When Mike Hammer, former editor of boy magazines Maxim and Stuff, launches the new Shock Magazine, it may be a bit more than you're used to.

Hammer calls the photo-driven magazine, "Life magazine for the new millennium," and will give daring readers "an uncensored view of the world around them."

Uncensored may barely begin to describe an opening issue which will have photos of a rotting human head, deformed victims of Chernobyl, a woman who set herself on fire and an article on "KKK Kids," children growing up in white-supremacist households.

Lagardere's Hachette Filipacchi Medias SA, which publishes Elle and Car and Driver, will put Shock on newsstands twice a week. Yet, if the U.S. is anything like France, where Choc, is selling out, then the publisher has little to worry about.