Since 2002, scholarship on the work of Henry Darger (1892–1973), a so-called “outsider artist,” has operated within a psychoanalytic discourse, heralding the solipsistic nature of this enigmatic figure's art and writings. In his new book, Michael Moon successfully challenges such dominant pathologizing narratives by contextualizing Darger's written opus, The Realms of the Unreal, within early twentieth-century American culture. Moon reevaluates various material resources appropriated by Darger, not just as aesthetic or stylistic influences, but also as complex and rich cognitive models. “Resource” in this study's title can be understood in the word's full sense; Moon looks to material culture and finds Darger's sources of information, his wellspring of creative energies, as well as evidence of the artist's practical ingenuity. Moon's chapters argue for the public nature of Darger's private creations, analyzing connections between Darger's prose and that of popular proletariat literature, namely pulp magazines, comic strips, adult juvenilia, and narratives of Catholic virgin martyrs. He skillfully positions Darger as a reflexive participant, fully conversant with the dreams and desires of the public sphere. Darger's fascination with violence, warfare, abducted children, and lost causes, in Moon's assessment, reflects and retells America's concerns of the 1920s–1940s.

Moon devotes the majority of his chapters to addressing one of the most disturbing elements in Darger's work: depictions and descriptions of intense physical cruelty against little girls. He begins the first chapter by carefully linking the artist's stories, replete with eroticized violence, to a larger arena of cultural production – from church-sanctioned saints' Actas to everyday religious magazines, parochial school martyr plays, and even popular children's books. Juxtaposing Darger's religious practices and his imagined girl martyrs with “the devotional and spiritual tendencies of the Roman Catholic Church” (29), Moon starts to unravel previously held arguments that such violence served as evidence of a disturbed psyche. Chapter 2 builds analogies between Darger's writings and the late nineteenth-century “Glasstown” juvenilia of Branwell Brontë and his siblings. Moon suggests an indexical relationship between their respective experiences of living within eras of massive warfare and their obsessions with never-ending stories of violence, grief, and excessive sentimentality. He hesitates to stigmatize recurrent, gruesome content as sadistic fantasy and instead extrapolates a sense of disjunctive pleasure or “spoiled” eroticism within the work of Darger in that “the potential subject of sexuality often seems to be in several different possible places at once, in a not altogether legible configuration” (74).

Chapter 3 discursively links Darger's plagiaristic method of writing, his own background as a child orphan (and later as an adult who desired to adopt), and stories of displaced and disenfranchised characters in popular comic strips. This is Moon's strongest chapter by far in its claims of a running discourse between Darger's sense of self and mass culture's narratives of vulnerable yet plucky protagonists on whom he modeled his little girls. Associations between Darger's girls and “Little Annie Rooney” and “Little Orphan Annie” are not new, but Moon effectively suggests further significance in their strips' potential portrayal of changing public attitudes towards orphans and adoption.

In the final chapter, Moon plumbs connections between Darger's imagined world and that of the hyper-violent misogyny of H. P. Lovecraft's and Robert Howard's pulp fiction. Here, in stories about creatures with supernatural powers, gruesome murders, and abject bodies, Moon finds equally fertile sites for “exploring and experiencing contradictory realities, social and political as well as familial” (108). Of particular note in this chapter is Moon's reading of aggression and victimhood as shared, gendered, and class-based experiences relatable to Darger, male pulp writers, and male pulp readers.

Moon is a pioneer in this revisionist study, first by revealing how the dark recesses of proletarian print culture can shed light on Darger's gory and elegiac art (and vice versa), and second by his use of nuanced queer perspectives to further elucidate intersections between sexuality, class, and religion in Darger's writings. One small shortcoming of the book, however, can be found in its introduction. Moon neglects to include Chicago's Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in his listing of institutions and online sites. Intuit's Henry Darger Room Collection (opened 2008) is a unique permanent installation re-creating Darger's Chicago apartment and its bewildering array of material resources: architectural elements, artwork, scrapbooks, Catholic icons, and other personal effects.