Chicken Soup for the Raped Soul

The Chicken Soup book people are banking on a new pool of readers: divorced, cancer-addled rape victims. Thank God for them.

Billed as "The most controversial book ever," the new Thank God I, the first in a series, would be nothing if it weren't for your crapass luck. Its promotional video is seemingly ripped right out of the Patrick Swayze scenes in Donnie Darko. And the books are the Traveling Wilburys of self-help franchises, calling upon a supergroup of writing ringers, The Riches Within author John Demartini, The Passion Test author Janet Atwood among them. But its meat and potatoes are the everyday horrible experiences to which we call can relate. "Thousands of writers will reveal gut-wrenching accounts of how they transformed perceived crisis into blessings," series creator John Castagnini says in a press release. It only gets worse from there.