I remember years ago working behind a bar in an attempt to cobble together some money and move on. The dreary work had few appealing aspects but the number of wackos you ran into was always good for the entertainment value.

One day, a freakish acquaintance of one of the stiffs who worked there bounced in, eager to relay the details of his intriguing life. He started speaking to his mate and I shamelessly listened in from a few metres away. He started off with a breathless flurry of recent developments, including praise for a recent book he had begun reading. He had spoken barely a few words on the subject when I knew without any doubt to which book he was referring. His sparse initial comments would have been barely enough for most to register a guess but somehow I knew beyond any doubt.

It was his mannerisms and desultory banter together with touching on what he would claim was a life-changing "literary" experience. I groaned to myself and muttered, "not another cunt on about The Celestine Prophecy." You may remember this title from a few years back and may have even read the bland prose yourself.

Take The Celestine Prophecy with its conspiracy laced yet ostensibly benign, new-age horseshit and infuse it with an insane dose of paranoid fear and hatred and the sinister mirror-image result is The Turner Diaries, an underground novel that has been the favourite of inbred, white-trash gun loving yanks for years. The kind of fools who are genuinely frightened that their right to own guns is at risk, that the hordes of immigrants flooding their country is part of a sinister plot orchestrated by "the Jews" to take over the world.

The popularity of such novels is not surprising. Their underlying premise is one which appeals to those unwilling or unable to explore issues and seek real and genuine knowledge on any given subject. They pander to every fear and desperate anxiety that exists in society and draw in countless wide-eyed, awe-struck individuals because of the fact that, of course, there are numerous instances where governments do lie, and undertake duplicitous, murderous acts and some things do always remain unexplained. Buying into such books and the surrounding subculture allows those people to bypass any effort necessary to acquire objective knowledge from a wide variety of sources and makes them feel they are in possession of the truth. At the same time they gain sense of belonging and feel part of a group who are hip to what's really going down.

I first heard of The Turner Diaries quite a few years ago, the name uttered with smug satisfaction by members of various hate groups, white supremacist organizations and fanatical gun owners on talk shows or internet discussion forums. There was always the cachet of secrecy; the fact that it was never available by usual means such as at book-stores, instead sold at gun shows and traded at clandestine meetings by breathless oafs bristling with the anticipation of an armed showdown with government forces al a Waco, Texas.