Louis Theroux is a British-American journalist, son of travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, who was given his first TV break by the political and often controversial filmmaker, Michael Moore. Louis has a smiliar style to Moore, of quasi documentary and Gonzo journalism. His travels in American marginalised subcultures, on the fringes of society, were aired in the UK with the title “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” and featured groups of people ranging from UFO hunters to Porn Starts to White Supremacists.

The documentaries themselves were eccentric, as well as the subjects, and his approach ironic, witty, and often introspective. I was curious how this would translate to written form but it was as if I was reading Louis’s own voiceover script for one of the episodes. He is even more introspective in words and meditates upon the nature of weird and how his and our voyeurism and consumption of weird contributes to society’s overall weirdness.

Some of the subject matter and the people are far from just a source of amusement but are intensely thought-provoking. The book delves deeper into the disturbing nature of these subcultures and the harm done to the participants. Often the people Louis has gone to seek out are the ones he was most concerned by and their follow-up stories are sad; Louis documents and evokes the decline of their lives, their loneliness, their disturbing beliefs. Not only are these -the TV documentaries and book- an insight into fringe societies but they are a comment upon society as a whole, as a composite of weirdness.