"Mark Dery’s cultural criticism is the stuff that nightmares are made of. He’s a witty and brilliant tour guide on an intellectual journey through our darkest desires and strangest inclinations. You can’t look away even if you want to."—Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz, Boing Boing
"Mark Dery is gifted with sanity, humor, learning, and a prose style as keen as a barber’s razor. He applies those qualities to a trustworthy and entertaining analysis of the lunatic fringe, which constitutes an ever-larger portion of the discourse in America today."—Luc Sante
"Do not turn squeamish from the many considerations of death that lurk within—vampires, tombs, disease, corruption of many varieties. Mark Dery’s restless and stylish essay is concerned with one thing only—what it means to be alive in America."—Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America
"The bebop rhythms of Mark Dery’s prose reflect an intellectual excitement that is rare among contemporary cultural essayists. Reading him is like ingesting a powerful jolt of espresso."—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars
"More relevant than Mythologies, funnier than Travels in Hyperreality, more readable than Simulacra, less gloomy than Living in the End Times, smarter than Hitchens and without the pomposity, Dery’s dazzling collection will, I unhesitatingly predict, become a classic of cultural criticism."—Words, Noises and Other Stuff
"We get delicious slivers of personal anecdote and some mind-blowing facts. Did you know a decapitated head maintains consciousness for 13 seconds? What do you suppose those last 13 seconds are like? Dery has considered these matters, studied the literature, the art and science and history of the subject and he presents it all with razor sharp wit."—Notes for Headstones
"What makes Dery such an appealing tour guide through all these bad thoughts of his is that he's right there with us, trying to answer the tough questions, and willing to turn his probing mind and eye on himself, too."—Phoenix New Times
"Mark Dery is an intellectually challenging writer. He makes few concessions to his readers. He has high expectations . . . He is witty. He is amusing. He is stimulating. The essays will force you to examine ideas you more than likely have never thought about before."—Blogcritics.org
"Always provocative, often humorous, Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between. "—Publishers Weekly
"How is it that Dery is able to produce this uncanny feeling of identification? You get the sense that, while the rest of us were living the zeitgeist, Dery was holding a stethoscope to its heart."—Supervert
"At his best, Dery cuts through the bewildering data fog we live in like no one else. These disarmingly frank and funny personal essays function as a welcome reminder that this prodigious brain we’re encountering does, in fact, come in the body of a human man. His whole purpose is to make us work a little harder, to shake us out of the torpor that blinds us to the subtext of our own lives. It’s true that watching his hypertrophied intelligence run frenetic circles around your own can sometimes be as exhausting as it is exhilarating, but his work rewards the effort."—The Brooklyn Rail
"The same laser-focused interrogation and machete-sharp wit that made Dery’s earlier books critical touchstones is here in rapid-fire form. Where his earlier work honed in on one subject or one genre of subjects, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is all over the place, a sniper-perch on the cultural sprawl where no one and nothing is safe. There are too many stand-out, entrails-examining moments to name... No matter the topic, no one puts together a sentence like Mark Dery."—Roy Christopher
"Mark Dery has just published I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, a long-awaited compendium of his oft-brutal, usually funny, and always-brilliant writings on the curious, bizarre, and downright dark crevices of our culture. Look no further than this new book for your next monstrous dose of Dery."—Boing Boing
"Whether you're starting your spring break or just slacking off work for another week, there's no better way to wile away your idle hours than reading through Mark Dery's new collection of essays I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.
"Mark Dery is a forward-thinking-and-looking writer who puts many of the more insane aspects of contemporary life under a magnifying glass and dissects them with fearsome insight and intellect. Dery is an excellent writer, approaching his subject matter with a wry, sometimes uproarious spiketop sense of humor which helps to leaven some of his more serious discussions."—3:AM Magazine
"A critical thinker whose razor sharp attacks on American idiocracy are always leavened by dry humor, colorful but precise language and an amused dissection of human perversity. In a better country, Dery would be widely recognized as one of our premier essayists."—Acceler8or
"These off-kilter essays don’t take themselves too seriously but shine an entertaining and sometimes insightful light on the corners of pop culture."—Zócalo Public Square
"Willing to tackle some tough and controversial subject matter—the Holocaust ‘industry’, for example—and examine it with rigor and willingness to upset conventional or comfortable opinion and piety."—PopMatters
"It’s a dazzling performance, with Dery compulsively trawling the garbagestrewn shorelines of the U.S. to examine its dark and rancid center: the homosexual panic behind the Super Bowl and George Bush’s cowboy pronouncements . . . He writes in a breathless and witty style, engagingly full of glib word play."—David Lida, Mostly New Mexico City
"This is a classy collection—cool, quick and quite often simply hilarious."—Rick McGrath
"Dery has made an art form of the short, punchy and polemical screed. Dery is clearly the 21st century’s most compelling and readable polymath of the perverse."—21C Magazine
"Writing from his own border, Dery’s essays are similarly bracing, sometimes infuriating, and (warning) may become a habit-forming guilty pleasure."—Newcity Lit
"Mark Dery is a great essayist, maybe even a world-class one. I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, a collection of pieces written in the past decade or so for a variety of print and online publications, is a visceral reminder of this."—Las Vegas CityLife
"This accumulated collection provides an outlet for an unbounded mind, and for a first-rank thinker, who has obviously spent a lot of time in front of the printed word. There is much to learn about style and substance within the covers of a Mark Dery book."—Staten Island Bob
"Cultural critic Mark Dery is something of a Tom Wolfe for the BoingBoing set, writing cranky and sneering essays about sensationalistic or offbeat subjects, compensating for the narrow range of conclusions these topics tend to offer with rhetorical excess and a thick smear of knowing pop-culture allusions."—The New Inquiry
"No critic delves into the dark recesses of American consciousness quite like Dery. And perhaps at no time in recent history has national disillusionment been so primed for such critique."—The Verge
"Dery invokes Hunter S Thompson, but not as a prankster - rather as a stylist and satirist, in a tradition that runs from Swift through Twain and implicitly on to Dery himself."—The Word
"An absolute treasure trove of the disturbing and enlightening."—Warren Ellis
"[Dery’s] thought processes are clear and firmly expressed, his opinions on anything from politics to sexuality to music neither blared in your face, nor in any way concealed – the man who wrote this book is in it, dancing between the lines."—Books and Bad Habits
"Dery’s dark you-can’t-think-this-stuff-up carnival tour of present-day America is far more thought-provoking than anything virtual reality can offer."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Dery’s book approaches the wicked wit and imagination of his heroes Ballard and Mencken, and is a provocative cultural document of America in the precarious 21st century. For a diagnostician of the national nervous breakdown, he’s damn funny."—The Journal
"The essays are first-rate, written with sharp-wittedness and elegance."—Time’s Flow Stemmed, blog
"Absolutely essential reading for those not yet familiar with the anarcho-nerd
mindset."—Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
"A collection of essays that fizz with ideas and neologisms (”sacrymose sentimentality”) and takes pot-shots at the sacred cows of the left, right and centre. . . All recounted with a rollicking sense of humour."—Fortean Times
"His writing is such a swift punch to the gut that you’re left not only gasping, but realizing that you’ll have to spend much more time processing his argument. He’s a smart, culture-obsessed writer, but the essays in this new collection are hard to stop reading because Dery accomplishes something so many modern commentators fail at: he keeps it interesting."—Flavorwire
"Each of the essays, which explore topics relevant to nearly all Americans, is an unforeseen assault on a way of thinking and living in America. Then, as soon as the mind stops reeling from the first battering, the essay has ended and a new attack waits in the next. I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts will expose a side of American Culture many choose not to gaze upon, but leaves readers feeling as though afterwards they are more in tune with the world."—Journal of American Culture
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