Operation Mindfuck Goes Mainstream – John Higg’s KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds

When I was a boy, one of the great privileges of being the oldest child in the family was being allowed to stay up to watch the first half of the Late Late Show on a Friday night. At this point we only had 8 TV stations, and most households in Ireland tuned in to watch Gay Byrne’s long running chat show. I would have watched every Saturday for a few years, but I only have memories of 2 specific episodes. One was an interview with Rael (who was on the show a few times) and one was an interview with a pair of musicians who had burned a million pounds.The latter episode roughly coincided with my 9th birthday, and I remember being as disgusted as both my parents and the members of the live TV audience at the notion of burning that much money instead of donating it to charity. I had never heard of the band.

It was probably about 10 years later that I became interested in a band called Extreme Noise Terror. I’ve mentioned them before on this blog. I read somewhere that they had performed at the Brit awards with some electronic dance act and that the performance had involved somebody shooting a real gun into the crowd. I remember seeing a very blurry video of the performance (here’s a clearer version) and thinking it was really cool. I probably checked the dance act’s wikipedia or something and learned that they were the same guys that burned the million pounds. I don’t think I gave them much more thought, but as a dedicated grindcore fan at that point, I probably had a much easier time accepting the artistic statement of burning a million pounds.

In 2015, I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. I had already started this blog at that point, but that book pushed me past the point of no return. Robert Anton Wilson‘s Discordianism and ideas on chaos magic have had a very significant impact on how I view reality.

I don’t remember how I came to discover the fact that I was in the same boat as the KLF. Because they had deliberately deleted their catalogue to make their music inaccessible, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I first saw the video for Justified and Ancient. It blew my mind. This is a big budget music video featuring a hugely popular country star singing about a sect of Discordians from one of my favourite books of all time, a book that remains relatively unread despite its reputation in conspiracy theory circles. This truly bizarre piece of art had remained hidden for decades at the behest of its creators. In truth, it’s not the kind of music that I enjoy listening to, but I couldn’t help but love it. This is real weirdo stuff, but at one point it had been hugely popular. I was fascinated.

**Blackstone Publishing – 2024 (First version published 2012)**

A couple of weeks ago, I read John Higg’s The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds. It was really entertaining. It’s a strange book to read too because so much of it seems unbelievable. The KLF’s story is so strange that they almost seem like characters from Illuminatus! rather than just fans of the book.

So Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were essentially failed musicians who had been in a few different projects but had taken on non-creative roles in the music industry. Almost as a joke, they started a “hip-hop” project that consisted of them mashing up famous songs and releasing them as singles. They used their contacts in the music press to drum up a bunch of attention and controversy. The music was fairly crap, but they did media stunts and record burnings to keep the attention going. It worked, but it is unclear as to whether they were just extremely lucky or whether the media stunts they were performing were actually extremely potent and successful chaos magic rituals. After getting a number one single with this approach, they turned away from the mash-up genre and started making stadium house. In reality, they only wrote a few songs, but they reworked and remixed these until they became huge hits. They continued doing weird stuff as they released these songs including making a road movie with no plot and burning a giant wicker man in a ritual in front of a bunch of music journalists on a small Scottish island.

In 1992, they were awarded the best British group award at the Brit Awards. It was in response to their growing popularity that they invited Extreme Noise Terror to perform with them. They also left a dead sheep outside the venue. Within a few weeks of that awards ceremony, the band quit the music industry and deleted their music. The money burning happened a few months later.

Higgs’ book is great. It has plenty of detail on the story of the band, but it also gets into odd theories too. There’s a chapter on Alan Moore, who seems to have been friends with the band, and there is even mention of psychogeography in here. The book heavily leans into RAW’s reality tunnel ideas too. The KLF claimed they were members of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAM). (The JAMs were agents of chaos fighting against the Illuminati in Illuminatus!) Anyone who has read Illuminatus! will remember Operation Mindfuck, the Discordian effort to thoroughly mess with people’s heads at any cost. That Drummond and Cauty leaned into the promulgation of chaos is obvious, but Higgs discusses the interesting idea that they were driven to do so by external forces rather than internal ones.

After reading the book, I also watched the 2021 documentary, Who Killed the KLF? I’m used to reading about bizarre stuff, but seeing video footage of what I had just read about was quite weird. These things really happened. The way we consume media is so different now compared to the late 80s/early 90s that it’s really hard to imagine anything as weird as the KLF becoming hugely popular again. I know there are still plenty of brilliant oddballs out there being creative, but I feel like it’s a shame that they’ll never have to chance to share their weirdness with a mainstream audience. At the same time, it was very encouraging to see people really pushing the boundaries of popular entertainment. Markoff Chaney would be proud.

In honesty though, I still think that burning the million pounds was lame.

Kathleen Hale’s Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls

A few years ago I started posting about true crime books. For the last decade, the tagline of this website has read “Horror and Occult Book Reviews” and in keeping with the theme of the blog, I’ve only posted about crime books focusing on cases that involved the occult in some way. Most crimes are horrific in some regard, but horror fiction does not play into many crimes in the same way that occult beliefs frequently do. There is, however, one infamous criminal case in which horror fiction plays a central role, the 2014 Slenderman stabbing of Waukesha, Wisconsin. While the story of 2 children attempting to stab their friend to death as a sacrifice to a sinister internet boogeyman seems rather suitable for a website like this, I have avoided discussing it here for personal reasons.

At this point, I doubt many of the freaks who spend their time reading blogs like mine don’t know the story of Morgan Geyser and Annisa Weier. When they were 12 years old, they became convinced that a character they read about on the internet would let them come and live in his mansion if they murdered their best friend. This seems absolutely crazy, and that is because one of these girls was suffering from severe case of schizophrenia and the other kid was impressionable and messed up in her own ways. Together they formed a very toxic relationship that school counselors and parents failed to notice until it was too late. They stabbed their friend 19 times and left her to die in the forest while they headed towards the forest to find Slender Mansion.

The book I read, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, was good. It doesn’t focus on the sensational aspects of the story and rightfully directs its readers’ attention to the shortcomings of the education, rehabilitation and mental health systems in America.

While the victim of this affair is obviously the child who was stabbed, it’s hard to believe how badly the support systems in Morgan Geyser’s life failed her. This book was published 4 years ago, and Morgan was recently in the news again for trying to flee her group home. I don’t think anyone suspects she’s out to hurt anyone at this point, but she is clearly very insane. The entire story of this case is horribly depressing. If you’re interested though, this book is a good place to start.

So apart from the fact that I generally avoid reading about children getting hurt, I’ve specifically avoided covering Slenderman stuff in the past because of my personal connection to the story.

I was 16 years old when we got the internet in our house. My parents knew nothing about the web, and my friends were computer nerds. I very quickly learned how to delete my browser history and how to connect with other like minded weirdos. I used to post on a few different heavy metal forums, and on one of these I befriended a user called DevilMatt666. He was 14 years older than me, and I thought he was really cool. He had seen Pantera live and used to describe things that he liked as “mint”. I’m pretty sure he’s the person who first introduced me to the music of Glenn Danzig. We weren’t best friends or anything, but I would have interacted with this guy several times a week for at least 4 or 5 years. When the internet changed and forums started to die, Matt was one of the few posters I added on facebook.

I remember sitting in work one day in 2014, reading the news. I had seen mention of the Slenderman stabbing but hadn’t bothered reading about it properly. When I saw a headline mentioning this incident and the name Morgan Geyser, a bell went off in my head. I knew that name. My internet buddy Matt’s last name was Geyser, and I knew his kid’s name was Morgan because he posted about her all the time. I had seen a constant stream of pictures of this kid as she grew up. Honestly, one of the things I liked about Matt was the fact that he was a big, long haired heavy metal dude who was absolutely enamored with his little girl. Underneath the tattoos and sick goatee was a big softy. When I saw the photos in the news article, I knew it was her.

Matt disappeared from the internet for a while, and when he returned he was a broken man. In truth, the only things I remember about him from this point on were the endless posts about missing Morgan and not being able to stop crying. I saw comments and articles on the internet labelling him as a Satanist and a monster, but as far as I could see, he was a really lovely man. I got rid of facebook in 2020, and it was only after reading a recent article on Morgan’s escape that I read that he died 3 years ago. This was a real bummer, but even when he was alive I found it hard to imagine a happy ending to his story.

Knowing that he was dead and that calling attention to this case was no longer potentially going to upset him, I read this book about what happened. It was actually quite challenging to get through. Part of this is the fact that it’s an all round sad story, but my familiarity with some of the characters and the fact that I have my own kids now made it quite a struggle to get through. Keep an eye on your children.

Two Books about Hell – A Short Stay in Hell and The Divine Farce

I read two books about Hell recently that were both really, really good.

A Short Stay in Hell – Steven L. Peck

I picked this up on a whim a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a horror novel set in Hell, but despite some fairly brutal violence, the actual horror here is made up of a kind of philosophical dread instead of any Satanic sadism.

A Mormon dies and wakes up in Hell to find that his religion was false but that the real god is somewhat lenient in his wrath. The Mormon is doomed to stay in Hell, not for eternity, but only a limited time. The amount of time is determined on how long it takes him to find a specific book in a library.

This doesn’t sound so bad, right? Even the biggest libraries we’ve built wouldn’t take too long to comb over. The difficulty for the protagonist is that he’s not stuck in a university library. He’s stuck in the Library of Babel, the one described in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. This library is very big indeed. It contains every 410 page book that could possibly be composed out of the 95 characters most keyboards can print. When you start thinking about how many books that makes, it becomes quickly apparent the library contains a rather large number of books indeed.

The vastness of that number, which is arbitrarily small when you think about it, is where the horror lies. The notion of existing in any state for half as long as it might take to find the book makes eternal oblivion seem preferable. The living conditions in the library are not generally that bad. The inhabitants there have unlimited food, companions and warm beds. It’s the amount of time that they have to spend like this that messes with your head when you start to think about it. Personally, I think the idea of any form of eternal consciousness seems nightmarish.

This book is short, entertaining and subtly horrifying. I strongly recommend you all read it.

The Divine Farce – Michael S.A. Graziano

After finishing A Short Stay in Hell, goodreads recommended Michael S.A. Graziano’s The Divine Farce. Graziano is another academic. (He’s a neuroscientist, while Peck is an evolutionary biologist.) I had enjoyed Peck’s book so much that I was delighted at the prospect of reading something similar.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised. This is another one about Hell, although here, the characters don’t seem to remember anything about the life that lead them to Hell. The whole plot seemed a bit like an allegory for life. Things start off with the characters trapped together in what seems like an upright coffin. They remain here for untold ages before escaping into a vast cavern filled with other maladjusted freaks. They get separated, and the rest of the story follows one of them as he tries to make sense of his new existence.

This book is also very short, and I don’t feel any need to further discuss the plot. It was very entertaining, and I recommend that you track it down and read it.

Jesus was a Vampire and a Dragon – Nicholas De Vere’s The Dragon Legacy

It has been a long time since I gave up on a book. When I started this blog, I had more free time and hence more tolerance for absolute bullshit. The last time I started a book and actually found myself unable to finish it was back in 2016 when I attempted a book called You Are Becoming A Galactic Human. A few years ago, I read a book by Tracy Twyman and a friend recommended I read a book by her pal Nicholas De Vere. I knew it was more on the bloodline of Christ story, but aside from that I had no idea what it would be like.

Before starting, I looked this de Vere guy up. He died a few years ago, but there’s some fairly bizarre claims about him on the internet. He traced his ancestry back and found out that he was descended from royalty, and it seems like he managed to have a royal title legitimately conferred on himself, but I’m not sure of the details there. He also claimed that he was a descendant of Elves, Vampires and potentially Jesus Christ.

I don’t think many people have read this man’s work. Part of this is due to the obscure nature of his claims, and part of it is likely how difficult he made it to understand what he was actually claiming. I spent over a week’s worth of reading on this book and got through less than half of it. The first few chapters weren’t easy to follow, but I could get the basic gist of what they were saying. It became so agonizing after a few hundred pages that I had to give up. My brain wasn’t taking anything in, and I didn’t want to waste another 2-3 weeks staring a book that wasn’t making any sense at all.

I’m going to summarize what I understood of the first few chapters.

Chapter 1
Human beings are dumb idiots. The Dragons (people with dragon blood) are Elves and are a separate species who have been persecuted for the last 1000 years. They are magic and exist on a higher realm that normal humans can’t comprehend. They have better senses than normal people like some animals do. The Grail Code is only applicable between Dragons because everyone else is shit. Dragons ritualistically drink the blood of their kings to gain their knowledge. Literally. Jesus was actually Satanic because Satan was actually good.

Chapter 2
Vampires and witches are all elves. When I was reading the words ‘elf’ and ‘elves’ in the previous chapter, I found it difficult not to think of the elves of Tolkien. It turns out I was right to think this way because those are the kind of elves that the author is talking about.

Chapter 3
Dracula is based in fact. Stoker was actually in the Golden Dawn and based his novel on insider information. Real vampires only drank the menses of beautiful virgins. This would make it likely that Jesus was in fact a vampire.

Chapter 4
The Elves faced a worse holocaust than the Jews. Again, the elves are literally like the elves in Lord of the Rings. The author compares homo-sapiens to hobbits. The elves who kept their bloodline pure weren’t racist because asking them to have sex with a regular person would be like asking a black person to have sex with a monkey. It’s not racist for them to refuse that! (This logic is not mine!)

Chapter 5
Things are getting complicated now. The author seems to think he’s talking to a mate that already understands all of this stuff. He gets into his family history. The de Vere dragon family are far superior to current monarchs who aren’t elven at all. He makes some good points about how garbage collectors never get knighted but provide a much more important service than actors or football managers. I thought this was a very interesting thought.

Chapter 6
Agonizing swill cross referencing grail lore, Irish mythology, kabala and numerology. The main take aways here are the swastika and the Star of David are the same thing. Jews are Aryan. The salmon of knowledge is actually a euphemism for licking the pussy off a beautiful woman. It really seems like the author lives in his own world. He seems to forget that people will have a hard time with him using words that generally mean the precise opposite of how he uses them.

Chapter 7
I cannot read this book anymore. I like the ideas, but the writing is too frantic and confusing.

I am sure there are gems spread throughout the rest of the book, but I am not able to spend any more time reading it. I’m sure de Vere’s fans will say that I’m just a mudblood homo-sapien who wouldn’t be expected to understand intelligent literature like this, but I could trace my ancestry back to the Merovingian Dynasty if I tried hard enough, so I am likely an elf, vampire and a dragon too.

Hailey Piper’s A Game in Yellow

I have subscriptions to a few different public libraries. Most of the horror that they offer is quite new, and I generally avoid that kind of thing. In recent months, I’ve read a few very enjoyable works of modern horror, and so I’ve been a bit more open to stuff from the library. The other day, I was looking through Libby, and I saw the audiobook for a title named A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper. It seemed liked it would offer a new spin on Robert Chamber’s King in Yellow mythos, and the blurb of the book mentioned S&M, so I downloaded it.

Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this book at all.

It’s about a woman who isn’t finding sex with her partner satisfying. This leads to them trying more extreme forms of bondage. These attempts to spice up their sex life don’t work, and so the main character resorts to reading pages from The King in Yellow, a play that drives people insane. This works very briefly, but she overdoes it and falls victim to the King.

The plot is a pretty cool idea, but the main character was a boring, self centered, unpleasant piece of crap. Her negativity drained all tension out the book. I wasn’t able to bring myself to hate or pity her. She was just annoying, the kind of person I would avoid at all costs. I could not have cared less about what was going to happen to her. The other characters were more interesting, but their roles in the book really only served to give an insight into how much of an annoying loser the protagonist was.

There was one part where she overhears the women in her office chatting about how handsome a man is and this makes her look down on them. She’s supposed to be gay, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t be particularly interested in cute guys, but to look down on people for what they like is an asshole thing to do, especially when they’re just having a chat at work to get through the day. I’m not gay, but if I heard my gay or straight female coworkers talking about cute a guy is), I’d be happy to join in on the chat or at least take a look to see what the fuss is about. Her response to her coworkers is, “Is he what gets you wet, or is he what you’re told to want?” This really reminded me of a lame dork I knew as a teenager who had “You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.” written on their backpack. Go back to Hot Topic, you sniveling, cringey dork.

She was also vindictive, careless about the safety of others, frequently late for work, completely humorless, frigid and sneaky. She was such a dose that I really wanted the book to be over soon after starting.

Fred Chappell’s Dagon

**Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. – 1968**

I’ve wanted to read Fred Chappell’s Dagon for years. I knew it was one of the more esteemed Lovecraftian novels and that it was written by a writer who wasn’t specifically a horror guy. I went into the book thinking that Fred Chappell was a noir fiction writer, but apparently I made that up. He was actually a poetry and literature kind of chap. Dagon confirms this. It’s definitely a bit deeper than tentacle monsters.

This book is categorized as Southern Gothic. I read some books by Faulkner and O’Connor when I was younger, and I mostly remember them being sad, sweaty, claustrophobic things. Chappell’s Dagon definitely contains those elements, but it starts off like half of August Derleth’s Lovecraftian stories: an academic inherits a farm that contains sinister and disturbing secrets. This one has bloody chains in the attic and a family of hideously ugly freaks living in a shack on the edge of the property. There’s also a pile of seemingly indecipherable documents containing references to Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth that seemingly drive the reader insane.

From here on, I’m going to discuss how the book ends, so if you haven’t read it, go and do so before continuing with this post. The book is not a masterpiece, but it was thoroughly unpleasant, and I quite enjoyed reading it.

So after the protagonist reads some of the weird letters in his house, he falls in love with a freakishly ugly young woman and murders his wife. He then spends the rest of the book drinking himself to death and getting tortured by the ugly mutant. After being held down and tattooed in front of a bunch of people, he is thrown in a hole and dies.

My immediate response on finishing the book was that I loved it. I really enjoy when horror novels end horribly. I kept thinking about this one after finishing it though, and in retrospect, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why did the main character kill his wife? They had an argument, but murdering her was a bit excessive. Why was the girl so ugly? Her face is described as fishlike, but are we to believe her ancestors hailed from Innsmouth or was she just minging? Why does the author passively let her destroy him? Who are the people that she involves in his torture? Are they in a cult? Why are the Lovecraftian deities mentioned? Nothing supernatural happens here.

As somebody who mostly reads trashy fiction, it unnerved me to have so many unanswered questions at the end of a book, but none of these issues actually bothered me when I was reading. Things generally do seem more horrific when they don’t make sense, and I think that the omission of these explanations was intentional.

The combination of Lovecraftian horror and Southern Gothic doesn’t really work. (Although it worked a Hell of a lot better here than in Lovecraft Country!) The genres are just a little too far removed from each other to mesh cohesively, but Chappell’s effort to do so was about as successful as we could realistically hope it to be. It’s not a perfect book, but I enjoyed reading it and i am still thinking about it a week later.

I’ve been hitting the fiction hard recently. I read 4 novels this week, and I wasn’t sure which to post first. There’s lots of cool stuff coming up in the next few weeks, so check back regularly!

“I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!” – Gef the Talking Mongoose

Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose – Christopher Josiffe

In 1931, a talking mongoose named Gef invited himself to live with a farming family on the Isle of Man. He stayed with them for a decade, engaging in long conversations, eating their food, catching them rabbits, keeping them up to date on island gossip and occasionally spitting and peeing on them. Several times he let them touch him and take very blurry photographs of him. Despite his brazen personality, Gef, or the Dalby Spook, as he was sometimes known, was generally hesitant to engage with anyone but the farmer, his wife and their daughter.

A lot of people, including my old pal Harry Price, dismissed this as a hoax, but the family remained adamant that they were telling the truth. There are several theories about different members of the family deliberately tricking the others, but none of the three ever admitted to such. They had little to gain from their fabulous claims, and they made an effort to shun some of the attention they received. This is an interesting case partly because one of the main reasons for believing the story is the fact that it is so ridiculous. If the family was deliberately conducting a hoax, we would expect them to do a better job.

Followers of this blog will know that I am generally quite skeptical of paranormal phenomenon, but personally, I’m not convinced this was entirely a hoax. I think it likely had more to do with mental illness than simple deceit. This family had moved to the Isle of Man because the father’s business ventures had failed. They were forced into a difficult existence where they were not only physically isolated but socially separate to their closest neighbours. I think it’s very possible that the father had a mental breakdown and managed to convince his family that his hallucinations were real. This may have led to the family to perform acts of deception as a means to avoid internal conflict. Either way, it’s a fascinating story.

I’ve come across mentions of Gef before, and I’ve had Josiffe’s book on my to-read list for ages, but I brought it to the top a few weeks ago. I was going to say that it was after coming across mention of Gef in Graham J. McEwan’s Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland, but I just looked there and realised that Gef doesn’t get a mention! The last place I saw him referenced was actually in The R’lyeh Text, a grimoire of Lovecraftian magic! There’s an essay at the back of that book which claims that Gef may well have been an influence on Lovecraft’s Brown Jenkin from The Dreams in the Witch House. Josiffe repeats these ideas towards the end of his book and notes that it was very likely that Lovecraft would have encountered articles on Gef in the news during the 1930s.

This book was great. The author presents things very fairly, and does a good job of just presenting the facts of the case. If anything, I think he could have been a bit more dismissive. The last few chapters of the book look at phenomena (poltergeists, fairies, tulpas and witches familiars…) in an attempt to potentially explain what Gef might have been. I wasn’t convinced by any of these suggestions. The story is weird enough without anything supernatural or paranormal being brought in to explain it. Still, I appreciated the comprehensive nature of Josiffe’s work. I am quite certain that this will remain the definitive book on the Gef phenomenon forever. If you like books about weird stuff, you have to read this masterpiece. This is the best book I’ve read this year, and it may well remain so for the remaining 361 days of 2026.

2025, The Year in Review

Another year has come and gone, and I’m still here blogging about creepy books. I sometimes wonder if I’m going to run out of weird stuff to read, but as I dig deeper and deeper into the archives of the occult, the horrifying and the Fortean, that seems less and less likely. At the same time, I am always interested in book recommendations, so please reach out if you have any!

For the last few years, I’ve tried to split my posts evenly between fiction and non fiction. This year, I read more trashy novels than anything else, but many of these were by the same authors, so I grouped them. I did posts on Sidney Williams, Ray Garton, and Stephen R. George.and Whitley Strieber. I planned to do the same for John Russo and Jack D. Shackleford, but the books I read by them were so bad that I abandoned my plan. I also read The Omen and The Exorcist series and The Wickerman books.

I ended up reading quite a bit of modern horror too. I used to avoid stuff that was written in this century, but there are still some talented authors alive today. I really enjoyed the books I read by David Sodergren and John Langan.

I read some other fiction that falls outside of the aforementioned categories. I was super excited to finally get my hands on a copy of Otto Fredrick’s elusive Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair, and the research for my post on Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories led me to see a ghost. I really enjoyed doing the reading for my posts on Nicolas Hawksmoor and Jack the Ripper.

I focused on conspiracies last year when it came to non-fiction. I did a few conspiracy texts this year, but also included some crime, some aliens, some cryptozoology and some general Fortean weirdness. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was a bizarre highlight. Also, I apologise to anyone who was deeply offended by my silly post on Fascist Yoga. Perhaps the strangest text I encountered was Martti Koski’s My Life Depends on You! In May, I was interviewed on the Bonversations podcast about some of this stuff.

I also did a few books on occultism and Satanism. I think I’m going to be a bit more picky about the grimoires I choose to review on here in the future. I went looking for something quick to review the other day, and after starting a grimoire, I did a little research on the author and discovered that he was literally mentally disabled. Still, I did enough studying of occult lore in 2025 to learn how to raise some tentacled Elder Gods from their deathly slumber. I was also finally able to read a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch. It was everything I hoped for.

February of this year marked an entire decade of Nocturnal Revelries. For several of those years, this blog was pretty much my only creative output. This summer, I started writing my own music, and I have been focusing more of my free time on that recently. This is partly why I didn’t post as frequently during the summer. Nevertheless, as the year progressed, I managed to balance my 2 hobbies. I will be taking a course in the evenings over the next few months too, so hopefully I’ll find a way to juggle that too. I have a few bizarre texts lined up for the near future, so please check in regularly.

I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. I’ve quite enjoyed the blog recently, so I’m sure I’ll be doing another one of these posts at the end of 2026 too.

Thanks, and happy New Year!

D.E. McCluskey’s Zola

I read A Helping Hand by Celia Dale this week. It was an utterly horrible book, but it was more a horrifying thriller than a horror novel. This left me with only 2 days before my weekly post, so I set out to find something short and fast. I’ve been reading fairly serious stuff recently, and I wasn’t in the mood for anything heavy or thought provoking. I thought back to Aron Beauregard’s The Cuck, a ridiculous splatterpunk horror novel that I breezed through last year, and decided that something along those lines would be perfect. Then I remembered reading about Zola, a notoriously disgusting book that somehow involved cheese. Perfect.

Yeah, this is ridiculous, disgusting garbage. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. That’s just what it is. It’s just gross-out scenes following gross-out scenes with little in the way of plot. The basic premise is that an abused housewife murders her husband after finding out that he has raped their son. This leaves them liberated from his abuse, but completely incapable of living a normal life. The results are murder, cannibalism and extremely poor hygiene. There’s cheese involved in all of these. I think that’s supposed to be funny. The characters have to eat cheese when they’re murdering or violating others.

I didn’t like the fact that the author had to use the rape of a child as the catalyst for the story. Yeah, it makes you want the rapist to suffer, but it’s lowest common denominator when it comes to fueling outrage. It’s not really necessary for the plot, and it honestly seemed lazy to me. I’m sure some fans of extreme horror would defend the author and claim I’m too woke or easily offended, but that would make them people who enjoy reading books about children getting abused, so I’m ok with the likes of them not agreeing with me. This element was just horrible. It’s not entertaining or funny.

After the first few chapters, Zola veers into bizarro territory, and nothing bears any resemblance to the real world. It was from this point that I began to enjoy the book. It gets so, so silly. I laughed heartily when Gordon, the main character, started eating handfuls of his own cum and referring to them as Gordoncakes. There was another part where he tries to marinade his mother’s decaying breasts in a shitty toilet bowl that also made me giggle. There’s literally a line in this book that says, “I’ll wrap the steaks in her dirty, then get the gravy from the toilet.” The “dirty” referred to here is the character’s dead mother’s shit filled knickers. LOL. It reminded me of Sea Caummisar’s Scatology, another extremely intelligent and classy novel.

Hopefully it will be another while before I have to resort to this kind of garbage again. I do quite enjoy the silliness, but the edginess grates on me.

John Langan’s The Fisherman

I don’t remember how I heard of this book, but I picked up a copy recently and really, really enjoyed it.

A man loses his wife to cancer and takes up fishing as a means to occupy himself. He makes friends with another recent widower and they start going fishing together. On the way to a new fishing spot, they stop at a diner for breakfast, and the owner tells them a chilling tale about the spot they are heading to. Nevertheless, they go there anyways.

The story they’re told in the diner makes up the bulk of the book, and it’s probably the scariest part. I was listening to an audiobook version before going to bed, and it scared the shit out of me. I’ve read my share of horror novels, and it’s quite rare that they actually creep me out like this one did. It was horrible and disturbing but purposefully written.

I’ve seen this referred to as Lovecraftian horror, and while I see the influence, this does not read like Lovecraft at all. The characterisation and imagintive plot reminded me of Stephen King at his best. The author used to be a university lecturer, and it seems his work is considered “literary horror”. I was too busy enjoying the book to really notice this except for when the author lifted lines directly from Moby Dick and put them in his own characters’ mouths. I only noticed this because when I read Moby Dick as a young man, I liked these specific lines so much that I wrote them on a sticky note and kept it in my wallet for years.

I know I’m not saying much here, but I deliberately avoided any kind of spoilers before reading this. I’m glad I did, and want you to do so also. Get a copy of this book and read it. I’m confident in saying that this was the most enjoyable novel I read in 2025. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author in the future.