All I Want Is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams

By: John Baltisberger

Narrated by: Nick Wright

"I killed my first Nazi at four years old. It wasn't art; I didn't discover the joy of a psychotropic kill until much later. Each moment that led up to it was the crescendo of a future lover screaming from around the bend of time, begging for the tantric orgasm that would define our future." Thus begins the lurid, gore-filled memoir of the author. Tainted by miles of hallucinogenic inspiration and sprinkled with poetic interludes, this audiobook seeks to bind reality with vision, discovering the truth that lies somewhere between what happened and what should have happened.

Part memoir, part novel, part collection, All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazis' Screams is more than a book, it's a way of life.

©2023 John Baltisberger (P)2023 Planet Bizarro Press

Critic reviews

"Baltisberger shows himself to be an occultic iconoclast counterpart to Lin-Manuel Miranda: he overturns icons, constructs a rich mythology from the rubble of that which has been torn down, and conveys it all with pulsing, infectiously inventive trash-talk."—Doris V. Sutherland, Attack of the Six-Foot Tranny

"Exquisitely showcasing Baltisberger's evocative poetry and biting prose, All I Want is to Take Shrooms & Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams is an intoxicating blood-drenched trip featuring a righteous protagonist and epic cast of characters that'll leave you buzzing with vigilante fire."—Jessica McHugh, 2x Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of The Quiet Ways I Destroy You

I couldn’t stop listening.

This book manages to feel both obscene and beautiful. Both sacred and profane. Surreal and painfully true to life. A fantastic trip of a book.

A Descent and Ascent from a Beautiful Hell

Striking, corporeal, grisly. Those words kept flashing through my mind as I read, or rather listened to, "All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams" by John Baltisberger. The novel reinvents the wheel of extreme horror into a form both loaded with other genres — life-writing, coming of age, and romance, to name a few — yet so seamless that the subgenres only serve to bolster the overall project of the novel. Following its narrator from birth to fatherhood, "All I Want" dares to ask the burning question of what makes us good in a world of evil, and what makes us human in a world of inhumanity. For Baltisberger, the answer comes through a menagerie of conversations with gods — though the Indian gods were given rather stereotypical accents by the audiobook narrator — as well as the experience of change through falling in love, only to realize that self-happiness and self-actualization perhaps cannot change the world. Rather, the novel posits that only direct action can. Brimming with beautiful impropriety, with gore so rich you can almost taste it, Baltisberger crafts an unholy yet righteous brew of psychedelic torment and serenity, and I can only hope that the family his narrator forges in the end can continue listening to the sound of Nazi screams.

Magnificent

John Baltisberger’s “All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams” is unlike any book I’ve ever read. Exceptionally well-written, psychedelic, and as bloody as a well-used gutting knife, Baltisberger’s book blends memoir, poetry, hallucinatory mysticism, kaiju fiction, and splatterpunk into what I can’t help but think of as an entirely new genre. I’m a longstanding devotee of Beat-era writers like William S. Burroughs and poets like Alan Ginsburg, both of whose DNA I can sense pumping in the veins of this strange beast. Not for the faint of heart, “Nazi Screams” combines a heartfelt exploration of a young artist’s path to self-actualization with frenetic, shroom-and-acid-fueled insanity. Baltisberger’s prose burns on the page like napalm, defoliating everything from Jesus Camp to frat boys to reveal the literally monstrous truths at the center of existence. A fantastically well-crafted, well-imagined work.