I don’t remember how or when I heard of John D. Shackleford’s occult horror novels, but I have been wanting to read them for years. I’m assuming it was the incredible cover artwork that both grabbed my attention and made it so hard to track copies of these books down at a reasonable price. Of all of his novels, Tanith was the most appealing to me. The cover artwork is phenomenal, and although I’m almost certain there is no connection, I’m also a fan of the obscure Irish doom metal band, Council of Tanith. I’ve long thought that their band name was a reference to the Tanith in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and from the titles of Shackleford’s books alone, I find it hard to imagine that he hadn’t read Wheatley’s masterpiece. I was intrigued to see if Shackleford’s Tanith had anything to do with Wheatley’s.
Corgi – 1977
Last week, I received an email from a pal of mine with a pdf copy of Tanith attached. It’s less than 200 pages, so I dove right in.
Virginia has just moved to a cottage in the woods, and after an argument, her husband stormed out of the house and hasn’t come back. Virginia goes out at night and sees an ugly leprechaun. She is almost raped by the leprechaun a few days later, but something scares him away before he can penetrate her with his knobbly cock. A sexy witch named Tanith finds Virginia in the woods and takes her home. Then she nurses her back to health.
At this point the plot gets ludicrous. It turns out that Virginia was a witch before moving to the woods, and Tanith seduces her and convinces her to take part in magical rites with her leprechaun pals because Tanith has cancer and these rituals are the only way to prevent her death. Ultimately the plan fails because Tanith’s grandmother, a good witch, convinces her servants to set the forest on fire.
Promiscuous witches and rapist leprechauns are promising ingredients for an occult horror novel, but the execution here was pitiful. This was muddled, poorly planned garbage. Holding back important facts about a main character could potentially be used to create suspense or surprise, but here it just made it feel like the author was making the plot up as he wrote and wasn’t bothered going back and editing early chapters for the sake of cohesion. There is no link between Shackleford’s Tanith and Wheatley’s Tanith other than them both being sexy witches. Also, the subtitle of the work, “A Nightmarish Novel of Demonic Possession”, is completely inaccurate. There’s no demonic possession in this book.
I have since read that this is the worst of Shackleford’s novels, but it was so bad, I have little motivation to seek out any of the others. I have a copy of The Scourge, so I may read that in the future if I’m feeling generous.
I didn’t finish my novel on time for this week’s post, so I rapidly consumed another book of Lovecraftian black magic. This one was written by a guy called S. Ben Qayin. I was going to read a different book by this author a few years ago, but I saw that he was involved with the becomealivinggod twats, so I didn’t bother. When I saw this fairly short Lovecraftian grimoire earlier on, I couldn’t resist.
Ok, so aside from a little self mutilation, but there’s nothing all that sinister about this book. You wouldn’t have to be a completely evil psychopath to follow the rituals herein, but you would have to be fairly silly. There’s a few prayers to Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, but despite S. Ben Qayin’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, we all know that these are fictional characters. This book is basically just fan-fiction. I am obviously a fan of Lovecraft, so I was reasonably entertained, and if I found a very cheap copy of this book, I would gladly keep it on my coffee table to make guests feel uncomfortable, but I can’t imagine anyone taking actually staying up late at night to go and do blood rituals to Yog-Sothoth in a forest. If I’m wrong and you do that kind of thing, I’d love to chat with you.
All things considered, I quite enjoyed the 45 minutes it took me to read this. I was sitting in my car, drinking coffee and eating a coconut donut at the time. I may go back and read more S. Ben Qayin in the future. It’s 5 years since I wrapped up my big Lovecraft reread (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5), and reading this grimoire made me want to do another. I might stick with a greatest hits collection this time around.
I bought The Wicker Man on DVD about 20 years ago. I can’t have watched it more than twice, but the ending of the film has stuck with me since. I was looking for a book to read recently when I came across David Pinner’s The Ritual, the novel that inspired The Wicker Man.
Ritual – David Pinner
New Authors – 19967
From what I have read, it seems as though the movie people bought the rights to Pinner’s novel, but had to change so much of it that he didn’t get mentioned in the credits of the movie. The plot is very similar.
A policeman ends up in remote village investigating the death of a child. The locals are uncooperative weirdoes and at least some of them practice witchcraft. The memorable scene in the movie where the sergeant humps the wall is taken directly from the book. There’s definitely a similar mood and cast of characters in both Ritual and The Wicker Man, but the ending to the book is quite different and falls far short of the horror of the film. Overall, it’s really more of a mystery featuring elements of the occult than a true horror novel. There’s a little more humour in it too. I quite enjoyed reading it.
The Wicker Man – Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer
Crown Publishers – 1978
I was going to post about Ritual last week, but then I read that the novelisation of The Wicker Man was held in high regard, so I decided to read that too. It was published a few years after the movie came out, and it offers a slightly different version of the story. As I mentioned, I’d seen the film before, but aside from the wall humping and the climax, I couldn’t remember too much. I’ve reviewed quite a few novelisations on here before, but I’ve never felt the desire to go back and watch the films after reading the books before. That was not the case here. I finished the book after dinner yesterday and sat down to watch the movie version maybe 20 minutes later. I wasn’t aware, but there are multiple cuts of the Wickerman out there. I found a version streaming on Kanopy (an awesome library streaming service) that was significantly longer than the version in Amazon. I watched the director’s cut, and to be honest, it wasn’t great. Some of the scenes are transferred from an old reel that looks like garbage in comparison to most of the film, and none of these scenes add anything of much worth to the story. Apparently there is a longer cut in existence now, but I have no interest in watching it. I reckon the short version is totally fine.
It was interesting watching the director’s cut right after finishing the novelisation though. Some very short scenes included in that cut of the movie are explained more clearly in the book, and there are a few little scenes in the book that weren’t included in the movie at all. Sergeant Howie is given more background, and there are a few extra characters. Overall, I quite enjoyed reading this novelisation. If you like the movie, the book is worth a read. The movie is great too. The director’s cut is bloated, and even the original might be a little slow to get going, but the scene when Howie realises what’s in store for him makes it all worth while. I love it.
The Loathsome Lambton Worm – Anthony Shaffer
While I was researching this post, I discovered that the screenwriter of the film had actually written an outline for a sequel to The Wicker Man with the same cast of characters. Anyone who has seen the movie or read the book will understand why that would be difficult, and the resultant screenplay is actually less coherent than you’d expect. It was called The Loathsome Lambton Worm. The brilliance of The Wicker Man is that it’s a horror movie that doesn’t rely on supernatural scares or gore to horrify. The efficacy of the islanders’ rituals is inconsequential to the plot. The proposed sequel includes decaptitions, magic spells, witches riding around broomsticks and a fire breathing dragon. It also features Sergeant Howie doing things that go against everything the audience has been told about him. The proposed sequel is pure crap, and I am more surprised that anyone ever took the time to write it out than the fact that it wasn’t made. Nobody could read it and think it was a good idea even at a time when the bar for sequels was pretty low. The treatment for this awful sequel was published in the revised edition of Alan Brown’s Inside the Wicker Man. I didn’t bother reading the rest of this book because I a bit sick of The Wicker Man at this point. I might go back and watch the Nicolas Cage version in a few years.
I had originally planned to post about a different book today, but I realised I needed to do some more research to do it justice, so I sought out a ridiculous pamphlet of black magic. I found one by my old pal, Carl Nagel. It starts off with a depiction of a badass Satanic human sacrifice, but then it turns out that the author is only describing this scene to say that it’s not true witchcraft. Obviously, this was quite disappointing. I was hoping this would be a grimoire of cool satanic murder rituals.
In the next section, we learn that “Black witchcraft” is “older than the centuries”. I assumed that meant it was prehistoric, but we find out in the next paragraph that it was born in the middle ages, so I’m assuming that Nagel originally meant to say that it was older than “some centuries”.
This is followed by a description of how witches used to be initiated into their covens, but Nagel then acknowledges that the readers of his work won’t have any friends, so he tells them how to initiate themself into a coven of one. They basically light a few candles and think of witchy stuff.
The guts of the pamphlet (about 5 pages) consists of a handful of silly spells. It’s the usual crap: how to attract lovers, how to make a voodoo doll, how to make a rival impotent… There’s really nothing unique or original here.
This is another instance where I find it hard to imagine a person stupid enough to take this shite seriously. When I refer to this as shite, I mean it. This book is smelly, smelly poopoo from a dirty bumhole. Carl Nagel actually has quite a few publications too, and I am very curious as to what his threshold of success is. How many copies of his last book does he need to sell to convince him to write more? Surely there can’t be more than 2 or 3 imbeciles alive who would pay for this heinously soiled adult diaper.
The first time I encountered Chuck Tingle was when somebody I followed on twitter posted images of the covers of his earlier books. They had some ludicrous titles (check out his bibliography if you haven’t already seen them), and while I am definitely not beyond reading a book purely because it has a ridiculous title, Tingle’s titles were overt gay porn. I was happy they existed, but content to leave them for their target audience.
Recently, a colleague in work recommended me one of Chuck Tingle’s newer novels. I was a bit taken aback, assuming the title would reference anal penetration in some manner, but it was actually called Bury Your Gays, and it was supposed to be a horror novel. To be honest, I’ve been running a little dry for blog content recently. I’ve been busy and largely directing my creative energy elsewhere, so I was quite happy to take my buddy up on a horror book recommendation. I’m really glad I did. This book was actually very enjoyable.
This is the story of Misha Byrne, a gay screenwriter whose characters start showing up in real life. (It’s funny, after writing that, I realise that was the premise of a Brett Easton Ellis novel I read years ago.) I won’t give anything else away. It reminded me a little of David Sodergren’s Rotten Tommy in terms of the manic creativity behind the plot and characters. It’s really enjoyable when capable writers let their imaginations loose.
The book is surprisingly well written. There’s sci-fi elements and social critique, but some scenes are horrendously violent, and I think this definitely counts as a horror novel. The sledgehammer scene made me wince, but also made me hope that this book gets turned into a movie.
I also found that while it’s a gay novel in many respects (gay protagonist, gay title, gay issues…), none of this book felt obscure or foreign to a straight reader. (The last gay horror novel I read was largely gay porn, so maybe it’s just the contrast to that book that susprised me.) I wonder how queer readers feel about how accessible this gay novel is to straight readers. While the book doesn’t trivialise the queer experience, I felt Mr. Tingle framed it in a very relatable manner. Do queer readers want to read something that makes the queer experience relatable to the straights, or would they prefer it to be a little more militantly queer? Is it naive of me to be a little taken back by how easy it is to relate to queer characters?
It’s pretty cool to see how much recognition this novel is getting. It’s a good book, but the author’s story is inspiring too. He did something weird and stuck with it until he got popular. While the title of this book isn’t as overtly self-referential as some of the author’s other works (2017’s Pounded In The Butt By My Book “Pounded In The Butt By My Book ‘Pounded In The Butt By My Book “Pounded In The Butt By My Book ‘Pounded In The Butt By My Book “Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt”‘”‘ for example), the plot of the novel revolves around that motif in a genuinely impressive manner. It’s really cool to see that kind of integrity and ingenuity. Chuck Tingle is a weirdo, a real weirdo, but weirdoes are awesome.
I first saw this book a few years ago. I assumed it was a collection of folk tales from different authors, but the fact that it was published as a Penguin Classic made me want to read it. I was in Ireland recently, and I needed something to read. While browsing through my library’s collection of audiobooks, I saw this title and noticed for the first time that an author’s name was on the cover. I had never before heard of Lafcadio Hearn, collector of Japanese ghost tales, but a quick google search revealed that his first name was actually Patrick and that he grew up in Ireland. I did my bachelors degree in literature in Dublin, and I believed I had read most of the big names of Irish writing. I was delighted to discover an enigmatic Irish writer on one of my brief trips back to my homeland.
So Lafcadio was born in Greece, spent his childhood in Ireland, moved to the states, became a succesful journalist and then spent the rest of his life in Japan. He married the daughter of a samurai and spent his time collecting and translating Japanese ghost stories into English. Later, these stories were translated back into Japanese, and some sources on the internet claim that these works are now better known and valued in Japan than anywhere else.
While the collection is titled Japanese Ghost Stories, a more accurate title would be “Japanese Stories that Feature Supernatural Elements”. Most of these tales don’t feature pale apparitions rattling chains. There’s a lot in here too, and honestly, some of the stories are quite lame. I noted down the general gist of each tale below and put it into the list below. This is more for my own reference than anything else, and it contains spoilers, so you may want to skip it for now if you plan on reading the book. (It won’t really ruin anything if you do read it. There’s not many surprises in this book after you’ve read the first few stories.) Make sure you check out the ending of this post though. I’m pretty sure my interest in this author led me to seeing a real ghost.
The Stories
Of Ghosts and Goblins Suitors try to impress girl. She only likes the one who eats a corpse with her.
The Dream of a Summers Day Fisher boy saves a tortoise and then marries sea gods daughter. Comes home 3 (actually 400) years later. Dies. Just like fairy stories
In Cholera Time Infant drinks dead ma’s tit milk
Ningyo-no-Haka Japanese people die in 3s. Ghost of mother comes back for son More a paragraph than a story.
The Eternal Haunter Description of spirit that gave man a wet dream. I think.
Fragment Man climbs mountain of skulls of his past lives
A Passional Karma First real story. Samurai’s love dies. Comes back to haunt him.
Ingwa Banashi Dying wife grabs the tits of her husband’s concubine and doesnt let go even after she dies.
Story of a Tengu A tengu takes a monk back in time to see Buddha talking. Trash.
A Reconciliation Samurai comes back to see his ex-wife, but she is now a ghost/corpse
A Legend of Fugen Bosatsu Monk sees a pretty girl turn into some religious figure. Crap and boring.
The Corpse Rider Priest tells man to ride his divorced wife’s corpse like a pony so she won’t haunt him
The Sympathy of Benten Goddess introduces man to his wife’s spirit before they get married.
The Gratitude of the Samebito Sharkman cries jewels to give to his friend to impress his crush’s family.
Of aPromise Kept Samurai commits suicide to get back to his brother on appointed date.
Of a Promise Broken Corpse of samurai’s first wife takes nasty vengeance on his second wife.
Before the Supreme Court Dying girl’s parents make deal with pest god. Pest god kills another girl with same name. Council of gods gets pissed and puts dead girl’s soul into live girl’s body.
The Story of Kwashin Koji Old man with a magic picture tricks people.
The Story of Umetsu Chubei Man holds heavy magic baby.
The Legend of Yurei Daki Woman steals gods money box and they get horrible revenge on her baby.
In a Cup ofTea Man sees a face in his tea. The own of face later comes to visit him. Fragment.
Ikiyro Woman hates young man because she thinks he is rival to her son, so her alive ghost haunts him.
The Story of O Kame Wife needlessly haunts ger husband after she dies.
The Story of Chugoro A beautiful frog vampire kills a young man when he tells his mate about their relationship.
The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi Ghosts tear off blind musicians ears.
Jikininki Priest comes across a goblin eater of the dead.
Mujina Crying woman tears her face off and frightens a traveller. Good.
Rokuro Kubi Decapitated heads gang up on samurai priest.
Yuki-Onna Man marries spirit that killed his friend.
The Story of Aoyagi Man marries a tree.
The Dream of Akinosuke Man falls alseep and joins insect kingdom.
Riki Baka Mentally handicapped boy dies and is reborn.
The Mirror Maiden A beauriful spirit lures people to their death down a well but turns out nice after an evil dragon releases her.
The Story of Ito Norisuke Man falls in love with ghost.
In truth, this collection felt bloated. If the 10 worst/shortest stories were removed, it would have been much more enjoyable. It seems that this is a ‘complete’ collection rather than a ‘best of’ collection. I do appreciate that really. I’d probably be curious about the crap if it wasn’t included in here. Only 5-6 of the tales live up to the grisly cover that Penguin gave this collection. (I showed my wife the cover, and she asked if it was supposed to be Bobby Hill. Hahaha.) There’s definitely some similarities in the tales here and the Irish folk tales that Hearn must have heard growing up in Ireland. All together, I’d say it’s worth a read.
Photo posted online in 2016. This plaque is now gone.
As I said, I was in Ireland when I found out about Hearn, and I wanted to use this opportunity to understand him, so I set out to find out what his experiences in Ireland had been like. On his wikipedia page, I found a picture of a plaque that used to be on the wall of his childhood home. I went to the address listed, but the plaque is no longer there. A careful analysis of the photo of the plaque and the front of the house confirms it is the same building. Given the numerous statues of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanagh and other Dublin writers, spread throughout Dublin, I was disappointed to see that Lafcadio Hearn is basically unrecognised in what was once his home city.
48 Lower Gardiner Street, Dublin, Hearn’s Childhood Home
The stories in the book are followed by a brief appendix on the nature of ghosts and nightmares. This was definitely my favourite part of the book. Hearn discusses how belief in ghosts is a global phenomenon that occurs in every culture, and how it may derive from inherited memories from our earliest ancestors. It’s an interesting piece of writing, and it’s made more interesting by Hearn’s descriptions of his own encounters with ghosts as a child. He acknowledges that these spectres were likely creations of his mind, but in the context of his writing that doesn’t make them less terrifying. He explains how he always struggled to describe what they looked like until he saw the images of exhumed, decayed corpses in Orfila’s Traité des Exhumations Juridiques and recognized his tormentors. Perhaps the most chilling passage in the entire book is when he claims how these phantoms started to appear to him in a particular room of his home when he was 5 years old.
Corpses pictured in Mathieu J.B. Orfila’s Traité des Exhumations Juridiques
“When about five years old I was condemned to sleep by myself in a certain isolated room, thereafter always called the Child’s Room. (At that time I was scarcely ever mentioned by name, but only referred to as ‘the Child’.) The room was narrow, but very high, and, in spite of one tall window, very gloomy. It contained a fire-place wherein no fire was ever kindled; and the Child suspected that the chimney was haunted.”
I went back to the photo I took of the house he lived in at that point of his life, looking for a room with a tall window. It could be any of them, so I zoomed in, looking for more clues. Then I noticed this:
Hearn’s ghost? This genuinely creeped me out when I noticed it.
I have never in my life had an interest in yoga. It always seemed like bullshit to me. I know that it’s good to stretch before and after exercise, but I never really understood why stretching needed a foreign name to make it seem more important.
When I started reading books on the occult, I was a bit surprised to see the concept of yoga popping up so frequently. Aleister Crowley was mad into it, and knowing that several of his books deal with the topic is precisely what prevented me from reading them. It’s clearly all a load of shit. Isometric exercises are important, but there’s nothing mystical about them.
Pluto Press – 2025
A friend recently gave me this book. It did nothing but confirm my suspicions. Yoga is a bunch of crap for stupid idiots who think they’re smarter than they really are. The author mostly discusses the key figures who made yoga popular over the last century or so. All of them were lying hustlers. A lot of the books that they put out were the same kind of nonsense as the magical self-help crap I review here. None of it is based in research, and their sources are always mysterious yogis that they met at the top of a mountain.
It also turns out that a lot of these yogis have had links with the far right. Personally, I wasn’t really surprised or interested by this. Stupid people like stupid things.
I assume that anyone who goes to yoga classes is either dumb or really likes the smell of feet.
John Russo wrote Night of the Living Dead with George Romero. I have been meaning to read something by him for years. I settled on his 1987 novel, Voodoo Dawn.
Imagine – 1987
This was pure garbage. It only took a few hours to read it, but every second of those hours felt as if the author was laughing at me for wasting my time reading his filthy pile of shit.
A voodoo witchdoctor goes on a killing spree in an attempt to make a Frankensteinesque voodoo doll out of human body parts. The premise here is good, but the execution reeks of human excrement. The discussion of the life sized voodoo doll is limited to a few sentences, and the murders take up only a few pages. Most of this novel focuses on the business plans of a gang of up-and-coming advertising executives. It’s shockingly boring. There was a little bit of satisfaction when these boring squares died, but it would have been much more satisfying to witness the author being brutally dismembered with a machete for making me read through his boring, dull, uninspired shite.
At one point the author describes how one of the characters is struggling to flesh out her book on voodoo and how she ultimately resorts to inserting large quotations from other books instead of integrating their main ideas into her work. Russo then proceeds to insert a large quote from one of the books that the character was supposedly reading. He’s literally flaunting his inadequacies to his readers’ faces.
Apparently there’s a movie with the same title that was very, very loosely based on this book. I doubt I’ll watch it. Honestly, avoid this book like you would a leper. It’s a diaper full of diarrhea.
Ok, so I know I said that I was going to get to regular posting 2 weeks ago, but I went camping last weekend and had no internet. I finished this novel, Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse, a few weeks ago, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.
Gallery Books – 1997 (Originally published 1996)
I’ve read 3 other books by Poppy Z. Brite. I lovedLost Souls and Swamp Foetus. I didn’t like Drawing Blood so much. It felt more like fantasy than horror, and it was extremely homoerotic. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, and I don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to give off “no homo” vibes here. I was able to enjoy the romance between the 2 male characters; I just didn’t like the cum eating. I guess I’m the kind of person who really only enjoys reading descriptions of people ingesting bodily fluids when these descriptions are purposely written to gross the reader out.
Anyone who has read Exquisite Corpse will probably be giggling at my squeamishness right now. Both of Brite’s publishers (Delacorte and Penguin) refused to publish this book after Brite submitted the manuscript. This is one of the most disgusting novels I have ever read.
The plot focuses on the intersection of the lives of 2 gay couples. One of these couples has recently broken up, and the other is comprised of a necrophile and a cannibal. The results are deeply disturbing and depressing. I don’t want to give anything else away, but Jesus this book was fucking grim.
At an early point in the novel, I considered giving up. There were a few chapters that were basically just gay porn. These weren’t just descriptions of what happened. This was clearly erotic writing. I generally skim over lengthy sex scenes in novels, regardless of the genders of the participants. I didn’t do that here because I was half expecting something horrible to happen, but it didn’t, and now I fear that I am a gay man.
I’m joking of course, but I was half right. Extremely horrible things do start happening in this book, and they are written about in such a way that sets them far, far apart from the generic splatterpunk book I have read here before. It’s a combination of Brite’s skill with the written word and the juxtaposition with the sexy parts of this book that make the violence in here so disturbing. At the same time, the actual brutality on display here is full on. There’s nothing left to the imagination. The viscera and gore are upsetting, but Brite also describes the psychology of the sadistic murderers too, and it was those parts that I found most upsetting. There’s one bit that genuinely disgusted me where the murderer is describing how the body of their victim acquiesces to the violence its undergoing with a kind of longing.
This book is seriously fucked up. It’s dark, disgusting and depressing. There were numerous points throughout that made me feel nauseous and made me question my sexuality. All in all, I enjoyed it.
Greetings dear readers. I want to offer my apologies for the disruption of my weekly posts recently. I’ve been away, and I had to prioritize my family over my creepy book blog. I can’t remember another month in my adult life where I did as little reading. I’m back home now, so the scheduled creepiness can now resume. I got my hands on some weird stuff when I was away too, so check in again soon.
The Haar – David Sodergren
Paperbacks and Pugs – 2022
I noticed this title on my library’s audiobook section a few months ago. I’ve listened to most of the horror novels available there, and I needed something to read, so I gave this a go. I think used to follow the author on twitter or something as I recognized his name as an indie horror author. I had no real expectations.
I loved this book. I genuinely really enjoyed reading it.
An old woman faces pressure to sell her house on the coast of Scotland so that a millionaire can redevelop the land. I’m assuming he was going to turn it into a golf course, but I can’t actually remember. Doesn’t Trump own a golf course in Scotland? Either way, a fucked up sea monster shows up and things get gory and psychedelic. This probably counts as splatterpunk, but it’s enjoyably written. There’s a story and characters at work here.
Rotten Tommy- David Sodergren
Paperbacks and Pugs – 2024
Shortly after finishing The Haar, I sought out another book by Sodergren. Rotten Tommy came out last year. I found it a bit weirder than The Haar. It’s about a woman who finds malevolent video tapes in her parent’s old house that lead her getting sucked into a forgotten TV show with an extremely nasty antagonist. This is definitely horror, but there are strong fantasy and even comedy elements at play. Again, I really enjoyed this book.
I often find myself running out of things to say when I review modern horror, especially when I’ve enjoyed reading it. There’s a million other reviews out there if you want more details, but I would strongly recommend just reading these books instead. Both of these novels were a lot of fun to read. I will hopefully get around to reading more of David Sodergren’s books in the future.
Nocturnal Revelries 