw, ugly, transcendent sex—is just the language we use to howl at the void.

In Wrath James White’s universe, love and desire aren’t healing forces—they’re infections. The story “Like Peyote for Pimps” captures this theme vividly through G-town Slim, a pimp whose hallucinogenic journey with opium, absinthe, and depravity leads him literally into his father’s jaws. The men in this story consume women’s bodies believing they’re tasting divinity; what they actually encounter is the divine madness of lust unbound by morality.

Desire becomes an alternate religion. G-town’s father claims that by eating the bodies of women, he’s taking communion—the ultimate act of worship toward creation itself. In his twisted cosmology, the womb is the temple of God, and devouring it means merging with the divine. White doesn’t sensationalize this cannibalism just for shock value—he uses it to illustrate how obsession transforms spirituality into self-destruction. When pleasure becomes infinite, it collapses into horror.

The Hunger for Power Beneath Lust

White’s men never simply desire—they hunger for control. Whether it’s the pimp believing he owns women’s bodies or the necrophilic husband in “Jeff’s Story” trying to dominate his wife’s corpse, sex becomes a desperate form of power reclamation. This recalls Georges Bataille’s argument in Erotism: that the erotic experience is the pursuit of continuity between beings through violent rupture. White pushes that rupture until continuity becomes annihilation.

The result is that lust itself is indistinguishable from madness. G-town doesn’t just see hallucinations—he experiences revelation. His transformation into a monster mirrors the mental disintegration that occurs when hunger replaces identity. By the end, the boundaries between appetite and personality disappear; man becomes sex itself, a creature of blind, infinite need.

When Passion Becomes Religion

This idea—desire as apocalypse—echoes throughout the collection. In several stories, characters treat sex not as intimacy but as liturgy. For both G-town and his father, violence and sex are sacraments. For Shana, vengeance and mutilation are divine justice. Even for the self-starving Tina, her ritual cutting resembles religious penance. White presents humanity as a species enslaved by sacred lust: always reaching for transcendence through the very act that ensures our destruction.

By framing desire as a kind of madness, White forces readers to question their own thresholds. What happens when passion becomes more important than morality, body, or sanity? His answer is chilling: when we worship desire, we eventually sacrifice ourselves to it.

Throughout Like Porno for Psychos, the female body is both the victim and the source of transcendence. In one sense, it is desecrated—through prostitution, mutilation, consumption, or judgment. Yet in another, it becomes a kind of cosmic weapon. White uses female suffering not to exploit it, but to magnify it into myth, turning trauma into power.

In Shana’s narrative, a girl mutilated through forced female circumcision inherits divine wrath from Yoruba gods. Her body, once destroyed by patriarchy and superstition, becomes the instrument of deity. When she takes vengeance on her rapist with lightning, the violence becomes creative—a reversal of all the destruction done to her. The gods do not curse her; they act through her. White transforms bodily pain into sacred fury, writing female victimhood as apocalypse.

Rage as Redemption

Unlike typical horror heroines, White’s women don’t merely survive—they avenge. Shana’s lightning-wrath and Rosie’s purging of her adulterous husband both represent female rage sanctified. White aligns their fury with cosmic justice. The mutilation of their sexuality is answered by supernatural empowerment. They mirror feminist psychological horror, where repressed trauma transforms into a force of autonomy (comparable to the themes explored in films like Jennifer’s Body or Revenge).

Still, White makes sure this empowerment comes with tragedy. Shana’s divinity is bought at the cost of her humanity. Rosie’s obsession with purity ends in madness. The point isn’t victory—it’s revelation: liberation through ruin. The female body, in White’s vision, is not just the battleground of patriarchal violence but also the crucible for spiritual transformation.

The Divine and the Profane

White’s women blur holiness and profanity. Blood, sex, birth, and death intertwine into one act. When Shana kills, she prays. When Rosie cleans, she confesses. This merging of opposites represents White’s recurring moral vision: that salvation and sin are inseparable. The human body is holy because it suffers and desires; desecration and divinity are merely two ends of the same spectrum.

By placing women at the core of cosmic horror, White’s stories suggest that it is through the body—especially the female body—that humanity confronts the sacred. In pain, pleasure, and rage, something divine awakens. And once awakened, it refuses to be silent.

White’s most cutting social commentary comes in his depiction of hypocrisy and self-deception. In “Mickey’s Story,” a closeted politician visits a trans sex worker for secret gratification. He preaches public virtue, yet privately seeks everything he condemns. White exposes societal repression as the root of monstrosity—hypocrites become literal demons, devoured by the very appetite they deny.

Mickey’s transformation into a serpentine creature of temptation isn’t just body horror—it’s metaphor. He embodies the desire that moralists project onto others. The politician’s lust for punishment mirrors his thirst for control; his destruction is poetic. White makes clear that the most terrifying monsters are born from shame and repression, not freedom. The more one denies their desire, the more uncontrollable it becomes.

Obsession with Cleanliness

This theme echoes in “Rosie,” where a woman’s fixation on cleanliness masks her guilt and rage. Her compulsive scrubbing leads to domestic massacre. In trying to sanitize her world, she erases herself. Here, White turns a mundane obsession into an allegory for modern puritanism. Moral purity, like physical purity, is unattainable—and the pursuit of it inevitably ends in blood.

When read alongside stories like “Tina,” where body image obsession results in self-destruction, a unified thesis emerges: our cultural demand for perfection—sexual, moral, physical—drives people insane. Every attempt to purify what is human only reveals the dirt beneath.

Repression as the Real Horror

In all these tales, the most horrifying acts arise from the repression of natural instincts. The politician’s death, Rosie’s massacre, Tina’s self-vivisection—all follow failed attempts to suppress sexuality, rage, and imperfection. White’s deeper message is that moral extremism breeds violence. To fear desire is to become consumed by it.

By turning hypocrisy into horror, White reminds you that monsters rarely come from the outside—they are born within the walls of our own restraint.

The final and most ambitious story in White’s collection transforms private depravity into global catastrophe. In the tale of “The Cure,” a medical breakthrough that eliminates HIV and all viral diseases sparks a worldwide orgy. What begins as liberation quickly becomes extinction as humanity loses the ability to stop. The primal drive to reproduce replaces every other instinct, leading to a sexual apocalypse where people literally die of pleasure.

By merging science fiction with erotic horror, White paints a chilling picture of utopia turned inferno. With the fear of disease gone, society indulges every latent craving. The result is chaos—the collapse of civilization into a sea of bodies. Like a modern Sodom reborn through biology, humanity learns that safety without restraint invites annihilation. Pleasure becomes a plague.

Freedom’s Final Consequence

What White depicts isn’t just sexual excess—it’s the death of meaning. Once desire has no limits, it devours itself. Relationships disintegrate, identity dissolves, and all that remains is biological machinery in overdrive. The protagonist, a sex addict named Shark, experiences this descent with surreal clarity. His final coupling with Simon becomes an act of terminal connection—love as last gasp. The cure for death becomes the cure for life itself.

This dystopian outcome echoes Mary Shelley’s warnings in Frankenstein and H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror: the pursuit of absolute control—scientific or erotic—inevitably leads to ruin. White extends that tradition into the realm of flesh, suggesting that our biological impulses are as dangerous as our technological ambitions.

Desire Without Fear

The moral paradox of the story lies in the elimination of fear. Fear had always restrained humanity, functioning as morality’s backbone. Without it, society unravels. In this sense, White argues that fear—of death, disease, rejection—is what kept humanity human. Remove it, and we revert to instinct. The apocalypse of desire is thus less about punishment than about inevitable truth: to live without fear is to die of appetite.

The story closes the book not with despair but with revelation. The same drive that creates life also destroys it. In the end, what White gives us is not merely pornography for psychos, but prophecy for a civilization forever seduced by its own hunger.