Although I enjoyed Steven Sidor’s The Mirror’s Edge, it was almost despite the subject matter – Satanism is one of those subjects, like UFO’s or vast conspiracies, that I prefer to read about in nominal non-fiction. Somehow the paranoiac imagination works best when somewhat constrained by reality, and the mundane, you couldn’t make them up because they’re so stupid details of alien abductions or occult rituals are what bring them to life in print. Even if I don’t believe a word of it, it really adds to the experience when it feels like the author is completely convinced.
 
So when my noble friend and colleague Sheridan showed me Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape by Lauren Stratford I had to snap it up and dive right it. Of course it does tend to wipe that ironic smirk off even UBU’s mug to think that some small child was perhaps abused in the awful ways described by Stratford, but even before the Satanist part, when her adoptive mother was pimping grade school Lauren to hobos in exchange for odd jobs around the house, her narrative seemed manifestly phoney. Even though anything verifiable was in short supply, I wondered if anyone had done any fact checking on Satan’s Underground, and I turned immediately to our old friend, the internet, and sure enough my b.s. detector once again proved accurate. Wikipedia even has an entry about her with a link to the Cornerstone magazine article that exposed her. Apparently her real name was Laurel Willson, and although she was adopted and her mother was a little high strung, all resemblance to the truth ends there. The real punch line is that after the controversy she dropped out of sight only to reemerge later under the name Lauren Grabowski, claiming to be a Holocaust survivor!
 
I should have waited, as that knowledge colored my reading of the rest of the book, from her forced pornography experiences to her eventual forced participation in Satanic sacrificial rites. None of it seemed remotely believable or even fully imagined, though there were a few good bits like her Satanic boyfriend putting her in a steel drum and then dropping sacrificed baby bodies in with her one by one. The actually bad experiences end about a third of the way when the Satanists inexplicably lose interest in her and she starts her process of evangelical rebirth. Here, entering actual autobiography, her writing becomes more enthusiastic and concrete – clearly having other people pay attention to her and take her seriously is what really turns her on. If Jesus and Satan are waging a relentless war for your soul, you must be important, and once Stratford’s unique suffering has been established her enormous narcissism and self-absorption can have free reign. She bullies people, taking advantage of their better Christian instincts to insinuate herself into their lives, which soon revolve around listening to and consoling poor Lauren. The circle of the sympathetic and duped becomes wider and wider until it includes the reader.
 
The last third of the book is a basically unreadable goulash of self-help bromides and "divine prescriptions" to those tempted by Satan. It’s funny that she has several pieces that include refrains such as her biggest concern Will someone listen to me? and even a hidden confession in a chapter where she repeats over and over again WATCH OUT…YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED! Indeed.
 
In the end the interesting thing to me is how the book struck such a sympathetic chord in the evangelical Christian world, where it was an acclaimed best seller and vaulted Stratford to celebrity. Among the adulatory blurbs is, ironically enough, one from Mike Warnke, author of The Satan Seller, a book about Mike’s experiences as a repentant former coven leader, another tome that was exposed as baloney. (An echo of this is found in Lauren’s next life of deception as a supposed Holocaust survivor when she claimed to remember Binjamin Wikomirski from the camps – and then he too was exposed as a fake, real name Bruno Grosjean. At least Warnke and Stratford never claimed to have met while kissing the devil’s patookie at a black mass.) In fact the two of them are now considered part of a late eighties sociological phenomena known as the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic. The growing evangelical movement needed to validate their own sense of self-worth with an enemy that validated their religious beliefs in much the same way that Communism had validated their political ones. They really, really wanted to believe that a great force was out there opposing their great purpose and so were quite easily taken in by something that confirmed their paranoia. In fact, despite all the evidence that has been marshaled to discredit Satan’s Underground, there are still people out there who believe in its veracity.
 
It is fiction, of course, and almost self-evidently so, but had it been presented as such it would have been condemned as trash and filth. As a cautionary tale however, the righteous can revel in lurid details of porno and orgy while still pretending a higher purpose, believing Stratford when she says "Ultimately the book is not about pornography or Satan. It is about the overwhelming power and victory of the Lord Jesus Christ." Ultimately, maybe, but there’s a whole bunch of semi-scintillating stuff that a good bible thumper can wallow in on the way.
 
Certainly in recent years the general reading public has been bombarded with fake memoirs, if only because confession is the genre of the moment. But the devil’s advocate (so to speak) in me has to give Lauren credit for a work of imagination, an insane paranoiac-critical take on her own life. To pretend as she did can even be seen as a work of performance art, even if she seemed to emphasize the paranoiac over the critical. Unfortunately, the unintentional artlessness that can be somewhat excused in a memoir doesn’t cut it in a fake. Even considered as a work of fiction or even camp, Satan’s Underground is rather clumsy and not very compelling, with only a few savory chunks of ripe cheese. As in every work whose background is more interesting than the foreground, its value is mostly historical.
 
Here’s a few overheated excerpts:
 
However the front of the office was only a facade. Behind that was where the real world began for me and for countless nameless and faceless others who had come looking for fame and fortune. Little did they know that when they signed on the dotted line they were signing themselves into the same world as mine – HELL!
 
Do you listen to heavy-metal music that condones and even encourages suicide, the torture and murder of babies, and Satan worship because that kind of music is "where it’s at"? WATCH OUT…YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED!