Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country

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.

William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Legion

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

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.

Clive Harold, Shaun Hutson and Nick Pope’s The Uninvited

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

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

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

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.

The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History – Joel Warner

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.

Anna Riva’s Secrets of Magical Seals and Domination

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.

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.

The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland – David M. Kiely and Christina McKenna

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.

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.

Happy Saint Patrick’s day, you disgusting snakes!

Armageddon is Nigh! The Omen Novelisations

I’m not huge into novelisations. I’ve read the first 2 Halloween novels, the Jaws sequels and Teddy, but those books, or at least certain books in those series are known for being considerably different to the movie versions. I decided to check out the Omen novels as I knew that these ended up in a different timeline to the film series.

The Omen – David Seltzer

The novelisation of the first Omen film was actually written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. It has probably been 20 years since I saw the movie, but I had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen. A baby adopted by the US ambassador to Britain is the Antichrist, and he and his followers are going to fuck up anyone who figures this out. The only way to stop him is to stab him with a set of 7 magic daggers. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t stop me from enjoying this book. It was exciting and atmospheric, and it’s in no way surprising that the movie version was so successful.

Damien Omen II – Joseph Howard

**Futura – 1990 (first published 1978)**

I haven’t seen the second movie, and after reading its novelization, I have absolutely no desire to do so. It’s basically the exact same plot as the first one, but this time Damien is a young teenager. This movie and book were clearly made to make money. There is nothing of interest here.

The Omen: The Final Conflict – Gordon McGill

**Futura – 1983 (first published 1980)**

The third book is a little different. Damien is an adult here, and he has become head of the Thorn Corporation, a huge multinational corporation. He is wealthy and powerful and about to bring about the end of the world. He gets close, but then Jesus shows up unannounced and ruins his plans. There is a scene near the end of the book when he surprises his date by anally raping her. This seems inconsequential at the time, but it’s important in the next book.

Omen IV: Armageddon 2000 – Gordon McGill

So the 4th Omen novel has nothing to do with the 4th Omen movie. It was written as a direct sequel to the 3rd movie, but it was never produced. Damien is dead in this one, but because he was only stabbed with one of the 7 daggers, the reign of the Antichrist was not prevented, and his power was passed down to his son. “His son?”, I hear you say, “but Damien didn’t have a son!” Well, this is where the anal rape from the last book comes into play. It turns out that he actually got his girlfriend anally pregnant when he came up her ass, and nine months later she shat out an evil baby. Literally. This evil bum-baby is now a teenager, and he plays with his father’s corpse in an attempt to blow up the world. He comes pretty close.

Omen V: The Abomination – Gordon McGill

The 5th book is also by McGill and was also never produced. It’s more of the same. Junior is still intent on destroying the world, but a reporter figures out what he is doing and tries to stop him. By the time I got to this book I had had enough.

With the exception of the first book, this series was repetitive garbage. All the novels are about 200 pages, and there’s so many characters that it’s hard to care about any of them. Also, given the fact that the Antichrist’s aim is to bring around the end of the world, there’s not much tension in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th book. You know the end isn’t going to come in that book, and by the time you get to the 5th, you’ll be looking forward to all of these asshole characters dying. I watched the prequel movie that came out last year, and I quite liked it, but I have no desire to go back and watch any of the other movies now.

B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space

I remember seeing the cover of this book a few years ago and being intrigued. It looked like the kind of thing I’d enjoy reading. Last December I decided that I’d give it a go, but when searching for a copy I read a couple of reviews that described it as unbearably bleak and depressing. I wasn’t exactly having a holly jolly Christmas, so I decided to postpone reading anything that might make me feel any worse. A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing my local library when I found a copy of Negative Space sitting on the bottom of a shelf. I took it home and spent the weekend with it.

So yeah, this is about a town where the local teenagers are all killing themselves. There are three narrators who weave the narrative of the final months of their friend Tyler, a particularly deranged youth. Most of these teens are fucking each other and getting fucked up on whorl. Whorl is a hallucinogenic that seems to have bizarre mystical qualities.

One of the characters is trans, but their transition is never actually addressed, and the reader is left to figure out that Lou and Lu are the same person. This goes with the quasi-philosophical element of the book that questions stuff like existence, identity and relationships. I think this is where a lot of the horror of the book is supposed to lie. I can imagine this being a real bummer to a person who didn’t already have a dim view of existence. There is an actual supernatural element to what’s going on, but it’s really not the scary part.

There are quite a few graphic depictions of self harm. I’d definitely avoid this book if that might upset you. In truth I was a little surprised at my own capacity to take it in. This is horrendous bloody stuff, but it’s happening to characters with more depth than the victims of most gory splatterpunk.

Overall, I was entertained by Negative Space. It is by no means a pleasant book, but reading it didn’t ruin my weekend. I know that B.R. Yeager has written a couple of other books. Maybe I will read them in the future.

10 Years of Nocturnal Revelries

After finishing secondary school, I did a degree in English literature, but I really only developed an interest in reading after finishing university. I spent a while reading important works of literature and then started on my area of interest, horror. Once I got my first full time office job and achieved some stability, I started collecting second hand copies of the classics of this genre. After reading a few Dennis Wheatley novels, I began collecting grimoires and books about witchcraft. The only thing cooler than having a bookshelf about Satanic sorcerers was to have the bookshelf of a Satanic sorcerer. I liked the idea of scaring any guests to my apartment with my nefarious collection of sinister tomes. The only problem was that I never really had guests over, so I decided to post my collection online instead. I made my first post on Nocturnal Revelries on February 27th, 2015.

I didn’t get a huge response when I started posting, but I liked the process of cataloguing my collection. Doing so made me want to expand my horizons, and pretty soon I had moved on from witchcraft to books about the spirit of Elvis and a Catholic Saint who ate her own shit. I started picking up books from Library sales about cryptids, Cabala and channelling aliens. My studies led me to a hunting lodge on a mountaintop in Ireland and a graveyard in Western Canada, both sites where the Devil has appeared.

After a few years, I realised that there was no way I could ever collect (or afford) all of the books I wanted to read, but I discovered that many of these books are available online. I was immediately able to access books about Satanic communists, death cults and sex magicians. At the same time, I discovered that some books are so rare that the internet doesn’t even know about them. I was able to procure one of the only known copies of Aristotle Levi’s mysterious and extremely elusive occult porno, Spawn of the Devil. (My taste for Satanic porn was dampened soon thereafter when I got my hands on a copy of Raped by the Devil.)

I don’t think I would have read these if not for the internet.

In 2018, 2 important things happened for this blog. The first was getting my hands on a copy of Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s Paperbacks from Hell. My blog was no stranger to paperback horror fiction, but the release of this book set me on the trail of countless trashy horror novels that belonged on this website. (The downside was that it sent countless others after these same books, and now many are ludicrously unaffordable.) I was delighted to play a small part in getting one of these books, Garrett Boatman’s Stage Fright, republished. Fortunately for me, I have been able to get my hands on many of the rarest of the Paperbacks from Hell without paying hundreds of dollars.

I found it really hard to pick which books to feature here.

The other big change from around this time was my discovery of a treasure trove of black magic grimoires in pdf form. I try not to let myself be surprised by human stupidity, but the sheer idiocy of these instructional books of malicious magic was addictive. I’ve read grimoires containg spells that will force women to rim your ass, piss puddle magic, a ritual to impregnate a woman without having sex with her, how to summon a rape demon, sex magic with a corpse, a rapist magician named “Smelly”, Hitler’s naked mirror-magic, anti-fascist Satanic executioners and an anal vampire. An author of one of these grimoires got so mad over my post that he threatened me with legal action.

I suppose this is a bit of an odd book blog. I don’t expect to enjoy many of the books that I read, and the most entertaining posts on here are probably on books that are objectively bad. Instead of listing the best books I have read, I generally prefer to highlight the weirdest, most messed up books I have come across:

None of these were good, but all were entertaining.

Sometimes I think that this blog lacks focus. I cover classic horror fiction, trashy horror fiction, books about aliens, conspiracies, murderers, the paranormal and more. I assume that most people who have an interest in any of these fields will probably have a mild curiosity about the others. Going back over the archives for this post was quite entertaining for me. There’s several books on here that I had completely forgotten about. (I don’t know what the exact count is now, but I know it’s approaching 700.) Still, I am always interested in book recommendations.

I don’t understand why you’d want to read anything else.

10 years is a long time, and my life is very different to how it was when I started this blog. Now I’m a respectable member of society. I have a driver’s license, a job, a family and a mortgage. I have to keep my dark passions under wraps for most of the day, putting up a front of normalcy and rationality, but every night, I still make time to read something eldritch, something hideous, something deviant or something Satanic. Long may my dark Nocturnal Revelries continue!

Zebra Horror from 1992: Nightscape and Near Dead by Stephen R. George

I remember talking to some dickhead online a few years back who told me that the book that he wanted most in the world was Nightscape by Stephen R. George. I had never heard of it, but one look at the cover, and I understood.

This started off pretty well. A kid moves in with his mother after his father goes missing, but soon thereafter his skin starts coming off. It gets a bit minging, but the entire book is ruined by a super happy ending. I hate happy endings for horror novels, and this one is the worst. I had enjoyed the rest of the book, but absolutely everyone getting exactly what they wanted is not what should be happening at the end of a novel with this cover. I want pain, violence and misery. Honestly, I was very disappointed.

I had another novel by Stephen R. George on hand though, so I read that too.

Now I read this book maybe 2 weeks ago, but I had to go and read a description online to remember what happened in it. It’s about a lad whose wife and daughter come back as ghosts once their murderer starts killing again. The lad then falls in love with a weird psychic lady. Although it didn’t really leave a lasting impression on me, I definitely quite enjoyed Near Dead. I know it only took me a couple of days to finish. It was definitely better than Nightscape.

I don’t have a huge amount to say about either of these novels. I got pretty much what I expected from the covers. While I didn’t like the ending of Nightscape, both books were very readable. The biggest problem with this author is that old copies of these paperbacks have become very expensive due to their awesome (but largely inaccurate) cover art.

I know I have a copy of Stephen R. George’s Torment, but my books are mostly in storage at the moment, and I wasn’t bothered to root it out. I may well read it or other books by this author in the future.