“Hey Mama, look at me, I’m on my way to the promised land…”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I assure you, the story I’m about to tell you is true- all of it. Every small victory. Every little triumph. Every lesson learned. Every mistake made. Every misdeed cast. Every bit of bullshit. Every lie. Every defeat. Every disappointment. Every heart broken. Every tear shed. Everything I’m about to share with you, it all happened. It’s all true- all of it.
Impossible for you to know the emotional toll telling you this story has taken. The long days and endless nights, restlessly searching for the right words, in the right order; hoping it makes sense; hoping to be seen. Restlessly searching for meaning; enduring moments of despair; intense bouts of frustration; fists against the wall. Desperate to be understood.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, submitted for your scrutiny and judgement, this is my story- this is my life- and I am proud to share it with you; proud to announce the release of my very first book.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, welcome to hell…
“When the fantasy is all that’s left, the impulse is to get lost in it. You want to forget that you’re an arm above the water and your legs are giving out.”
Modernity is Hell. It’s a sentiment shared by many people, even if they aren’t honest enough to admit it. But what is Hell? Hell is the impermanence of identity, the death of authenticity, the absence of love. It’s the unsettling nothing you feel as you amble to work and back, numbingly consuming pop culture pleasures, sleepwalking your way through dead-end sexual encounters. Hell is the void, the death of God, the blurring of reality and fantasy, your own consciousness lost in the stew.
Welcome to Hell is a clear-eyed, touching examination of the world we live in. Equal parts memoir, cultural critique, meditation, and lament, “Bad” Billy Pratt’s literary debut traces a poignant line through his failed relationships and other life experiences, painting a stark picture of the abyss that we’ve been condemned to.
- Matt Forney, Editor-in-Chief, Terror House Press
Praise for WELCOME TO HELL
“This collection is, as they say, a mood; an elegy for lost Americana, a memory of a place you’ve never been. If seduction is getting lost in the incomparable alienage of the other, and writing is teasing out the universal from the particular, then Billy tries to capture a universal sense of feeling lost. You will be able to see how much he cares.”
- Zero HP Lovecraft, author of They Had No Deepness of Earth (2021)
“Billy Pratt wanders and wonders through the ruins of what is left of our civilisation and provides poolside musings on the facade of what now passes as human relationships in our atomised present day. With more than a helping of melancholy and longing for things which are now past, Billy Pratt writes in the mould of Delicious Tacos midway through an existential crisis. Enjoy these Despairing Tacos.”
- Mencius Moldbugman, contributor to Ending Bigly: The Many Fates of Donald Trump (2021)
BUY WELCOME TO HELL ON AMAZON
BUY WELCOME TO HELL THROUGH TERROR HOUSE PRESS
We Simply Are Not There: An Interview with “Bad” Billy Pratt upon the release of WELCOME TO HELL
WELCOME TO HELL reviewed on THE AMERICAN SUN
KTP 
Yes! Congratulations, man. I’ve been a reader since I stumbled upon your Primer article (and, in turn, introduced to TRP — which was useful for a while, before I had to tune out and form my own thinking.)
All in all, you are appreciated. I’m buying the kindle and physical copy. Thank you for all the entertaining and insightful prose.
Thank you, my friend. I truly appreciate it. Enjoy!
I could have put a Slayer or Morbid Angel song in here, but that’s some low hanging fruit. So, more inline with cover of the book;
Will be sure to buy physical copies for my nephew and two nieces. As generation Z, they are more fucked than they know. Cheers.
Well hell, with the lack of blog content, I was worried you’d died. Or you had been quietly unpersoned from the internet. In more optimistic moments I thought you may have fallen in love. Now it turns you’d just been toiling on a book. Slacker.
Guess I’d better buy a copy.
Congratulations! Approximately what percentage of the book is content that’s not already on the blog?
The book is a collection of content from the blog, revised and expanded; brand new end notes were added which are roughly 6,000 words of 50,000.
I believe the book is greater than the sum of its parts. I believe it is thematically coherent and functions more as a cohesive book rather than just a collection of posts.
Reblogged this on muunyayo .