Method and Madness

The first 3 chapters of my new book THE EARTHEN DARK for your listening pleasure.

Get a copy of the book: bradkellyesque.com.

SPECIAL DEAL: In 2026, if you sign up for a yearly paid subscription to Method and Madness (via substack or patreon), and provide a US postal address, you’ll get a special signed copy of THE EARTHEN DARK, along with two hand-edited manuscript pages of early drafts, and a one-card tarot reading (with card). You’ll also get all the other benefits: early access to all episodes and exclusive access to one-of-a-kind MADNESS presentations.

A peek behind the paywall.

In this episode, I go in depth on Ellroy’s stylistic forebears, play a little Glass Bead Game between AMERICAN TABLOID and very different book, give the quick and very dirty history of CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE, and go full-on true crime telling the ‘real’ story of Chuck Rogers.

In this clip from the full episode, I dive into the career of Hugh Everett III, a brilliant physicist who developed the groundbreaking Many Worlds Interpretation—and ushered in the algorithmic age with classified work for shadowy government entities.

Anthony Metivier is known as the magnetic memory master. Using time-tested techniques he has not only taught himself to memorize large quantities of complicated information, but he’s gained a reputation for being among the very best teachers of memory practice. Now, he’s written his second novel in the Decline series, a bold detective saga that puts these memory methods in praxis and takes the reader on a wild ride: serial killers, exotic drugs, and conspiracy, and the gradual fall of civilization.

Find everything Anthony Metivier is up to here.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic 1836 story, first appearing in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, later re-published in TWICE-TOLD TALES.

Andrew Edwards, the author of what just might be the best novel of 2025, joins me to talk conspiracy, LSD, the interior journey of writing, the 1980s, literary gnosticism, the quantification of everything, and, of course, his certified banger CROWBAR.

Buy Crowbar

Jacob Austin, mastermind behind the fantastic Gnostic Pulp substack joined me to talk about the work of Thomas Pynchon, what the heck was going on with PKD, the nature of UFOs, and much, much more.
Linktree

Some Gnostic Pulp pieces we touched on:
Further Adventures in Pynchonian Reality

Year of the Lichen

Moby-Dick is about UFOs

Writer, critic, and host of the podcast Strange Exiles, Bram E. Gieben joins me to talk about Philip K. Dick’s most unsettling work: THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH: suspicion about reality, the commodification of the mind, PKD’s conception of God, whether sci-fi is still the trash stratum, and much more.

Subscribe to Bram’s substack for his ongoing series CRISIS masculinity, the latest episodes of Strange Exiles, his upcoming book on PKD, and everything else he’s up to.

Bram’s linktree.

The multi-talented Scott Laudati joined me to tell the crazy story of being courted by Hollywood for his great novel PLAY THE DEVIL, finding the spirit of America, and what it means to put in a hard day’s work.

Scott’s twitter

To Kingdom Come (full tour movie)

Buy PLAY THE DEVIL

Scott’s linktree

Freud’s influence on the history of Egon Praediger’s favorite drug.

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We get into the strange fates of several real figures referenced in the book, and the stories of one Pynchonian figure who may have proved ESP in the SHADOW TICKET era (J.B. Rhine) and another (Moritz Schlick) whose work made such things unmentionable in intellectual society.