I had originally planned a different post for this week, but I got about halfway through writing it and realised I needed to do more research. Luckily enough, I spent last Friday night reading Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black.
Hamish Hamilton – 1983
I had seen the movie version with Daniel Radcliffe when it came out, but I had largely forgotten what it was about. (I do remember quite enjoying it though.)
A solicitor has to go and stay in the house of a recently deceased recluse in an attempt to find some important legal papers that had been in her possession. While he is staying in her isolated, desolate mansion, he starts to see an emaciated woman dressed entirely in black.
This is a good old fashioned ghost story, much in the style of M.R. James. At least one of the chapters is named after a story of his. I love this kind of fiction, especially when it’s done well, and this novel is just that. It starts off with the narrator’s family telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. He leaves the room in a panic when it’s his turn, creating a blissful amount of tension. His tale is so terrifying that he can only tell it through writing, which is exactly what he proceeds to do. This is the kind of book that you want to read under a blanket. It’s very short too, and I find it hard to imagine reading it over more than a couple of sittings. I feel silly for not having read this classic sooner. If you haven’t read it, do so immediately.
Not much else needs to be said. This is an excellent ghost story. There was a novelisation of the sequel film that came out in 2014, but it’s supposed to be crap, so I have no interest.
I’m currently working on a few multi-book posts, and I realised yesterday that I had nothing prepared for this week’s post. I went through the archives looking for something short enough to get through in one day and found a curious pamphlet on the history of Satanism. I had no idea who Joseph McCabe, was, and I assumed this was going to be an evangelical tract, but it turns out that this McCabe guy was actually an important player in the rationalist and secularist movements of the early 20th century. Prior to writing texts like this, he was actually a Catholic priest, and so he has a pretty decent idea of what he’s talking about.
Haldeman-Julius – 1948
This deceptively dense text was written before the rise of the Church of Satan, and it presents a fairly unique historical perspective. The author doesn’t believe in Satan, but he does accept the notion of Satanic (yet mostly benign) witchcraft being fairly widespread throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. Here’s a chapter by chapter summary:
Chapter 1. How people started to believe in devils. First they came to believe in their own spirit and then the spirits of things. Then they imagined evil demons were responsible for things going wrong.
Chapter 2. How Satan went from a friend of God in the book of Job to a prince of demons. McCabe claims it was the due to the influence of Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirt of Zoroastrianism.
Chapter 3. During the Dark Ages, belief in the devil gave way to belief in vampires and werewolves. This chapter discusses incubi and succubi and the unlikely processes they use to impregnate sinners.
Chapter 4. McCabe believes that there was a witch cult as described by Margaret Murray but that it was more a revolt against Christianity than a cult dedicated to doing evil. Sure the witches used to hold orgies, but what harm is there in that?
Chapter 5. How the templars did actually bum each other and how the culprits involved in the Affair of the Poisons in the court of Louis XIV were sincere and genuine Satanists.
Chapter 6. Describes how people have come to see the freemasons as Satanists. Discusses the Taxil affair. Points out that communists are the modern day Satanists.
Joseph McCabe
Overall, the information in this book is not very accurate, but it offers an interesting insight into the way that people thought about the concept of Satanism before it became a codified system of belief. If you want to give it a read, it’s available to download here.
I first came across the name Jim Brandon when i was researching James Shelby Downard last year. Brandon was the guy who was interviewing Downard on the Sirius Rising recording that resulted in Robert Anton Wilson describing Downard’s ideas as the “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. A little research on Brandon told me that wrote two books on Fortean phenomena, Weird America and The Rebirth of Pan but that most of his literary output was neo Nazi material that came out under the name William Grimstad.
Now I don’t have any interest in promoting the beliefs of neo-Nazis, but I do like reading weird stuff, and what I had read about Brandon sounded truly bizarre. After glancing through Weird America, I decided to skip it. It’s basically a list of places in America where Fortean phenomena have been witnessed. It might be useful as a reference book, but the thought of reading it cover to cover seemed pretty boring. I decided to focus instead on his The Rebirth of Pan. A book that claims that the great God Pan, a great and powerful Earth spirit is alive and dedicated to causing mischief in North America.
The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirt
Firebird Press – 1983
This is definitely among the weirdest books I have read. Its central claim, that science has become too rigid to meaningfully account for every known phenomena, is one I have encountered many times before, but the reasons given here to believe this claim are definitely more far-fetched than the usual stuff. I’ll give a brief summary of each chapter, or at least what I got out of each chapter.
Chapter 1 Bigfeet appear near horny people and menstruating. Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant point out that sex can be used to bring about bizarre magical entities. This would explain why we can’t catch bigfeet the way we catch other wild animals. Instead of luring our traps with meat, we should use a shagging couple.
Chapter 2 North America is covered in mounds. We don’t know who made these or how. Traditional archaeologists have suggested it was prehistoric Native Americans, but the author seems to believe that it was more likely a race of giants and a race of cannibal pygmies who were responsible.
Chapter 3 This chapter is a discussion of a bunch of artifacts that have shown up in America with text on them. Many claim these were from Native Americans, but others point out the similarities between this writing and Hebrew, Norse and Chinese. Most of these artifacts were dismissed as hoaxes, but author dismisses this notion because one hoax is unlikely but more than one is even more unlikely. This chapter is a bit confusing because Brandon includes both sides of the discussion, and it’s not until the end that he tells you what he actually thinks. He doesn’t think these artifacts come from native Americans or pre-Columbian visitors to North America. He thinks they’re from bigfoot. Now bigfoot here is a transdimensional entity, the kind encountered in The Psychic Sasquatch and some other book I’ve read recently that I can’t quite remember. (Maybe John Keel?) The writing on these artifacts is Norse, Chinese, and Latin, or some combination thereof. Whatever entity left these artifacts came from another time or dimension and they didn’t know which language the locals used, so they wrote in the one they were most familiar with. This is definitely the least unlikely possibility.
Chapter 4 Fossils that feature well preserved lifeforms may not be what scientists say they are. How do we know that these aren’t just rocks that are actually giving birth to these creatures? The author claims that idea that life comes from rocks is much better than the theory of evolution. Proof of this idea is found in the fact that bigfoot often makes piles of rocks and throws rocks at people to attack them. Weird stuff often happens near water, but more interestingly, weird stuff (tornadoes, bigfoot sightings, random explosions) frequently happen to trailer parks. The author suggests that this is probably because as metal containers, trailers are more likely to trap mysterious orgone energy, but it seems more likely to me that they’re more susceptible to tornado damage because they’re not anchored to the ground and more susceptible to bigfoot attacks because the people living in them are poor and probably uneducated (and hence more delicious to predators). It turns out that many of the strange structures and rocks dotted across America were made by Pan, the Earth spirit.
Chapter 5 More of the same, but this time he looks at how the measurements of some of these structures can be manipulated so that they relate to the measurements of the pyramids at Giza. Some of the structures he discusses here are from a book called Traditions of De Coo Dah by William Pidgeon, a book that has been accepted as a hoax for over a century. Brandon claims that the reason nobody has ever seen the monuments described by Pidgeon is that Pan caused the Earth to swallow them up in a reversal of the way he created many of the mysterious mounds previously discussed.
Chapter 6 Some numbers 23 and 33 are linked with countless weird events. Some names are too. Author lists off bad things that have happened in places called Lafayette or Fayette. These include cryptid sightings, the murders of presidents and prophets and more. He also points out that the Amityville murderer‘s name was Defeo (de-fay-oh), and Aleister Crowley’s mantra of, “do what thou wilt” translated into latin is, “fay que ce voudras”.
Chapter 7 The last chapter is basically a long conclusion that adds little to the author’s claims. It talks about symbolism and alchemy and Sirius. The nost intersting claim here is that some aliens, probably those from Orion, hate dogs because of the link between dogs and Sirius. The aliens from Sirius and Orion supposedly hate eachother according to some alien contactees. Bigfeet also hate dogs, so maybe they are aliens?
Appendices Only point of interest here is the suggestion that cattle mutialtions are done by bigfoot.
Overall, this book was a boring slog. It had some truly ridiculous ideas, but the reasoning is just too weak for it to be taken seriously at all. I love the idea of reading a book that references the works of Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Montague Summers, and Robert Anton Wilson, but there was no real cohesion to this jumbling mess. It’s not surprising that the author is a dumb piece of trash.
I read this on a whim recently, and though more modern than a lot of what appears on this blog, Scott Smith’s The Ruins was quite good.
Vintage – 2007 (First published 2006)
A bunch of young people go on vacation to Mexico and end up travelling into the jungle to see their friends who are supposedly working on an archaeological dig. When they get there, they get trapped on a hill that’s covered with an evil plant that won’t let them escape. Things get grizzly pretty quickly.
The plot is a bit silly, but this is well written, and there were a few genuinely scary moments. It really reminded me of The Troop by Nick Cutter. I just looked it up online, and apparently Cutter openly acknowledged that this book directly inspired his. Both books follow a small group’s nightmarish weekend on a remote and lethal location, and both feature the timeless combination of things that burrow inside people and sharp knives.
This kind of survival horror isn’t my favourite genre, but this was enjoyable. I am going to give Smith’s other, more famous, novel, A Simple Plan, a read soon.
Lovecraft Country is an excellent title for a novel. Initially I assumed it was going to be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but with Cthulhu, the nightmarish diary of a drug user as they passed through Innsmouth and Arkham, not being able to distinguish between hallucinations and genuine sinister apparitions. That would have been awesome, but that’s not what this is.
Lovecraft Country – Matt Ruff
Harper – 2017 (First published 2016)
This is a novel that features Lovecraftian entities, but the horror it focuses on is actually that of American racism. First off, let me clarify immediately, that I am not an “anti-woke” asshole who disregards things because they mention race. I understand that racism was and continues to be a huge problem, especially in America. If you disagree with that sentiment, go stick a knife up your shitter. My complaint is not that racism shouldn’t be addressed; it’s that this is not a good way to do it. To me, the appeal of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror lies in its villains’ complete apathy towards human life. In Lovecraft’s best stories, there’s no bad guy who hates people because they were mean to him. He was writing about entities who see human life as nothing more than a mistake. We are slime to the Great Old Ones. What does Cthulhu care for the tribulations of man? To write a story that focuses on race against that backdrop seems absurd. If the world is soon to repopulated with a species of humanoid beetles, why should we care about the immediate suffering of one particular group of people?
In actuality, the Lovecraftian influence on this novel seems to come more from Lovecraft’s fantasy stories than his horror. The amount of Shoggothery in here is minimal. I kept hoping that really bad stuff was going to start happening to everyone, but it didn’t. This novel did not deliver the Lovecraftian horror that I am a fan of. If you want Lovecraftian horror with a black protagonist, I would recommend Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom instead.
I hummed and hawed for a month after finishing Lovecraft Country, trying to figure out if I was going to read The Destroyer of Worlds, the book’s sequel. I eventually decided not to bother. I read that Ruff claimed that the first novel is a better book, and as I found this one quite boring, I decided not to bother with its sequel. I’m not going to bother with the TV show either.
The other thing is that the author is a white man. I’m certainly not of the opinion that an author should only write about characters of their own race, but this is very much a novel about the hardships endured by black people in the 1950s. While I thought that Ruff dealt with the topic in a sensitive manner, I am a white guy, so my opinion isn’t that important here. I guess a cast and crew of mostly black people worked on the TV adaptation though, so it’s probably ok. Personally, I wouldn’t touch this kind of thing with a 10 foot pole in my own fiction. I’d be afraid of being accused of virtue signaling or insensitivity. Ruff, at least in my opinion, manages to walk that fine line successfully, but it seems like the effort required in doing so made it much more difficult to deliver the promises made by the book’s title.
The first time I heard of The Exorcist was when it was unbanned in Ireland in 1998. I was about 12 years old and still very Catholic. What I heard about this film was terrifying, and when I saw it a year or two later in a friend’s house, I was shitting myself. Part of this was due to my deeply ingrained fear of the devil, but it is also a very scary film. Despite losing my faith in the power of Christ, the original film still creeps me out every time I watch it. I first read the novel that the movie was based on just a few months before starting this blog, and I never got around to posting about it. I found an audiobook version recently, and decided to give it another go.
William Peter Blatty – The Exorcist (40th Anniversary Revised Edition)
Harper – 2011 (Originally published 1971)
I’m assuming anyone clicking onto a blog like this knows the story of The Exorcist, but in case you don’t, this is the story of a little girl getting possessed by a demon. The film follows the novel very closely, and if you like one, I’m sure you’ll like the other. The only problem here was that I realised very closely to the end of the book that the audiobook version I was listening to was a revised version. There’s a scene where a fat ghost priest shows up to Karras’s bedroom to warn him about the exorcism that I didn’t remember. This part was cheesy and dumb, and it cheapened the original. The ending is slightly different in the revised version too. The author tries to clarify that Karras is ultimately victorious at the end. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I didn’t compare it with my paperback copy of the original book, and while it’s not a huge change, I don’t like happy endings to horror novels, and I thought this was unnecessary. If you haven’t read The Exorcist before, make sure you read the original text and not the stupid revised version from 2011.
William Peter Blatty – Legion
Simon & Schuster – 1983
Directly after finishing The Exorcist, I read its sequel, Legion. A film version of this was released in 1990 as The Exorcist 3. William Peter Blatty, the author, had nothing to do with the 2nd Exorcist film, and Legion completely ignores the events in that film.
Honestly, I thought this book was trash. It follows the detective character from the first Exorcist novel as he tracks down a serial killer who is supposedly dead. The premise of the story would be fine, but every chapter gets bogged down in amateur philosophizing on the natures of evil and death. It’s painful.
Eventually it turns out that the murderer’s spirit has possessed Damien Karras, the exorcist from the first book. This makes absolutely no sense in the context of the revised version of The Exorcist, as after finishing that, the reader is expected to believe that Karras was victorious in defeating the demon. The functional premise of Legion is revealed to be that the evil spirit was victorious against Karras. This is a stupid horror novel, and while it’s pointless to get too critical here, it’s hard not to do so when the author spends half the book trying to make himself seem clever.
Well, there you go. I’ve finally done the 4 of the creepy children genre: The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Other.
Chainsaw Terror is soon to be rereleased, but a few years ago, the only way to read it without paying a fortune was to buy the Shaun Hutson omnibus containing Come the Night (the alternate title for Chainsaw Terror) and the 2 sequels that Hutson wrote to Clive Harold’s The Uninvited. Seeing as though I already had 2 of the 3 books on my shelf, I decided to give this trilogy a read.
The Uninvited – Clive Harold
Star – 1983 (Originally published 1979)
Clive Harold’s The Uninvited is about a farming family in Wales being disturbed by aliens. They see spaceships that stop their cars from driving, they get a rash, their cows disappear and reappear, they see spacemen in shiny suits, and weird men with waxy foreheads call at their neighbour’s house to ask questions about them. It’s pretty straightforward stuff as far as these things go, and no explanation other than aliens from spaceships is considered.
There were a couple of passages in the book that made me think of how horrible it would be to experience this kind of thing, but I didn’t find any of it convincing. I have seen pictures online of the family this book is about, so it is possible that there was at least some factual basis for this story. I reckon they were bullshitters though.
The book was published in the late 70s, and when I looked up the author, the only thing I could find about his life after publishing this book was that he ended up homeless and selling the Big Issue in the 1990s.
My favourite thing about this book was the amount of tea and coffee the family drink. It genuinely made me care about their wellbeing. Imagine having your evening swally of tae ruined by a disappearing herd of cows. Nightmarish.
The Uninvited 2: The Visitation – Frank Taylor
Star – 1984
This one is about a family who own a pub who get harrassed by aliens. The aliens abduct and rape the mother and send down Men in Black to annoy the family. I was hoping this was going to be like the first book but Shaun Hutsoned, but it’s very similar in its scope. There’s no mutant abortions, IRA men or chainsaws. Although it is suggested that the women are raped, it cuts out after they feel their legs being spread open. This is boring crap, and I sincerely doubt any of it is true.
The Uninvited 3: The Abduction – Frank Taylor
Star – 1985
This time it’s a policeman who sees an alien, but his coworkers don’t believe him. He gets a heat rash after being chased by a spaceship, and 2 aliens try to come into his house. Men in Black show up to tell him to keep things to himself, but these are members of the government rather than aliens Eventually the copper is abducted and raped by a sexy alien woman with red pubic hair. This was boring, definitely fictional garbage. It’s half-assed, and I am not surprised that Shaun Hutson used a pseudonym.
The Uninvited – Nick Pope
Pocket Books – 1998
I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently, and the reason I read the three above books was because I downloaded an audiobook called The Uninvited thinking it was the first book in the series. It turns out it was actually a completely different book about aliens by a researcher named Nick Pope. I was a few chapters in before realising that it was something totally different, but at that stage I had gone too far to turn back.
This is a fairly broad overview of the alien abduction phenomenon. It covers many of the most famous abduction cases and some cases that the author came across when working as a UFO specialist for the British Ministry of Defence. I found the stuff on the older cases quite interesting, but Pope’s willingness to accept obvious nonsense was a bit jarring. A lot of the people he’s talking about were clearly liars or morons, and some of the cases he discusses have long been accepted as hoaxes. Here is a video of him interviewing an alien who has possessed a woman that Pope claims holds the world record for number of times to get abducted. There’s a whole chapter in this book about her.
On a separate note, I found out yesterday that my friend Sandy Robertson died. I first encountered Sandy when he scolded me for pretending to throw my Colin Wilson books in the garbage. We became friends after I interviewed him about his Aleister Crowley book, and I heard from him nearly every week after that. He was a really cool guy, and I was deeply saddened to hear that he passed. Sandy my friend, if your ghost is reading this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is), I will miss you.
I read a few books by the Marquis de Sade when I was in my early twenties. I was thoroughly amused, but I haven’t really felt the need to revisit his work since. A few days ago I was searching through my local library’s collection of audiobooks when I spotted a book called The Curse of the Marquis de Sade. Initially, I thought it might be a light BDSM romance novel, but on closer inspection it seemed to be a history of the manuscript of 120 Days in Sodom, perhaps the most twisted novel ever written and one of my personal favourites.
So de Sade wrote 120 Days in Sodom while locked up in prison. After the storming of the Bastille, he lost the hand-made scroll it was written on and assumed it had been destroyed. It turned up after his death, and while he had spent his remaining years writing other foul books, none of them compared to 120 Days in terms of their meticulous and undiluted cruelty.
It’s the story of 4 perverts who kidnap a bunch of kids and take them to a remote castle. There, they proceed to perform acts of every perversion imaginable. The plot is extremely simple, and as the novel was never actually finished, the version that we have is largely just a list of perverted acts. We’re not talking foot fetish or balloon popping stuff here. This is mostly shit eating, blasphemy, dismemberment and masturbating to scenes of brutal torture. I wrote more about this book a long time ago in case you’re interested.
Warner’s book goes into very little detail on the contents of 120 Days of Sodom and instead focuses on the history of the scroll. Obviously as a one of a kind manuscript, it became quite a collector’s item, and it has been highly sought after and prized by several interesting characters. Warner also gives a biographical account of de Sade. I knew the basic story of his life, but I found this part quite amusing. He was a terrible person, but his pettiness and penchant for blasphemy are quite endearing to me.
The Curse of the Marquis de Sade is a short book about a book. If you have managed to read 120 Days, I would imagine you will find Warner’s book quite entertaining. It has made me think about revisiting de Sade’s work. I’ve had unread copies of Justine and Juliette on my shelf for years. Maybe the time is now right.
It is a rare occurence that a week goes by without a new post on this website. I try to arrange my reading so that I have something to post about every Sunday. Things have been a little busy recently, and while I have several posts started for the near future, I am waiting to finish other books before posting them. Last night, I found myself scrolling through my archives of magical texts in the hopes of finding short enough to digest before my deadline today. I’ve been in this situation many times before, and I’m generally able to find some ridiculous pamphlet from Finbarr books about playing with wee or waggling your dick in the mirror to post about.
International Imports – 1999 (Originally published 1975)
Last night, I found 2 short grimoires compiled by Anna Riva. The first was a text called Secrets of the Magical Seals. It was extremely disappointing. It was just a collection of seals and pictures that Anna took from other books. I have an old Dover edition of Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs & Signets, and just a glance through that proved that it was the source of many of the images in Riva’s book. The actual instructions in Riva’s book are dull and uninteresting.
International Imports – 2002
I was disappointed, but not discouraged, so I read another of Riva’s magical texts, this one called Domination: The Art of Casting Spells. I thought this might be a little juicier, but it’s not. It describes how to manipulate a person with a doll stuffed with their pubic hair, but nothing else of any interest.
Anna Riva put out crap like this for decades. What a load of shit. I am sorry for this dreadful, lackluster post. I just didn’t want you to think that I haven’t been doing my homework.
It’s Saint Patrick’s day tomorrow, and by sheer coincidence, this week’s book is set in Ireland. I was quite excited when I found a book set in my home country about demonic possession.
Gill & Macmillan – 2006
I started reading the original edition titled The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland, but later editions were titled Dark Sacrament: True Stories of Modern Day Possession and Exorcism. These editions are identical expect for an additional story in the latter, but this story is set in Kerry, so I’m unsure as to why they dropped the reference to Ireland in the subtitle. The whole time I was reading the book, I felt like the authors had written it to appeal to stupid Irish Americans. I had hoped for horrendous blasphemies, but I got a bunch of hooey about fairy forts, Banshees and druids. I can’t imagine any of the Irish people I know taking this nonsense seriously. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of stupid, religious Irish people, but this stuff is so daft that only an uneducated American pig could possibly accept it as true.
The introduction makes reference to a protestant Canon meeting a girl in Belfast who became possessed when she was initiated into satanic cult as a child. Bullshit. This supposedly happened in the 70s. If you google Satanism in Belfast in the 1970s, the only relevant information that shows up is about stories spread by British disinformation agents as part of a psy-op against Catholic communities. If I am wrong and any knows anything about Satanic groups that were active in 1970s Belfast, please reach out and let me know!
The cases presented in this book appear as short stories, and after finishing the book, I doubt any have any basis in reality. This entire book must be fiction. It’s too stupid to believe.
The first story is about a woman who was neglected and sexually abused as a child. She had attempted suicide twice before the exorcism, and she smelled like piss. The narrative is actually quite scary. Her granny’s ghost visits her house and terrorizes her and her boyfriend. Later, she gets possessed by this ghost and tries to kill herself. The book never really explains why her granny hates her so much. The exorcism was supposedly successful, but the girl hung herself 6 months later, so it seems like she was definitely just a person with severe mental health problems. I liked the story, but it was clearly bullshit.
A woman is repeatedly night raped by a French spirit named Pierre Dubois. This happens after she plays with a Ouija board. Sounds like a case of sleep paralysis.
A young teenager finds a Ouija board by a river. Its planchette floats up into the air, and mesmerized, the kid uses it and comes into contact with a spirit named Tyrannus. Then he starts having seizures and tells his ma to fuck off. The kid is exorcised but it doesn’t work. Now he has suicidal thoughts. Load of bollocks.
A woman buys some smelly wooden balls in a hippy shop that unleash the spirit of a missing child from 200 years ago into her house. The ghost child is mischievous, but after she is dispelled with prayer, she is replaced by an evil spirit that burns the homeowner’s prayers and wrecks their crosses. It turns out the house was built in a fairy ring. This is clearly fictional. Total bullshit.
A child starts seeing ghosts in her house. No possession involved, just ghosts that rearrange video tapes and play peekaboo.
A family moves into a house owned by their ancestors but left to other people. They had to buy it back. It turns out their family were trying to protect them from an evil spirit that lives under the hearthstone that has inhabited that home since the time of the druids.
An old man goes on a cruise after he retires, but when he gets to Egypt he meets a man who is either drunk or possessed. When he gets back to Ireland, the spirit that possessed the drunkard takes possession of the retired man’s next door neighbour. Then the neighbour rapes the old man in front of his family at a barbeque.
The ghost of a German Hessian mercenary rapes a mother and daughter and their Bosnian employee.
A girl meets a creepy guy in a bookshop who gives her a book about Tuesdsy Lobsang Rampa, the fake Tibetan monk, and then teaches her how to astrally project and go back in time with LSD. He is evil, and when she gets scared, he sends evil spirits to attack her. Priest exorcises them away. Not true. Horse shit.
This story is only in later editions of the book. It is the vilest of all. A woman crashes her car into a truck and ends up marrying the truck driver. They have a kid. Turns out that the husband is having a gay affair with his paedophile priest friend. This man was raped by his father and forced to have sex with his siblings. After his dad died, his mom prostituted her own kids out. It turns out this man is raping his own child and letting his priest boyfriend and paedo brothers in on the action. The woman runs away, but the priest dies and haunts her and her child until another Catholic priest gets her to pray for the soul of the child rapist. This story is obviously untrue and deeply perverse, but the fact that it works as a Catholic morality tale is fucked up.
There is a bit on the history of exorcism in Ireland as an afterword, but the above stories make up most of the book.
Honestly, I find it hard to believe that anyone could read this book and take it seriously. This book is trash. I have to say though, when I was looking up the author, I found his youtube channel, and while I didn’t enjoy his book, I did enjoy his singing.
Nocturnal Revelries 