The World Wide Web has long ago ceased to be just a technological advance, or an aid to scientists and businessmen. Rather, like the telephone and automobile before it, it has become a cultural phenomenon. Just like its predecessors, it has attracted a rather large number of oddballs, of various sorts, who make use of it to expound and spread their own views of the world to others like them, and to the population at large.

This book is an anecdotal introduction to some of the wildest and worst foibles of the Internet. We find in it a rather large collection of weird, silly, macabre, and sometimes downright frightening sites, dedicated to everything from political intrigue, to the glorification of celebrities and nonentities, to the spreading of rumors, conspiracy theories, and vendettas.

Such a collection would, of course, be a delight to students of the human comedy in all its forms, and would have supplied abundant material from which writers of the caliber of O. Henry, Mark Twain, H. L. Menken, or Ambrose Bierce could expound on the stark humanity of us all. Unfortunately, Holden lacks the wit, insight, and literary ability of such masters. His prose style is as flat, shallow, and colorless as that of the average Web site. The book suffers, therefore, from the common malady of most of the sites the author presents: after a while, it is just boring.