Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom

The Horror at Red Hook is probably H.P. Lovecraft‘s most racist story. Sure, there are dodgy cats and demeaning comments in other tales, but Red Hook is as much a rant on how disgusting Howard found immigrants as it is a horror story. It’s not even a particularly good story, relying on the threat of black magic rather than the cosmic horror which fuels Lovecraft’s more effective nightmares.

A detective, Malone, goes insane after investigating Robert Suydam, a black magician who has been cavorting with the immigrant scum of Red Hook, a slum in New York. The story involves much of the usual Lovecraft stuff, subterranean vaults, reanimation and a protagonist who loses his mind… It’s pretty forgettable, but it comes up frequently as an example of Lovecraft’s hateful views. It’s bad, but it pales in comparison to his poem, “On the Creation of …”.

I have been planning to read something by Victor LaValle for a while, and when I found an audiobook version of his retelling of Red Hook, I snatched it. It’s been a while since I read anything Lovecraftian, and this novella won a Shirley Jackson award.

The Ballad of Black Tom – Victor LaValle

In this version of the story, Suydam enlists the help of Black Tom, a hustler turned guitar player. Tom becomes the main character, and the black magic of the original story is replaced with Cthulhu cult stuff that we’ve all come to expect (and desire) from a modern Lovecraftian tale.

LaValle takes an infamously racist story and gives it a black protagonist. While it does deal with the discrimination this character faces because of his race, the story never feels preachy or overly didactic.

In truth, there’s nothing hugely revolutionary about this tale, but it delivered pretty much everything I wanted. I was entertained from start to finish, and it made me want to read more Lovecraftian stuff and also more by Victor LaValle. Check it out if you can.

Also, I didn’t realise this until after I made the post, but last week’s post on the Zodiac Killer was actually my 500th blog post on this site. That’s a lot of books.

No Gary, your Dad was not the Zodiac Killer. Gary L. Stewarts The Most Dangerous Animal of All

I’m no expert on the Zodiac killer, but I have read Graysmith’s books and least have a sense of how complicated the case is and what kind of evidence would be required to confirm the killer’s identity. A new Netflix documentary recently came out confirming Graysmith’s claim that Arthur Leigh Allen was the killer, and while I am not convinced that it definitely wasn’t Arthur Leigh Allen, the claims put forth in that documentary are so damning that I find them suspicious. Either way, there are lots of reasons to think that Arthur Leigh Allen might have been the Zodiac, and until concrete evidence arises, Allen will be the measuring stick for all other Zodiac suspects.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I am very busy these days, and I am having to rely on audiobooks from my local libraries to get any reading done. Unfortunately, my Libby account doesn’t really offer many books that fit in with the theme of this blog. The horror is all modern, and the occultism is all new-age. When I checked the true crime section, I found The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a book by a man who believes his father to be the Zodiac Killer. I thought it might be worth a read.

This book sucks. There’s nothing remotely convincing about any of the author’s claims, and many of these claims have been proven to be false. On reading about the author after finishing the book, I realized that there is a 4 part documentary on this book that basically proves that it’s complete bullshit. His dad was in Austria when the Zodiac did most of his killing. Even if the claims in here were all true, Allen is still a better suspect.

Ok, so the book is bullshit, but so are many of the books I enjoy. Is there anything interesting about this at all? Well, the author claims that his father was good friends with Anton LaVey and that he jammed with Bobby Beausoleil. His dad was a convicted paedophile (that much is beyond doubt), and so these links cast darker shadows on the high Priest of Satanism and Charlie Manson’s pal than they do on the author’s sicko father.

Also, the author is a whiny little weiner. Most of the book is about his boring, pleasant life with a nice family and how he acted like a wanker when he met his birth mother. He also repeatedly brings his faith into the story and makes himself sound like a twat. If the author’s father was actually in the Zodiac’s vicinity, it’s a real pity that the Zodiac didn’t murder him too. A child wouldn’t have been raped, and this awful book would never have been written.

“I got worms.” – Nick Cutter’s The Troop

I don’t read a lot of recent horror, but somehow I got the idea that Nick Cutter’s The Troop would be worth reading. I got an audiobook version from my local library, and spent a week listening to this as I was lying in bed. I enjoyed it immensely.

A troop of boy scouts is on a camping trip on a remote Canadian island. Unfortunately for them, a man with a minging, extremely contagious worm parasite ends up on the same island and ruins their trip.

I’ve read plenty of books that exist for the sole sake of grossing the reader out. A lot of splatterpunk stuff tries so hard to be disgusting that it completely neglects the elements of suspense and character. The Troop left me feeling nauseous, but it’s also a very enjoyable story. I’ve seen some criticism directed at the fact that the characters are all stock characters (the nerd, the jock, the troubled youth, the nice guy and the weirdo), and while this is a fair criticism, the scouts do have enough depth to make the reader care about them. The novel is partly epistolary, and the chapters are interspersed with newspaper documents and excerpts from a court case. I thought this worked really well in creating tension and setting the tone.

This novel is disgusting body horror done properly. Seriously, one scene (the bit with the monkey) literally made me sit up in bed because I thought I was going to vomit. The Troop is gross and entertaining. I had a great time reading it.

The Bodies Recovered at Roswell Were actually just Disabled Asian People: Nick Redfern’s Body Snatchers in the Desert

The crash at Roswell is surely the most infamous UFO incident of all time. The story goes that a spaceship full of aliens crashed on a ranch and the government recovered parts of the craft and its pilots’ corpses. Much of the controversy and allegations of a cover-up stem from the government’s own initial reports that they had recovered a flying disc. Days later they claimed it had been a weather balloons.

During the summer, I read a book by Nick Redfern in which he claims that Satanic aliens are in league with the US government, so I was a little surprised to find that his book, Body Snatchers in the Desert, claims that the government didn’t find any aliens at Roswell. No, here he claims that much of the UFO lore that has been spread over the last 75 years has been government disinformation. The reality of what crashed in Roswell is much more sinister than a gang of unlucky instellar adventurers.

The crash at Roswell was actually an experimental nuclear aircraft that was piloted by a team of physically and mentally disabled people that the American government had retrieved from Japan’s infamous Unit 731 in China. Unit 731 was the Japanese equivalent to Nazi concentration camps in terms of the scientific experiments performed on human beings. Supposedly the American government gave the scientists working there a choice. They could either be executed for crimes against humanity, or they could come and work in the USA. After they joined Team America, the scientists and their remaining test subjects were covertly brought to the US and set to work on calculating how much radiation a person could be subjected to.

During this work, there was a mishap with an experimental airship that was being piloted by a group of disabled people, and when the government realised how bad this would look, they deliberately spread disinformation about aliens because that would cause them less trouble. Redfern accepts the testimony of the soldiers who saw the alien corpses, but insists that these were merely Asian people who had progeria.

This is so revolting an idea that it’s hard not to laugh. At the same time, it is a more believable explanation to the Roswell story than aliens. The United States government did perform radiation experiments on disabled people at this time, and it did harbour international criminals for its own benefit after the second world war. It also definitely spread misinformation to its own people and agencies. Most of the elements of Redfern’s story are based in fact, and it’s only when they’re put together that they become hard to swallow.

Redfern wrote a follow up to this book a few years ago, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. The actual message of Body Snatchers in the Desert can be summed up as above, but most of the book is made up of testimony from mysterious insiders. Redfern provides some legitimate looking documentation, but it’s impossible to judge how trustworthy this kind of material is. If the US government was spreading disinformation, I would assume that they would not only cover their tracks by not documenting certain things, but they would also do their best to obfuscate any other information on the topic. Nothing proves anything when it comes to stuff like this, and you can never tell who is lying and what is true. (Not lying doesn’t mean true!) Redfern’s premise sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense, and while I don’t necessarily buy his story, I wouldn’t put it past those bastards at the Pentagon!

Happy Halloween! Short stories from Al Sarrantonio

Happy Halloween, freaks! It’s been quite a while since I featured a book with a pumpkin on the cover. So here’s something by Al Sarrantonio.

I went through a Sarrantonio phase a few years ago. I enjoyed all of the books I read by him, but most of the ones I haven’t read seem to have Halloweeny titles. This gives me limited window during the year to check them out. I gave his short story collection Halloween and Other Seasons a go this October. Here’s what I remember from the stories:

Summer	Summer gets hotter and hotter until everyone dies. The fact that this is literally happening made this story less enjoyable than it probably was when it was written.
Sleepover	Kids abandoned by their parents into a realm of blackness.
Eels	Unpleasant dad takes kid out to sea to drown him, but kid is an eel.
Letters from camp	Summer camp run by bad robots.
Roger in the Womb	Baby refuses to be born. Uses morse code to contact outside
The Return of Mad Santa	exactly what you’d think.
Baby Boss and the Underground Hamasters	Bizarre screenplay about talking hamsters and a chicken. I let my children listen to this. They loved it.
Trail of the Chromium Bandits	Western that turns into sci-fi.
The Man in the Other Car	Excellent story about man getting mad driving his family to park. This was the absolute highlight of this collection. Grim ending.
Hedges	Awful teacher becomes part of a bush. Weird. Not in a good way.
The Silly Stuff	Reporter meets Charles Fort who is an alien
The New Kid	A new kid shows up and stops the bullies bullying the old new kid. Then old new kid turns into new new kid. A story so predictable and not interesting that it made me want to quit this book.
Ahead of the Joneses	Jealous neighbours outdo each other. Silly.
The Artist in the small room above.	Weird sci-fi. An emotional muse inspires music so emotional it kills.
The Dancing Foot	Guy pushes girl in front of train. Her foot comes back for revenge.
Liberty	Another western. A nasty guy takes advantage of pioneer Americans.
Dust	A family enters a dust cloud while driving through some mountains. It becomes considerably more difficult to deal with than they imagined.
The Pumpkin Boy	This is the longest story by far, and it’s actually part of Sarrantonio’s Orangefield cycle. I haven’t read those books yet, and while I got the feeling it was referencing those stories now and again, this story does work by itself. A weird pumpkin robot boy shows up and some kids go missing.

I quite enjoyed this collection. I don’t think it was quite as consistent as Toybox (the only other collection of Sarrantonio’s short fiction that I’ve read). Halloween was published over a decade after Toybox, but some of the stories are considerably older than the ones in that earlier collection. A few of these older stories clearly weren’t good enough for Toybox. That said, I was still decently entertained throughout. I might try to read the rest of the Orangefield books next year.

Have a spooky one!

John A. Keel’s Our Haunted Planet

I’ve been having a busy time juggling work, family and studying recently, and I’m struggling to find time to read for entertainment. Audiobooks are ideal for my current situation, but I find it difficult to find free non-fiction audiobooks that are even slightly relevant to my interests. When I found an audiobook copy of Keel’s 1971 book Our Haunted Planet, I thought I’d give it a go.

**Futura – 1975 (Originally published 1971)**

The only other book I’ve read by Keel was The Mothman Prophecies, and this is a far less focused book than that one. There’s a lot of stuff about UFOs, ancient archaeology, and most other Fortean phenomenon in here. The main idea is that there were civilisations on Earth before humans evolved. This was entertaining enough to listen to while I washed the dishes, but the stuff in here that I’ve encountered before is so ludicrous that it was hard to take any of the other information seriously. This is very much in the same vein as Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians and that kind of crap.

Very few of the ideas in this book have any basis in reality. Our Haunted Planet is more than 50 years old at this point, and the immediate availability of more accurate information on the internet renders it obsolete. I can only recommend reading this if you want to understand what people on the fringes of thought were into half a century ago. I do quite enjoy thinking about that, and I will probably read more Keel in the future.

Normally I only post on Sundays, but I have a seasonal post lined up for Thursday. Check back then if you’re interested!

Aron Beauregard’s The Cuck

I saw this cover and couldn’t resist.

Two lads go to a lonely woman’s house to have sex with her. When they get there, an old man watches them. Afterwards, the old man appears any time the lads do anything sexual and convinces them to mutilate their genitalia.

This was published as its own book, but it’s really just a short story. My expectations weren’t particularly high going in, and I can happily say that I was in no way disappointed. This book does contain a perverted old man and some disgusting dick abuse.

The only thing that confused me was the title. The old man is not actually married, so he isn’t really a cuckold. It’s funny to call people (or demons) a cuck, but multiple characters arrive at this appellation independently. Weird. Again though, I didn’t expect much in terms of sensibleness when I started this book.

The Cuck was not high literature, but it gave me a few chuckles.

On a marginally related note, I came across this book online a few days ago. There’s no ebook versions and hard copies cost about $100, so I’m probably never going to read it, but it looks seriously bizarre. (If somebody wants to buy it for me, I will review it here!)

Be careful. There are clearly some real sickos out there.

Take the Backward Masking Challenge! Jacob Aranza’s Backward Masking Unmasked: Backward Satanic Messages of Rock and Roll Exposed

Backward masking, in case you don’t know, is when a musician thinks of an evil satanic thing to say, and then somehow writes and records a seemingly unrelated song lyric that when reversed gives this evil message. The story goes that if you play Stairway to Heaven backwards, it says “my sweet satan”. There’s a part of Judas Priest’s cover of Better by You that apparently sounds like an order to, “Do it!” when played backwards. This message apparently caused a couple of teenagers to make a suicide pact in 1985. One of Ozzy’s songs apparently tells the listener to get their gun.

It’s hard for me to understand how somebody like Ozzy Osbourne would have the intelligence to write a lyric that could run both ways. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ozzy but he’s no Weird Al. (Not only did Weird Al write an entire song of palindromes he also put backwards messages into 2 of his songs.)

So this idea suggests that a bunch of drugged up 70s rockstars were far smarter than they really were, but it also suggests that the fans of this music were so smart that their brains could decode these hidden messages. Seriously, if our brains are smart enough to subconsciously extract backwards words that are intermixed with guitars and drums, wouldn’t we be able to listen to something backwards and then be able to figure out what it said? What kind of evolutionary function would this serve? Here, take the backwards masking challenge!

There’s no sense in digging into this issue too much. The very notion of stadium rock bands attempting to get their fans to kill themselves is ludicrous enough to dismiss this as nonsense. You’d have to be a real moron to take this crap seriously.

Unfortunately, only the first chapter really deals with the backward masking stuff. The explanation given is half-hearted stupid rubbish. The rest of the book is a more general screed on the dangers of rock. This book was actually written before the Judas Priest/Ozzy suicide pact. I watched the Dream Deceivers documentary years ago. It’s truly depressing stuff, and this book probably exacerbated the trauma of the families who were devastated by that tragedy.

Looking through the list of bands at the end of this book is pretty amusing. Bob Larson’s Book of Rock had a very similar list if I remember correctly. They’re mostly inane soft rock groups being painted as depraved Satanists. I’m quite sure that this kind of scaremongering provided the blueprint for bands like Venom and Mercyful Fate. Those guys must have seen this and thought, “That’s a great idea!”

This book was a stupid pile of crap. Keep listening to heavy metal and worshipping the Devil.

Please Don’t Finger Me: Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac

I don’t remember how The Hands of Orlac ended up on my to-read list, but I’ve wanted to read it for years. Although it was a popular novel in France, and a few movie versions have been made, copies of the English translations were hard to come by (up until very recently).The first translation came out in 1929, but a second translation by Iain White was published in 1981. A new one by D.H. Bernhardt came out more recently, and that one is widely available as an ebook. I read White’s translation.

**Souvenir Press – 1981 (first published 1920)**

So a famous pianist is hurt in a train accident. When his wife shows up at the wreckage, she sees a ghost hovering near her bloodied and unconscious husband. A doctor manages to save him, but his hands are all messed up. Stuff starts to go missing from their house and bloody daggers keep showing up.

Reading this novel was a chore. It took me 2 weeks to get through the first hundred pages. The main character is the pianist’s annoying wife, and for every paragraph of plot there are 3 pages of her emotions. Maybe the translation had something to do with it, but I found this book to be unbearably overwritten. I rarely managed more than a couple of pages before turning the lights off to go to sleep. I wanted to give up, but forced myself to power through the last 20 pages over a couple of evenings last week.

There’s a few mysterious things happening in the book, but none of them are interesting except the suggestion that a decapitated murderer has been revived and that he has started to kill again. At this point my interest was piqued, but a few pages later it turns out there is another, far less cool, explanation. By the end of the book, everything has been explained rationally.

I hate it when that happens.

I don’t know. Maybe mystery fans will enjoy this, but I thought it was crap. If you want to read a better book about evil hand transplants, I would suggest Martin Thomas’s The Hand of Cain.

Gary Brodsky’s How to Use Black Magic to Get Women (to lick your crack)

How to use Black Magic to Get Women – Gary Brodsky

Honestly, I sometimes forget where I get my books. I’ll buy or download a bunch and come across them years later when looking for something to read. Thus was the case with Gary Brodsky’s How to use Black Magic to Get Women. I’ve read a lot of books, but the only other pick-up manual I’ve read was Robert Johnson’s absolutely terrible The Satanic Warlock. I’m not looking to “get women”, but I decided I’d see what Brodsky had to say on the topic.

This was pathetic, even in comparison to the other crap I review here. Truly, it is hard to imagine anyone taking anything in this piece of garbage seriously, and even harder to imagine anything in here actually working.

Brodsky comes across as a true idiot. I’m not exaggerating or trying to be mean here. He actually seems like a very stupid person. At one point he describes himself as “someone who knows a thousand times more than” his readers on the topic of Black Magic. He later goes on to explain that understanding the actual workings of the spells he is presenting is entirely irrelevant to their efficacy. At no point does he offer any explanation as to how his spells operate. It’s enough to just rub some oil on your feet. That will convince the nameless spirits to help you get the woman of your dreams.

The actual “spells” presented are garbage. Light a candle with your true love’s name engraved on it. Take a bath and think of the girl you like. The weirdest one involves stealing crumbs off her plate and then pissing on them. This will make her find you irresistible.

The language he uses is revolting and telling of the kind of man that this book is written for.

She has rejected you so often, and yet soon, she will not be able to swallow enough of your penis, she will not be able to get her tongue deep enough into the crack of your ass, no matter how hard she tries, she simply will not be able to get enough of you.

I don’t know. People can like what they like, but wanting to make a woman lick your crack because she doesn’t like you is pretty nasty.

Gary Brodsky obviously had a very limited knowledge of Black Magic, and this book is obviously aimed at horny incels rather than true students of the occult. It turns out that nearly all of his other books are pick-up manuals, including How To Dominate Women, Charm The Pants Off Any Woman, The Alpha Male Guide and How To Pick Up Exotic Dancers. Yuck. While his books are vile, his youtube videos are even worse. Featuring such classic lectures as GARY BRODSKY GOES SUPER ALPHA, GARY BRODSKY RIPS FEMINSM TO SHREDS, MEN ARE BECOMING SISSYS and WHY WOMEN ACT LIKE BITCHES, Brodsky’s youtube channel is filled with gold. It seems like he used to get drunk and record himself ranting for hours at a time about feminism, being alpha, getting sexy women and any other nonsense that would pop into his head. I clicked on one of his videos, but turned it off to ruminate after he said,

“The PC bullshit agenda ok, is steroids, not steroids, I mean, is communism with tits. that’s all it is.”
– GARY TAKES ON THE SATANIC AGENDA

One of the most interesting features of Gary’s videos is the cross he wears in many of them. You’ll also notice him frequently talking about the Bible and the importance of God and Jesus. In one of the videos he discusses how homosexual acts are an abomination to God. I wonder how a god who hates gay people feels about a man making a woman lick his hairy asscrack out of spite.

I could go on, but Gary did a pretty good job of showing what kind of a person he was. Watch his videos if you can stomach them. He died in 2016.