More Necronomicons: The Book of Dead Names, The R’lyeh Text and Al Azif

Exactly 10 years ago, I reviewed the Simon Necronomicon. While that is probably the most famous hoax Necronomicon, there have been others.

Earlier in the year, while I was researching Alan Moore for my posts on Nicholas Hawksmoor and Jack The Ripper, I came across a review he had written of The R’lyeh Text that made me want to read it. After a bit of searching, I realised that The R’lyleh Text was a sequel to a 1978 version of the Necronomicon that’s usually referred to as the Hay Necronomicon after its editor, George Hay.

The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names

**Skoob – 1996 (Originally published 1978)**

Colin Wilson’s book on the occult was one of the first I read in the topic, and while it led me to countless other books and resulted in the creation of this blog, I’ve never bothered to read any of his other works. Actually, my low opinion on Wilson got me in trouble with another historian of the occult a few years ago. Wilson wrote the introduction to this Necronomicon and reading it did not change my opinion of him. He was well read, but full of shit. This introduction is considerably longer than the actual text that it is introducing.

The text of the Necronomicon here is supposedly taken from a ciphered manuscript that had been in the possession of John Dee. It was decoded with a computer program. Wilson presents the claim that Lovecraft’s father had been a freemason and occultist and had somehow acquired a copy of this manuscript and either told his son about it before he went insane or left a copy lying around their home.

The story is obviously bullshit, and the text it presents isn’t particularly interesting. I love Lovecraftian prose and black magic, but these aren’t entertaining if they’re not sincere. None of the rituals in here are things that anyone is going to do. It’s not even like reading a Lovecraftian story where the verbose ramblings add to the suspense. I knew this book was a hoax when I started it, and it felt truly underwhelming reading it.

There’s three essays included after the grimoire part to flesh the book out, but none of them were particularly interesting. One of them was by Angela Carter. I recently read and quite enjoyed her The Bloody Chamber.

The R’lyeh Text: Hidden Leaves from the Necronomicon

While the Hay Necronomicon went through a few editions, its sequel, The R’lyeh Text, only went through one. This has made it harder to come by at a reasonable price. Let me warn you my friends, don’t spend a lot on this if you’re thinking of buying a copy. It’s boring crap.

There’s another lengthy introduction from Colin Wilson. This one chirps on about Edgar Cayce and Atlantis, the Sirius Mystery, Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley, the Marquis De Sade and the Piri Reis maps, all in an attempt to prove that Lovecraft’s mythos stories were based in fact. I was astounded at how boring this introduction was given my interest in the topics it covers. Again though. this may have had something to do with the fact that I knew the book was a hoax and that Wilson was literally bullshitting. I think it may also have had something to do with the fact that Wilson’s writing is a bit dull.

The grimoire text here is the remainder of the text that was published in the Hay Necronomicon, and it is even less interesting. There’s a few essays included too. One of them discusses the Red Book of Appin, and another has put me on the trail of a book about a talking mongoose, but neither was interesting enough to save The R’lyeh Text.

Truly, I was quite disappointed by these books. If you’re going to make a fake Necronomicon, you should to overdo it. Throw mystery and mythology to the wind and include brutally violent rituals of heinous, tentacled evil. Nobody is ever going to believe it, so at least make it fun.

Al Azif – Abdul Alhazred

The Hay Necronomicon includes a section on a different version of the Necronomicon that had been published in 1973, the Owlswick Necronomicon. (Hay’s book does not make reference to the Simon Necronomicon even though version had come out a year before Hay’s.) The Owlswick Necronomicon is a hoax book that contains a short introductory essay by Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague De Camp in which he claims to have been sold a dodgy manuscript from the Middle East that killed whoever tried to translate it. It’s supposedly written in Duriac, a non-existent language, and it’s actually just a bunch of scribbles. It’s the kind of book that’s just going to take up space on your shelf after a couple of moments of initial amusement.

I’m really thinking of doing a Lovecraft re-read next year. This crap has me longing for the good stuff.

Whitley Strieber’s Early Horror Novels: The Wolfen, The Night Church and Black Magic

It’s roughly a decade since I first reviewed a book by Whitley Strieber. I hadn’t been into this stuff very long, and I was shocked at how stupid the book was. I read the next book in his series about getting diddled by aliens a few months later, and a couple of years after that I managed to make it through the third book. Although I’ve had the 4th entry in the series on my shelf for years, I’ve never been able to convince myself to open it. What I had read of Strieber made him seem an unbearable twat, a boring, self centered gobshite.

I knew from the outset that he had been an author of horror novels, but his alien books were so cumbersome that I had no desire to read his fiction until. It was only when I became more interested in paperback horror a few years later and discovered that some of his horror novels seemed to be held in high regard that I decided to give his fiction a chance. He wrote 4 horror novels before switching to fantasy in the mid 80s. (It was a few years later that he moved on to “non-fiction” about aliens.) Over the last 8 months, I have read 3 of his 4 early horror novels. The one I didn’t read, The Hunger, seems to be considered one of the better ones, but it has sequels, so I am saving it for a separate post.

**Avon – 1988 (Originally published 1978)**

The Wolfen

I read this a few months ago and didn’t bother taking notes. It’s about a pair of detectives trying to solve a series of grisly murders committed by superwolves (not werewolves). It wasn’t utterly amazing or anything, but it was competently written and definitely of a higher standard than a lot of the paperback horror boom. I quite enjoyed it.

**Grafton – 1988 (Originally published 1983)**

The Night Church

I was expecting to enjoy this one more as it deals with Satanists rather than werewolves. The different covers are really too. Look at the one above! Unfortunately, the story is boring. A young couple falls in love only to discover that they have been bred to breed the Antichrist. I read this a few months after reading all of the The Omen novelizations, and maybe the similarity to those is what made this seem underwhelming. After finishing this, I waited roughly 6 months until I could convince myself to read another book by Strieber.

**Granada – 1983 (Originally published 1982)**

Black Magic

I bought a copy of this book after seeing the cover online years ago. Unfortunately, this is a spy novel with only a touch of occultism. The plot is complicated and involves 4 different story lines. There’s the good guy, the evil, gay, psychic Iranian teenager and then 2 Russian communist generals who hate eachother. They’re all working against each other, and I didn’t care about any of them. This was boring crap, and I was very relieved to finish it.

The Wolfen was pretty good, but The Night Church and Black Magic were a waste of my time. I do plan to read The Hunger in the future as I’ve heard it’s one of his better efforts. I doubt I will ever return to Strieber’s non-fiction.

Are Zombies Real? Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow

I saw the cover for the VHS of The Serpent and the Rainbow at the video shop after mass when I was a kid. I’ve mentioned before how I would become hung up on the covers of these 18+ rated forbidden films that it seemed I would never see. It stayed with me, and as soon as I could, downloaded and watched the movie. The only thing I remember about the film is that I thought it was shit, so it’s not surprising that I never bothered tracking down the book.

I don’t know why, but it popped into my head the other day, and it took me just a few minutes to locate a copy of the book. I knew that the author was an academic, and the book was somehow related to zombies and voodoo, but I didn’t really know what to expect.

The book starts off like an adventure novel, the author describing some his experiences in the jungle of south America as a student. This stuff is quite impressive and made me jealous. I never got to travel through the jungle for credits during my time in university.
The main adventure begins when he approached by some weirdo academics who tell him about Haitian voodoo and their desire to acquire the elusive poison that is used to turn people into zombies. There had long been claims that people in Haiti were dying and being buried, only to return to their families years later with little to no memory of the intervening time period. The locals attributed this to voodoo, but the academics believed it was being done with a potent chemical.

Davis goes to Haiti to track this stuff down, and he meets a bunch of colourful characters. He helps one of these weirdoes dig up the corpse of a child and then they mix parts of that decaying infant into a potion with bits and pieces of some minging animals.

After a bit of research, Davis realises that it’s the inclusion of a pufferfish in this mixture that’s responsible for the apparent reanimation of corpses. The poison in pufferfish is known to temporarily paralyze in small enough doses, and it is not completely out of the range of possibility that this poison, along with continued doses of other drugs could result in the kind of zombification that had been reported in Haiti.

From what I have read online, Davis’s claims were not well received by the scientifific community. Very little of the pufferfish poison was actually found in the samples of the zombie potion that Davis acquired. There has been debate on this since, but the fishier element (excuse the pun) to me is the notion of zombification. I can’t find any footage online of actual zombification. I’m not expert on Haiti, but I know that it’s had more than its share of troubles. I find it very easy to understand how stories from a place like this could become twisted and exaggerated. Maybe I’m totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that the entire Haitian zombie phenomena is probably bullshit.

The worst part of this book was that it reminded me of John Russo’s absolutely terrible Voodoo Dawn novel that I read a few weeks ago. I’ve read a few other novels about voodoo (Strange Conflict by Dennis Wheatley and Frank Lauria’s Doctor Orient novels come to mind), but I have to say, the only truly enjoyable book I’ve read that really featured voodoo was Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel.

VOLUBILIS EX CHAOSIUM: A Grimoire of the Black Magic of the Old Ones by S. Ben Qayin

**Dark Harvest Occult Publishers – 2011**

I didn’t finish my novel on time for this week’s post, so I rapidly consumed another book of Lovecraftian black magic. This one was written by a guy called S. Ben Qayin. I was going to read a different book by this author a few years ago, but I saw that he was involved with the becomealivinggod twats, so I didn’t bother. When I saw this fairly short Lovecraftian grimoire earlier on, I couldn’t resist.

I’ve read a lot of grimoires, and I’ve often claimed that I enjoy the more sinister ones. I once read a grimoire about killing yourself in a graveyard, another that describes how to make a giant bell with a human corpse as the clangy bit, and another that instructs the magician to make a giant sausage packed with festering human flesh. Of course, the more sinister these things get, the less likely they are to be taken seriously by anyone. Some of these books seem like they were written to entertain the reader more than to instruct them, and that’s definitely the feeling I got from Volubilis Ex Chaosium.

Ok, so aside from a little self mutilation, but there’s nothing all that sinister about this book. You wouldn’t have to be a completely evil psychopath to follow the rituals herein, but you would have to be fairly silly. There’s a few prayers to Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, but despite S. Ben Qayin’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, we all know that these are fictional characters. This book is basically just fan-fiction. I am obviously a fan of Lovecraft, so I was reasonably entertained, and if I found a very cheap copy of this book, I would gladly keep it on my coffee table to make guests feel uncomfortable, but I can’t imagine anyone taking actually staying up late at night to go and do blood rituals to Yog-Sothoth in a forest. If I’m wrong and you do that kind of thing, I’d love to chat with you.

All things considered, I quite enjoyed the 45 minutes it took me to read this. I was sitting in my car, drinking coffee and eating a coconut donut at the time. I may go back and read more S. Ben Qayin in the future. It’s 5 years since I wrapped up my big Lovecraft reread (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5), and reading this grimoire made me want to do another. I might stick with a greatest hits collection this time around.

Gary Brodsky’s How to Use Black Magic to Get Women (to lick your crack)

How to use Black Magic to Get Women – Gary Brodsky

Honestly, I sometimes forget where I get my books. I’ll buy or download a bunch and come across them years later when looking for something to read. Thus was the case with Gary Brodsky’s How to use Black Magic to Get Women. I’ve read a lot of books, but the only other pick-up manual I’ve read was Robert Johnson’s absolutely terrible The Satanic Warlock. I’m not looking to “get women”, but I decided I’d see what Brodsky had to say on the topic.

This was pathetic, even in comparison to the other crap I review here. Truly, it is hard to imagine anyone taking anything in this piece of garbage seriously, and even harder to imagine anything in here actually working.

Brodsky comes across as a true idiot. I’m not exaggerating or trying to be mean here. He actually seems like a very stupid person. At one point he describes himself as “someone who knows a thousand times more than” his readers on the topic of Black Magic. He later goes on to explain that understanding the actual workings of the spells he is presenting is entirely irrelevant to their efficacy. At no point does he offer any explanation as to how his spells operate. It’s enough to just rub some oil on your feet. That will convince the nameless spirits to help you get the woman of your dreams.

The actual “spells” presented are garbage. Light a candle with your true love’s name engraved on it. Take a bath and think of the girl you like. The weirdest one involves stealing crumbs off her plate and then pissing on them. This will make her find you irresistible.

The language he uses is revolting and telling of the kind of man that this book is written for.

She has rejected you so often, and yet soon, she will not be able to swallow enough of your penis, she will not be able to get her tongue deep enough into the crack of your ass, no matter how hard she tries, she simply will not be able to get enough of you.

I don’t know. People can like what they like, but wanting to make a woman lick your crack because she doesn’t like you is pretty nasty.

Gary Brodsky obviously had a very limited knowledge of Black Magic, and this book is obviously aimed at horny incels rather than true students of the occult. It turns out that nearly all of his other books are pick-up manuals, including How To Dominate Women, Charm The Pants Off Any Woman, The Alpha Male Guide and How To Pick Up Exotic Dancers. Yuck. While his books are vile, his youtube videos are even worse. Featuring such classic lectures as GARY BRODSKY GOES SUPER ALPHA, GARY BRODSKY RIPS FEMINSM TO SHREDS, MEN ARE BECOMING SISSYS and WHY WOMEN ACT LIKE BITCHES, Brodsky’s youtube channel is filled with gold. It seems like he used to get drunk and record himself ranting for hours at a time about feminism, being alpha, getting sexy women and any other nonsense that would pop into his head. I clicked on one of his videos, but turned it off to ruminate after he said,

“The PC bullshit agenda ok, is steroids, not steroids, I mean, is communism with tits. that’s all it is.”
– GARY TAKES ON THE SATANIC AGENDA

One of the most interesting features of Gary’s videos is the cross he wears in many of them. You’ll also notice him frequently talking about the Bible and the importance of God and Jesus. In one of the videos he discusses how homosexual acts are an abomination to God. I wonder how a god who hates gay people feels about a man making a woman lick his hairy asscrack out of spite.

I could go on, but Gary did a pretty good job of showing what kind of a person he was. Watch his videos if you can stomach them. He died in 2016.

Bits and Pieces from the Tomb: Thomas K. Johnson’s Graveyard Wanderers

Thomas K. Johnson is an academic who translated 37 books of Swedish folk magic as part of his PhD thesis in 2010. These books comprised of spells that had been passed down through generations of the “wise people” From these translations, Johnson picked out all of the spells involving stuff that comes from graveyards (dirt, bones, coffin nails…) and compiled them into this macabre collection.

The Graveyard Wanderers: The Wise Ones + The Dead in Sweden

**Society of Esoteric Endeavour – 2013**

There’s spells to stop birds moving, to hex and un-hex a gun, to turn invisible and to kill a tree. Most of these spells involve mixing graveyard dirt into different things and then spreading it on whatever you want to affect. Another common way to invoke the magic of the dead is to hammer a used coffin nail into something. Doing so to a horse shoe will render the horse lame, and doing so to a piece of shit will give the shitter a bad case of diarrhea. Seriously. If you can’t find a coffin nail, but still want to give somebody the trots, you can also fill a human bone with your victim’s shit and then let a river flow through the bone. (My advice would be to let it flow over your hands too, unless you want to be a Mr. Shitty Brownfingers.) If you want help from the dead in raping a woman, stick a coffin nail in her piss. (I’ve heard from a reliable source that a more efficacious way of achieving this goal is to drink a pint of bleach.)

Speaking of piss, to cure a child who has had a stroke, their mom should piss in a skull and then give it to the kid to drink. If there’s no skulls handy, mom can just piss in her hand and give it to her thirsty whippersnapper that way. (It was only a year ago that I reviewed another grimoire that used a lot of piss magic.) If you want to turn invisible, plant some peas in a human skull and when they grow, put them in your mouth. If you want to get really close to a bird without it flying away, make a mask out of a human skull and approach the bird while looking through the eye sockets of the deceased. There’s also a cool section in here that describes making a belt from the skin of a corpse’s abdomen. When created properly, this belt allows its wearer to turn into a werewolf.

I quite enjoyed this book. Many of the spells are ridiculous, but this is folk magic, and it made me think about what ordinary people valued and how they tried to make sense of the world a few hundred years ago. It reminded me of The Black Books of Elverum, another collection of Scandinavian spells. Only 180 copies of the fancy embossed cover hardback of Graveyard Wanderers were printed, but a paperback copy is now available for anyone who wants this in their library.

The Grimoire Inspired by a Children’s Book written by a Sex Pest: Var Von Brennos’ Gravelording

Long time readers of Nocturnal Revelries may recall an era (mostly 2018 – 2019) when the blog focused on strange grimoires of black magic. Most of these books are boring garbage, and I don’t read many anymore, but occasionally I come across something that piques my curiosity. Such was the case when I found a copy of a book called Gravelording by Var Von Brennos. What the Hell is Gravelording? The book in question was short, so I decided to find out.

Gravelording – Var Von Brennos

Gravelording is becoming a Lord of a Graveyard. Being a Gravelord allows one to converse with the dead and to order them around to do ones bidding. To become a Gravelord takes a huge amount of time and effort, and I am entirely certain the process outlined in this book has never been carried out by any human being. The basic idea is that you spend your nights in a Graveyard and limit your sleep and food intake to bring you closer to death. There’s also instructions on how to make a wand, how to open a Ghoul Gate, and how to reanimate a corpse. The reanimation part is very vague about why you would want to do so.

Most of the book is written in deliberately archaic English, but Var Von Brennos occasionally lapses into the vernacular and tells his readers not to be sloppy (when exhuming corpses from abandoned graveyards).

I enjoyed reading this book for the most part. It reads like something out of a horror story. It advocates the kind of behaviour that you’d expect from a ghoul. This is not surprising considering the fact that the only webpage I can find that discusses the author claims that his background is in Lovecraftian Sorcery. My only real critique of this book is that it seems to be creepiness for the sake of creepiness. The whole concept of this book is so far away from anything that a normal person would ever want to do that it almost felt like a prop book from the set of a horror movie. If I’m wrong about this, I’d love to hear from any true Gravelords out there.

When I got to the end of the book, I glanced through the bibliography and saw some old friends. There, beside the works of Lovecraft were listed Leilah Wendell’s The Necromantic Ritual Book and Liber Falxifer. There were a few other grimoires listed and a book by Neil Gaiman called The Graveyard Book. This caught my eye as I had actually glanced through a copy of the graphic novel version of Gaiman’s book on that very same day. I’d been meaning to read something by Gaiman for a while, so I decided to give it a look. One does not ignore such synchronicities! Once I started reading The Graveyard Book, Gravelording began to make a lot more sense.

The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman

**Harper Collins – 2018 (First published 2008)**

The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod Owens, a child who grows up in an abandoned graveyard after his parents are murdered. He converses with the dead, travels through Ghoul Gates and has the spirits of the dead protect and empower him. It’s a book written for 9-12 year old children, but it has clearly been a huge inspiration on Von Brennos’ work of sinister black magic. Some of the magical incantations in his grimoire are directly lifted from Gaiman’s novel.

Some panels from the graphic novel version of *The Graveyard Book* and some lines from *Gravelording*.

So, to tell the truth, I actually haven’t finished The Graveyard Book yet. I’m listening to the audiobook, and I still have a few chapters left. I’m a bit annoyed though because I was really enjoying the book, and I googled it to see what age group it was initially aimed at. I saw that this book is currently in the news because Disney have just stopped a movie version being produced. Apparently Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual misconduct by 5 different women. Now I obviously don’t know the ins out outs of Gaiman’s sex life, but from what I have read, he does seem to have been quite the creep. This is quite disappointing. Still though, The Graveyard Book is an enjoyable read. If you want to check it out, make sure you pirate a copy so you’re not giving any money to Greasy Gaiman.

Ozzy did 9/11! S.K. Bain’s The Most Dangerous Book in the World

I was still in school when I saw Loose Change, one of the documentaries that popularised the 9/11 truther movement. It was a formative experience for me. I was convinced that it was real for a few days, but after reading up on it, I came to realise that it was nonsense. I accept that the American government is a deceit machine that was at least partly culpable, but if they were deliberately going to do this to their own country, they wouldn’t leave as many clues and discrepancies as conspiracy theorists would have us believe.

I ignored the topic for almost 20 years, even after taking an interest in conspiracy theories. If the 9/11 attacks were staged, it could only have been political. There were no aliens or Satanic cults involved, so I wasn’t interested.

The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual

A few years ago, I saw this book and it caught my attention. Not only is the title unutterably stupid and potentially offensive, but it also promises a scintillating layer of black magic to the 9/11 truth movement. I knew I’d have to read it, but it seemed pretty long. The introduction was also written by Peter Levenda. I’ve read a few of his books, and my least favourite was his book on conspiracies. After recently reading and enjoying the Heck out of Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, another lengthy book about insane conspiracy theories, I decided to dive into Bain’s work.

I’m really glad I did. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting, and I finished it in just a few days. Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a convincing book at all, but it’s easy to read, and its claims are so outrageous that I consumed it very quickly

The US government is run by Illuminati disciples of Aleister Crowley. These creeps organised the 9/11 attacks as a massive black magic ritual to usher in a new era of Satanic glory. The details that give this information away were not accidents. They were deliberately left there because the Satanic Elite are mocking us. I’ll just give a few examples.

George Bush found out that the planes had flown into the World Trade Center while he was visiting a school. Footage exists of him listening to the children reading a story called “The Pet Goat” as he is told that “America is under attack.” This is not a coincidence. The Pet Goat is a symbol of Lucifer. Even the text of the story depicts this particular goat as rebellious and violent. Also, the children in the classroom were mostly black. Seeing the pattern yet? (Bain’s insinuation, not mine!)

One of the many illustrations in this very important and serious book

The school that Bush was in was also close to the flight school where the terrorists had trained and a clown college with links to the Freemasons and the CIA. You think this is a coincidence? Guess again, idiot!

Flight 93, the plane in which the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who were armed with shanks), crashed down in a place called Shanksville. Bill Crowley (yes, CROWLEY!!!) was a Pittsburgh FBI guy who had jurisdiction in Shanksville. Flight 93 too! 93 was one of Aleister Crowley’s favourite numbers. You might brush this off and say that there’s loads of Crowleys out there and that the FBI guy’s name has nothing to do with anything, but Bill wasn’t the only Crowley involved.

Korean Airlines Flight 85 was supposed to land in Alaska on September the 11th, 2001, but because of some miscommunication, it was redirected to the airport in Whitehorse in the Yukon. The air traffic controller at that airport was one Tim Crowley. As if that wasn’t enough, please recall the lyrics to Mr. Crowley, one of the most famous songs about Aleister Crowley:

Mr. Crowley
Won’t you ride my white horse?
Mr. Crowley
It’s symbolic, of course
Ozzy Osbourne 1980

White horse? Whitehorse! The song was written more than 30 years before the events it describes, and the songwriter was at the peak of his legendary drug use, but to me, it seems almost impossible that Ozzy didn’t foresee the Korean pilot of flight 085 misunderstanding the message from the groundstation in Alaska. He is clearly in league with the Illuminati overlords.

Ozzy isn’t the only heavy metaller involved here. Judas Priest’s Some Heads are Gonna Roll forecasts the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Arizona in 2012. Rob Halford was in on it too.

Oh, by the way, if you’re reading that last bit and you’re wondering why you don’t remember the nuclear bomb detonating in Arizona in 2012, that’s because it never happened. Half of this book deals with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but the other half describes what was supposed to happen in 2012, the year after the book was published. None of this stuff actually happened, but that’s probably only because Bain had predicted it, and the Illuminati backed off. It’s ironic that the subtitle of this work is “The World’s Most Dangerous Book” when it actually saved millions of lives.

There’s a lot more in here that I’m not mentioning. The Skull & Bones Society, the JFK assassination and the Insane Clown Posse all play their part. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty actually depicts Lucifer? This is ridiculous stuff, and trying to refute the claims made in this book would be entirely pointless. It was an entertaining read though.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians a few years back, I stopped reading new horror. That book was fine, but there was so much hype around it that I felt like I had nothing original to say when I posted about it here. I was in an awkward situation recently in which I had to take a book out of my local library. I saw this near the front counter, and having a ague idea of what it was about, I grabbed it.

After meeting their favourite film director, pair of movie nerds get sucked into the terrifying world of esoteric Nazi occultism. This director guy made a few weirdo horror movies and then disappeared for decades because one of the films he made was cursed. It was written by a Nazi wizard and never completed. When the 2 friends help edit some of the footage from this film, it activates a spell (or is it a curse?) that the weird Nazi had begun before his death.

So yeah, this book has a Nazi wizard, murders, ghosts, human sacrifices, black magic, occult books, demon dogs and a main character clad in an Iron Maiden tshirt. Hell yeah!

I quite enjoyed Silver Nitrate. Unlike other books about Nazi occultism that I’ve read, the characters in here were fleshed out and generally very likeable. I’d like to see them in a sequel to be honest. Parts of this book do feel a little slow, but overall it’s very easy to digest.

I’m a pedantic dork when it comes to this kind of thing, and I was pretty impressed with the level of detail that went into Silver Nitrate. The bad guy is named Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers. I wondered if this was a reference to Hanns Heinz Ewers when I saw it. The author confirms this in an afterword. (The real Ewers wrote a few horror novels and movie scripts in the early 20th century, but his work has been ignored because he later became involved with the Nazis. I’ve been planning to read his books for a while now.) The attention to detail here made it feel like this book was written for weird nerds like me, but there seems to be some hype about this one. I was only able to borrow it from the local library for 7 days because it’s in such high demand. I’ve seen Silvia Morena-Garica being interviewed by big news websites too. It’s really cool to see an author with a background in Lovecraftian horror getting attention like that.

Urinate in My Footsteps: Marcus T. Bottomley’s 9 Proven Magickal Rites

I’ve been reading lots recently, but the way things lined up, I found myself without anything to post this week. I had a quick look through the archives and found this, a 17 page pamphlet of magickal rites from Finbarr Publications. It’s terrible. I reviewed another book by its author a few years ago. I recalled it being terrible too, but I actually forgot how much of it revolved around piss until I reread my review of it moments ago. Thankfully, 9 Proven Magickal Rites also relies heavily on the use of urine as a magickal tool.

Here are the main rites described in the book:

To break up a relationship without having to deal with awkward conversations, find your partner’s footprint and fill it with piss.
If you want to attract money, take a bath, but mix some sugar and white lead into the water before you get into it. I thought that maybe white lead was just a misleading name like “fools gold” or something, but minimal research shows that white lead is highly toxic and does cause lead poisoning.
If you want something, anything really, go to a crossroads and say the Our Father while looking at your feet.
To stop a person coming back into your house, flick some sulphur and black pepper at their back as they leave. I would have thought keeping your door closed would be easier, but I’m clearly no wizard.
Piss into a bottle containing your partner’s pubic hairs and bury it your garden. Your partner will never leave you. If you put some nails into the bottle they will become your servant.

Now you may be confused as to why I have only listed 5 rites when the title of the book is 9 Proven Magickal Rites. Well, there are 5 chapters in the book, each focusing on a different magickal procedure, but some of these procedures have variations, and there are actually 13 distinct rites described in the book. (Chapters 2 and 5 have 5 rites each.) No matter what way I counted these, I could not arrive at the number 9.

I’ve read more than a few titles from Finbarr over the years, and I am consistently shocked by their lack of quality, cohesion and moral standards. I sincerely struggle to imagine how this publisher remained active for multiple decades. This book is about taking a bath in lead water and pissing on your sweetheart’s pubes. I read another one from Finbarr about Hitler waggling his mickey in the mirror. Is this some kind of post-modern art project?

Sorry dear readers. Hopefully it will be a while before I have to resort to Finbarr again.