Sorry, I am still on holidays, so my weekly post is late again. In April of last year, I mentioned my intention to do a post on books about Jack the Ripper. I recently reread Alan Moore’s From Hell for my post on Nicholas Hawksmoor, the Satanic architect, and before doing so I decided to prime myself by reading Donald Rumbelow’s The Complete Jack the Ripper.
The Complete Jack the Ripper – Donald Rumbelow
Virgin Books – 2016 (First published 1975)
This is the first and only non-fiction book I have read about the Whitechapel murders, and while I don’t have anything to compare it to, I was very pleased that I read this first. This book, as far as I can tell, restrains itself to the facts of the case. It outlines what is known about what happened in Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper murders. It provides background on several of the key suspects in the murders, but it does not present any one of these characters as the likeliest candidate. The book does a very good job of making it very clear that this is a very complex case that, for many reasons, will likely remain unsolved. I don’t want to get into the events of the murders here as that information is available in a million other places, and I have no clever insights to offer. If you are interested in this case, I reckon this book is an excellent starting point. I’m actually a little hesitant to read some of the other books on the case as Rumbelow includes some details on why they’re probably not accurate.
From Hell – Alan Moore
Top Shelf – 2004 (First published 1999)
The first time I read from From Hell was an upsetting experience. I knew that some prostitutes were going to get butchered, but Moore’s story makes them people, and the violence was actually upsetting. It’s a phenomenal piece of art though. I only read a few graphic novels every year, but this is absolutely my favourite. The amount of research and thought that clearly went into is astounding. I strongly suggest that you keep 2 bookmarks handy while reading through it, one to keep your place in the story and one for the corresponding chapter notes at the back of the book. You must read both. I was very glad I had read Rumbelow’s book beforehand this time. Knowing something of the case made the depth of Moore’s work even more apparent.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – Iain Sinclair
Gollancz – 1987
I read a bit of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat for my Hawksmoor post. I didn’t like it. I was slightly disappointed to find out that he had also written a book that involved the Ripper murders. I knew this guy’s ideas had influenced Alan Moore, and I decided that I should check out his Ripper book too. I was hoping that his White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings would be a bit more straight forward than his poetry. It’s not. It’s one of those arty books with a plot that’s buried underneath a weight of literary wank. I read it over a couple of days a few weeks ago. I’ve been putting off writing about it because I didn’t want to think about it, and now I don’t remember much of what little coherent plot there was. A bunch of ugly booksellers go on a road trip or something. There’s some flashbacks to the time of the killings, but nothing that was of any interest to me. Load of shite.
I’ve noticed a few times that people get upset when I dismiss books for being too deep or arty or clever. My review of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams was particularly offensive to one individual, and I recall somebody getting quite upset when I made fun of Stephen King’s attempt at critical writing in Danse Macabre. If you’re one of these people, fuck you, nerd. Kiss my hole.
These three books were my first real foray into Ripperology. I’m certainly not averse to the idea of reading more on the topic, but my curiosity has largely been satiated. I’d be interested in books that attribute Satanic, occult or extraterrestrial motives to the murders, and while I assume such books probably exist, I also assume that they’re complete rubbish. Much of the allure of reading about the Ripper murders is the fact that these brutal crimes have remained unsolved for more than a century despite the attention they have received. There’s so many theories and suspects that reading more facts about the case doesn’t really hold any appeal for me at this stage. I either want a definitive explanation of who was responsible or I want ridiculous (yet sincere) claims that it was a vampire.
Sorry for not posting last week. I’ve been travelling, and I haven’t had much time to sit down and blog.
I read Herbert Gorman’s The Place Called Dagon a few weeks ago. I had read somewhere that it had influenced Lovecraft, and its title made it seem like the influence would be pretty direct. I enjoyed the book, and while it did feel very similar to some of Lovecraft’s tales, it wasn’t really what I expected.
George H. Doran Company – 1927
A doctor moves to a remote town in New England. He’s largely shunned by the locals. Things start to change when he is called to the home of the local eccentric who has just shot himself in the foot. This lad is a weirdo, but his wife is a total babe. One thing leads to another, and it’s not long until the doctor finds himself at a Satanic coven’s ritual sacrifice.
This is actually a pretty straight forward folk horror story, but the setting and tone is very similar to some of Lovecraft’s work. I was a bit surprised because when I think of what stands out about Lovecraftian horror, I tend to think of the cosmic side of things, strange and terrible gods that are oblivious to the suffering of humanity, but the evil in Gorman’s book is actually quite prosaic. There’s definite Dunwich vibes, but no real Yog Sothothery. The Dagon referred to in the book’s title is literally a place too. There’s no fish Gods involved.
I quite enjoyed this one. I went back and took a look to see what Lovecraft actually said about it. All I could find was a brief mention in his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature. I remember reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, a book about horror fiction, a few years ago and then going back and reading all of the books it mentioned. I did the same thing after reading T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies. I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t gone through Lovecraft’s essay in more detail and then hunted down the books mentioned therein. I’m just glancing through it now and seeing a lot of familiar names. Maybe I’ll get going on that soon.
I first encounered the writing of Ray Garton in the first Splatterpunks anthology. It contained a chapter that had been from his book Crucifax, presumably for being too edgy. It had a dead baby in it or something, and I wasn’t terribly impressed. Years later, I read that his vampire novel, Live Girls, was considered a classic in the field, so I sought it out and gave it a read.
Live Girls
Futura – 1987
Yeah, this is pretty good. There’s a peepshow in New York city where beautiful vampire women dance in glass boxes. There are gloryholes in the walls, and when the men stick their dicks in, they get a toothy blowjob that satisfies both their lust and the vampire’s hunger. There’s also a basement full of hideous mutants. This part isn’t explained properly. We’re told how they became mutants but not why they’re trapped in a cellar. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that they’re mutants is a perfectly good reason for them being kept in cellar. This is not high literature, but it’s fast paced and enjoyable. It’s also quite of its time (1987). The following passage had me laughing:
“He thought he was being raped by a homosexual.” he added. She put her whole hand over her mouth and her eyes crinkled as she tried to hold the laughter in.
I can’t imagine those lines appearing in a modern novel.
Night Life
Subterranean – 2005
I waited a week and then read Night Life, the sequel to Live Girls. This was written almost 20 years after the first book. It features many of the same characters, and while it was decently entertaining, it just wasn’t as good as the first book. It’s one of those sequels where the author tries to rewrite new versions of all of the memorable parts of the first book. The vampire hideout in this one is a hotel rather than a peepshow, but the hotel also features a basement full of mutant freaks. There’s more rape in this one too, and it felt a bit vulgar. The rapists in the first book are female vampires. There’s an interesting element of subversion there. Not so in the sequel. I don’t want to come across as a prude here because I willingly read a novel by a writer who was known as a first generation splatterpunk, but the innocent woman being forced into an anal rape gangbang with 13 vampires was a bit silly. The ending was a bit abrupt, and I felt like Garton left it open with the plans to maybe write a third book in the series. Unfortunately, he died last year, so we’ll never find out what happens next.
If you’re going to read Live Girls (and I recommend that you do), you should probably read Night Life too. It’s not as good, but I did actually enjoy reading it. I am probably going to go back to read Crucifax soon.
I’ve read 2 Nick Redfern books in the last year. The first was about evil aliens and the end of the world, and the second was about progeria patients flying UFOs. Nothing I have read by this man has made me think he is a trustworthy source. Nevertheless, I recently read another of his books, Bloodline of the Gods. I can safely say that this one was much, much sillier than the other two. This is presented as non-fiction, but its connection with reality is so tenuous that it is impossible to take seriously. I read plenty of wacky books, but this one doesn’t even try to be convincing. It’s just a series of ifs.
Bloodline of the Gods: Unravel the Mystery of the Human Blood Type to Reveal the Aliens Among Us
Weiser – 2015
A long time ago, the Annunaki aliens came down to Earth to harvest our gold so that they could take it back to their planet to pump it into their atmosphere to prevent the greenhouse effect from destroying their planet. When they got here, they realised that it was going to take a long time to export all of our gold, so they spliced their DNA with that of the neanderthals to create a hybrid race that would continue harvesting Earth’s gold. These hybrids were slightly unruly, and so some of the Annunaki stayed behind to make sure they were behaving themselves. These are the reptilians. The proof of this story is the fact that many alien abductees have RH negative blood.
Redfern gets into more detail, but the whole thing is so ridiculous that I’m not going to bother getting into particulars. This is clearly a steaming pile of horseshit that the author himself doesn’t believe.
Unlike other authors who write multiple books about aliens, Redfern doesn’t build on what he was already written. All three of the books I have read by him present different, incompatible accounts of what’s going on with UFO sightings and alien abductions. Aliens may well be evil demons, disabled Japanese people or shapelifting lizards, but surely they can’t be all of those things at once.
Honestly, this book was so stupid that I considered giving up after a few chapters. Part of what convinced me to plow through and finish this was the fact that I had an audiobook version that I could listen to while cleaning the dishes. There’s a part in the book where Redfern uses the word “ass”, but the audiobook narrator is British and pronounces it as “arse”. This one quote made the entire experience worthwhile.
It was one thing to get nabbed by aliens, taken on-board their craft, and hosed down like a muddy, old car. It was quite another to get rewarded after that traumatic experience with a fine and tasty piece of extraterrestrial arse.
Bloodline of the Gods is Teletubbies, use your imagination crap. You’d have to be a ham sandwich to take this stuff seriously. I don’t think I’ll bother with any more Redfern for a while.
You may not know this, but Tuesday is Canada Day. People in Canada get the day off work to clean their moose and harvest their maple syrup. I’ve done a few posts on Canadian stuff in the past (a Canadian ghost, a Canadian cult, Canadian mind control…), but the most infamous title of “Canadian” horror has long eluded me. I recently got my hands on it, and I thought this would be the perfect time to share it with you.
Otto Frederick’s Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair
Pageant Press – 1960
I don’t remember where I heard of this book, but on reading the title, I knew I had to track it down. A small amount of research on this book will show that it gained some of its infamy after appearing as number 3 in R.S. Hadji’s list of 13 Worst Stinkers of the Weird in the June 1983 edition of Twilight Zone magazine.
Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair is a lot harder to track down than some of the other titles on this list. This is likely because it was printed by Pageant Press, a vanity press. Vanity presses were companies that would print books at the expense of the author, so it is hard to imagine that more than a few thousand copies were ever printed. The author was a clerk for the airforce living in Ohio, and he had 2 kids and a wife, so I doubt he had enough money for a huge run of hardbacks.
There’s also something infinitely collectible about this book. It’s rare, it sounds peculiar, it’s infamously bad, and it’s set in Canada. What self-respecting Canadian connoisseur of horror fiction could sleep easily without a copy of this book on their shelf? I’m not Canadian, and I literally spent years trying to track down a copy. I’m not exaggerating. Years.
I found a copy online a few years back, but it was a little more than what I was willing to pay. It disappeared soon thereafter. A few months back another copy appeared, but it was twice the price of the previous copy. I bought it anyways. It is by far the most expensive book I’ve bought, but I had to have it. I simply had to.
I read it last week. It is indeed very shit.
A brother and sister and their uncle move to the Canadian wilderness where their father has been given some land. They make friends with some local lumberjacks and then spend a few months turning an old logging cabin into a lakeside home. Unfortunately, a weird man in a military uniform keeps sneaking into their house when the men are away and assaulting the girl. She doesn’t really put up any resistance. If this was a better book, it would describe how she wasn’t sure if these visits were real or a dream, but the author isn’t that competent, so it just seems like getting raped doesn’t really bother her. She manages to keep it a secret, but when the family’s horses go missing, the men realise something is up. It turns out that Dracula is living on an island in their lake, disguising himself as a soldier.
The book ends shortly after this. There are no details given on how Dracula made his way to Canada or where he goes after the settlers chase him away.
Otto Fredrick
I believe that this was the author’s only book. I’m not surprised. He was not a good writer. This is more a moderately boring adventure novel than a horror novel, and the addition of Dracula to the plot seems forced and bizarre. It’s pretty short though, and I read it in 2 sittings, so the frustration and disappointment didn’t really hit me until after it was over. The elements for a decent novel were all here, but this mostly felt rushed and poorly thought out. If you’re expecting the Trailer Park Boys but with vampires, you’re in for disappointment.
Was this objectively terrible book worth the ridiculous amount of money that I paid for it? Reading it was not a particularly exciting experience, but seeing my copy on my bookshelf is priceless. There’s another copy available on Ebay now. Go and buy it, you coward.
It’s funny. A few years ago I did a post on Barry Hammond’s Cold Front, referring to it as “Canada’s rarest horror paperback”. It was recently republished, so it has definitely lost this title. Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair isn’t a paperback or truly Canadian, but surely it is now the rarest work of Canadian horror fiction! Unfortunately, I find it hard to imagine this one ever getting republished. Happy Canada Day!
Last week, I was looking through a set of “Myth or Real” trading cards on archive.org. It featured bigfoot, mothman, and many of the popular cryptids, but there were also 2 cards on a mysterious character called the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. The cards looked cool, and I had never heard of this chap before, so I decided to do a little research.
So in 1944, the small town of Mattoon was terrorized by a weirdo with a cannister of gas. He was running around town spraying this stuff into people’s homes, making them cough, puke and pass out. Nobody died or suffered any lasting problems because of these attacks, but the residents of Mattoon were spooked. Many of the men in town were away, fighting in the second world war, and most of the Gasser’s victims were women. Rumours went around that Gasser was a large, warty ape with a gas gun. The source of this rather fantastic element to the story was added by the town’s local psychic. It was later hypothesized that the Gasser was able to evade police because he had teleportation device.
Over the course of 2 weeks, there were more than 20 attacks. While it is likely that some people did experience something out of the ordinary, it seems probable that the local media’s sensational coverage of the story riled the town’s populace up to an extent that people were looking for something to cough over. After two weeks with little to no progress on the case, local police said that any further victims wishing to report a gas attack would have to submit to medical testing to verify their story. This almost immediately put an end to the reports, and the entire case was soon written off as an example of mass hysteria. There was no Mad Gasser. It was all just the imaginings of some hysterical, lonely women.
Or was it?
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria – Scott Maruna
Swamp Gas Book Co. – 2003
In this 2003 book, the author, Scott Maruna, a chemistry teacher, argues that the hullaballoo around the Mad Gasser was not a case of mass hysteria. There actually was a mad person running around spraying gas into people’s windows. His name was Farley, and he was a closeted homosexual. He was an amateur chemist and apparently ended up in a mental asylum shortly after the gas attacks. His father was an influential person in Mattoon, and so it’s possible everything was covered up.
I have no way of knowing whether Maruna’s claims are true or not, but the book is well written and there’s nothing in here that seems like a huge stretch. Enough time has gone by now that we will never know for certain, but it may well have been Farley. It makes sense to me that a real creep started the panic in Mattoon and that the media blew it way out of proportion resulting in a town-wide state of panic. The claims that the Gasser was a transdimensional alien ape with a ray gun are certainly appealing, but maybe a little unlikely.
Maruna’s book is short (just over 100 pages), and I read it in one sitting. It seems like a fairly complete account of the Mad Gasser phenomenon, and aside from a few recently self-published attempts, there doesn’t seem to be any other books about the topic. Give this a read if you’re interested in the case. Physical copies are pretty hard to come by, but there’s a copy up on archive.org if you need it.
I normally post on Sundays, but I had a busier weekend than expected, so you’re getting this on a Tuesday. Sorry!
Sasquatch Books – 1992
I’m planning a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest this summer, so I thought I’d read this Field Guide to the Sasquatch in the hopes of improving my chances of seeing a bigfoot. Unfortunately, this book contains little I haven’t encountered in greater detail before. It’s short and quite readable, but it was only when I sat down to write about it that I realised how incomplete it is. It contains the standard physical description of a sasquatch and lists a few places where they have been spotted, but the author assumes that sasquatch is a species of giant ape and gives no consideration to the idea that it might be a transdimensional entity. This text’s brevity and failure to consider the more fringe theories on the origins of sasquatch render it obsolete at this point. There’s not much point in reading this one.
This thing was written more than 30 years ago, and with every day that has passed, the likelihood of bigfoot’s existence has diminished. It’s disappointing, but I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I’ll probably never see one. I’m going into the woods in August though, so fingers crossed!
A few weeks ago, I was emailed a pdf of an academic paper on math. In 1992, Robert Birrell submitted his master’s thesis on the “analysis and construction of the small inverted retrosnub icosicosidodecahedron”. The small inverted retrosnub icosicosidodecahedron, a 3-d shape, and apparently it’s one of the more complicated uniform polyhedrons out there. Its complexity led to it being referred to as Yog-Sothoth, one of the Outer Gods of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.
Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.
So this Robert Birrell guy was clearly a nerd of the highest order, and for his Master’s thesis, he actually built one of these things. The essay I read is a description of how it was built. It does contain a section of the Lovecraftian origin of the shape’s name, but math isn’t my strong point, and most of the document went completely over my head. I wanted to do a blog post about Yog-Sothoth, but the paper I had read didn’t really give me enough material. Birrell has no internet presence that I could find, but I did find another nerd who had built a model of the small inverted retrosnub isohoohoo. I emailed him and asked if anything eldritch or bizarre occured during its construction, but he didn’t respond. (I want to make it very clear that when I use the word “nerd”, I do so with sincere respect. These are great men.)
I went looking for more Yog-Sothothery, but most of the books containing that name in the title are manuals for role playing games. I came across references to a grimoire named Liber Yog-Sothoth, but only a few copies were ever printed. The author, John Coughlin uploaded a pdf version of the central rite of the text, and that is freely available online. I read through it, and in honesty, it seemed as incomprehensible to me as the paper on geometry. The description of the rite is mostly limited to its script, and although I now know the basic steps of the ritual, I’m not really sure of the purpose behind it. The idea of summoning Yog-Sothoth is pretty cool, but what am I going to do with him when he shows up?
K’aem’nhi kh’rn K’aem’nhi kh’r K’aem’nhi kh’rmnu.
I was intrigued by this bizarre text, and I decided to further investigate the author. I found that he had written another book on Lovecraftian magic, and although physical copies are equally as scare, a pdf of this one, A Cthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work, was floating around online. I had to read it.
ACthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work
Waning Moon Publications – 2006
Last year, I read a grimoire called Gravelording. It was a bizarre book that described how a person would bring themselves closer to death so that they would have any easier time speaking to spirits in a graveyard. It was ludicrously silly, and it wasn’t until after finishing the book that I realised it was inspired by a novel written for children. The basic idea was that to communicate with dead people, you first have to almost kill yourself by starving yourself and going without sleep. I was reminded of this book when I started reading Coughlin’s ACthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work because Coughlin’s work gives almost the exact opposite advice.
The first section in the book outlines the Rite of Cthulhu. It’s pretty cool. I like the idea of shrieking “Cthulhu Fhtagn!” in a cave with my mates, but this rite is only supplementary to the rest of the book. The remainder is essentially a manual on how to induce lucid dreams. You could do the rite of Cthulhu if you wanted to try to point your dreams in a certain direction, but you could also skip it completely. In the next section, Coughlin advises the prospective dream voyager to tidy their room, drink some herbal tea, do a little stretching and to avoid television, caffeine and strenuous exercise before bedtime. This guy wants you to have a good night’s sleep! I was reading this just before going to bed too, so I was very appreciative of the author’s very good advice. I did a bit of snooping online about this guy, and he seems like a nice, good person. This suspicion was confirmed when I emailed him and received a prompt and polite reply.
I would have preferred to read something more heinous, but that says more about me than Coughlin. These books were not written for a mass audience, and from what I have seen, they actually contain fairly sensible advice. (Lucid dreaming, unlike gravelording, is a real thing.) Personally, I would prefer a book that explains the process of inducing horrible nightmares. I’ve had some pretty horrendous dreams before, but it would be kind of cool to be able to choose to dream about the great old ones destroying society and enslaving humanity.
Oh, and by the way, I recently appeared on the Bonversations Podcast. We talked about this blog, the Unabomber, Robert Anton Wilson and conspiracy theories. Give it a listen here.
Every now and again, I go back to Robert Anton Wilson. After reading his Illuminatus! Trilogy, I went on to theorize about his Sex Magicians. I then took a look at his Irish novel before returning a few years later to his autobiography. While the effects that Wilson’s writing had on the realms of conspiracy and modern occultism are vast, not all of his books are Nocturnal Revelries material. I recently read 2 of his books, Prometheus Rising and The Illuminati Papers.
Prometheus Rising
New Falcon – 1983
Prometheus Rising is basically a self-help book to show people how to untangle their neuroses and understand their own thinking. It’s largely based around Timothy Leary’s 8 circuit model of consciousness. This idea comes up in the first entry of Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger series, but he goes into more detail here. I’m not a psychologist or neurologist or anything, but this concept seems like a load of hoaky bullshit to me. The first few “circuits”, the ones involving survival, emotions and semantics, make some sense. These are definitely things that affect how people think, but by the time we get to the discussions of genetic memory and quantum consciousness in the 7th and 8th circuits, we are dealing with nonsense.
While the main premise behind the book isn’t remotely convincing, Wilson’s writing was entertaining enough to get me through to the end. One of Wilson’s big ideas, and I think he talks more about this in Quantum Psychology (which is essentially a sequel to Prometheus Rising), is the idea of reality tunnels. The fact that Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnel incorporated Leary’s 8 circuit model of consciousness doesn’t have much of an effect on how I view his other ideas. It works for him, but I don’t think it works for me. Maybe I just don’t understand it properly.
SMI²LE, another of Leary’s ideas, is also important in this book. SMI²LE stands for Space Migration, Intelligence squared and Life Extension. As Leary and Wilson saw things, these were the goals that humanity should be striving for. I found it painful to see how optimistic Wilson was in the early 1980s. Back then, these guys thought that humanity would currently be living on different planets, educated to the point that we’d be living in a work and war free utopia and that medicine would be bringing us to the edge of immortality. What’s actually happening in the world today? Social media has taken control of our thinking, and it’s promulgating anti-scientific and anti-humanitarian disinformation to an audience that is too complacent to spit out the shit they are being fed. The quality of human life in wealthy nations is actually deteriorating. The most powerful men in the world are narcissistic scum who care only for themselves, and the majority of people are happy about this. We’re completely fucked.
The Illuminati Papers
Ronin Publishing – 1990 (Originally published 1980)
I also read The Illuminatus Papers. This is a collection of interviews with Wilson and essays that are written from the perspective of characters in his Illuminatus! Trilogy. It’s far less focused than Prometheus Rising, but it contains many similar ideas. The 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness and SMI²LE both come up again. There’s also essays on Stanley Kubrick, Ezra Pound, Beethoven and Raymond Chandler and lots of poems. The most interesting parts of this book are the interviews with Conspiracy Digest magazine where Wilson discusses Crowley, Satanism and various conspiracies. Of the 12 books by Robert Anton Wilson that I have read, this one is the least important. I actually enjoyed reading it more than Prometheus Rising, but it doesn’t really add anything substantive to the the author’s big ideas.
Just last night, I found an interview that Robert Anton Wilson did with Nardwuar. I knew that they had talked, but I had never heard the interview before. It’s a good listen. I find that Bob’s interviews and lectures are a more entertaining way of learning about his ideas about the real world. I think I’ll read some more of his fiction next.
Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and Moore’s From Hell (1999)
I first heard of Nicholas Hawksmoor when I read Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, a graphic novel about the Jack the Ripper murders (more to come on that topic in the next few weeks!). Hawksmoor was an architect in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and in Moore’s book, there are repeated references to the churches Hawksmoor designed in London. Moore suggests that the locations and designs of these churches bely their function as places of Christian worship. Hawksmoor was actually a Satanic pagan, and his churches were designed as talismans to serve in the great ritual of London city. The fact that Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper’s hunting ground, is situated between 2 of Hawksmoor’s churches is no coincidence.
Quote from Sinclair’s Lud Heat
One of the major accomplishments of Moore’s meticulously researched work on From Hell is the synthesis of different conspiracies, characters and ideas from and about London in the late 1880s, and the notion of Hawksmoor’s churches being evil talismans originally comes from an author named Iain Sinclair. In 1975, he published a book of poetry called Lud Heat. The first section of the book is titled, Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches, and it’s here that Sinclair puts forth the idea that Hawksmoor deliberately infused his churches with sinister codes and symbols.
Quote from Sinclair’s Lud Heat
While there is no real evidence that Hawksmoor was a Satanist, he did incorporate obelisks, pyramids and other supposedly pagan symbols into his architecture. He was also extremely picky about the sites where his churches were to be built. When plotted on a map, they are said to form a pentagram, and Hawksmoor had them built in curious historical locations.
From Hell Chapter 4. Note the claim that the stone of the church will ensure the survival of Hawksmoor’s will.
Sinclair is a proponent of psychogeography. Psychogeography, as far as I understand it, is basically the process of walking around an area in an attempt to understand how its layout and architecture affect people. Alan Moore is friends with Sinclair and has openly acknowledged the influence of Sinclair’s ideas on From Hell. (Sinclair himself wrote a book about the ripper murders which I plan to read soon.)
Lud Heat is very much a poem about London. I’ve been to London a few times, but I don’t know the city well enough to really have a feel of what Sinclair is talking about. I also don’t care much for poetry, so while I read through his Hawksmoor poem, it didn’t really do much for me. This poem was published in 1975, and From Hell was finished roughly 20 years later, but halfway through this period, novelist Peter Ackroyd published Hawksmoor, another novel influenced by Sinclair’s ideas on Hawksmoor and psychogeography.
Harper and Row – 1985
Hawksmoor has 2 storylines. One deals with the trials and tribulations of Nicholas Dyer, a cantankerous architect who was initiated into a sinister cult as a child after his parents died of the plague. There’s a few minor discrepancies, but Dyer is clearly based on the real Hawksmoor. This is confusing because the second narrative takes place 200 years later and focuses on a homicide detective named Hawksmoor…
As Dyer’s churches are erected, he commits ritual murder at the site of each of these edifices to instill them with a malignant power. When the narrative switches to the present day, the reader witnesses Hawksmoor investigating similar recent murders that have occurred in the same locations as Dyer’s sacrifices. He is unable to solve these crimes, and the implication is that the sinister power that was imbued into each of the churches is still at work today. It’s not quite clear whether the recent deaths are to reinvigorate the churches with fresh sinister power or whether these crimes are just a grisly echo of evil “reverberating down the centuries”.
Quote from Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (Remember that the Hawksmoor mentioned here is actually a police officer!)
Ackroyd only mentions the Whitechapel murders briefly his novel, but the notion that the design and locations of Dyer’s churches are responsible for violent deaths is central. Also, the fact that the murders in Ackroyd’s book are unsolvable does have an eerie parallel with the Jack the Ripper murders.
Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor is entertaining and at times quite funny, and while it’s more literary than what I usually read nowadays, I quite enjoyed it. I had been going through a bit of a lull with my reading material, and as I was reading this, it got me excited about books again. I have been meaning to read some books about Jack the Ripper for a while now, so I jumped at the chance to reread From Hell, and all of this talk of buildings being imbued with sinister powers caused me to revisit another old favourite.
Psychogeography seemed like quite a novel idea to me at first, but then I realised it was very similar to the mysterious science of megapolisomancy described in Fritz Leiber’s classic Our Lady of Darkness. Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities is a mysterious (and unfortunately ficitonal) book written by an even more mysterious character named Thibaut de Castries. De Castries believed that modern cities were dangerous places because of the materials used to construct their buildings. The layout and architecture of these buildings can drive people mad. De Castries claims that these pieces of architecture attract paramentals, bizarre entities that feed on human terror. A building designed in a particular way could be used to manipulate these entities into doing ones bidding.
Quote from Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness
This is pretty much the exact idea that Sinclair, Ackroyd and Moore use in their respective books works involving Hawksmoor. Compare Thibaut’s thoughts there with the Sinclair’s description of Hawksmoor above. Note the emphasis on location, geometry and ritual.
De Castries dies before the events described in Our Lady of Darkness, but the effects of his work are felt long after he’s gone. Compare the following quote from Megapolisomancy with the events described in Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Moore’s From Hell. The buildings, these talismans of concrete are designed to house a lingering terror whose effects continue long into the future.
Quote from Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness. De Castries probably doesn’t want to commit these “manipulations” to print because they involve ritual murders in the style of Hawksmoor!
In Our Lady of Darkness, the protagonist is terrorised by a paramental entity that had been coded onto the local architecture by an infernal work of neo-pythagorean meta-geometry (God, I love that phrase!). Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor leave rooms for a similar interpretation. The murders in From Hell are commited by a human of flesh and blood, but the murderer himself repeatedly refers to the influence of Hawksmoor’s churches on his heinous acts.
From Hell, Chapter 4 “magic… reverberating down the centuries”
Now at first I thought this was all a coincidence. Fritz Leiber’s first novel was first published before Sinclair, Ackroyd or Moore were born, and Our Lady of Darkness actually came out when Leiber was in his late 60s, 2 years after Sinclair’s Lud Heat had been published. Sinclair did not invent psychogeography, but the similarities between his ideas on Hawksmoor and Leiber’s megapolisomancy seem very specific. How would an old man have gotten wind of this new fangled version of psychogeography and put it into his novel? Now I can’t say for certain, but I’ve come across a potential explanation. Leiber was famous for popularizing the sword and sorcery genre along with English writer Michael Moorcock. These two authors were apparently good friends, and doubtlessly recommended books to each other. In 1995, Moorcock actually wrote an introduction to a new edition of Sinclair’s Lud Heat. He claims that he first met Sinclair as the author of Lud Heat, so it’s a long shot, but it’s not entirely impossible that Moorcock had read Lud Heat and suggested it to Leiber before Leiber wrote his first draft of Our Lady of Darkness. I know that Alan Moore is chummy with Moorcock, and Moorcock has also expressed praise for Ackroyd’s work, so it seems likely that Moorcock likely has some interest in their notion of psychogeography… It’s probably just a coincidence, but it’s fun to connect the dots.
I quite enjoyed writing this post. I’m going to have another post featuring From Hell in the near future. I generally avoid talking about graphic novels on here, but Moore is something of an authority on this stuff and I love him as an author and a person. It was funny reading through the appendix at the end of From Hell and seeing mention of my pal James Shelby Downard. Hawksmoor was initiated in freemasonry a few years before he died. I wonder what Downard would make of that!
Nocturnal Revelries 