Brian McNaughton’s Satan Series: Satan’s Love Child, Satan’s Mistress, Satan’s Seductress and Satan’s Surrogate

Don’t deny it. Those covers are one the coolest things you’ve ever seen.

I remember seeing the covers of these books and immediately looking them up to buy them. This would have been 7 or 8 years ago. At that point, there were no copies available for less than 10 dollars, so I decided to wait. I just checked, and the cheapest available copy of Satan’s Surrogate available at the moment is just less than 300 dollars. Thanks a lot Paperbacks From Hell!

Satan’s Love Child (1977)

A reporter for a small town newspaper discovers the horrendously mutilated corpse of a reclusive old man in a town that has recently been overrun by weird, taciturn hippies. Around the same time, the reporter figures out that her husband has been cheating on her, partly because he hates his weird stepdaughter.

As a horror novel, Satan’s Love Child is pretty mediocre. On the plus side, it has plenty of Satanism, a weird monster, a reanimated corpse, and even a few mentions of Yog-Sothoth. Unfortunately, the characters are transparent and don’t really act the way normal people would, even when they’re not under the influence of witchcraft. It’s not perfect, but I enjoyed it.

This was originally published as porn though. The author was initially asked to write a rip off of The Omen and then forced to insert graphic sex scenes before it was published. There’s only 3 or 4 sex scenes, but they’re full on hardcore porn. Honestly, I skimmed through these bits. They don’t add anything important to the book. There is a lengthy anal rape scene towards the end of the book that I wasn’t sure about. Was that bit supposed to be sexy or horrible? It came across as horrible.

Satan’s Mistress (1978)

A dead wizard is reincarnated through incestuous rituals and then attempts to summon the Old Ones discussed in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft after sexually assaulting some teenagers.

This book is trash, but it’s quite entertaining. I knew it was supposed to be Lovecraftian horror, but I didn’t realise quite how Lovecraftian. Lovecraft plays a similar role here as he does in Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons, not as a mere author of pulp fiction but as a prophet.

Despite the titles, this book has absolutely nothing to do with Satan’s Love Child. While the cover here is equally as sexy as its unrelated predecessor, the gratuitous sex scenes are absent. There is a similar unpleasantness running through the books. McNaughton wasn’t a happy ending kind of guy.

Satan’s Seductress (1979)

Satan’s Seductress is a direct sequel to Satan’s Mistress. Its cast is almost entirely made up of characters who survived Satan’s Mistress. It’s more of the same. The evil wizard and his mistress are searching for the Necronomicon, and they are prepared to do some pretty horrendous stuff to get it.

This is not a great book, but it contains knife-wielding cultists, reanimated corpses, portals to other dimensions and eldritch tomes of forbidden mystery. This is precisely the kind of trash that I want to read after a hard day at work.

Satan’s Surrogate (1982)

While there is not much point in reading Satan’s Seductress if you haven’t read Satan’s Mistress, Satan’s Surrogate, like Satan’s Love Child is entirely separate, standalone novel. The plot has similarities with Mistress, and it’s similar in tone to the other books, but it’s far more complicated. Honestly, I found it a little disappointing. The story is too busy. There’s a lot of characters, and they’re largely uninteresting. There’s also a lot of plot elements, probably too much really. It has vampirism, wizards, alternate dimensions, cannibalism and references to Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft, but it has a weird folklore thing running through it too. It wasn’t a total pain to read, but I never looked forward to sitting down with at night. This is particularly disappointing, as I paid more for my copy of this book than I did for any of the others mentioned here. As far as I know there was only one edition published under this title, so this is is the hardest to find of the Satan series.

I realise that I said very little about the plots of these books. That’s not laziness. There’s really not very much to say. These books are trash. The reason they are hard to find is because they look so damn cool.

The first editions of Satan’s Love Child, Satan’s Mistress and Satan’s Seductress all had the same face on them.

The sexy covers pictured at the top of the post appeared on the Star editions between 1980 and 1981. Satan’s Surrogate came out in 1982, and it never got a sexy cover. When it came out, it seems that Carlyle put out new editions of the earlier books with new covers. I have not been able to find an image of the cover of Satan’s Love Child from this run. I am not sure it even exists. That book is more pornographic than the others, so it might have been left out. Then again, the other books are numbered, so it seems unlikely that they left out #1.

If anyone has a copy of the *Satan’s Love Child* from this run, please scan it and let me see!

All editions of these books are pretty scarce at this point, but the sexy Star ones are the hardest to find. Fortunately, Wildside rereleased the original texts with their original names in the early 2000s. These are all available as ebooks on amazon for a few dollars. The first book in the series won’t include the gratuitous sex, but I doubt that will affect anyone’s enjoyment much. I thought about getting the new (actually old) editions too and comparing the texts to the Satan versions, but the books aren’t actually good enough to warrant doing that.

Satan’s Love Child is now Gemini Rising
Satan’s Mistress is now Downward to Darkness
Satan’s Seductress is now Worse Things Waiting
Satan’s Surrogate is now The House Across the Way

Honestly, these books are alright, but you’ll probably never end up with the full collection. Get the ebooks and save your money. Getting my hands on the full set of Star editions took more time than it did money, but they have only become scarcer since then. I have copies of a few of McNaughton’s short story collections too. I may get to them at some stage, but I’m in no rush.

Lee Brickley’s British Cryptids: Bigfoot, Werewolves and the Pig-Man

Blimey chaps! To celebrate the king’s coronation, we’re ‘avin’ a gander at two books from me mate, Lee Brickley, a paranormal researcher from England, innit?

On the Hunt for the British Bigfoot

I don’t think Sasquatch exists. The Pacific Northwest has some of the biggest forests in the world, but people go into these forests every day, and everyone has had a camera on their phones for at least 10 years now. There’s no proof, and the likelihood of proof showing up becomes less and less likely every day. I sincerely hope I am wrong about this, but I doubt we’ll ever find Bigfoot.

Lee Brickley is a paranormal researcher from England. He wrote a book about the British Bigfoot. He claims this creature lives in Cannock Chase. Cannock Chase is a 26 square mile forest in the West Midlands of England. This book recounts several incidents that Brickley and others had with the beast.

Most of these incidents happened within a couple of years of each other, and nearly all of them happened at night. One witness literally claims that the beast looked like “some huge bloke in a monkey costume”, and when Brickley saw the beast himself, a feeling of awe overtook him and he forgot to take out his camera to take a picture… sure.

Brickley claims that he has a frozen footprint in his freezer and that a sample he found in the forest was taken by a shady government agency too.

This is one of the least convincing books I have ever read. I understand that an author choosing to write about topics like this shouldn’t get too wrapped up in pandering to sceptics, but there has to be more evidence than this. It really seems like that author’s motivation for writing this book was his desire to write a book about an English bigfoot. He doesn’t seem to have been concerned with making what he says believable.

Again, Cannock Chase covers 26 square miles. The Rocky Mountains, where Sasquatch is supposed to reside, cover well over 38,000 square miles. If you’re going to try to show that there’s a Bigfoot in the former, you’re going to need something more convincing than an Elvis impersonator claiming he saw a hairy face in his window.

UFOs, Werewolves & the Pig-man

This book was writen a few years before the Bigfoot one. It’s a more general look at the reports of odd disturbances at Cannock Chase. It’s easier to accept some of what’s written here as the reported incidents being discussed occurred over a much longer time frame, and they’re not all the about the same thing. None of them are particularly convincing, but they seem less like lies than the Bigfoot claims.

This book features aliens, giant cats and snakes, ghosts, werewolves, demons and underground government tunnels. It almost reads like a proposal for a season of a shitty British version of the X-Files.

“This shit’s about to get really weird.”
Lee Brickley

The above is actually a quote from the book that introduces its most intriguing section, the chapter on the Pig-Man of Cannock Chase. Apparently some twisted scientists during the Second World War were messing with genetic engineering and got a woman pregnant with sperm that had been riddled with pig DNA. She didn’t show any signs of pregnancy for a while, but a year and a half later she gave birth to a half-man, half-pig creature and abandoned her job and family to live with her mutant offspring in the woods. She supposedly died a few years later, but the pig man lived on. The author heard this story from a waiter in a local restaurant.

There is far space in the book given to the pigman’s background story than there is on his sightings. One of the three people who claim to have seen the pigman was a teenager. He claims he was out at night when a naked man who looked a bit like a pig started chasing him. It was probably just Prince Andrew.

Again, nothing in this book was remotely convincing. The author seems to have written it for people who are willing to completely suspend critical thought. I’m sure these books were fun to write, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone taking them seriously.

Which of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lector books are worth reading?

I was very young when I found out who Hannibal lector was. I had heard that The Silence of the Lambs was the ultimate sicko film. I remember staring at the vhs box in the video shop after mass when I was kid, wondering what the butterfly had to do with lambs. I asked my very Catholic parents, and while they wouldn’t give any details about the sexual-pervert, Buffalo Bill, they didn’t have a problem telling me all about the cannibalistic doctor. I would have been in my early teens when I finally saw it, and I spent the next 10 years quoting it to my friends. It’s one of my favourite movies..

About a year ago, I started reading a bunch of books that have been made into movies. These were just comfort reading, nothing to do with this blog, but then I realised that I should read The Silence of the Lambs and the other Hannibal Lector books.

I read Red Dragon (1981) last May, and I loved every page of it. I honestly can’t think of another book that sucked me in as much as this one. I had seen the movie version once when I was a teenager, but I didn’t remember much of it. Francis Dolarhyde is perhaps the creepiest character in any of Harris’s novels. This book was absolutely brilliant.

The Silence of Lambs (1988) was also excellent, but I was so familiar with the film version that it didn’t seem quite as tense as Red Dragon. I find it hard to imagine somebody reading my blog who hasn’t seen the movie, but if you’re in that position read the book first. (The movie version is obviously excellent too.)

It seems like common knowledge that Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are masterpieces of suspense. Opinions on Hannibal (1999), the third book in the series, are more varied. It’s a bit more gory, and the ending is contraversial. I was warned by a pal to avoid it completely. I didn’t, and I actually quite enjoyed it, but it’s definitely not as good as its predecessors. The titular character doesn’t show up until a quarter of the way through the book, and he plays a very different role here than he does in the first two books. Before he shows up, the reader is introduced to Mason Verger, a mutilated child-rapist with a whole bunch of money and power. What follows is a bit of a Varney the Vampire situation in which the original bad guy turns into the hero. I suppose Hannibal isn’t really the antagonist in either Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs, but he is definitely very, very bad. In Hannibal, we’re completely rooting for him.

The ending is silly. It’s not believable. I think the ending to the movie version was a far better idea.

If you’ve read and enjoyed Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, I’d say you will probably enjoy Hannibal. It’s not as good as those books, but it’s still quite entertaining.

While opinions on Hannibal were varied, it seemed that Hannibal Rising (2006), the fourth and final entry in the series, was universally hated. Harris supposedly only wrote it because Dino De Laurentis wanted to make a prequel movie and threatened to get somebody else to write it when Harris refused. I was warned to avoid this one, but I’m not a quitter.

Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. It’s over 300 pages long, and I finished it in 2 days. I found teenage Hannibal hunting down the Nazis who ate his baby sister enjoyable. It’s a prequel, so there’s no chance of any big surprises, and it doesn’t come close to the suspense of the first two books. Also, it humanizes Hannibal too much. He’s very clearly the good guy here. All that aside, this is still an entertaining thriller. I was never bored. It felt a bit like fan-fiction written by the original author.

Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are as popular as they are for a reason. They are two of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. They’re deeply unsettling and hugely exciting. If you haven’t already, I command you to read them. Hannibal and Hannibal Rising are not as good, probably even unnecessary. In saying that, I still had a good time reading them.

“Hannibal the Cannibal” though? I only thought about this on the way home from work the other day, but that is the cheesiest name for a villain imaginable. Realistically, what are the chances that a person named Hannibal would actually end up as a devourer of human flesh?

What Happened to the Manson Family Snuff Films?

A few weeks ago, I reviewed a book about the history of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. That book describes the very tenuous links between the Process and the Manson Family and notes that these links were initially highlighted in the first edition of Ed Sanders’ The Family. The Process took Sanders to court and had the offending chapter of his book removed in subsequent editions. This is a bit ridiculous as they had interviewed Manson for an issue of their magazine that came out before Sanders’ book. They liked looking for attention, but it seemed to concern them when they actually got it. I had been planning to read Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter for years, but when I heard of Sanders’ book, it seemed far more appealing. While a lot of it wouldn’t hold up in court, it’s not supposed to. Sanders fully acknowledges that many of his sources were less than trustworthy. Part of its value lies in the way it preserves the rumours about the Family from a time when they were still an entity.

The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion

When I was an edgy teenager, I thought Charles Manson was pretty cool. I was 16 when I stenciled his face onto the front of my schoolbag. (LOL. I was an idiot.) All the bands I liked seemed to have songs or t-shirts about him, and I read a bunch of websites about the Family and watched all of Charlie’s interviews on youtube. I knew the basic story of Manson’s life, the Family, the murders and the whole Helter-Skelter thing. There was lots of interesting stuff in Sanders’ book that I didn’t know about already, but the biggest surprise was the claim that the Manson Family may have recorded snuff films.

Apparently the Family made quite a few home movies, some of them pornographic. It doesn’t seem like the footage has ever turned up, but it is known that Charlie’s gang had several cameras, including a TV camera they stole from an NBC station wagon. Far more concerning are the claims of one associate of the Family who claims to have seen three extremely disturbing films featuring Family members. He claims that these films were shown at night and involved animal torture and sacrifice. One of them featured a dog being tortured to death and then people having sex while covered in the dog’s blood. The person who made this claim did not explicitly say that the video was filmed by the Family but that it involved members of the Family. Sanders mentions reports of numerous occult rituals that were reported in that area at the time the Family were living there, and elsewhere in the book, he spends a great deal of time discussing the The Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a bunch of Crowley freaks who were supposedly linked with the Family. Crowley used animal blood during some of his sex magic rituals at the Abbey of Thelema, so it’s not unbelievable that his followers would have done the same. (Apparently the source of his information about the cult activity was Arthur Lyons, author of Satan Wants You.) Another video featured a cat being blown up with fireworks, and the final and most gruesome video was of the corpse of a decapitated woman. Sanders claims that it was suggested to him that the Process may have been behind these appalling acts, but as Gavin Baddeley notes in Lucifer Rising, this doesn’t really make sense. The Process were always dog lovers, and their organization ultimately ended up as an animal shelter.

In the revised version of The Family that came out in 2002, Sanders notes that none of this footage has ever been found. Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t think the more innocent Manson Family home movies have shown up either. Do (or did) they exist? Does some weirdo have them? Are they buried in the desert in Death Valley?

The 2002 revised version of the text that omits nearly all mentions of the Process.

I was reading an article on The Reprobate recently that mentioned an advertisement that showed up in Variety Magazine in the 1980s offering hundreds of hours of footage of the Manson Family filmed between 1969 and 1973. This sounded intriguing, but it also included the movie rights to Robert Hendrickson’s 1973 documentary, Manson. The asking price was ridiculously high, and it didn’t seem like anyone took the mysterious seller up on their offer. I also saw mention of a documentary series from 2018 that was called Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes, but when I researched that, I found that the 100 hours of footage that was sifted through to make the show, “was discovered after British producer Simon Andreae traced the whereabouts of filmmaker Robert Hendrickson, who had been given exclusive access to the Manson cult 50 years ago.” It seems like Hendrickson was probably the seller in the Variety ad, and I doubt very much that his collection of Family footage contained any snuff films.

The difficulty with researching anything to do with the Manson Family is the sheer volume of information and discussion about them online. We’re talking about some of the most infamous crimes ever committed. Also, it turns out that Sanders’ book was the birthplace of the phrase “snuff film”, so that messes up google searches on this specific topic, and that’s rabbit hole that I don’t want to fall into. There was also an exploitation movie produced called Manson Family Movies (1984) that claimed to be found footage of the Tate-La Bianca murders. This film shows up a lot when you go looking for the real stuff. I’m not saying that it hasn’t been addressed countless times, but I didn’t actually see much discussion on the films, real or fake, that Sanders’ mentioned. If anyone has any further thoughts or information on them, I’d love to hear from you. (If you are in possession of the snuff footage, please don’t send it to me.)

Again, I’ve been familiar with the Manson story for most of life, but I’ve long had it categorized in my head as a crime story. I hadn’t really given much thought to the culty aspects of it. The Family was as culty as can be. While it doesn’t seem likely that there were any important links between the Family and the Process, both were certifiable doomsday cults. Like de Grimston, Charles Manson once claimed to be a scientologist and had a Christ/Satan thing going on. I think the big difference was that Robert de Grimston was a huckster and that Manson was violently insane. There’s other stuff in this book about the mysterious (and possibly fake) Four Pi cult, but I’ll do a separate post on them in the future. Also, while we’re (kinda) on the topic of Satanism: Bobby Beausoleil, the Family member who murdered Gary Hinman, starred in a movie with Satanist Anton LaVey, the guy who played Satan in a Roman Polanski movie. Some Family members later claimed that Sharon Tate’s murder was a copycat job to make it look like Hinman’s murderer was still on the loose so that Bobby could get out of jail. Small world. (Edit: Apparently LaVey had nothing to do with Rosemary’s Baby. Sorry. I read it in a book, but apparently that book was wrong.)

When I started the book, I googled Ed Sanders and saw a familiar face. It took me a few days to realise where I had seem him before. He was one of the guys in that video of William F. Buckley interviewing a drunk Jack Kerouac about hippies. I went on to listen to his band, The Fugs. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed by the first few songs I heard, but this one instantly became one of my favourite songs ever. Seriously, it’s genius. Ed Sanders is a pretty cool guy.

I was greatly entertained by this book, and while reading it and researching the Manson Family, I came across quite a few other books that I intend to read. I mentioned above that I used to think that Charles Manson was pretty cool. I actually find him more interesting now than I did back then, but I want to make it very clear that I now understand that he was a tragic, but horrible piece of walking garbage.

Maggoty Bodily Fluid Soup: Michael Green’s The Jim-Jams

The Jim-Jams – Michael Green

Pocket – 1994

As soon as I heard of this rare, disgusting work of cosmic-horror, it jumped straight to the top of my to-read list..

Blue Turtle Island is an isolated holiday resort for old people. The small team of staff working there are in for a rough weekend. Not only has a gang of thugs sailed over with plans to mug the visitors, but there’s a weird… thing in the woods, and it’s having some rather strange effects on the creatures that come into contact with it.

It feel from the sky, and it seems to mess with the DNA of all lifeforms who encounter it, altering their physical structure and behaviour. Insects and small animals seem to morph into each other, and people get really messy. There’s lots of swelling, tumours, fluids, new orifices and more. Oh and there’s bugs in everything.

A plot centering on a bunch of old people is novel, but the real fun of this book lies in it’s relentlessness. It’s really gross. Think of all the horrible things that can happen to a human body, and then imagine most of them happening at once to the same body while that body is being infested with worms and spiders. There’s no great build-up here either. Things get gooey early on, and they never dry up.

There’s weird references to other horror writers in here. Different bugs are referred to as koontzes, bradburys and straubs. One character is called Farris too. Also, there is a direct reference to another horror author that had me laughing. One of the characters sees a mutated freak and assumes it’s an alien.”Feeling almost faint with excitement, Lana strove to keep in mind the courageous example of Whitley Strieber, a man she admired more than any other, an ambassador for all humankind who endured so many hardships during his encounters with Visitors from other worlds.”

The Jim-Jams reminded me of Edward Lee’s Slither. That one was also about people trapped on an island with gross mutating bugs. Both are very silly novels, but there’s enough self awareness and plot to keep them enjoyable. If you like Edward Lee, give The Jim-Jams a read.

This book has been out of print for almost 20 years, and it’s almost impossible to find. There’s no copies for sale online right now. I read it online at the Internet Archive, one of the greatest resources on the internet for people with an interest in books. The Internet Archive is currently in a legal battle with the biggest publishers in the world. You can show your support for libraries here.

The Process Church of the Final Judgement: Misunderstood Prophets of Doom or Edgy Dorks

Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgement Timothy Wyllie
Feral House – 2009

I’ve long been meaning to look into the Process Church of the Final Judgement. I remember a big section on them in Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising, but they’ve popped up in loads of other books I’ve read too. This book, Timothy Wyllie’s Love, Sex, Fear, Death, is a first hand history of this mysterious and misunderstood group of devil worshippers.

The Process was a British offshoot of scientology. Its leaders, self-styled Messiah, Robert de Grimston and his wife, Mary Ann Maclean, convinced a group of rich students to give up all their money and proselytize for the Church on the streets of London. It was a weird form of proselytization though. The young disciples wore long dark cloaks and sold creepy looking magazines about sex, fear and death. Their literature claimed that they worshipped both Jehovah, Satan and Lucifer, and they occasionally performed occult rituals and self flagellation for the public. It seemed like they put more effort into scaring people away than to luring them in.

This book is a collection of recollections and reminisces of former members of the church. “Church” here basically meaning a cult; it had the central authority figure(s), the need to give up all worldly possessions, thought reform, sexual grooming… it ticks all the “cult” boxes. Perhaps the most curious thing about the Process was that few of the members seem to have taken its religious teachings seriously. This may be due to the fact that these accounts were given decades after the group disbanded and the authors didn’t want to admit their gullibility, but most of them explicitly state that they were never convinced by de Grimston’s absurd theology.

It almost seems like most members of the Process were aware that the whole thing was nonsense, but they were having fun so they went with it. I wouldn’t say these accounts glamourise life in a cult, but they don’t generally describe it as intolerable. Most of the contributors seem to value the time they spent together. These were young people spending their twenties acting like the bad guys in a Dennis Wheatley novel. Some of them travelled the world with the cult and their reputation and weird looks got them a lot of attention. They hung around with celebrities and got invited to the Playboy Mansion. They had their own rock bands and TV shows too. Honestly, it seems to me like they all knew it was horseshit but kept going because it was fun.

If you walk around in dark capes saying that you worship Satan, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll find yourself in trouble, and the Process were no exception. After the Manson murders, people tried to draw links between the Process’s LA branch and the Manson family. This wasn’t helped when the Process interviewed Manson in their magazine a few years after the murders. A decade after they disbanded, people were still trying to pin the blame for murders on this gang of naïve edge-lords. (There’s a book on that specific topic that I plan to read soon.)

As silly as the Process were, this book is actually very interesting. Wyllie’s narration is so entertaining that I checked to see if he had written any other books. He has, but they are about psychically talking with angels and dolphins, so I will definitely not be reading them. There’s an entertaining video of him online in which he snorts ketamine to communicate with angels. He must be close to 80 in the clip. I don’t want to promote drug use, but if you’re going to get high, that’s the way to do it.

It’s generally accepted now that Mary Ann was the actual leader of the Process. It seems that de Grimston was really just her puppet. She was the one who psychologically manipulated the group members. Sometimes this emotional manipulation degraded into physical abuse. Wyllie recounts an incident when she lured him upstairs to have sex with him and then surprised him when he was cumming with a non-consensual finger up the bum. This doubtlessly constitutes sexual abuse, but it’s also a little bit funny. Wyllie fell for the oldest trick in the book.

The Process was a doomsday cult, but despite their sinister appearance, scary literature and reputation, they weren’t that bad. I get the sense that Processeans were more self aware than members of the People’s Temple or a Heaven’s Gate. The worst thing about the Process was its negligence towards its members’ children. These kids were kept in prison-like conditions, and it seems like most of them ended up dead or badly damaged. It’s for this reason that I can’t really get behind the Process as a cool symbol for dark 60s counter-culture. Lots of extreme musicians have incorporated Process imagery and ideas into their art and thus contributed to the mystique and allure of the group. Realistically though, they were a gang of pretentious, self-centered dorks who were willing to sacrifice worldly comforts (and dignity) for the chance to seem dark and mysterious.

This is a good book though. The piece from Genesis P-Orridge felt a bit tacked on, and the excerpts from de Grimston’s writings are unbearable, but otherwise it was very interesting. I watched the movie/documentary that came after it too, and that was also worth a watch. There is a few other books about these weirdos that I will probably read in the future.

The Sandwich – A Romance

I haven’t posted any of my own fiction for a few years. Here’s something I wrote a while back. It’s a little bit disgusting. I hope you enjoy it.

The Sandwich

Pascal Smith found himself in the position most dreaded by 16 year old boys. He had been caught wanking. His mother, assuming that Pascal was studying, had opened his bedroom door to deliver a basket of clean laundry only to find her son abusing himself, his mickey in one hand, a wad of toilet paper in the other. She fled in embarrassment and bumped into her husband on the way down the stairs. They later discussed the event between themselves and determined that any and all steps to prevent Pascal from befouling himself again ought to be taken.

There wasn’t very much they could do. Pascal was briefly chastised by his stepfather and his room was searched for pornography, but other than this, the only consequence was a new rule prohibiting Pascal from keeping any toilet paper in his bedroom. If he needed to blow his nose, he could do so in the bathroom.

Although Pascal was mortified by the experience, he was 16 years old, and while he managed to keep his hands out of his pants for the rest of the day, by the next evening he was back at it. He contemplated sending his wet little parcel out the window, but he was afraid his neighbours would see. He ended up using a sock. While it might seem more appropriate to further dirty a soiled sock, Pascal opted instead for a clean one. His mother collected his laundry weekly, and any cumstains in a sock would be less noticeable if it had since been worn.

He became more careful about masturbation. He’d make sure the coast was clear before beginning, and if he heard even the slightest creak from outside his room he’d zip himself up. It was a good thing too because, despite her initial embarrassment, his mother had become no less likely to barge in without knocking. In fact her doing so is largely to blame for the curious events that later occurred.

Pascal was really drawing one out. He had heard from a mate that a wank would last longer if he’d occasionally tug on his bollocks. Doing so felt awful, but it did seem to be having the desired effect. Pascal was approaching his climax when he heard his mother’s gentle foot upon the stair. He shoved himself back in his pants, threw the sock into his laundry basket and swiveled his chair towards his desk so it looked like he was reading. He was so efficient that he had a good 5 seconds to spare before his mother entered the room.

“Your father won’t be back until 6, so we’re having dinner late. I made you a snack, just a couple of slices of bread and butter.”

“Thanks mom.” he replied, annoyed that she was referring to his stepdad as his father but also reluctant to say anything that would cause her to stay longer.

She took a look at the books on his desk and gave him a smile as she laid the plate next to his notebook.

“Alright sweety. I’ll just take your laundry and let you study.”

As she was crossing the room, Pascal briefly worried she would notice the obviously clean sock on top of his dirty clothes, but before she had gotten to it, he realised that this wouldn’t prove anything. He took a measured breath and waited for her to leave.

This interruption had lasted less than a minute, and Pascal was still very much in the mood to finish what he had started. It took him seconds to get back to full speed, and it wasn’t until almost the moment of orgasm that he realised he had not replaced his cum-sock. He gave his sack a sharp tug, and although it made him wince in pain, it did nothing to slow things down. No, this was happening no matter what. He glanced at his desk. There were two potential receptacles, his library book, a biography of Hitler he was using for a school project, or his buttered bread.

He grabbed a slice and managed to jam it down on top of his nob just in time. The greasy texture wasn’t something he was used to, but it certainly wasn’t bad. Pascal came like a bastard.

Moments later, he was feeling very conflicted. He had just experienced perhaps the greatest orgasm of his life, but now he felt like a butter-dicked pervert and his snacky-poo was ruined. He certainly couldn’t eat it anymore, and he wasn’t sure how he could get rid of it without causing suspicion.

He thought about this for a while and then realised he had only ruined one of his two slices. “In for a penny, in for a pound”, he thought as he geared up to ruin the second slice. Doing so took him only 3 minutes, no sack pulling involved.

As enjoyable as they were, Pascal knew that these were small, single-use slices. He wasn’t going to get another go out of them, and he didn’t want to make a habit of this. His balls were drained, and he was thinking clearly now, but he couldn’t figure out a palatable way to get rid of the evidence. He ended up smoothing out the slices as best he could and then placing one on top of the other, wet sides inwards. He put this repulsive sandwich into the drawer of his desk and lay down to have a nap. He would deal with the removal later.

He forgot the sandwich was there until bedtime, when it was too late to do anything, so he again put it off. The next day he had piano lessons after school and genuinely forgot. When he got home the day after, he noticed a funny smell in his room.

There were a few black spots on the sandwich. It was mouldy. Although he was home alone for an hour after school and could have used this time to throw it out, Pascal didn’t. He felt a bizarre mixture of shame and pride. He knew he was a sandwich-fucking degenerate, but he also liked the idea that something that came from his own body was helping to create new life. He moved the plate and its contents to his wardrobe and placed them behind a stack of board games.

The next few days were unremarkable. Pascal would take a peek every now and then, and although he was masturbating regularly, he refrained from interfering with the sandwich again. It wasn’t until the weekend that he noticed anything truly odd.

He woke up on Saturday night after hearing a soft groaning noise coming from his closet. Assuming that some small rodent had been at his sandwich and poisoned itself, Pascal picked up his cricket bat and approached the wardrobe. He put his ear to the door to listen for scuttling but heard none. He lifted the bat in preparation to strike and quickly threw the door open, but nothing moved or scurried out.

“Myeeeeeyah”

There it was again, the noise that woke him. Clearer this time, it was coming from directly in front of Pascal’s eyes, but it was dark and he couldn’t see much of anything. Confused and quite afraid, Pascal turned on the light and returned to the wardrobe. He bent over, hovering his face just inches from the putrid sandwich, looking for an intruder and considering how best to get this mess out of his room when the noise came again. This time he was certain. It was coming directly from the sandwich. He knew this because he had seen a ripple of movement along with the sound. Perhaps some baby mouse had engorged itself on rancid butter and cold cum and was now too bloated to escape from the inside of the beastly butty. Pascal nudged the bread with the tip of his cricket bat, and it responded with a soft moan.

“Weghhhhh!”

No, this didn’t look like there was a creature inside the sandwich. It looked like the sandwich itself was groaning. The furry gray crusts were quivering open and shut, and a repulsive susurration was uttering forth.

Pascal stumbled backwards, shutting the closet door in the process. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that he was afraid, but he was disturbed. His vision of reality did not include meals that could groan. Part of his brain told him to ignore it and go back to bed, and the rest of his brain was easily convinced. This would be best dealt with in the morning when he could be sure that he was entirely awake.

When he awoke the next morning, he went straight downstairs and had breakfast. After using the bathroom, he came back to his room and went straight to the closet, feeling more and more certain that his experience during the night had been a dream or hallucination. He picked up the plate holding the sandwich and brought it level to his eyes. After peering at it for a good 20 seconds, he felt entirely sure that whatever had happened the night before had largely occurred in his imagination. Although the sandwich no longer seemed disturbing, the patterns of sporangium spreading on its surface drew Pascal’s attention, and it was as he was examining these that it happened again.

“Wuuuuuuuuuugh”

Pascal froze. This was no dream. The moldy bread sounded like it was vocalising. He set the plate down on his desk, opened his window and sat down on his bed. This was really happening. An uneaten meal had somehow become alive. This freak occurrence in a teenage boy’s bedroom could potentially change everything that scientists understood about evolution. Pascal thought about this, and for this very reason knew that he could never tell another soul. If any scientist got their hands on his sandwich, they would quickly find out what had been the life-giving catalyst. No, this wonder of nature was for Pascal’s eyes only.

Pascal understood enough about biology to know that all life needs food to sustain itself, and that the mold on the sandwich was actually eating away at the bread and its contents. If he wanted his creation to live, he would need to feed it. He walked down to the kitchen and opened the fridge. As he stared at its contents, he wondered what kind of food a sandwich would most like to eat. He discreetly grabbed a slice of ham and returned to his room, rolling the meat into a salty cylinder as he ascended the stairs.

As he brought the slice of ham towards the sandwich, its rotting lips parted, and Pascal did his best to slide it in without having to touch the bread. This proved impossible, but Pascal was surprised to find that the sandwich had acquired a warm rubbery texture, and it left no observable residue on his fingers afterwards. Once he had fed the slice of ham about halfway in, he experienced a soft tugging sensation coming from inside the sandwich. Although he was warming to the idea of having a pet sandwich, the sensation of it moving was too much for him, and he placed the whole thing back in the closet and left his room.

On returning, he saw that the mold had spread rapidly, and even the half inch of rolled ham that was sticking out of the bread was fungified. He couldn’t tell for certain, but it seemed as though the sandwich was aware of his proximity as it started to groan as he neared. Although his recent experiences had left him feeling confused at several points, the first time he felt actual revulsion was when he saw the protruding, mold-sealed roll of lunch meat flapping up and down like a hideously limp and dislocated tongue.

“Luuuuuuuughluughhhhl”

No. That had to have been his imagination. He could accept the notion that the process of decomposition might produce sounds. Chemical reactions could produce gas that could squeak as it was released, but this sounded like syllables. Surely it wasn’t possible that a festering sandwich could speak.

“Meeuuuuuyhleeeughhhhl”

The pronunciation was way off, but Pascal’s gut told him it was calling his name.

It didn’t stop. For the rest of the day and the following night, the sandwich would gurgle whenever Pascal came close to it. He was torn over what to do. The sandwich was both an abomination and a miracle, and he hadn’t the heart to throw it out or show it to anyone else. He spent most of the weekend staring at it.

By Sunday evening, he thought that it looked a little worse for wear. It had been a rotten sandwich for its entire life, but it was really haggard now. The ham he had fed it had transmogrified into a tongue instead of providing it with sustenance. He had tried to feed it small spoonfuls of peanut butter, but it wasn’t interested, and its grumblings had now turned to desperate, soft moans that tugged on Pascal’s heartstrings. Don’t forget that he had given it life, and he was starting to feel like a parent watching their child waste away.

Suddenly he knew what to do. He ran downstairs and rummaged through the pile of magazines on the sitting-room coffee table until he found the Sears catalogue. He snuck it back to his room and got to work. He had been so preoccupied with his new pet that he hadn’t had a wank since Friday, so it didn’t take long. Seconds before reaching his climax, he moved in towards the sandwich, pointing his glans at its dry gray lips. Sensing that sweet nourishment was close, the sandwich opened its mouth like a very weak, yet very eager baby bird. Pascal’s eyes rolled back as the first spurt of cum blew out of his dirty knob. Through waves of ecstasy, he could hear a repulsive gobbling. As he shook his dick at the sandwich, flicking the last few drops over it like an aspergillum wielding priest, he noticed that it already looked rejuvenated. He could sense its happiness, and this made him feel good too.

He went to bed that night feeling rather pensive. The sandwich, while no less rotten than before, was somehow looking stronger after 3 hearty meals. It seemed to be in a better mood, and this filled Pascal with optimism. The strangeness of having a freak of nature living in his bedroom had taken a backseat in Pascal’s troubled teenage mind. He was more concerned now with his relationship with the sandwich. Was he its father or its lover? Pascal was an unpopular virgin, and never in his wildest wank fantasies had he thought he’d end up with a pal with an insatiable lust for his cum. It wasn’t his ideal girlfriend, but it was better than anything he’d had before.

The next two weeks were busy but fulfilling. Pascal fed his pet several times each day and started changing its plate after he noticed that it was actually discharging small gray pellets from the side opposite its mouth. It had somehow formed a simple digestive system, and although it was a rotting luncheon Pascal could not bear to see it wallowing in its own waste.

He also managed to train it to communicate. It didn’t have lips or teeth, and it would be a stretch to say it could speak, but it learned to make different sounds that corresponded to its different needs. A two syllabled “Beeughleeughl” was its cry for attention. To anyone else, this would have sounded like a choking geriatric, but to Pascal it sounded like his name. “eeeeeeagh” was how it called for food. It made an aggressive grunting noise when it was didn’t like something. Most surprising of all was its “peeeeugh” noise for when it had passed waste and wanted Pascal to change its plate.

As his caring bond with the sandwich strengthened, so too did their sexual relationship. Pascal no longer jerked off into its mouth. Now he was quite content to let it blow him. He grew to love the sensation of its slimy tongue working its way under his foreskin. It got to a point where he was no longer fantasizing about girls when he was with the sandwich. It was her he wanted now. If he ever masturbated without it (which he didn’t) he would have fantasized about her decaying bread flaps. After a while, he even built up enough confidence to try putting his dick in the sandwich’s ass to spice things up. She didn’t like it at first and she groaned and complained, but Pascal found her more receptive if he fingered her rear open while he was fucking her mouth. It was still a tight squeeze, but they both enjoyed the novelty of it. He’d always take it out of her shitter and put it back in her mouth before he came though. He knew that sex was more than just fun for her. It provided her sustenance.

Months passed, and their love grew. Pascal withdrew from his small circle of friends and spent more and more time in his bedroom, making sweet, dirty love to his vile cum-sandwich. One morning, after serving up a hot breakfast bukakke , Pascal lay on his bed with the sandwich in the crook of his arm. Pascal asked his lover what she wanted from life. “Weeughlweeughl eeeeeeagh”
“You want to eat? But I just fed you. You’ll have to wait a few minutes.”

“Hnnnnnnghh! Weeughlmeeughl eeeeeeagh. Beeughlweeughl eeeeafh!”

Parents are able to understand the speech of their children before anyone else, and at this moment, Pascal understood his baby perfectly. She wasn’t saying that she wanted to eat. She was saying that she wanted Pascal to eat her.
“No! I couldn’t do that. I love you!”

“Weeughlweeughl eeeeeeagh. Weeughlweeughl eeeeeeagh!” Her groans became manic. She had never been refused anything before, and she was panicking. Unable to see his love in this state, Pascal picked up her and bit off a small green morsel from her crust. He started to wretch as soon as the fungused bread turned to salty powder in his mouth, but he somehow managed to swallow it down. Still the sandwich shrieked. EAT! EAT EAT!

Pascal couldn’t handle the situation. He put her back on her plate and ran downstairs. He loved the sandwich, and he didn’t want to imagine not having her in his life, but he had heard the desperation in her voice, and it hurt him to think of her not getting what she wanted. She was a sandwich after all, and it made sense that a sandwich would want to be eaten. He didn’t come back to her until the next evening, and when he did, he picked her up, brought her inches from his face and said “I will give you what you want, but not just yet. Let me love you one more time.” Then he fucked her gently, cherishing the feel of her decaying hide as he pumped into her putrid maw. When he was sure she had climaxed and felt that he was close to orgasm himself, he brought her to his mouth and kissed her, his tongue passionately wrestling with her animated flap of gray meat. “I’ll love you forever.”

Although he had been pumping it with cum, the sandwich had shrunk considerably since its birth, and Pascal was able to fit the whole thing in his mouth. As he chewed and his mouth attempted to dilute the repulsive flavour with a flood of hot saliva, Pascal fought to keep his gorge from rising. To avoid the thought of regurgitation, he focused on the pleasure building in his phallus. This was real love. This was romance. He was viciously jerking his cock, but as he chewed he could feel parts of the sandwich’s innards actually pumping inside his mouth, and all he could do to avoid wretching was to increase the sensations elsewhere. With his free hand, he began fingering his own rotten ass. It hurt, but it took his mind off the taste, and it reminded him of other intimate moments with his lover. As he prepared to swallow, he felt his oncoming climax building. His lover’s body was becoming one with his own. As he stood in his room with his cock in his hand, his fingers up his arse and his decaying lover in his mouth, Pascal Smith achieved the momentary state of unity with all existence that only the most powerful orgasm can deliver.

When he recovered from his staggering climax, Pascal reached out for a clean sock to wipe the cum from his belly, but he stopped short. His first dalliance was over, but it had changed him. With a stooping gait and a wet tummy, he shuffled down to the kitchen…

The Travelling Grave and Other Stories – L.P. Hartley

The Travelling Grave and Other Stories by L.P. Hartley

Valacourt Books – 2017
This book was first published by Arkham House in 1947, but many of the stories were published years before that. In truth, I found it very boring. It’s mostly ghost stories, but none of them are particularly scary. The writing is quite dense at times too, and it usually didn’t feel worth the effort. It’s less than 250 pages, but it took me more than 4 months to get through it.

Here’s what I remember about the stories:

Story	My thoughts (includes spoilers)
A Visitor from Down Under	A lad listens to weird kids’ games on the radio and a ghost comes from Australia to get him. Shit and confusing.
Podolo	A creepy island. Somebody tries to kill a kitten? Maybe it’s a werewolf or something. I forget.
Three, or Four, for Dinner	Some lads arrange to meet another lad, but he dies. Shows up to dinner anyway. Supposed to be droll?
The Travelling Grave	A lad collects coffins. One can bury itself and does when a person is in it.
Feet Foremost	A ghost can’t come into the house because there is a step or something. Not scary at all.
The Cotillon	A lad kills himself, but he goes dancing afterwards.
A Change of Ownership	A truly idiotic man gets upset because he was too much of a wuss to invite his boyfriend in for some sex, so he has a nervous breakdown instead and imagines he is a ghost or something.
The Thought	A lad goes for a walk and gets confused. This went so far above my head. Hated it.
Conrad and the Dragon	Predictable fantasy story. Maybe for kids.
The Island	A lad gets caught by his girlfriend’s husband. At least one of them is dead.
Night Fears	A lad gets scared while working the night shift. Short.
The Killing Bottle	A lad gets mixed up with another chap who murders people who hurt animals. Then the other chap kills his own brother. Who knows what becomes of the dipstick protagonist?

A lot of lads.

I have nothing else to say about this book.

This is probably a poor time to mention this, as the above review is hardly riveting reading, but I have noticed a dramatic drop in traffic to this blog recently. Google updated its algorithm on the 15th of last month, and it seems to have worked against me. I’m seeing roughly half of what I had been seeing for the last 3 years. This is quite frustrating, as (with the exception of the above post) the content on here has been pretty good recently. I have glanced through a few pages explaining search engine optimization, but the thoughts of spending hours trying to make sure my posts are tagged and titled appropriately seems horrendously boring. I’d far prefer to spend my time reading a weird book. I’ll probably update the layout in the near future to make the 400+ posts on here easier to sift through, but until then, do me a favour and share this blog with your friends.

David St. Clair’s Say You Love Satan: True Crime or Truly Awful

Say You Love Satan – David St. Clair

Dell – 1987

I can’t remember the first time I heard of Ricky Kasso, but I remember watching My Sweet Satan, a short movie roughly based on his last weeks alive, when I was teenager. This book, David St. Clair’s Say You Love Satan, has been on my goodreads to-read list since October 2016, and I was mistakenly under the impression it was the definitive version of the Kasso story. It only took a couple of pages for me to realise that this could not be the case.

I plan to focus on the book rather than the events it describes, but a bit of background on Ricky Kasso is probably necessary.

In 1984, Ricky Kasso, a homeless, mentally unstable, drug addicted, 17 year old, murdered Gary Lauwers, one of his friends, while tripping on hallucinogens in Northport, New York. His pal had stolen drugs from him a few weeks previously. Events like this, while certainly tragic, aren’t particularly rare, but Ricky Kasso was a fan of heavy metal and a self-professed Satanist. He had also previously been arrested for grave-robbing. While it seems that his tastes in music and his interest in the occult had little to do with the actual murder, he apparently ordered his victim to “Say you love Satan” while he was stabbing him in the face. Ricky killed himself a few days after being arrested for the murder. The media latched onto the satanic elements of the story and ran wild with them. Before long, people believed that the city of Northport was home to a coven of sadistic Satanists who had murdered Gary Lauwers as a sacrifice to the Devil.

It’s a fascinating story, and 3 years after it occurred, David St. Clair published this book. Say You Love Satan became, as far as I can tell, the most popular version of the Kasso story. Unfortunately, it’s a very, very shit version of the story. I haven’t read many true crime books, but the story here is presented as a novel, and it’s awful. St. Clair describes lengthy conversations that he wasn’t privy to, and he very clearly had absolutely zero insight into what these kids were like. It’s painful. Page 266 of this book contains some of the worst writing I have ever encountered.

The response from the teenage girl on discovering that her boyfriend has participated in a murder is quite funny, but the awful joke about the child’s corpse at the end is my favourite. How did this nonsense get published?

While this book is sensational, exploitative garbage, it’s not particularly accusatory. St. Clair makes it very clear that he doesn’t approve of heavy metal and occultism, but he also gives the details of Kasso’s unhappy upbringing and drug use, and he doesn’t give any consideration to the idea that there was a satanic cult operating in Northport. Still, the parts where he made fun of Judas Priest’s lyrics made me wince. He also interweaves lyrics from Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon into the murder scene. This guy was a real weiner.

I did a bit of research of David St. Clair. It turns out he was a self-proclaimed psychic, and he also wrote a few other novels that were supposedly about real cases of Satanic possession. Most of his other books looked like trash, but I did actually order one based on its awesome cover art. I’ll review it here in a few months.

I also watched The Acid King, a recent documentary on Ricky Kasso, and everyone in that documentary hates St. Clair’s book. I get it. The people interviewed in that film knew the characters involved, and they have every right to be annoyed that David St. Clair didn’t do a better job of telling their friends’ story. I thought that he had made some scenes up for shock effect, particularly the part where they visit the Amityville haunted house to perform a ritual, but apparently that really happened. Ultimately, both the book and the documentary tell a very similar story. My complaint isn’t that that the author took too many liberties with his characters; it’s that he was an absolutely terrible writer. Apparently, parts of the book were plagiarized too. None of this should have surprised me. A few years ago, I read a book of essays on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and there’s an essay in there that contains much of what I discovered while reading Say You Love Satan.

This book is poorly written, but I have other reasons not to like it. I was a heavy metal teenager, and many of my friends are still heavy metal satanists. I’m also a parent, and both the murderer and his victim in this book were children. I knew how this book was going to end, but because the story is basically being novelized, I couldn’t help but root for the characters. A kid goes to library to take out books about witchcraft after listening to Black Sabbath with his friends? I want to give that kid a high five, not read about him murdering his friend and then killing himself. This is an extremely sad story, and the saddest parts really happened. Reading this book was a huge bummer.

Sex, Satanism and Cannibal Freaks: Mark Mirabello’s The Cannibal Within

The Cannibal Within – Mark Mirabello

Mandrake of Oxford – 2005 (first published 2001)

A friend recommended this to me a few weeks back. I found an ebook versio n online, but after reading the fourth paragraph, I ordered a physical copy. This is one I knew I’d want on my shelf.

We may think we are special – holy, honoured, valued – god’s chosen primates – but that is a fraud. The dupes of superhuman forces, we are misfits and abominations. We have no higher purpose – no saviour god died for our sins – we exist, only because our masters are infatuated with our meat.
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Mirabello is an academic. He has a Ph.D, and he has lectured at different universities. His fields of research are fairly wacky, but I have no reason to belief that his research itself is questionable. He has appeared on some ridiculous documentaries and talk shows about aliens and conspiracies. Having an education doesn’t necessarily make a person a good writer, but Mirabello’s credentials, along with what I knew of this book, made it seem very, very intriguing.

The narrative in The Cannibal Within is framed as a memoir that was presented to the author due to his academic standing. A crazy lady walks into his office and gives him a document describing her bizarre experiences. She was abducted by cannibalistic trans-humans after her and her friend performed a Satanic ritual. The unholy freaks eat her friend and then kidnap the protagonist and lock her in a cage in their underground layer for decades. They do really bad stuff to her, but she takes it rather philosophically. While recounting the utterly horrendous abuses she suffered, she quotes from and/or discusses the work of Yukio Mishima, Friedrich Neitzsche, Plato, Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, De Sade, Goethe, George Bataille, Octave Mirbeau and Philip K. Dick.

Oh, and there’s a big part at the end of the book that talks about how the trans-humans evolved from brain eating cannibal monkeys. This sounded very familiar to me, and it was immediately followed by a quote from The Beginning Was the End, my favourite book. Hell yes.

Also, the Satanic ritual that kicks things off is supposedly taken from the Red Book of Appin. Anyone remember my post on that mysterious grimoire?

If you’re not familiar with this blog and/my reading proclivities, let it suffice to say that I have an interest in the above authors and texts. I felt very much that Mirabello had somebody like me in mind when he was writing this book. I can’t really say that it’s a brilliant book, but I also can’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy every page. I finished it in an afternoon. I really found it hard to put it down.

When the book isn’t discussing the absurdity of life, it’s shoving giant mutoid cocks down your throat. There’s an awful lot of rape, in here, and the pricks doing the raping are all hilariously large. One of them is described as an “enormous fascist rod”. LOL.

Objectively, The Cannibal Within fails as a novel. It sets the scene, but doesn’t really go anywhere. The ending of the book felt like the point at which a team of marines, armed to the teeth, should have been entering the freaks’ burrow, Aliens style. I don’t need (or want) a happy ending, but I would have liked a bit more conflict. I suppose it would have taken a lot of effort to ramp up the gross-out sequences as a plot developed, but it would take that kind of commitment to make this a real masterpiece.

Mirabello, if you’re reading this, please write a sequel, a long one.

The Cannibal Within is splatterpunk for grad students. If you’re a misanthropic book-nerd with a penchant for the disgusting (and you probably are if you’re reading this blog) you will likely get a kick out of this horrid book. Honestly, I doubt anyone else will get past the first few pages.