Carnivals of Life and Death: The Bizarre Life of Conspiracist James Shelby Downard

A few months ago, my friend recommended that I read the autobiography of James Shelby Downard. I didn’t recognise the name, but it turned out that this Downard guy is a mysterious figure in the conspiracy theory world. It’s not that he was into mysterious topics (although he definitely was). His life, output and reputation are shrouded in uncertainty. I mentioned him recently in my post about Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger books. The reference to him in the first of these books is quite vague, and he’s only mentioned as Mr. Downard. Wilson describes hearing a tape recording of a conversation between Downard and Jim Brandon (aka William Grimstad, a notorious white supremacist). In this conversation (some of which can be heard here) Downard and Grimstad supposedly set out a theory about how the Illuminati are preparing the world for UFO contact. More than a decade later, an essay by Downard appeared in Feral House’s Apocalypse Culture. Apocalypse Culture is an infamous collection of essays from some of the most bizarre and disgusting fringes of society. Kill King 33, Downard’s essay, is one of the strangest pieces of writing in there. It basically blames the killing of JFK on the Freemasons. It’s an abridged version of a longer piece of writing that appeared in another Feral House book a few years later. The revised version of Apocalypse Culture replaces it with another essay by Downard, and Apocalypse Culture II features yet another essay by him. It was through these appearances that the work of Downard came to attention of mainstream conspiracists.

A few years after he died, Feral House published Downard’s autobiography. It such a bizarre piece of writing that it convinced some people that James Shelby Downard was actually a hoax perpetrated by Michael A. Hoffman II (his pal and collaborator) and Adam Parfrey. This doesn’t make sense to me as Robert Anton Wilson came across him well before these two collaborated. Also, I feel that if somebody was going to make up a person, they would put more effort into making things seem believable. The writing here is far too ludicrous for me to imagine that a person wanted me to believe it. How many 5 year olds would think of circumcising themselves to get out of a pickle? A lot of this book is made up of memories that were wiped from Downard’s mind as a young man which he later recalled. The way that he got these memories back isn’t clearly outlined, and most of them are so hazy and unbelievable that I suspect they were just dreams.

James Shelby Downard’s The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth, 1913-1935

Unfortunately, while this book does touch on aspects of conspiracy theories, it doesn’t do so in a meaningful or interesting way. The enjoyment that comes from reading this text is derived solely from the surprise that an adult man could write such bizarre nonsense. I don’t normally summarize books chapter by chapter, but I have done so here for my own future reference and to save you from having to wade through this terrible, insane piece of writing. This is long, so if you’re only mildly interested and just want the craziest parts, I suggest just reading the bits I have highlighted. (I expect that doing so will convince you to carefully reread the whole thing.)

Chapter by Chapter Summary

Chapter 1
The author, a 5 year old boy, is kidnapped by the KKK after being arrested for smuggling alcohol. Goes on to kill KKK by blowing some up with dynamite and shooting others with gun he stole from a police officer. He later kills more men with dynamite.

Chapter 2
His mom makes him dress like a girl to go meet some men in a music shop. When be gets there he shoots one with a gun he had hidden in his outfit. Next day his mom sends him away with some other men. His gun is gone, so he packs a scissors for protection. The men poison him, but he spits it out. When he is left for dead, he gets an erection, so he takes out the scissors he has stashed in his outfit and circumcises himself. His screams of pain scare the bad men away. A few months later an old man tries to turn him into a golem by writing on his forehead with lipstick.

Chapter 3
Mom runs away with a “dirty greaser” named Count Eugenio, but she takes James with her. He is taken to Jekyll Island where he sees Alexander Graham Bell getting sucked off by a gambler. He later goes to a party where a man named “Cock Robin” chokes him in front of a cheering crowd. Cock Robin is shot dead shortly after. The KKK show up again and Alexander Graham Bell uses a machine to bring Cock Robin back to life. Then he gets sucked off by a klansman. Count Eugenio then takes James to some kind of toilet museum where James pisses all over the floor and walls. James will later see somebody cut off Count Eugenio’s bollocks and shove it down his throat.

Chapter 4
The gang move on. In one place they stay, James finds himself in a warehouse full of centipedes that are part of a mind control experiment. then his mother abandons him with a paedophile hotel-keeper, but James locks the paedo in a room, fills it with gas and then lights a match and throws it in. He then lives on the street with a coyote and eats cow shit.
He returns to try to kill the man he recently blew up, but the man actually sends a killer to get the boy first. The boy sets his pet rattlesnake on the killer and then beats him unconscious with a chunk of wood and steals his money. Mom comes back and says she took so long because she had been kidnapped.

Chapter 5
The KKK kidnaps the 7 year old narrator and his dad, and then they crucify the boy. Dad pulls the nails out and takes him home, but KKK kidnap him again and try to bum him, but his asshole is too small. They plan to cut his asshole to make it bigger, but their boss says no.
The narrator later tricks them into shooting each other by firing a cap gun in the air.
Days later, his mom tells him to go to scene of the shootout he caused to get a present. He doesn’t want to, but his mom forces him. When he gets there, another child gives him a dead cat in a box. He then attends a dinner in a Jewish family’s home, but he seems to suspect the food is poisoned so he throws it on the table, issues an anti Semitic remark and runs away.

Chapter 6
The Jewish man he insulted gets him a job at a local bar that is actually a front for a freemason’s hall. A man there takes a disliking to him so he tries to feed him to some carnivorous pigs. The kid befriends the pigs and sets them free and throws the skull of one of their victims through the bar’s window. The freemasons then conduct a trial to determine his guilt, but this is ended quickly when he takes out his willy and pees at the judge.
A man then tries to shoot him, but he fills the bar with gas and blows it up. After the explosion he sticks his pocket knife up the bad guy’s nose.
The freemasons are angry about this so they send a cowboy assassin to kill James, but James shoots him with a shotgun made out of a pipe and then smashes his face with a hammer and throws corpse over a bridge. This all happened when he was 8 or 9.

Chapter 7
The boy sees a snake charmer doing an act, betting people they cant lift his heavy snake. The boy gives the snake some meat and the snake is so thankful that it lifts itself onto this shoulders and makes it look like he is lifting it, much to the charmer’s chagrin.
A week later his mom sends him to the shop for cleaning fluid. He also buys a water pistol which he fills with said fluid. On his way home, the snake charmer threatens him with a real gun, so James shoots him in the eyes with the cleaner and stabs him in the belly. He then feeds him to the snake and opens a sewer drain so the snake can escape. He then goes into the charmers home, kisses another of his snakes and gives his Gila dragon an orgasm.
Three men jump out of a car and try to kill him on his way home, but he shoots 2 of them. He was 9 or 10 at this point.

Chapter 8
The klan and his mom plot to kill him again, but he sets them on fire. Then another man kidnaps him and tries to shoot him, but the kid shoots his eyeball out with his BB gun.

Chapter 9
He agrees to join the Order of DeMolay, a masonic youth group. His initiation ritual is held in a house owned by Count Cagliostro, and another boy tries to murder him with a ventriloquist’s dummy containing a spring loaded knife. He has a thick magazine stuffed down his shirt though, so he lives to get the dummy to stab the stabber. He then gets one of his mates to steal Cagliostro’s sword. Cagliostro, who may actually just be a man named Beppo, gets pissed so tries to kill James with a gun loaded with a needle bullet, but James shouts at Cagliostro that he is the devil and frightens him away.
Then he takes the needle bullet out of the gun and stabs Cagliostro with it before killing him by smashing his head with a telephone. His mom convinces him to go to the funeral, but he is kidnapped by Beppo’s friends to be buried alive with the corpse, but he stabs one of them and jumps out of the car.

Chapter 10
His teacher takes him on school tour and tries to abandon him, but he finds a way home. He electrocutes a pig-owner who was using his family’s faucet.

Chapter 11
Sister’s boyfriend introduces him to Arthur Rochford Manby, a con artist who later had his decapitated face eaten by a dog. His mom tells him to move out after he finds his dad living in an abandoned building. She gives him 75 cents and a shotgun and an address. When he gets there, he befriends a pack of wild boar outside. When he enters some men try to get him drunk and fuck a prostitute, but he runs away and sends his pigs to kill the men. Then as he is going through their pockets, the girl they tried make him shag comes and helps. She later tries to adopt him but it doesn’t work out.

Chapter 12
Mom throws hot coffee in two burglars’ eyes. A man in a quarry tries to kill him, so he hurts the man (presumably with a gun) and chains his buddies to a fence, fills the quarry with water and walks away.

Chapter 13
James goes to see a new oil pipe being laid. A man tries to kill him by shoving him into the pipe, so he shoots the man in the head with his “nigger shooter” (a slingshot). He is immediately taken to a house where another man sticks him in a wooden trap, but he escapes and forces the man into the trap where he probably dies.

Chapter 14
The KKK try to get him to join, but when they tell him to whip a black guy, he refuses. They try to kill him, so he shoots one of them dead and the rest run away. He then goes to free the black guy he didn’t beat from slavery, but he has to shoot the black guy’s boss to set him free.

Chapter 15
He finds a treasure chest but his friends basically steal it from him.

Chapter 16
A man asks James to look at his house. Initially his price is too high, but he drops it on the condition that Downard goes into his father’s tomb and takes some stuff out of it. When Downard gets there he finds the tomb booby trapped, so he steals the stuff inside out of spite.

Chapter 17
He looks through the stuff he looted from the grave. It’s mostly books attributed to him that seem to be written in a cipher. There is also a machine that he thinks might decipher them. He contacts the American government, but they are no help, and they actually steal one of his books, so he goes to JP Morgan’s house and gets a guided tour of his library.

Chapter 18
Downard writes to Franklin D Roosevelt because the government stole one of his books. The president apologizes and sends some secret service men over to collect everything Downard took out of the grave. He then sends Downard a cheque for a million dollars, but Downard’s dad won’t let him cash it.

Chapter 19
Downard befriends millionaire Mr. Proctor of Proctor and Gamble fame. Proctor borrows his book of cryptograms and when Downard asks for it back Proctor tells him to go to a pottery shop where 2 men show him a skeleton being cremated.
Proctor then tells him to meet him in graveyard but then doesn’t show up.
Downard’s da then brings him back to the pottery shop/crematorium where a man with a shotgun threatens to throw him into a fiery kiln. Downard runs to the car, grabs his shotgun and scares the bad man. The man’s workers then throw the man into the fire and burn him alive.
Downard never gets the book from Proctor back and deduces that it was part of an Illuminati scheme perpetrated by his own father.

Chapter 20
Downard visits another Downard’s house and claims to remember it from childhood. His mom tells him his dad has been lying to him because he resents what the klan did do him because of James. The book was written by Uncle Brad, but no further info on Brad is given.

Chapter 21
James starts a new school. One of the teachers sucks off the students. Downard exposes him at graduation ceremony.

Chapter 22
Mother and father are having trouble with some criminals who stole their house. They send Downard to a masonic lodge. The mason he meets tries to get him to hang a doll, but this makes Downard mad so he pushes the mason down the stairs and pisses in his face. He later meets a guy who tries to kill the president.

Chapter 23
Mom gets dad put into a nuthouse because he has started drinking too much. He tells Downard somebody will come to kill him, but then he hangs himself.

Chapter 24
Downard joins a military camp, but the guys in charge want to kill him so he gets discharged on purpose by deliberately getting caught sneaking out at night. As soon as he is discharged, he walks up to the Whitehouse, gives his name and the security let him in.

Chapter 25
He meets the president and both confess to being illuminati members to each other even though Downard is bluffing. The president then gets him a job at the the Bureau of Investigation but during training an Bureau of Investigation man points a gun at him so Downard shoots him.

Chapter 26
On a Bureau of Investigation mission, Downard goes to the docks to get work from mafia. They say they wont hire him because he looks weak, so he lifts a large man over his head to prove strength. He gets the job and steals some whiskey from a boat. Then he goes back to the Bureau of Investigation who send him on a secret mission to Cuba. When he gets there he buys a gun and meets an old school friend who tells him the Cuban police are going to kill him. Then he meets a man who pulls down his pants and shows him a castration scar. Several cars then drive by Downard and the men inside all try to shoot him, but he shoots each one dead.
He tells a story of how when he was a kid he used to feed some alligators and walk on their backs to burp them. Once he lured a bully into their cage and they ate him.
He kills some more Cuban police officers and meets another member of the secret society of benevolent castrati. He bribes a government official who puts him on a boat with an Obeah priestess who takes him to Haiti. From there he gets boat back to the USA.

Chapter 27
Downard buys a Bugatti but some men hit him in the back of head and take him to a military hospital where they wipe his memory with a mind control machine that gives him seizures and orgasms. He is allowed to escape after a while but he is then abducted again and poked with a syringe full of something. He loses his memory but somehow gets home.

He attends a few colleges but leaves because the people are weird. Has a meeting with military personnel but shortly thereafter passes out. When he comes to, he has a hiccupping fit so he goes to the doctor. The doctor vigorously fingers his asshole. No harm done. He says the doctor did this to stimulate his pudendal nerve. I don’t know why a doctor would do that to a person with the hiccups.

Chapter 28
In Memphis, Downard goes to a sex circus where he sees a woman, probably a witch, having sex with strangers. He leaves before she fucks a dog, but he is more disturbed by the fact that she “fucked and sucked a negro”. The next day he goes to another sex circus with the same girl sucking and fucking strangers, but this time he leaves when they bring a pony in to fuck her.
He tries to stop these sex circuses from happening with help from his Bureau of Investigation buddies, but they wipe his memory.

Chapter 29
He trades a million dollar certificate for an old shotgun and some other crap, but people dupe him out of his prizes except for a fancy archery bow.

Chapter 30
He gets a job on a Greek ship but discovers there are illegal immigrants locked in the hold. He sets them free and they take control of the ship. Both the men working on the ship and the men in the hold are referred to as greasers. I was a bit confused. I know that Mexicans and Greeks had a greasy reputation, but one of these men is referred to as a “chink-greaser”. I guess all foreigners were greasers.

Chapter 31
He goes to watch a boxing match and visits a fencing club and a concert. The Greek calls him and asks him to work on the ship again.

Chapter 32
A famous socialist asks Downard to retrieve some books by an author with the same name as Downard, but when he gets to the place with the books, the door is booby-trapped. He turns off the electricity to the booby trap, gets books and then goes back and punches the socialist in the face. Military guys offer him a job but he gets suspicious because the interview for the job is in the woods. At the second interview for this job, he shoots somebody. He gives the books that somebody with his name wrote to the Skull and Bones society.

Chapter 33
The books by “him” are science, telepathy and prophecy books. He has another job interview, but when he gets there the interviewer attacks him with a needle. He gets the needle and injects the other lad with it. This chap dies. Then he finds the lad who sent him to that interview and punches his face for him. He joins a secret carnival society who try to kill him, but he outsmarts them, steals their chickens and gives them to a black man. He goes to a party in Florida but it turns out to be a gunfight, so he flees.

Chapter 34
He joins a new college and pranks the dean by releasing some chickens into his garden. He finds some old stuff with his name on it of which he has no memory. He would have been about 23 or 24 at this point, but the book ends here.

This book covers the first 23 years of the author’s life, but James Shelby Downard lived until he was about 83 (dates of his birth and death vary by a few years online), and I am sure he had plenty more adventures before he died. I don’t know if I could stomach reading about many more of them though. This book took a lot of effort to read. It’s entertaining to take a look into the mind of a crazy person, but this is a lengthy, dense tome, and it took me more than 2 months to get through it.

Another book of his writings recently appeared, but I don’t think that it’s a continuation of his life story. I have been making my way through some of Downard’s essays recently, and I will do a separate post on them in the near future.

Catholicism, Conspiracies and Consciousness: Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger Trilogy

Robert Anton Wilson has been a hero of mine for quite a while. His Illuminatus! Trilogy was one of the first books I read for this blog. My reviews of his The Sex Magicians and Masks of the Illuminati are probably the best pieces of writing I’ve published. I’ve read a couple more of his books since posting those, but the contents of The Book of the Breast and Quantum Psychology aren’t exactly Nocturnal Revelries material.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about conspiracies recently, and digging in this field this has led me to an absolutely bizarre individual called James Shelby Downard. There are rumours online that he’s not a real person, and that was was made up by Adam Parfrey and Michael Hoffman II for an essay published in Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture from 1987. This confused me as I had read that Robert Anton Wilson had mentioned Shelby in Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the first part of Wilson’s “autobiography”, in 1977. There’s actually a quote on the cover of Shelby’s autobiography from Wilson that says, “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. I thought it only responsible to see what Wilson had to say about Downard, so I read all three entries of the Cosmic Trigger series.

So these books aren’t really an autobiography. There’s autobiographical elements, especially in the second volume, but, as a whole, they’re more a collection of Wilson’s big ideas and how he came to adopt them.

Final Secret of the Illuminati – 1977

The first book wasn’t that great. I’ve watched enough video lectures of Wilson to know his general outlook, and none of the stuff on Timothy Leary, the Illuminati, Discordianism, Aleister Crowley, and the author’s own alien contact came as a surprise to me. One of the big things that Wilson pushes is the idea of reality tunnels and how truth, by his definition, is relative. I accept this idea, and Wilson’s linguistic philosophy is one of my favourite things about him, but the examples he provides in this book are ridiculous. One of his favourite books at the time of writing this was Robert Temple’s The Sirius Connection, one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever read. He also presents the psychic powers of Uri Gellar as evidence for some of his claims. I was a bit surprised that a person who I thought was intelligent had been duped by such garbage. Also, there’s a bit near the end where Wilson presents Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness in significant detail. Admittedly, I am not a cognitive neuroscientist, but this idea absolutely stank of shit to me. The book ends with Wilson’s kid dying. This was heartbreaking to read, and I wonder if it had something to do with the second half of the book being far worse than the first.

Down to Earth – 1991

Part 2 was by far the most enjoyable in the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson tells more of his life story in this one, and he comes across as the witty, interesting guy I know he was. He had spent much of the time between writing this and the first book in Ireland, and this is apparent in his writing. Much of the book is taken up with discussions on his “Irish” upbringing, James Joyce and the modern Irish legal system. He also gets into the P2 conspiracy. Honestly, you could read and enjoy this one without picking up the other 2 entries in the series. It actually deals with the earliest parts of his life more thoroughly than the first entry in the series, so it’d be a fine starting point.

My Life after Death – 1995

I don’t know if I’d been reading too much of the one author or that this book is just worse than the others, but I didn’t hugely enjoy the last entry in the series. Wilson had already covered most of his important life experiences in the previous books, and this one came out only 4 years after the preceding entry. Does enough stuff happen between the ages of 59 and 64 to warrant a new entry in an autobiography? Apparently not. Instead of offering new, insightful ways of thinking about the world, Wilson instead fills this book with cringeworthy claims about the threat of political correctness and how society oppresses men more than women. I am quite sure that Wilson wasn’t a bad guy, but these tirades are hard to stomach in 2024. Don’t get me wrong. I accept that some of the ways that people currently expect others to use language are utterly ridiculous, but in my experience, the people who are complaining about political correctness and “wokeism” are usually assholes. Again, I’ve read enough of Wilson to know that he wasn’t anything close to a bigot, and he does make some valid points about identity politics, but the way he sets his arguments up are a little too similar to your Trump voting uncle’s facebook posts. At one point he asks why there’s no such thing as a straight pride parade. Sigh. There’s some discussion of the Priory of Sion mysteries here, and it seems that Wilson had encountered similar ideas on this topic to Tracy Twyman’s. He also discusses Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Elmyr, the art forger. This wasn’t as interesting as the other books, but it’s still worth a read.

I read these books because I’m going through a conspiracy theory phase at the moment, and Robert Anton Wilson is something of a conspiracy expert. He does discuss multiple conspiracies in these books, but he’s using conspiracies as a way to explain his worldview rather than adding a huge amount to conspiracy lore. Some of his ideas were a bit naïve and/or silly, but Wilson was always self aware enough to avoid coming across as a complete tool. He also had a lot of really good ideas, and I think his ideas on language should be more widely read. The Cosmic Trigger books were amusing overall, and they’re probably an easier starting point than the author’s fiction. I’m sure I’ll get around to more of that in the future.

Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States

**Corgi – 1980 (Originally published 1978)**

When I saw Altered States in my early 20s, I was blown away. It was a big budget Hollywood movie about a scientist who took psychadelics until he turned into a monkey. I also realised it was the source of the “my heart is being touched by Christ” sample from that Ministry song and the cover of Godflesh’s first album. Cool!

A friend told me that the movie had been based on a real set of experiments that had been performed in the 60s, but I wasn’t sure of what these experiments actually entailed. I hadn’t thought about this for years, but I was recently reading a book by Robert Anton Wilson that mentioned John C. Lily and his sensory deprivation tank experiments, and I realised these were what Altered States was based on. John C. Lily did write some books on his experiments, but I think they focus on using the tanks to speak to dolphins as opposed to turning into an ape, so I decided to read the horror novel instead.

It’s at least 15 years since I saw the movie, but as far as I can remember, the book is pretty close to the film. I read that there was conflict between the author, Paddy Chayefsky, and Ken Russell, the director, on the set of the movie. Chayefsky got so mad that he had his names removed from the credits of the movie.

The book is pretty good. The main character is such a dickhead that I was rooting for him to die the whole way through. The author uses a lot of technical jargon for effect, but all the multisyllabic words in the dictionary don’t change the fact that this is a book about a man who gets so high that he turns into a giant slug. I was going to write a more detailed plot synopsis, but there’s really no need.

The visuals from the movie make it a more memorable version. If you’ve seen that and really enjoyed it, give the book a go.

Devoured by Vermin: The Brutal Horror of James Herbert’s Rats Series

One night, when I was 11 or 12 years old, my parents left me downstairs in front of the TV. I didn’t concern myself with what they were doing because I had the opportunity to potentially see some boobs on the tv. I switched on to MTV, and to my great delight, I found a show that was basically a compilation of videos that MTV wouldn’t play during the day. I remember it had Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin and that black and white, sexy Wicked Game video. This was incredible. This was the best stuff I had ever seen. The next video that came on was for a song called “Devoured by Vermin” by a band named Cannibal Corpse. I’m assuming most of the people who read my blog what death metal is, but as a child growing up in 1990s Ireland, I did not. The “heaviest” music I had ever heard at that point had probably been the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something similar. This video was the most disgusting, depraved thing I had ever seen. It didn’t make sense to me. Why would a person make those noises? This wasn’t singing! This wasn’t music! This was evil. This was sick. I hated it. I remember going out with my friends the next day and telling all about it.

A few years later, I started getting interested in classic rock. Then I moved on and got some White Zombie and Korn cds. I liked that stuff, but I kept thinking back to that Cannibal Corpse song I had heard. My musical tastes were getting heavier, but I would never listen to that crap. It was just too much.

Then I got the internet. I spent about a month downloading the video for Devoured by Vermin off of Kazaa. I showed it to one of my best friends, and he was repulsed. I showed it to my cousin. She hated it. Their response was exactly what mine had been. Seeing this, I started to enjoy it. Part of it was seeing how people reacted, but another part of it was googling the band and reading their lyrics. Good grief! I very quickly became a fan of death metal.

Ok, but this is a book blog, why am I harping on about this music video?

Well, recently, I read James Herbert’s The Rats, a super influential horror novel from 1974 about a bunch of rats that attack London and start eating people. It only took a couple of chapters to realise that this book was the inspiration for the death metal song that got me hooked.

Ruthless gnawing vermin, feed
Cleaning off my bones while I breathe
Stenching greasy rodents, swarm
My body is losing its form

– Cannibal Corpse

While I can’t find anything online stating that the book was the inspiration for these lyrics, it is well known that Alex Webster, bassist and lyricist for the band is a huge horror fan, and the words to the song could be describing several of the scenes in this infamous book.

The Rats

**Signet – 1975 (First published 1974)**

Like the song it inspired, this book is not subtle. It’s extremely violent to the point. I had read Herbert’s The Fog before, and while I enjoyed parts of it, I felt it dragged a little bit. The Rats is less than 200 pages, and they’re all good. There’s no surprises with this book. It’s exactly what you think it’s going to be. Go read it if you haven’t already.

Lair

Lair is a very predictable sequel. It’s 4 years after the first rat attack, and the rats have migrated to a nature reserve outside of London. None of the characters from the first book appear except for the rats. It’s so derivative of the first novel that I’d call it pointless if it didn’t contain the scene in which a priest is seen vomiting into an open grave where a bunch of mutant rats are eating the corpse of an old woman. Total redemption! While I definitely enjoyed Lair, it’s easily the worst book in the series.

Domain

**New English Library – 1996 (First published 1983)**

Domain is a much more ambitious book than its predecessors. Not only are the rats back, but 5 nuclear bombs have also fallen on London for totally separate reasons. This is a post apocalyptic disaster novel where the protagonists have to be as wary of other humans as they do with the hideous, mutated, blood thirsty rodents that are trying to eat everything. This is highly enjoyable trash. I read these books in quick succession, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this one.

The City

The final entry in the series is a comic book called The City. I really enjoyed it, but it feels more like a separate work that was inspired by the trilogy of novels rather than a continuation of the story. The rats here are no longer just eating the humans; they have now become our masters. It’s horrendously bleak, and the art is cool. Definitely read this one if you get a chance.

This series, particularly the first book, is both infamous and influential in the field of horror literature, so I don’t feel pressed to say too much more about it. I’ve mentioned a few times when reading other horror novels about killer animals that I assumed they were rip-offs of Herbert’s work. I can now confirm that most the “animal attacks” books by John Halkin, Simon Ian Childer, Harry Adam Knight, David Anne and Nick Sharman that I have read are all knock-offs of The Rats. I feel like I’ve read a lot of these silly animal books in the last few years, and I’m planning on giving this particular genre a break for a while. It took me about 4 years to get around to The Rats after finishing Herbert’s The Fog, but I don’t think I’ll wait that long before returning to his work. I had a lot of fun reading these books.

Beware the Rock People! Tom Dongo’s The Mysteries of Sedona

A long time ago, I read a book called Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds by a guy named Tom Dongo. When I wrote about it here, I was relatively critical of it. Years later, somebody commented on a blog post I had written on Mac Tonnies’ Cryptoterrestrials claiming that I had given Tonnies preferential treatment to Dongo. This made me think. Had I changed, or was Dongo’s book actually deserving of more disdain than Tonnies’? I thought I’d better give Dongo another chance, so I read The Mysteries of Sedona, the first entry in his Sedona series.

The Mysteries of Sedona: The New Age Frontier

Dongo lives in a place called Sedona in Arizona, and he claims that it’s a hotspot of psychic energy. This very short book describes some of the phenomena he has observed and heard about. There are some bog standard accounts of UFO sightings and psychic channellings that aren’t remotely convincing. He spends a lot of the book describing vortices where you can meditate and become one with the cosmic consciousness. This book reads like a pamphlet for unbearable new-age, hippy-dippy asshole tourists.

Honestly, there’s only 2 interesting claims made in this book of trash. The first being that Sedona is actually in the same place as the lost continent of Lemuria and that’s why it has so much psychic energy. Lemuria, of course, never existed, but that doesn’t make much of a difference to the fools who read this garbage.

Dongo also claims that parts of Sedona are inhabited by rock goblins. They aren’t visible to everyone, but Dongo can see them and they look like this:

This reminded me of the Kentucky Goblins case. I recently started watching that Hellier series that came out a few years ago. I was intrigued by the mentions of the elusive Terry Wrist in the first episode, and I liked where things were going with the mothman discussions, but when the team turned to tarot cards to guide their investigation, I turned off the TV in a fit of rage.

Dongo’s work is as bad as I made it out to be all those years ago. This book is utter nonsense. At one point the author suggests that school children be forced to take a class in channelling extraterrestrial spirits. I think I said it best in 2016 when I described Dongo’s writing as “bunch of ridiculous ideas that popped into the head of a stupid weirdo.”

Beware the Cryptocracy! Michael A. Hoffman II’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

When I was reading 9/11 as Mass Ritual, I noticed repeated references to a book called Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffman II and put it on my to-read list. Recently, I’ve been researching a particularly bizarre conspiracy-theorist named James Shelby Downard, and it turns out that his most infamous piece of writing, an essay called Kill King 33°, was co authored by Hoffman. I did a little research on this Hoffman chap, and it turned out that most of his other books are about how much he dislikes the Jews. He’s a holocaust denier and a key proponent of the Irish slavery myth. I’m not interested in reading crap like that, but this particular text is focused on more esoteric topics, and it seems pretty influential among cuckoo crazy conspiracists. Bill Cooper spent a couple of episodes of his radio show on this text. I had to read it.

**Wiswell Ruffin House – 1992 (First published 1989)**

Michael A. Hoffman II – Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

The world is ruled by a shadow government. It’s not exactly clear who makes up this cryptocracy, but it’s almost definitely the Freemasons. This satanic cabal uses the media, shadow language and psychodrama to control the unthinking masses.

Hoffman claims that the cryptocracy produce traumatic events to scare the public and then wait a few years to leak information that basically admits their guilt. Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Kennedy assassination were all examples of this. It’s this idea that 9/11 as Mass Ritual is based around. I covered the Son of Sam stuff before, and I’m going to be revisiting the JFK stuff with Hoffman’s pal Downard real soon. I’m also thinking of doing a deep dive into Ripperology at some point in the future. The main thing holding me back is the sheer volume of books about Saucy Jack. I don’t know where to start.

Shadow language is method by which the cryptocracy deliberately drop hints that they have done something terrible. Remember that time when an Ozzy Osbourne song contained the name of an airport where a plane landed on 9/11? You think it’s coincidence that Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed is on the 33rd parrallel and that there are 33 degrees in Freemasonry? I suppose crazy people forget that there is a finite number of words in and that some words will pop up in conversations about entirely different things.

Hoffman also claims that the murder of Sharon Tate was a sacrifice to the moon goddess after the first astronauts to land on the moon desecrated her by loading 50lbs of moon rocks into their shuttle back to earth. I hadn’t heard that one before.

In general, there are two big problems with Hoffman’s writing. The first is that it’s bad. I’m a big fan of clarity. My approach to argumentative writing has always been to state things as clearly and simply as possible. Don’t beat around the bush. Say what you mean and then provide examples and clarifications. Hoffman doesn’t do this. There’s no clear central thesis to this work. It reads like a frustrated rant.

The second problem is that most of what Hoffman says is glaringly obvious. In fact, many of his claims about the manipulability of the public seem understated given the events of the last 30 years. Human beings are exactly as stupid as Hoffman portrays them, but in reality, the forces that govern them are considerably more powerful (and sinister) than the freemasons. It would be pretty easy for a stupid person to read this book and see it as prophetic. In that way, it’s similar to the Unabomber’s manifesto. It came as no surprise to see that Hoffman actually contributed an essay on the Unabomber to the second volume of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture.

People are dumb idiots, but I cannot believe that there is a well coordinated effort by a shadow government to control them. That idea gives us too much credit. Everybody is stupid, absolutely everybody. The Illuminati, if they exist, are morons too. As mentioned above, I am currently reading more of Hoffman’s work on conspiracies. It’s leading me to a lot of bizarre texts and sketchy characters. Take care. There’s a lot of freaks out there.

JAWS: The Books

I saw Jaws 3 at a friends house when I was 5 or 6. I don’t remember anything about the movie, but I know that it left me permanent fear of swimming in the sea. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I saw the original movie, and I never bothered watching the sequels. I have read that each sequel is significantly worse than the movie that came before it. Over the last few years, I have read a lot of books about killer animals. It’s not a good genre of literature, but its rise in popularity seems to have stemmed from 2 novels published in 1974, James Herbert’s The Rats (review of this series forthcoming) and Peter Benchley’s Jaws. While Benchley never wrote a sequel to Jaws, Hank Searls wrote novelisations for two of the Jaws movie sequels.

Jaws – Peter Benchley

Jaws was a bestseller when it came out, but its fame is largely due to the movie version that came out a year after its release. Spielberg’s classic is significantly different to the novel. The basic plot (giant shark attacks small town) is the same, but the focus of the book is more on the characters than the killer fish. There’s more politics and adultery going on. I know some people think that the book pales in comparison to the film, but it has been so long since I’ve seen the film that I was able to read and enjoy the book as its own entity. After finishing, I did go back and watch a few clips, and I’m quite sure the film is more important than the book, but the book is still a decent read.

Jaws 2 -Hank Searls

The relationship between the movie version of Jaws 2 and its novelisation seems to be the inverse of the relationship between the original book and its adaptation. I haven’t seen Jaws 2, but the consensus online seems to be that it’s a pointless, if moderately entertaining, retelling of the first movie without Quint, the best character. It’s the same story as the first installment, but this time the shark is even bigger. The novelisation is based on an early version of the screenplay that’s supposedly quite different to the movie, and this book is supposedly better than its film version. I really enjoyed most of it. It’s scarier than the original book. There was one part where the sharks shows up that genuinely frightened me. Searls seems to have had a better understanding of the thrill that a reader wants from a book about a killer shark than Benchley did. The only problem with this book, and it is a big one, is the Deux ex machina ending. The suspense ramps up and up and up, and then suddenly it’s all over. This probably wasn’t Searl’s fault. If it was in the screenplay, he would have had to stick with it. Still though, he could have set it up a little better. As we will soon see, Searls was well capable of adding to the source material to make it more entertaining.

Jaws 3 was not based on a book, nor did it get a novelisation. Again, I haven’t seen it in more than 30 years, but I’ve read that it’s utter shit. I was delighted that I didn’t have to read it.

A few weeks ago, I decided to treat myself to a day of book-shopping. I took the train into town so that I could look through all of my favourite second hand bookstores. Most of them have closed down, and the ones that are left are trash. You’d be lucky to find a few Dean Koontz books in their horror sections. I think I went to 4 different shops and found fuck all. On my way home though, I found this on a wall beside the train station. I thank the trash Gods for looking down kindly on me that day!

Jaws: The Revenge – Hank Searls

Jaws 4, or Jaws: The Revenge, is an infamously bad movie. It’s about another giant shark who is trying to kill off the Brody family specifically. (Brody was the police chief who killed the sharks in the first two movies.) Somehow another giant shark is able to follow Ellen Brody from Amityville to the Bahamas so that he can kill her. Think about that. A big fish follows the path of an airplane to kill one of its passengers because her husband killed some other fish in the past. It doesn’t make any sense, and the movie’s tagline of, “This time it’s personal.” is truly hilarious when you think about it. How did Searls make sense of this in his book? Voodoo and cocaine!

Jaws: The Revenge is a stupid book. A few years ago, I would have said that if this wasn’t the novelisation of a Hollywood movie, it wouldn’t have been made. Since then though, I have actually read lots of horror novels that are significantly worse than this. The story was sufficiently entertaining to hold my interest, but reading this book has the added appeal of watching an author struggle to make a coherent story out of a bloody squirt of shark shit.

So another shark comes to Amity and kills Brody’s son. Then Ellen, the dead guy’s mom, flies to the Bahamas to be with her other son who is working as a marine biologist. It turns out that he has insulted a local witchdoctor, and the witchdoctor has summoned a spirit to possess a shark to kill him. This doesn’t really make sense though. Why would the witchdoctor summon a shark in Amity when his enemy is in the Bahamas. How would he even know that his enemy had family in Amity? Also, the shark is the son of the shark from Jaws 2. What are the chances?!

In the second book, Searls describes how a sharks consciousness is limited mostly to the instincts that help it feed. The shark in The Revenge is a fan of reggae music and cannot resist a tropical calypso beat. He also feels seriously miffed when he is harpooned.

Apparently, the voodoo aspect was included in an earlier version of the movie’s screenplay but it was deemed “too corny” to actually film. I can’t comment on whether this was a good decision or not. I went back and watched some clips from Jaws 4 after finishing the novel, and I am quite certain that the novelisation, although deeply silly and not “good” in any sense, must be a lot better than the film.

I have a fondness for reading the book versions of my favourite movies, but I’m not a fan of doing things the other way around. If I’ve read the book, I usually don’t have any interest in seeing the movie. I definitely feel the same about the Jaws sequels, especially when I read that the books are supposedly better than the movies. These books were alright, but in truth, the movie version of the original Jaws is the only version of any of these stories that you need to witness.

Lucilla Rebecca Hedley’s Mark of the Beast as Revealed by the Shape of the Head

I had initially planned another post for today, but as I was putting the final touches to it last night, I discovered something about the book that necessitated further research. Luckily, I’ve had this post lined up for an occasion such as this for a while. Do you want to know how to tell if a person is a deranged freak just by looking at the shape of their head?

The Mark of the Beast Revealed by the Shape of the Head – Lucilla Rebecca Hedley

The first 30ish pages of this 90 page book are a mildly entertaining description of how to spot a person with a savage instinct by observing the shape of their skull. Much of the amusement comes from the illustrations.

I bet most of my readers look like these absolute weirdos. Ewww.

The two tell-tale phrenological signs of a degenerate are a large gap between the eyes and a protrusion in the middle of the forehead. Spot these two together and you’re likely looking at a subhuman beast.

This is well and good and clearly backed up by science, but the last two thirds of the book descend into a jumble of Biblical hermeneutics and apocalyptic numerology. While the first part of the book deals with the mark of the beast (beast in the literal sense, pumas and lions and that), the rest of the book warns against the promises of the Biblical beasts, Mammon is the main threat here.

Honestly, the latter part of the book made me wonder about the sanity of the author. Phrenology is obviously a pile of nonsense, but there is some cohesion to the idea. The bulk of this book comes across as the incoherent ramblings of a devoutly religious lunatic. I read every word in here, but after the halfway point very little sank in. There’s a whole lot of words in here, but very few ideas.

Unfortunately, there is scant information about this curious text and its author online. I am assuming she was wealthy as she had this masterpiece published herself. There’s a copy online if you want to read it.

IRA vs. Gilles de Rais: Shaun Hutson’s Renegades

Happy Saint Patrick’s day. I’ve read a few horror novels set in Ireland over the years, but I’ve been saving Shaun Hutson’s Renegades for a special occasion. I bought this book a few years ago because the back of it mentioned Irish terrorism, ultra violence and Gilles de Rais. I was looking for something to read the other day when I took it down for another glance. Again I was intrigued by the blurb on the back, but when I saw the author’s portrait on the inside I started to read immediately. Holy shit, look at that bad-ass!

A dissident group of terrorists shoot up a political meeting in Belfast with the aim of stopping peace talks. They are being paid to do so by an English arms dealer who has been profiting from the conflict. Sean Doyle, an English counter terrorism operative with a very Irish name is sent in to Ireland to kill the bad guys.

This would be a fairly straightforward mission only the arms dealer has also recently come into possession of an evil stained glass window inhabited by an evil demon summoned by Gilles de Rais.

There is a supernatural element here, but this is 95% a crime novel. There’s occasional scary bits, but apart from the last few chapters, these ALL turn out to be “oh it was just a dream” sequences. This was written by the author of Chainsaw Terror though, so the whole book is ludicrously violent. Every bullet wound, and there are lots of them, is described in detail.

This book, which is mostly set in Ireland, was written by an English author in the early 90s. I was a little apprehensive starting out. I certainly don’t want to condone everything that the IRA did during the troubles, but let’s remember that they were fighting a foreign force that had stolen their land and oppressed their people. Fortunately, Hutson doesn’t take sides. Everyone is a piece of shit in this book, but it’s the Brits causing all the trouble here.

There’s a few scenes where the Gardai (Irish police) show up and pull their guns on the bad guys. In reality, regular Irish police officers have never had guns.

The protagonist, Doyle, is an unrepentant bad-ass. He quotes heavy metal lyrics, bangs hot babes, kills anything he doesn’t like and generally doesn’t give a fuck. He has long hair, and he’s covered in scars. He’s supposedly based on the author. Scroll up and take another look at that cool motherfucker. Hell yeah! Hutson wrote a few other novels featuring sean Doyle as a protagonist, but I’m not going to seek them out. (I felt similar about his sequel to Spawn.) I don’t think the other Sean Doyle books have any supernatural elements.

Looking back, the supernatural element in Renegades is actually pretty unnecessary to the plot. The lore of Gilles de Rais is briefly summarized, but the demon that appears in this book is a bog standard evil spirit. It kills, eats or possesses everyone in sight. I’m glad it was there though. (If you like trashy novels about Gilles de Rais, I recommend Philip José Farmer’s Image of the Beast.)

Renegades is pure trash, but I really enjoyed it. May you have a snake-free Saint Patrick’s day. If you’re interested, I’ve written about quite a few other books set in Ireland, about Ireland or by Irish authors over the years.

Up the Ra!

Killer Cats: Nick Sharman’s The Cats and Berton Roueché’s Feral

Miaow.

Nick Sharman’s The Cats

I’ve had this one for ages, but a few years ago I read another book by the author that wasn’t very good, and I assumed this would be pretty bad too. When it comes to “animals attack” horror, there comes a point where you know what to expect.

Nothing about this book was unexpected. It was like that book about killer bunnies I read a few months ago except this one was about killer cats, and it didn’t have a plot twist. The Cats is actually very, very similar to any of the three books in John Halkin’s Squelch trilogy. I haven’t read it yet, but I assume all of those books are basically rip-offs of James Herbert‘s The Rats. I’m not just saying that because of the line on the cover of The Cats either. There’s something very formulaic and British about all of these books, and The Rats predates them all. I’ve been holding off on that one because it’s part of a trilogy. I’ll get to it someday.

A science experiment gone wrong leads to an army of cats attacking London and killing everyone in sight. My favourite part was when the president of the USA comes over to England and pours a bottle of acid down a cat’s throat. This book is truly ridiculous. It’s not particularly bad or hard to read, but it’s also not a good book at all.

The above didn’t seem sufficient for a post of its own, so I read another book about killer pussies.

Berton Roueché’s Feral.

**Pocket Books – 1975 (First published 1974)**

A young couple moves into an old house in a remote neighbourhood on Long Island, but their peace is shattered when they discover that the woods behind their new home is filled with angry, feral cats with a taste for blood. Imagine Jaws but with cats instead of a shark.

It’s also very similar to The Pack by David Fisher. It’s a warning to summer people not to abandon their house pets after their vacation.

The ending turns into a bloodbath, but it never gets as silly as Sharman’s The Cats. Once the humans start shooting, the kitties never stand a chance. There’s fewer characters in here too, and they’re far more believable. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel about evil puddy tats, but Feral is well written and so short that I really enjoyed it.

I saw that there was a retitled edition of Feral that came out a year after it was first released that was also named The Cats. Herbert’s The Rats was released at the same time as Feral, and it seems that somebody decided to give Feral‘s rerelease a similar name to capitalise on the other book’s success. I haven’t yet read The Rats, but I doubt that Feral is very similar. Either way, it seems like a sign that both of this week’s books tried to ride the coattails of Herbert’s infamous novel. I better take a look at those rat novels soon. I’m sure there’s more horror novels about cats out there, but I’m in no rush to read any more. Cats make my hands itchy.