This had been on my radar for a few years. I generally avoid descriptions of books after hearing that they’re good, and apart from assuming it involved a house, I went into Maynard’s House with no idea what it’d be about.
A Vietnam veteran inherits an isolated house from another soldier. He returns to the States and takes up residence there. The house is clearly haunted, and his neighbours are quite weird. He falls in love with a teenage girl who may be a fairy. It’s hard to distinguish between supernatural events and the symptoms of his PTSD.
This book was great. It’s quite funny in parts, and the characters are interesting and believable. This is definitely a cut above a lot of horror novels from this era. Honestly, this was such a breath of fresh air in comparison to the last 2 novels I read. I actually looked forward to sitting down to read this one. If you haven’t read this, you should check it out. I always feel like I have less to say when I enjoy a book, but that’s ok because I have other news for you today!
Weresatan – Infernal Hymns of the Sodomite Cultist
A few months ago, I mentioned that I had been working on a musical project. I recorded 5 songs of ultra-Satanic death metal, and I am happy to announce that tape copies of Weresatan’s first release, Infernal Hymns of the Sodomite Cultist, are now available from Defiled Altar.
Life has been very busy recently. I’ve been finishing up my coursework and working on music stuff, and consequently, there’s been a few weeks that I haven’t updated this site Sorry. I’ve still been reading quite a lot, but much of what I’ve been reading doesn’t really fit in with this blog. I finished Scott Smith‘s A Simple Plan and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright during the week. Both were good books, and just as dark as anything I’ve reviewed here, but neither comes close to horror in the Nocturnal Revelries sense of the word. Here’s a novel I read a few weeks ago. While not as depressing as the 2 books I just mentioned, it at least contains a haunted house.
PS Publishing 2024 (First published 2015)
Wylding Hall is a good book, but it’s barely a horror novel. It’s about a folk rock band that goes to a remote mansion in the English countryside to write and record an album. Unfortunately, their singer runs away with a ghost. There’s a couple of creepy moments, but overall, it’s not scary. It has a few elements of gothic fiction, but the narration is a little too upbeat for it to seem creepy for long. It’s like horror-lite or sugar free horror. At the same time, I really quite enjoyed reading it. I love those old those classic album documentaries, and this feels like reading one of them. This would be a good book to read on a plane or a bus. I thought it was good fun.
I have some more straightforward horror novels coming up soon, and I recently got my hands on some ridiculous conspiracy theory books, so stay tuned.
When I start researching a new topic, I usually look for the book that has had the biggest effect on the public’s opinion of that topic rather than the book that contains the most accurate information. Books like Michelle Remembers, The Mothman Prophecies, Helter Skelter,Communion, and Behold A Pale Horse, are almost worthless as descriptions of reality, but if you’re interested in the Satanic Panic, cryptozoology, the Manson Family, alien abductions or conspiracy theories, you have to read these books. I do this with books about hauntings too. Neither Harry Price’s book on the Borley Rectory and Jay Anson’s book about Amityville are considered accurate or truthful, but in many ways, these are the definitive books on the topic. I have been coming across references to the Bell Witch for many years, but it was only a few months ago that I decided to take a closer look at the topic. A few minutes research pointed to Ingram’s Authenticated History of the Bell Witch. as the source of most of the lore surrounding the Bell Witch Case. I started reading it in January, but I’ve been so busy with work and school that it took me 3 months to get through it. This is a nightmare of a book.
Rare Book Reprints – 1961 (Originally published 1894)
So the Bell Witch is more of a ghost than a witch. It’s sometimes referred to as a goblin. The spirit showed up in the house of the Bell family in 1817, and terrorized (some of) them until the father died in 1821. It’d pull off their blankets and say mean things to them. It was quite nice to the mother of the house, reciting poetry and bringing her treats when she was sick. Some local people suspected it was the spirit of another local woman named Kate Batts. Kate was a bit of a weirdo, and people seemed happy to blame her for their misfortunes. She probably just had autism or something. The Bell family did not think it was her. Some of them thought it may have been the spirit of a Native American. One of the Bell family members supposedly kept a diary of these events, and it ended up in Ingram’s hands with the stipulation that he wouldn’t publish it until everyone in the family who had been directly affected by the spirit had died.
While this book is where most of the tales of the Bell Witch come from, it’s suspected that Ingram wrote some, most or all of the book. He did so in a horrible manner too. You would be far better off reading the wikipedia page than wasting your time on this awful, awful piece of writing. The author seems to think that readers will believe these ludicrous stories if he heaps enough praise on the characters involved.
Never, in all the land, was as devout a Christian as Master Chubbs found, and even today you’ll see a twinkle in the eyes of the older residents of Roberston County who still remember this jovial and most generous man whose handsome appearance and gentle hands gave relief and solace to all who beheld them. It was on his 22nd birthday that the young master had the pleasure of encountering the most perfect and exquisite lady Bell, but their most pleasant encounter was ruined when Old Kate appeared and shoved a pin up his supple and tender anus…
Honestly, every single character gets this kind of treatment. It’s truly excruciating.
Even worse is the books depiction of black people. This was written in Tennessee the 19th century. There are entire chapters written in… I don’t even know what you’d call it… slave-speak?
I find it very difficult to read stuff like this without saying it out loud, and as I read most of this book in a community center, I wasn’t able to do so. An author’s racism generally won’t stop me from reading their books, but in this case, it literally made the book difficult to read. It was so unnecessary too. It seems like the “Negro Stories” chapter was included for comic relief. While the witch mainly just teases white people, she actually turns a black person in a donkey.
Ingram’s book is the source material for much of the legend of the Bell Witch, but there has to be better written books on the topic. I think at this point, this book has become more regarded as an interesting early study and source of folklore than as an accurate account of anything. Personally, I have no further interest in this topic. Ingram has ruined it on me. It’s clearly all a load of bullshit.
Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose – Christopher Josiffe
Strange Attractor Press – 2017
In 1931, a talking mongoose named Gef invited himself to live with a farming family on the Isle of Man. He stayed with them for a decade, engaging in long conversations, eating their food, catching them rabbits, keeping them up to date on island gossip and occasionally spitting and peeing on them. Several times he let them touch him and take very blurry photographs of him. Despite his brazen personality, Gef, or the Dalby Spook, as he was sometimes known, was generally hesitant to engage with anyone but the farmer, his wife and their daughter.
A lot of people, including my old pal Harry Price, dismissed this as a hoax, but the family remained adamant that they were telling the truth. There are several theories about different members of the family deliberately tricking the others, but none of the three ever admitted to such. They had little to gain from their fabulous claims, and they made an effort to shun some of the attention they received. This is an interesting case partly because one of the main reasons for believing the story is the fact that it is so ridiculous. If the family was deliberately conducting a hoax, we would expect them to do a better job.
The clearest photo of Gef
Followers of this blog will know that I am generally quite skeptical of paranormal phenomenon, but personally, I’m not convinced this was entirely a hoax. I think it likely had more to do with mental illness than simple deceit. This family had moved to the Isle of Man because the father’s business ventures had failed. They were forced into a difficult existence where they were not only physically isolated but socially separate to their closest neighbours. I think it’s very possible that the father had a mental breakdown and managed to convince his family that his hallucinations were real. This may have led to the family to perform acts of deception as a means to avoid internal conflict. Either way, it’s a fascinating story.
I’ve come across mentions of Gef before, and I’ve had Josiffe’s book on my to-read list for ages, but I brought it to the top a few weeks ago. I was going to say that it was after coming across mention of Gef in Graham J. McEwan’s Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland, but I just looked there and realised that Gef doesn’t get a mention! The last place I saw him referenced was actually in The R’lyeh Text, a grimoire of Lovecraftian magic! There’s an essay at the back of that book which claims that Gef may well have been an influence on Lovecraft’s Brown Jenkin from The Dreams in the Witch House. Josiffe repeats these ideas towards the end of his book and notes that it was very likely that Lovecraft would have encountered articles on Gef in the news during the 1930s.
This book was great. The author presents things very fairly, and does a good job of just presenting the facts of the case. If anything, I think he could have been a bit more dismissive. The last few chapters of the book look at phenomena (poltergeists, fairies, tulpas and witches familiars…) in an attempt to potentially explain what Gef might have been. I wasn’t convinced by any of these suggestions. The story is weird enough without anything supernatural or paranormal being brought in to explain it. Still, I appreciated the comprehensive nature of Josiffe’s work. I am quite certain that this will remain the definitive book on the Gef phenomenon forever. If you like books about weird stuff, you have to read this masterpiece. This is the best book I’ve read this year, and it may well remain so for the remaining 361 days of 2026.
It was roughly a year ago that I reviewed The Amityville Horror. That book is an unconvincing piece of trash, but if you read it as a novel (which it is), there are some genuinely creepy ideas. I recently saw somebody posting about this book, Harry Price’s The Most Haunted House in England, and I thought I’d give it a go in the hopes that it would creep me out.
Longmans, Green and Co. – 1940
The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory,
So Borley Rectory was a big house where a bunch of ghost sightings and poltergeist activity supposedly occured. From 1929 until 1939, Harry Price, a paranormal investigator, catalogued a bunch of the weird stuff that happened there.
People reported seeing a ghost nun walk across the garden. Others saw a black coach ride through the same area. Guests at the rectory heard creaking noises during the night and saw weird messages written on the walls. The people who lived there saw things falling off shelves without having being touched. One of the women who lived there claimed that a ghost punched her in the eye and flipped her out of her bed.
The (entirely fake) story of Borley Rectory could be interesting if told by the right author, but Harry Price’s book is very boring. He does his best to make the paranormal happenings seem unscary. These ghosts don’t mean any harm. They just want attention. I hate this idea. If I wanted a friendly fucking ghost, I’d watch Casper.
The other thing is that none of what Price claims in here is remotely convincing. There’s a part where the woman who owns the house goes upstairs to bed because she’s feeling sick, and then a few minutes later a ghost throws something down the stairs. Price claims that it couldn’t have been the woman because she was too sick. Shortly after this, the people below hear a clattering noise coming from upstairs. When they run up to the old lady’s room, they find her and mattress on the ground. Apparently the ghost had pushed her out of bed! Nice try Granny.
The Rectory
Not only is the book not convincing, but Price’s close associates came out after it was published and claimed it was lies. Price set most of it up. One man went into the house with Price to witness poltergeist activity. When he was walking in front of Price, he thought he felt small objects bouncing off his back. When he turned around, Price abruptly started whistling and checking his watch. Later on, the man noticed a bunch of pebbles falling out of Price’s pockets when he was taking off his jacket. When confronted, Price said that a ghost must have put them there.
Price wrote another book about Borley Rectory a few years after this one, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. The Rectory actually burned down before the first book was published, so I can’t imagine the next book has anything of substance to add. I saw a trailer for a movie based on Price’s story. I couldn’t be bothered watching the movie, but it looks a lot more entertaining than this boring book of lies and nonsense.
I got a notification from WordPress during the week telling me that this blog is now 9 years old. I don’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed. There’s been ups and downs, but I’ve been really enjoying it for the last year though, so I’ll probably keep it going for a while longer. There’s still so many books left to read. Please let me know if you have any recommendations!
The scope of this blog covers anything remotely spooky. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I like ghost stories, and I’m moderately interested in how a person would go about hunting a phantom. I read this book because it was very short, and I had some time to kill.
I suppose I expected a manual explaining the best methods to lure a specter out from underneath the stairs, followed by an appendix with tips on how to stop ectoplasm samples from dissipating. Maybe there would be a chart describing the different varieties of apparitions. Nope. That’s nothing close to what this book is.
Dean Russell (or Dr. Dean Russell) is an “organizational effectiveness consultant”. I think this means that he goes into companies to help them figure out how to operate more efficiently. That’s a respectable thing to do, and Dean seems to be pretty successful at it. His resume is probably pretty impressive to business people. In this book he has taken his knowledge of business and project management and applied it to the field of ghost hunting.
None of the advice given in this guide relates to anything spooky or supernatural. It’s all stuff about how to build an efficient team, how to budget an adventure and how to prepare for and deal with any setbacks you face during your outing.
Realistically, a ghost hunter probably should pay close attention to the above topics before stepping foot in a haunted house. They are practical considerations for almost any professional outing. They are also the kind of things that people who go ghost hunting probably don’t bother with.
If I was actually a ghost hunter, this book might give me pause for thought. I am not a ghost hunter though. I’m just a weirdo who likes creepy books, so I was just mildly amused at this strange little text. Dean Russell has also written a few novels about a guitar playing ghost fighter. Maybe I’ll give them a go some day.
In 1891, a hiker had a creepy experience while climbing Ben MacDhui, one of the highest mountains in Scotland. He was pottering alone when he heard footsteps approaching him from behind. When he turned around, there was nobody there. He didn’t tell many people until 1925. After this, other climbers who noticed strange happenings while climbing Ben MacDhui came forward. In this book, Affleck Gray, a Scottish mountaineer and historian, collects every single iota of public discussion of the mysterious mountain and the Ferla Mor.
Ferla Mor comes from Fear Liath Mor, Scottish for Big Grey Man (technically “man grey big”). This is the name given to the phenomenon. Apparently people have seen a giant grey man walking around up there. It seems pretty likely that these sightings could have been the Brocken spectre, a spectral phenomenon that makes an observer’s shadow look like a giant. I’ve come across mentions of the Brocken Spectre before when reading books about bigfoot or the yeti, and it definitely could account for visions of a big grey man in the mountains.
It’s not just big shadowy men that people have encountered up this mountain though. Several people have heard creepy music and sinister footsteps. Members of the Aetherius society claimed that the mountain was used as an alien base, and some nutty spiritualists claimed that the Fear Liath Mor was actually a Buddhist master. Is this lad supposed to be a Sasquatch, a ghost, an alien or a what? Another witness claims to have seen a fox walking upright, wearing a top-hat… Yeah. When I said that Affleck Gray collected every iota of discussion of the weird stuff up this mountain, I was serious. I admire the comprehensive nature of this work, but it’s this exact feature of the book that makes it unbelievable. This is a collection of folklore more than anything else. The author never really tries to convince the reader that anything specific is going on, and this is the book’s saving grace.
Some of the chapters feel like filler. There is a big discussion on the possibility of life on other planets that has very little bearing on the rest of the book, and there’s an unreadable chapter on ley-lines. Things get a bit repetitive towards the end of the book too, but it’s fairly short, so it’s not unbearable.
There’s been a few editions of this book. I believe the first one came out in 1970. There is also an ebook available from Birlinn Press.
I’m not convinced that anything particularly weird has happened on this particular mountain. A surprising amount of the book is taken up with discussions on stuff that happened on other mountains. Mountains are weird places though. I think that a mountainside is the perfect place for a person to get a bit freaked out when they’re on their own, and I only wish that I had the opportunity to do so myself. I live fairly close to some mountains, but they’re full of bears and wolves and I’d get eaten within minutes. Ben Macdhui looks like it’s fairly close to Loch Ness and Aleister Crowley’s old house, so I’ll try and get over there once I’ve made my fortune.
Despite what it says on the cover, this book is definitely not “a true story”.
The Lutz family move into a new house right before Christmas. The kids are disappointed by their presents, the stepdad feels chilly, the dog pukes, the mom has some sex dreams about a man who isn’t her husband, there’s a reek of human shit in the basement, and the parents beat their kids with a strap. Oh, and some weird stuff happens too.
The family hear some creepy voices, see an evil talking pig, and get covered in green slime.
Honestly, I quite enjoyed the first few chapters. There was a part where the little girl asks her mommy if angels can talk that genuinely creeped me out. Unfortunately, things get silly pretty quickly. Once the mom started levitating I lost interest and the book became a chore to read. So many haunted house clichés are present here that it’s very difficult to take seriously. (Some of these clichés likely originated in this book, but that doesn’t make them easier to accept.) This is absolutely not non-fiction.
One of the most confusing features of this book is the character of Father Mancuso. He’s a Catholic priest who visits the Lutz family right after they move in so that he can bless their home. A spirit tells him to GTFO, and he runs away. The rest of the narrative goes back and forth between what’s happening to him and the Lutz family, and I was expecting him to make a grand return to help the family out during the climax of the book. He doesn’t though. He just shits out his bathroom so badly that he has to leave his house for several days and then picks some scabs on his hands. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s suggested that these events were caused by the evil entity in the Amityville house, but the book is set during flu season, and it seems absurd to suggest that an man getting a bad dose of the trots in January has anything to do with ghosts. Honestly, he craps out the shitter so bad that his neighbours complain. Dirty old fucker with a stinking asshole. I read online that he was kicked out of the priesthood after the book’s publication, but I couldn’t find out why. It likely had something to do with his repulsively reeking shitter.
There’s a whole slew of other books about the Amityville house and the Lutz family, but some are presented as fiction based on the truth, some are non-fiction that examines the fiction, and some are presented as nothing but fiction. (There’s also novelisations of movies that don’t seem to be involved in the literary canon of the Amityville mythos.) I’d be interested in looking at some of them just to see how they go between fiction/non-fiction, but three of the key Amityville texts were written by Hans Holzer. I read two books by Hans Holzer during my first year of keeping this blog. Gothic Ghosts andElvis Presley Speaks are two of the worst books I have ever read, and I don’t want to read anything else by Holzer. (Do yourself a favour and go back and read my reviews of those books. Pure quality.) No. I think it’s safe to say that I won’t be wasting my time on Amityville.
I just noticed that tomorrow marks 8 years since my first post here on Nocturnal Revelries. I must be getting close to 600 books reviewed. I didn’t expect the blog to last this long. You may not have noticed, but since the beginning of this year, I have been deliberately alternating between fiction and “non-fiction”. I had been avoiding non-fiction for a few years, but I’m enjoying get back into it. I actually feel happier with the blog recently than I have in quite a while. Here’s to another 8 years. Hope you’ve been enjoying it!
Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis Iris M. Owen and Margaret Sparrow Harper Collins – 1976
In the early 1970s a group of Canadians with an interest in the paranormal decided to try to create a ghost. They came up with a name and backstory for their ghost and then spent a year meditating together, focusing their attention on Philip, the character they had created. After a year, Philip started talking to them.
There’s no denying that that is a cool set up for a horror story, and at least two films have been loosely based on the Philip experiment. Copies of this book are hard to come by for a decent price at the moment too. That doesn’t always mean a book is good, but it does add to the mystique. I had to read this.
Unfortunately, this book is the literary equivalent to eating a cooked turd.
Philip chose to communicate with the group by knocking on a table. The group would ask a question, and he’d knock once for “yes”, twice for “no”. Occasionally he would excited and bump the whole table around. Ugh.
The book is a horrible read. It’s incredibly repetitive, and none of the sources it references are trustworthy. It gives the story of the Fox sisters as evidence of real poltergeist activity, but the Fox sisters themselves admitted that they had produced the noises that brought them attention. There was a chapter towards the end that discussed the psychology of poltergeist activity. It was so frustratingly stupid that I literally couldn’t bring myself to read it thoroughly.
I’ve never encountered a table rapping poltergeist, but I have encountered many, many idiots in my life. It’s much easier for me to believe that the people involved in this experiment were morons than it is for me to believe they created a ghost. Also, the whole way through the book, the authors discuss how the Philip experiment is going to have profound effects on the fields of psychology and even physics in the future. Here we are, almost 50 years later, and their work has had no effect on anything.
This is an poorly written, extremely boring book. When I was finished it, I was completely unconvinced in what the authors were saying. Directly after finishing the book, I watched the documentary referenced therein called “Philip the Imaginary Ghost”. This footage was shot during the experiment, and some of the scenes are discussed in the book. If I had watched the video before starting the book, I wouldn’t have bothered. Reading the book, you can’t fully appreciate how lame the people involved in writing it were. The footage is actually hilarious. It’s a bunch of dithering idiots singing at a table and pushing it around, pretending that a ghost is making it move. I genuinely don’t know if they were stupid enough to not realise that it was in fact them moving the table or if they were only stupid enough to think that people seeing them wouldn’t realise that they were moving the table. Part of me hopes that they were fully aware of how dumb they looked and were just acting like fools for a bit of fun. It truly boggles the mind.
Ghost Story – Peter Straub Pocket Books – 1980(Originally published 1979)
I have heard a lot of good things about Peter Straub, and I knew that Ghost Story is considered to be one of his best books. It was the last book I read of the 10 discussed in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, and it was also the last book of my summer vacation. (That might give you an idea of the backlog of posts I have.) I had high expectations for this book, and it did not disappoint.
This is a very long novel, but its influences are the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. With the exception of Hawthorne, I have tracked down and read all of the supernatural fiction by these authors, so it’s not super surprising that I enjoyed this. (I read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Twice told Tales years ago but none of his later short fiction. I’ll have to see if there is a dedicated collection of his ghost stories out there.) While this book wears its influences on its sleeve, it has in turn become very influential on modern horror. One of the stories in Ryan Harding’s Genital Grinder uses this book’s opening line as homage.
There’s a part in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre where King discusses how the unknown is perhaps the most potent element of horror. The scary thing behind the closed door is always scarier when that door remains closed. Regardless of how terrifying the menace actually is, by making itself known it loses some its power. (Sure it’s scary, but it’s teeth and claws could always be a little bit longer.) In short, the question is scarier than the answer.
I reckon the first half of Ghost Story is one of the greatest set-ups in all horror fiction. The mystery, atmosphere and tension are magnificent. What the hell is happening here? Why has this man kidnapped a child? Who or what is picking off the small group of old men in Milburn? What’s the unspeakable event that occurred between these old men and the mysterious Eva Galli in the past? How are the answers to these questions linked?
The problem with this book is that those questions have to be answered. As King notes, the answers are doomed to fall short of the horror of the questions themselves. The ending of this book is fine. The characters remain interesting, and there’s plenty of creepy bits, but for my money, the malevolent supernatural force at the heart of the story is just a little bit too complicated for the second half of the book to live up to the first.
Maybe that sounds like a jerk thing to say. There’s literally no way to keep this kind of tension consistent until the end of a story, so this critique isn’t really fair. At least Straub tried. Most writers wouldn’t be able to come anything close to what he has achieved in this book. There are some seriously creepy moments in here. Even thinking of one particularly skillful use of foreshadowing near the beginning of the book makes me shudder, months after finishing the novel.
Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead.
I really enjoyed Ghost Story, and I recommend it to any fan of horror. Straub has written a bunch of other novels too, including two with Stephen King. I am entirely certain I’ll be reading more of him in the future.
Nocturnal Revelries 