The Dark Side of Freemasonry – Ed Decker

Huntington House Publishers – 1994

About 20 years ago, a bunch of evangelical christians met up somewhere in the backwards part of the southern US and had a symposium on the evils of Freemasonry. Most of the attendees were former masons, mormons and muslims; the kind of people who jump ship at the drop of a hat. This book collects the speeches that they gave. A lot of it is the kind of thing you’d expect (“Freemasons worship the Devil!” stuff). Other chapters are outright ludicrous (Freemasons are trying to destroy the US education system!), and one of them is a fairly interesting account of famous occultists and their links and opinions on masonry.

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(If anyone can fill me in on the relevance of ‘The Wayfaring Man’ within Masonic ritual, it would be greatly appreciated. I own the above copy of a book with that title by George Estes. It was published in 1922, and it’s very definitely a Masonic text. I don’t want to read it until I have some context.)

I’m not a Freemason, and I don’t feel any great desire to defend Masonry, but most of this book is silly nonsense. Several of the papers claim that most Freemasons aren’t aware of the occult influence on their organisation because they never bother to read the literature. I’m not interested in refuting this claim, but I found it hilarious to see christians criticising others for blindly accepting dogma without having read the literature. Have you seen that awesome video of christians reading passages from the Bible for the first time and being repulsed?

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Whoever owned this book before me took it pretty seriously. They seemed to have been upset by this image of Baphomet. Also pictured is the bookmark that was hidden inside when I bought the book. I looked it up, and the christian bookstore it came from has shut down. Yipeeee!

Yeah, this book was crap. I only read it because I don’t want to get into anything too interesting while I’m in school. It came with the two books from my last blog post, and I promise it will be the last christian book that I review for a while. I got a great haul of books off craigslist the other day, and I’m hoping to read a few of those over the christmas break. Oh, and before I forget to mention it, I’ve created a facebook page so that people without a wordpress account can stay updated on this blog. The link is here and also in the menu in the top right. Give it a like if you’re so inclined.

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The X-Files Haul
A guy was selling most of his book collection on craigslist, and I nabbed these absolute classics for a measly 8 bucks. I had to take three buses to get out to meet him in front of a drugstore in the middle of nowhere, but it was totally worth the opportunity to pretend I was Mulder meeting up with some shady character to obtain esoteric information.

Demonology Past and Present by Kurt Koch and Satan, Satanism and Witchcraft by Richard W. DeHaan

Well it’s Halloween today, and I thought I had better make a post to give you something to read before the trick-or-treaters come to set fire to your cat. Here’s a review of the two books that I have managed to read since September. Enjoy!

Demonology Past and Present – Kurt Koch
Kregel -1973

Satan, Satanism and Witchcraft – Richard W. DeHaan
Zondervan – 1972

These ones aren’t just shitty books; they’re actually shit books. I have barely any free time anymore, and so I have to limit my leisure reading to my Sunday morning craps. Being in school has made it so that those holiest of moments on the Sabbath are now my only opportunity to read about Satan without feeling irresponsible. (I used to limit my toilet reading to the collection of Poe’s poems that I kept under the bathroom sink. Whenever my phone was out of battery and I couldn’t play solitaire while pinching a loaf, I would treat myself to an old ‘Edgar Allan Poo’.)

As you have probably guessed, these two books are awful. They came as part of a collection I purchased a few years ago from a hippy lady in the suburbs. She was selling a collection of 6 books, only 2 of which I actually wanted to read. I have since read and reviewed all 4 of the books that I was not interested in, but the ones I wanted have remained on the shelf. Anyways, both of these books deal with the topic of Satanism from a Christian point of view, and unsurprisingly, they are both repulsively stupid.

Let’s consider the authors for a moment. One of them is named Kurt Koch. Old Kurty is a classic case of “Koch by name; Koch by nature”. And what about his companion; Mr. Richard W. DeHaan? Well, they say that a picture speaks a thousand words, but the below picture only seems to repeat the word ‘wanker’ a thousand times.

As i have probably mentioned elsewhere, I find it fascinating to read the ideas of people who take each word of the Bible as being literally true. Let’s be completely honest here; 99% of the time, when a non-christian comes into contact with a christian, the non christian can instantly be sure of the fact that they are more intelligent than the christian. Oftentimes though, we can give the christian the benefit of the doubt; although the person claims to be a christian, it can be safely assumed that they have not actually read the bible. When a person has actually read the bible and still claims to be a christian, you can safely infer that that person is an imbecile of the lowest order. To all whom encounter them, rubes of this variety seem to be entirely incapable of thinking critically.

On closer inspection though, these people are capable of a form of critical thinking. Unfortunately, the logic on which they base their thought is both flawed and perverse. Instead of using reason to reason, they use fear, prejudice and a unhealthy splash of utter nonsense. The authors of these two books are particularly fond of this approach. They weave a web of dogma around the topics of Satan and Satanism, and make themselves look like a pair of proper fools. One of the big points that both authors push is that many people who are having problems with their mental health are actually possessed by a demon and more in need of an exorcist than a psychologist or a doctor! My favourite argument that is put forth in either of these books though, is DeHaans argument for the consistency of the Bible’s attitude towards witchcraft. There has always been a bit of a problem with this issue; despite the infamous “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” rule, there are actually quite a few witchy characters in the bible. There is a particular incident in Genesis when Jacob plays with some sticks to alter the appearance of the lambs being born to Laban’s flock. (Gen 30:37-43) He peels patterns into the bark on some sticks, and the animals who mate near the sticks will give birth to offspring with a similar pattern on their fur. Now let’s think about that for a moment. If a woman were to have attempted something similar to this 500 years ago, she would almost definitely have been burnt as a witch. If somebody was to do something similar in the 1970s, the authors of these books would likely have attempted to perform an exorcism on them. How then does DeHaan get around the fact that Jacob, grandson of Abraham himself, was a dirty, occulting, sorcerer? Well, it turns out that God was actually trolling Jacob; he had organised the sheep to mate a certain way, and Jacob’s twigs never had any effect. Therefore, the sticks were a waste of time and Jacob hadn’t actually done magic. That’s fair enough, but DeHaan seems to think that this gets Jacob off the hook; however, it doesn’t change the fact that Jacob attempted to do magic. Just because he was a shit sorcerer doesn’t mean he wasn’t a sorcerer. It’s all about intent, you fucking dope DeHaan. (On a depressing side note, I just looked it up, and it seems that many people are still seriously discussing the tenability of Jacob’s approach to genetic engineering.) DeHaan’s twisted defenses of other biblical witches are just as unsatisfying, but this is hardly surprising. He is stretching the prim, white blanket of reason over an awkward, shit-brown, virulent mass of obtuse, dogmatic rubbish.

There was one cool part of DeHaan’s book where he lists some other books that you shouldn’t read. I haven’t heard of these, and maybe he made them up, but I’m sure as hell going to keep an eye out for them in the future. Let me know if you have copies!!!

To conclude; these two books were truly moronic. Don’t waste your time with this kind of crap unless you’re crapping. School is really getting intense now, so it’ll probably be another little while before I post anything else. In the meantime, have a good Halloween, listen to metal, worship Satan and remember to keep it anti-christian!

The Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Nightmare Abbey

I recently started back at university, and I won’t have much time for reading or blogging for the next year. Still though, I’ll try to get a few posts up whenever I get the chance. Here are three books that weren’t as good as I hoped they would be.

The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
Signet Classics – 1987
This one was actually pretty good for most of the book. I just felt that the ending was a let down. I read it a good while ago, and I have actually forgotten how it ended. I could look it up for the sake of this blog post, but I don’t think that my fragile heart could bear to go through that disappointment again.
Although the characters in here are annoyingly see-through, I think that the biggest problem for this book is living up to the reputation that Hollywood has created for it. The Phantom of the Opera, as an archetypal villain, is in the same league as Dracula or Frankenstein. Unfortunately the book that he comes from is not nearly as good as those of his rivals. It’s still fun though, and I probably enjoyed this the most out of any of the three turds.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Golden Press – 1978
I had a cool Jekyll and Hyde board game when I was a kid, and I grew up imagining that the book would be as much fun as that game. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It basically tells the same story twice: once from the point of view of Jekyll and once from the point of view of Hyde. The plot is framed around a twist, but I can’t imagine that there are many readers who don’t already know who’s who of this tale. This was another book that I read on a plane, so maybe it’s better than I remember. Still though, I’m not going to reread it.

Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock
Penguin Classics – 1986
This one isn’t all that bad; it was just quite a bit different to what I expected. It’s often included in lists of classic Gothic literature, and while it is fairly morbid, it’s just not that spooky. Not a lot happens in it either; it’s mostly dialogue. It’s not an all-together bad read though; I definitely got a few laughs out of it. My edition also includes another novel by the same author. I probably won’t bother. Much of the inspiration for that terrible Gothic film by Ken Russell came from this.

There you go faithful readers; three turds in the bowl. I’m sure this post has been even more disappointing than any of the books reviewed. Que sera, sera.

Morning of the Magicians – Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier

Dorset Press – 1988

This one is utterly moronic. I’m no stranger to idiotic books, and I have a fairly high threshold for reading garbage, but this one was seriously stupid. It was made particularly disappointing by the fact that I actually spent quite a while trying to track down an affordable copy. I always knew it was going to be fairly bullshitty, and so I decided that anything more than 15 dollars would be too much. It took me five separate orders over the course of two years to actually get my hands on this thing. Three times the bookseller had already sold their copy and not updated their stock online, and one copy got lost in the post. When this nice hardback edition arrived, I was delighted.

The delight was not to last.

Why was I so determined to own a copy of this book? Well, this one was actually fairly popular when it was published (this edition boasts “Over 800,000 copies sold!” on the back cover), and a lot of the silly ideas in here went on to influence other silly writers. I kept seeing its title pop up in other books and articles. It has been claimed that this is the source for the main concept in Erich Von Däniken’s work. Also, a large part of this book focuses on Nazi occultism, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke spends a few pages of his book talking about how fucking stupid this one is. On top of that, I had read that this book was influenced directly by the writings of Lovecraft, and while it is only mentioned briefly in Colin Wilson’s The Occult, it becomes apparent after reading it that it had a pretty big influence on his thinking. I didn’t really have a choice; I had to read this one.

So, the main idea of the book is that human beings are on the brink of the next stage of our mental evolution. Pauwels and Bergier believe that the scientific method has run its course, and any major future developments will be based on something other than logical reasoning. Being sensible is holding us back from reaching our potential. Their idea is to use their imaginations to come up with absurd nonsense, and maybe that nonsense will actually be true. T.C. Lethbridge used this exact approach in his book, the topic of which fits in perfectly with the ideas of Pauwels and Bergier. The authors title this approach ‘Fantastic Realism’. I think another, more accurate, way of describing this approach would be ‘simpletonism’.

They talk about how difficult it will be for the masses to adapt to this new approach. You might find it hard to imagine a modern society radically changing its system of beliefs over a short period of time. The authors’ response to this is ingenious. They claim, ‘ If Nazi Germany did it, we can too!’ Honestly, I think they must have been planning to write two different books and ended up throwing all of their material together to reach a word-count or deadline or something. The Nazi stuff takes up about one third of the book, but its function is limited to serving as a bad example of what the authors want to achieve: a society in which people ignore common-sense and listen to the most mental dopes in all the land.

My favourite part of the book was the authors’ theory on mutants. Pauwels and Bergier believe that while nuclear radiation definitely has negative effects on some people, it probably also has positive effects on others. Sure, it melts some people’s skin off and causes cancer and sterilization, but what’s to say that it doesn’t also create super humans? Back in a few minutes guys, I’m just going to go stick my head in the microwave and become one of the X-men! They give a description of one such super human: “He is now superior to us; his thought no longer plods – it flies… Such a man would have absolutely no interest in trying to communicate with us, nor would he seek to dazzle us by trying to explain the enigmas of light, or the secrets of genes… This man would be above and beyond humanity. He could only communicate to advantage with minds of his own.” I would be surprised if Alan Moore hadn’t based Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen on that specific paragraph.

This book discusses Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, aliens, the Nazis and mutants, so you know that there’s going to be some good stuff in here. Unfortunately, all of the juicy bits are (a) not particularly enlightening and (b) surrounded by pages and pages of wank. It’s a long book, and I was only able to stomach a few pages a day. In fairness though, I probably would have enjoyed it a little more if I hadn’t come across its ideas in so many other texts. It would be a good place to start if you wanted to begin researching the ridiculous and inane. Otherwise, your life is almost definitely going to be better if you don’t read this imbecilic pile of crap. I bought two other books by Pauwels and Bergier before this one actually arrived, but I’m going to give myself a break before I torture myself with them.

I’m going to have nightmares about having to read these.

Zanoni – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

P.F. Collier – 1892

Last year, I ordered a set of books by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It’s a 9 volume set of his most popular works. All the books are double-paged, and each volume contains a few different works. I have a pretty big reading list, and it took a few months to get around to any of these battered old tomes, but almost as soon as I started reading, I knew this set had been a wise purchase. If you find a cheap copy of these books, buy them immediately. I spent about three times the cost of the books on the postage, but it was still worth it. (UPS are a dirty shower of thieving bastards!)

A pretty cool cover. N.b. the fasces and the obscenity.

LOL

These books were published in 1892, and it shows. The spines are all cracked and the binding is falling apart. I had to sit down at a desk and carefully turn each page so as not to cause further damage. Now one might think that this would have been detrimental to my enjoyment of these texts, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I felt so cool, patiently leafing through the pages and inhaling their aged musk. One can only imagine my delight on finding that the text that I started reading was about a ciphered manuscript given to the author by a mysterious Rosicrucian whom he had met in an esoteric bookshop. All my dreams were coming true at once!

The frontispiece of Zanoni. It depicts Gaeto Pisani and his daughter, Viola. (I think.)

The manuscript tells the tale of Zanoni, an immortal sorcerer and member of an extremely exclusive secret society consisting of only two people. He tries his best to help out a pair of young lovers, but he fails miserably and ends up making their lives incredibly difficult. The youngfella thinks that Zanoni is really cool, and tries his best to be like him. Zanoni is fairly chuffed, and invites him to join his club. Unfortunately for everyone, Glyndon, the young man, doesn’t get past the initiation ritual for the order, and ends up spending the rest of his days getting stalked by a particularly nasty entity called ‘the dweller of the threshold’.

Lytton was a hugely popular writer in the 19th century, and apparently the theosophists were big fans of his. Helena Blavatsky introduced a version of the dweller of the threshold into her teachings. She described it as an extension of one’s astral body that results from the remnants of past lives. Other occultists have appropriated the dweller in other equally silly ways. Van Morrison, everyone’s favourite adept of easy-listening, had an interest in the occult at some stage, and he used one of these bastardized versions of the dweller for the topic of one of his songs. Before I go any further, I want to declare my extreme and utter hatred for Van Morrison. I remember being a kid and having the tape of Van the man’s greatest hits playing in the car every fucking time my parents took me on a drive. I didn’t know what it was called, but I referred to it as ‘sweaty music’ because that’s how it made me feel. I actually listened to his song a few times before I wrote this review, and it made me want to vomit and shit diarrhea at the same time. Anyways, the lyrics to Morrison’s song are about some kind of benevolent source of spiritual inspiration. Bollocks to that. In Lyttons book, the dweller is a seriously nasty piece of work:

Its form was veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female; yet it moved not as move even the ghosts that simulate the living. It seemed rather to crawl as some vast misshapen reptile; and pausing, at length it cowered beside the table which held the mystic volume, and again fixed its eyes through the filmy veil on the rash invoker. All fancies, the most grotesque, of monk or painter in the early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone. All else so dark,—shrouded, veiled and larva-like. But that burning glare so intense, so livid, yet so living, had in it something that was almost HUMAN in its passion of hate and mockery,—something that served to show that the shadowy Horror was not all a spirit, but partook of matter enough, at least, to make it more deadly and fearful an enemy to material forms. As, clinging with the grasp of agony to the wall,—his hair erect, his eyeballs starting, he still gazed back upon that appalling gaze,—the Image spoke to him: his soul rather than his ear comprehended the words it said.

“Thou hast entered the immeasurable region. I am the Dweller of the Threshold. What wouldst thou with me?”

Deadly, isn’t she?

I won’t say much more about the plot, as I don’t want to ruin the story on you. Being honest though, this is not a great book. There are some fairly big flaws here; it seems a bit like the author was making up the plot as he went along, and the detailed parts on the French revolution are neither interesting nor particularly relevant. Some editions use the subtitle; ‘A Rosicrucian tale’, and this is fairly apt: there’s probably a lot of symbolic and esoteric meaning between the lines that will only become apparent to patient students of hermeneutics, but I’m not really concerned with that shit. This is an old book about wizards, spirits, demons, and babes with heaving bosoms, and I thought it was deadly.

The Bible

I grew up in a Catholic household, and I went to mass every Sunday until I was 17 years old. I tried to read the Bible as a child, but I got a few pages into Genesis and stopped. I’ve since renounced my faith and made some sinister pacts with you know who, but in my reading I kept seeing references to this book and I decided to give it another go. I’m also an extremely petty person, and I enjoy knowing more about Christianity than most Christians. I started reading the Bible about 2 years ago, and I only recently finished the whole thing. It’s about 900 double pages long, so I took my time with it; reading a book here and there in between other texts. Parts of it are incredibly tedious, but some of it is really interesting. I remembered a lot of the New Testament stories from my church going days, but the Old Testament is filled with awesome bits that they never tell you at mass. I am quite certain that most ‘Christians’ would abandon their faith if they actually took the time to read and think about this awfully silly book of utter nonsense. Any person who reads and acknowledges all of the stories in this book as true is an utter imbecile.

One thing that surprises me about the Bible is the ignorance that surrounds the book. Most people (including Christians) don’t know what the Bible is. It seems that many people think that it is a book of rules. The Bible shouldn’t really be seen as a book. It is a library of arbitrary texts that were written by savages in the iron age . Some of them are instructional, many of them are historical and some are philosophical. The instructional books are intended for people living in the iron age, and any modern human who relies on these texts for guidance is a stupid fucking pig. The historical and philosophical books are still rather interesting, but it is extremely obvious that the people who wrote these books did not have the same standards of historical accuracy as we might hope for. Several of the books in here tell the same stories but give very different accounts of the same incidents.(Did Judas hang himself or did God blow him up?) I was walking through town yesterday and I saw a book entitled “The Juice Bible”. That is an idiotic title for a book that is comprised solely of juice recipes. To compose a true “Juice Bible” one could compile the top 50 results of a google search for the words “juice blog”, regardless of their content and reliability. Maybe that’s a silly analogy, but my point is that the Bible is basically a incoherent collection of assorted crap that was written and compiled without any sensible authority.

My favourite books are Genesis, Exodus, Judges, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel and Daniel. Isaiah and Jeremiah are soooooooo boring. The Gospels, Acts and Revelation are the juicy bits of the New Testament; the letters and epistles are all absolute gick.

This certainly won’t be my last post on the Bible. I’m going to do a post on my top 5 favourite Bible stories fairly soon. I assure you that my sermon will be most enlightening. Also, I have yet to read the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, so expect posts on them at some stage too. I read some of the books on different websites and copied my notes into a hard copy that I stole from a hotel room. I didn’t stick to one translation, but the copy I work from is New American Standard. It’s one of the Gideon’s. I make a point to either steal or desecrate every hotel room Bible that I encounter. I encourage you to do the same. Don’t use reason or logic: Christians don’t understand those things! Be as childish and disrespectful as possible, and remember to have fun and be creative!

Mysteries of the Unknown – Time Life (Part One)

I didn’t want to review these until I had read all of them, but that will probably never happen. This is a 33 volume collection of books on the ‘mysteries of the unknown’. Some of the books are very cool, but a lot of them are extremely lame. (I’d say about half of them are about psychics.) They contain a nice mixture of essays and articles, and they’re all full of fancy pictures. It’s a really nice set to have, and I got mine for fairly cheap. I find that they’re quite good if you read them as primers before getting stuck into more difficult/older books on the same topics. I’m going to briefly review three of them today, and I’ll do some more in a few months. The full collection

Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects

I read this one a good while ago. It’s probably the best introductory book on secret societies that I have read. That’s not saying much really, as I have only read three such books. What I am trying to say is that this is a far better introduction to secret societies than Arkon Daraul’s piece of shit. It goes into detail on the assassins, the masons, the Rosicrucians and the Golden Dawn. I thought it was pretty enjoyable.

This is some bullshitty Golden Dawn picture from the book. The bird at the bottom has serious attitude and the lad at the top is wearing a wiggy.

Speaking of the Golden Dawn, I went to the Yeats exhibition last time I was in Dublin, and I took some pictures of his occulting stuff. Here they are:

Sorry William, but that Angel is fucking lame.

Another notebook and some dodgy tarot cards.

Transformations

This one was pretty good too. It’s mostly about vampires and werewolves. It discusses the potential causes of vampirism and lycanthropy without getting too bullshitty. There was also a nice section on Vlad the Impaler, and it has lots of cool pictures, including this saucy snap of Theda Bara.
What a babe!

Mysterious Creatures

This one mainly focuses on Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. I like the fact that these books give fairly objective accounts: They don’t try to disprove anything, but they don’t feel bullshitty either. I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster at all, but I do think that Bigfoot COULD exist.
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This lad also made a brief appearance. He is wrecked.

My lovely wife and I recently celebrated our wedding anniversary in Harrison, British Columbia. Harrison is a bigfoot hotspot and home to Sasquatch Park. We didn’t see one while we were there, but it’s a really nice place. I would definitely recommend going if you get the chance.
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The entrance to our suite

These were in our hotel room. They give some background information and tips on what to do if you encounter a Sasquatch.

A History of Secret Societies – Arkon Daraul

Citadel – 1997

I’m not really interested in secret societies. There’s a few interesting ones, but they’re mostly pretty boring. A few months ago, I saw this book for sale on craigslist for fairly cheap. I wasn’t really bothered, but I was reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy at the time, and when I saw it mentioned therein and recalled the craigslist ad, I took it as a sign that I should buy it. (Coincidences don’t exist.)

Why I bought this piece of trash. Note the misspelling of the author’s name.

I decided to read the book because I am currently reading Zanoni by Bulwer Lytton, and as that book is about Rosicrucians, I thought this would complement it well. It’s certainly as fantastic; in fact, there are more references in Lytton’s work than there are here. Arkon Daraul is full of shit.

This book is garbage. It doesn’t seem reliable at all. Daraul’s choices of which secret societies to discuss are completely arbitrary. There is a lengthy chapter on peacock worshippers in modern England, but there’s no chapter on the freemasons. Admittedly, I was relieved that I didn’t have to read the same crap about freemasons that I have already read in 10 other books, but it did seem a little odd that the most famous secret society of all were barely mentioned in this “historical account”. Also, Daraul doesn’t really bother to distinguish between secret societies and cults.

I don’t really have much else to say on this book. It was crap. The cover (Is that Satan?) makes it look way better than it is. There were some interesting parts, but there are lots of other books on the same topic that are much better. I reviewed a shitty little book on this kind of crap before that covered more ground and was way less bullshitty.
Don’t bother reading this one.

The best part about this book was this prayer leaflet that the previous owner had left in it.

Le Fanu’s Short Stories – Madam Crowl’s Ghost and In a Glass Darkly

Sheridan Le Fanu – Madam Crowl’s Ghost & Other Stories / In A Glass Darkly
Wordsworth Editions – 2006 and 2008

Here are two collections of short stories from one of my favourite writers. I would recommend the Oxford edition of In A Glass Darkly, as that one contains nice notes at the back. Wordsworth editions are bare bones and rarely contain annotation. They are cheap however, and I own quite a few of them.

In A Glass Darkly is the better of the two collections. It’s been a few years since I read it, but I distinctly remember the joy I felt when the evil monkey appeared the first story. It’s also great because it contains lesbian vampires in a vampire story that predates Dracula. I think my favourite story in here is the novella: The Room in Le Dragon Volant. It’s not as spooky as the others, but I really like Le Fanu’s writing

Madam Crowl’s Ghost is a nice collection of ghost stories compiled by none other than M.R James. I read this one more recently, but I read the first two stories on a transatlantic flight and didn’t end up enjoying them as much as I would have were I to read them on the couch at midnight with a cup of peppermint tea. The stories in here are collected from different sources, and the quality and tone varies quite a bit. Some are great though, and most of them are set in Ireland. You can imagine my sheer delight on finding a story in here about a man from my hometown who shares my name. I loved this book, but the other collection is probably a better place to start if you haven’t read Le Fanu before.

Elvis Presley Speaks – Hans Holzer

elvis
New English Library – 1981

This book was not my first encounter with the work of Hans Holzer. Some of you may remember my review of Gothic Ghosts. If you have read that review, you will probably wonder why I bothered to read another book by this chump. (If you haven’t read that review, I strongly suggest that you do. It’s one of my personal favourites.) Well, after reading that utter piece of shit, I needed somewhere to direct my hate, and so I did a google image search for the author. An image of this book appeared, and I simply could not help myself. I bought a copy immediately.

This is a book about a woman named Dorothy who believes that the spirit of Elvis Presley exists in an Astral realm between earth and heaven. This realm is peopled by souls awaiting reincarnation, and it is managed by a mysterious bearded figure named Matthew. (My first guess was that it was the gospelly Matthew, but this is neither confirmed nor denied in the book.) The astral residents spend their days going to school, attending jam sessions and sometimes making contact with the living.

Elvis descends from the astral realm and appears to this woman for two reasons.
1. They have been soul mates in many previous lives, but because of some heavenly error, they ended up apart in their most recent incarnations. (Dorothy was a housewife from New Jersey; Elvis was the king of rock and roll.) This separation was partly to blame for the untimely death of Elvis. After death, Elvis’s soul realizes what he has been missing and decides to spend all of his time watching over this woman.
2. Elvis wants Dorothy to contact the famous parapsychologist, Dr. Hans Holzer so that he can send a message to the world. His message is that there is existence after death and that dead souls can get quite lonely.

So what is the ghost of Elvis like? Well, he’s a weird creep. He gets annoyed about impersonators, worries about his family and tries to ruin a woman’s marriage. At one point he climbs on top of Dorothy when she is in bed with her husband and asks her if she wants to “fool around”. There’s not much insight into Elvis’s character here that wouldn’t be available in other biographies or interviews. Let’s remember that Elvis is one of the most famous people to ever walk the earth, and it would probably be a challenge for Elvis himself to give any additional insight on his character. Given that, I have to say that Dorothy Sherry’s portrait of the king is incredibly underwhelming.

This is a very poorly written book. It’s mostly repetition, and Holzer has no interviewing skills whatsoever. As soon as Elvis starts answering any of his questions, Holzer will immediately interrupt him with another unrelated question. I don’t know if Dorothy Sherry even existed, but if she did, I wonder how much of this book is based on her own subjective experiences and lies and how much is based on Holzer’s personal agenda. It seems a bit odd that Elvis Presley, the most famous entertainer in the world, would come back to substantiate personally the claims of a fiddeldy-dee parapsychologist. I got the impression that Dorothy was being led on by a manipulative cadger, anxious to profit from the unfortunate woman’s mental instability.

Obviously the book is completely stupid and unbelievable, but the most annoying thing about it is Holzer’s sense of self importance. He mentions several times that Elvis had read many of his books and that Elvis wanted Holzer to deal with this case personally. The book is about a famous musician, and Holzer can’t help but announce that he too is a professional musician. At one point in the book he offers to write music for new Elvis songs. Later Dorothy recounts a vision of a past life in ancient Egypt. In this life she was a slave, but she was able to alleviate the misery of servitude by basking in the glory of a noble and intelligent teacher figure. This teacher was none-other than an early incarnation of Hans Holzer himself. Why did Holzer include this vision in a book about the ghost of Elvis?

Hans Holzer, you are an arsehole.

This book is shite. Pure shite. I found myself questioning my own intelligence when I was reading it. In the hours that it took me to read this garbage, I could have tidied my bedroom or gone for a walk. Sometimes I justify reading stupid books to myself by viewing the activity as an exercise in critical thinking. This book provided no such exercise. The critical thinking involved in the reading of this book was limited to my evaluation and immediate repudiation of the book’s subtitle, “The astonishing evidence of spiritual contact with Elvis from beyond the grave”. This book is scraping the bottom of the barrel, and the only good that can come from reading it is the contrast of quality that you will immediately notice in whatever book you read after it. I doubt that I will be reviewing anything this bad for quite a while.