I’m talking about books like Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries, that are products of minds dangerous and extremely abberant from the mainstream.
What are some others? If you’ve read some, do you recommend them, and why?
Some of the Marquise De Sade’s stuff is pretty messed up, even by today’s standards.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Communist Manifesto
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey
(I never made it through 3 and didn’t get past the foreword of 4).
FriarTed, what are 3 and 4 about, or, what type of “evil” book are they?
The Hoax of the 20th Century denies the Holocaust exists. Imperium says that Hitler was right and that Europe should be under a unified fascist government.
I’d recommend “the Creature from Jekyll Island” It’s one of the better written of the “the Federal Reserve is an evil cabal of shadowy international financiers/Freemasons/Bilderbergers who are trying to set up a new world order and destroy American sovereignty and so we need to go back to the gold standard” nuttiness.
I was going to suggest something by Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. 
I’ve never even picked up 4, but it is reviewed here. Plenty of other evil (and not-so-evil) books reviewed by John J. Reilly (a Catholic conservative intellectual with interests in eschatology and theories of history) here, here, and here.
“The Klansman” which is the book that “Birth of a Nation” is based on, I understand, is pretty evil. Word is D.W. Griffith cleaned it up quite a bit before he filmed it, which’ll give you an idea. Very difficult to find though.
Personally, I find books like “Fascinating Womanhood” and the like which say things like, “Ladies, if you act all sweet and empty-headed, your husband will love you more.” are sorta evil.
Books that advance the recovered memory movement like “When Rabbit Howls”
piss me off. I saw that one at Barnes and Noble yesterday. Thankfully, the recovered memory craze seems to be dying out.
Read whatever you want- just be forewarned that a LOT of “evil” stuff is mighty boring when you actually read, see or hear it.
When a teenage metalhead with an urge to be transgressive picks up a Charles Manson record, he’s likely to be EXTREMELY disappointed when he finds out that Charles was actually a wimpy wuss who mostly wrote and played folkie stuff. As a musician, Charles Manson was much closer to Cat Stevens than to Alice Cooper.
In the same way, a lot of “evil” books are pretty tedious. I HAD to read “Das Kapital” at Columbia. It’s slow going, to put it charitably (in fairness, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” was a snooze, too; I suspect most of my fellw free-market conservatives have read OF it than have actually read it!). And Hitler was not exactly a master prose stylist. If you don’t fall asleep first, “Mein Kampf” is likely to make you wonder, “Who could possibly have thought this pompous dweeb was the savior of Germany???”
I’d lend you my copies of Mr. Crowley’s diaries, but my pet bird Azazel ate them.
I came in here to mention that one. I have a copy. It’s very old, but I can’t remember quite how old and I’m not at home at the moment to check. My husband found it at our neighbors’ garage sale. He showed it to me with wide eyes and his mouth hanging open. Of course we bought it. I haven’t been able to muster up the courage to read it, though. This picture was enough to make me feel pretty queasy.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (aka The Little Red Book)
Very charitably. Here’s the opening passage of Volume II:
Exciting, huh? Like any good writer, Marx knew you had to hook the reader with the first page.
The Communist Manifesto does not belong on this list. It advicates nothing hateful or evil, and it certainly is not comparable to the racist titles listed in this thread. I would defend Marx as essentially correct in most of his assumptions, and as a Humanitarian in general. He was naive in many ways, but he wasn’t evil.
The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanis
Chasing Hairy by Michael Fleischer (When he sued Harlan Ellison for calling him “bugfuck,” Fleischer’s lawyers tried to get this horrible book excluded from evidence)
Except for advocating the violent overthrow of society, the abolition of private property, and abolition of the family.
I’d say Marx was more often wrong than right in his assumptions. His biggest error was assuming the conditions he saw in his immediate view were universal.
And his naivete was so enormous that it was virtually evil. He advocated turning over all power to a small group of ideologues with no checks over them. Marx simply assumed that this would be okay because these men would only use their unchecked power righteously. That’s not just naive; that’s foolish. The reality is that once these men had power they kept it and used it to favor themselves. Marx may not have wanted to create men like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Dzerzhinsky, Beria, Ho, Castro, Tito, Ceausescu, Guzman, Honecker, Hoxha, Mengistu, Najibullah, Neto, Kim and Kim Junior, but he created a system that all of these men used.
Ain’t that the truth. Many ‘evil’ books tend to be pompous, boring, and wandery. Sometimes they have many CAPITALS.
Fascinating Womanhood is good for a giggle, though. I used to bug my husband by cooing things like “I’m so glad you’re the man!”
Has anyone mentioned “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” yet? Don’t try the recipes at home, I hear they’re quite as likely to blow you up as to work as advertised.
I heartily recommend The Mind of Oswald, by Diane Holloway. It’s not composed entirely of Oswald’s writings and thoughts (it also has Ms. Holloway’s analysis and comments), but I think it fits your criteria. It’s a very interesting book about an enigmatic man. Here’s the first sentence of the book; it effectively summarizes what it’s about…
“The goal of this book is to examine Oswald’s own words to learn what was going on in his mind.”
Well, whether the Communist Manifesto is evil, or just wrong, I’ve already read it.
The Klansman sounds tempting, and the Marquis de Sade for my “Evil Books After Dark” shelf.