Neutron Gun Reloaded: A Gerry Reith Reader | Gerry Reith, Denis McBee & Chip Smith

On April 7 1984, in the small city of Sheridan Wyoming, Gerard Bennet Reith died at his writing desk of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. He was 25. While the details of Reith’s suicide remain hazy and subject to apocryphal embellishment, the work he produced during his apogee as a writer for a raft of underground publications left an indelible impression in the minds of those who discovered it. Consorting at the bleeding edges of what has since been described as the “marginals milieu” of the pre-Internet era, Reith traded arts and letters with a motley coterie of avant garde outsiders whose only alliance distilled to a spirit of freewheeling creative rebellion. Athwart and among these misfits who inhabited and cultivated the mail-order demimonde that preceded Anonymous and the chans and cryptocurrencies and 3D-printed gun schematics and incel manifestos and myriad manifestations of digital mischief that would later complicate the Spectacle, Gerry Reith produced essays and criticis