So named for Goad's predilection for attracting all things fecal in both his professional and personal life, "Shit Magnet" is like an "Everything you always wanted to know but were (ITALICS) literally afraid to ask" styled peek into the sordid life and crimes of the scandalous editor of the still controversial death-tripper magazine 'Answer Me!' 'Magnet' was written entirely while Jim was serving a two-year prison sentence for punching his girlfriend's face into hamburger, and it shows. Goad was already a hostile writer, but his imprisonment hardened his words into literary bullets, each page sculpted to explode in your face like a paper and ink bomb. He traces his eventual downfall, from an abusive household rife with the violence he would soon embrace as a credo, through his tumultuous marriage with the equally misanthropic Debbie Goad, who at least indirectly led him to his sorry fate. After all, it was with Debbie, a miserable, lonely 30 year old from Long Island who had finally met her caustic match in angry young man Goad, that the future inmate wrote and self-published 4 issues of the notorious Answer Me! Rife with blistering rants on topics like serial murder, suicide, and rape, and plastered with photographs of accident victims and birth defects, Answer Me! sought to provoke on every level, and it found a rabidly receptive audience amongst thousands of disenfranchised hipsters in an era (the early 90's) when ugly was most definitely 'in'. Ostensible a husband and wife effort (although Goad claims to have ghost-written his wife's screeds), Answer Me! was a fiercely intelligent, sociopathic bundle of raw nerves, and the Goads became micro-celebrities, Hell's coolest couple. Things quickly went downhill, though. The magazine soon found itself at the center of bad craziness. Remember that nut that shot up the White House? Answer Me's fault. How about the German goth suicide club that traveled all the way to Vegas to end it all? One of 'em called Jim right before she ate a bullet. Goad soon found himself in court, slapped with obscenity charges. He barely squeaked by. Then Debbie got cancer. Then Jim started cheating on her with a crazy punk rock girl named Anne. Then things (ITALICS) really started to wrong.

Goad spits out the whole terrible true tale in poisonous chunks, leaving no one, not even himself, unscathed in the process. What's most striking about "Shit Magnet" is how white-hot effective Goad's writing is. While most certainly psychopathic, he may be one of the greatest narrative journalists in the country. Take, for example, this paragraph, part of a chapter that explains his motivation for writing:
"So much power in this psychotic mind of mine. Words and thoughts which burn laserlike through glass, steel, and cement.
My words will find you. They will slip through your fingertips and hit their target.
A brain tumor? A blood clot? A bone splinter pressing in against my aggression center?
Doesn't matter.
I will die for these words. Kill for these words. And you aren't nearly as dedicated about anything."

And he means it, man. Goad was well-known for literally driving across the country to hunt down an Answer Me! critic just to show him how willing he was to walk it like he talked it. Prison doesn't even seem to have mellowed Goad a bit, either. By book's end, he still seems just as volatile and unhinged as he was before being locked down. So, the shit will most likely keep rolling Goad's way. Aging cool kids that remember Answer Me! as a harmless snark-fest, a fitting diversion to go along with Ministry records and Mad Max boots, can just kiss those care-free days goodbye. This is not about chortling at the misfortunes of others, this is real life. Real (ITALICS) bad life from a man that has taken every wrong direction and refuses to regret any of it. Personally, although I was completely captivated by these terrible true tales, I found myself reading the entire book in one sitting, just so I could get the fuck away from Jim's ugly reality. Brutal and absolutely uncompromising, this is a bible of hate written in Goad's own blood, and for anyone willing to stare right into the abyss of a truly black soul, it's a must read.