Sorry for not posting last week. I’ve been travelling, and I haven’t had much time to sit down and blog.
I read Herbert Gorman’s The Place Called Dagon a few weeks ago. I had read somewhere that it had influenced Lovecraft, and its title made it seem like the influence would be pretty direct. I enjoyed the book, and while it did feel very similar to some of Lovecraft’s tales, it wasn’t really what I expected.
George H. Doran Company – 1927
A doctor moves to a remote town in New England. He’s largely shunned by the locals. Things start to change when he is called to the home of the local eccentric who has just shot himself in the foot. This lad is a weirdo, but his wife is a total babe. One thing leads to another, and it’s not long until the doctor finds himself at a Satanic coven’s ritual sacrifice.
This is actually a pretty straight forward folk horror story, but the setting and tone is very similar to some of Lovecraft’s work. I was a bit surprised because when I think of what stands out about Lovecraftian horror, I tend to think of the cosmic side of things, strange and terrible gods that are oblivious to the suffering of humanity, but the evil in Gorman’s book is actually quite prosaic. There’s definite Dunwich vibes, but no real Yog Sothothery. The Dagon referred to in the book’s title is literally a place too. There’s no fish Gods involved.
I quite enjoyed this one. I went back and took a look to see what Lovecraft actually said about it. All I could find was a brief mention in his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature. I remember reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, a book about horror fiction, a few years ago and then going back and reading all of the books it mentioned. I did the same thing after reading T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies. I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t gone through Lovecraft’s essay in more detail and then hunted down the books mentioned therein. I’m just glancing through it now and seeing a lot of familiar names. Maybe I’ll get going on that soon.
I first encounered the writing of Ray Garton in the first Splatterpunks anthology. It contained a chapter that had been from his book Crucifax, presumably for being too edgy. It had a dead baby in it or something, and I wasn’t terribly impressed. Years later, I read that his vampire novel, Live Girls, was considered a classic in the field, so I sought it out and gave it a read.
Live Girls
Futura – 1987
Yeah, this is pretty good. There’s a peepshow in New York city where beautiful vampire women dance in glass boxes. There are gloryholes in the walls, and when the men stick their dicks in, they get a toothy blowjob that satisfies both their lust and the vampire’s hunger. There’s also a basement full of hideous mutants. This part isn’t explained properly. We’re told how they became mutants but not why they’re trapped in a cellar. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that they’re mutants is a perfectly good reason for them being kept in cellar. This is not high literature, but it’s fast paced and enjoyable. It’s also quite of its time (1987). The following passage had me laughing:
“He thought he was being raped by a homosexual.” he added. She put her whole hand over her mouth and her eyes crinkled as she tried to hold the laughter in.
I can’t imagine those lines appearing in a modern novel.
Night Life
Subterranean – 2005
I waited a week and then read Night Life, the sequel to Live Girls. This was written almost 20 years after the first book. It features many of the same characters, and while it was decently entertaining, it just wasn’t as good as the first book. It’s one of those sequels where the author tries to rewrite new versions of all of the memorable parts of the first book. The vampire hideout in this one is a hotel rather than a peepshow, but the hotel also features a basement full of mutant freaks. There’s more rape in this one too, and it felt a bit vulgar. The rapists in the first book are female vampires. There’s an interesting element of subversion there. Not so in the sequel. I don’t want to come across as a prude here because I willingly read a novel by a writer who was known as a first generation splatterpunk, but the innocent woman being forced into an anal rape gangbang with 13 vampires was a bit silly. The ending was a bit abrupt, and I felt like Garton left it open with the plans to maybe write a third book in the series. Unfortunately, he died last year, so we’ll never find out what happens next.
If you’re going to read Live Girls (and I recommend that you do), you should probably read Night Life too. It’s not as good, but I did actually enjoy reading it. I am probably going to go back to read Crucifax soon.
You may not know this, but Tuesday is Canada Day. People in Canada get the day off work to clean their moose and harvest their maple syrup. I’ve done a few posts on Canadian stuff in the past (a Canadian ghost, a Canadian cult, Canadian mind control…), but the most infamous title of “Canadian” horror has long eluded me. I recently got my hands on it, and I thought this would be the perfect time to share it with you.
Otto Frederick’s Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair
Pageant Press – 1960
I don’t remember where I heard of this book, but on reading the title, I knew I had to track it down. A small amount of research on this book will show that it gained some of its infamy after appearing as number 3 in R.S. Hadji’s list of 13 Worst Stinkers of the Weird in the June 1983 edition of Twilight Zone magazine.
Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair is a lot harder to track down than some of the other titles on this list. This is likely because it was printed by Pageant Press, a vanity press. Vanity presses were companies that would print books at the expense of the author, so it is hard to imagine that more than a few thousand copies were ever printed. The author was a clerk for the airforce living in Ohio, and he had 2 kids and a wife, so I doubt he had enough money for a huge run of hardbacks.
There’s also something infinitely collectible about this book. It’s rare, it sounds peculiar, it’s infamously bad, and it’s set in Canada. What self-respecting Canadian connoisseur of horror fiction could sleep easily without a copy of this book on their shelf? I’m not Canadian, and I literally spent years trying to track down a copy. I’m not exaggerating. Years.
I found a copy online a few years back, but it was a little more than what I was willing to pay. It disappeared soon thereafter. A few months back another copy appeared, but it was twice the price of the previous copy. I bought it anyways. It is by far the most expensive book I’ve bought, but I had to have it. I simply had to.
I read it last week. It is indeed very shit.
A brother and sister and their uncle move to the Canadian wilderness where their father has been given some land. They make friends with some local lumberjacks and then spend a few months turning an old logging cabin into a lakeside home. Unfortunately, a weird man in a military uniform keeps sneaking into their house when the men are away and assaulting the girl. She doesn’t really put up any resistance. If this was a better book, it would describe how she wasn’t sure if these visits were real or a dream, but the author isn’t that competent, so it just seems like getting raped doesn’t really bother her. She manages to keep it a secret, but when the family’s horses go missing, the men realise something is up. It turns out that Dracula is living on an island in their lake, disguising himself as a soldier.
The book ends shortly after this. There are no details given on how Dracula made his way to Canada or where he goes after the settlers chase him away.
Otto Fredrick
I believe that this was the author’s only book. I’m not surprised. He was not a good writer. This is more a moderately boring adventure novel than a horror novel, and the addition of Dracula to the plot seems forced and bizarre. It’s pretty short though, and I read it in 2 sittings, so the frustration and disappointment didn’t really hit me until after it was over. The elements for a decent novel were all here, but this mostly felt rushed and poorly thought out. If you’re expecting the Trailer Park Boys but with vampires, you’re in for disappointment.
Was this objectively terrible book worth the ridiculous amount of money that I paid for it? Reading it was not a particularly exciting experience, but seeing my copy on my bookshelf is priceless. There’s another copy available on Ebay now. Go and buy it, you coward.
It’s funny. A few years ago I did a post on Barry Hammond’s Cold Front, referring to it as “Canada’s rarest horror paperback”. It was recently republished, so it has definitely lost this title. Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair isn’t a paperback or truly Canadian, but surely it is now the rarest work of Canadian horror fiction! Unfortunately, I find it hard to imagine this one ever getting republished. Happy Canada Day!
Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and Moore’s From Hell (1999)
I first heard of Nicholas Hawksmoor when I read Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, a graphic novel about the Jack the Ripper murders (more to come on that topic in the next few weeks!). Hawksmoor was an architect in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and in Moore’s book, there are repeated references to the churches Hawksmoor designed in London. Moore suggests that the locations and designs of these churches bely their function as places of Christian worship. Hawksmoor was actually a Satanic pagan, and his churches were designed as talismans to serve in the great ritual of London city. The fact that Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper’s hunting ground, is situated between 2 of Hawksmoor’s churches is no coincidence.
Quote from Sinclair’s Lud Heat
One of the major accomplishments of Moore’s meticulously researched work on From Hell is the synthesis of different conspiracies, characters and ideas from and about London in the late 1880s, and the notion of Hawksmoor’s churches being evil talismans originally comes from an author named Iain Sinclair. In 1975, he published a book of poetry called Lud Heat. The first section of the book is titled, Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches, and it’s here that Sinclair puts forth the idea that Hawksmoor deliberately infused his churches with sinister codes and symbols.
Quote from Sinclair’s Lud Heat
While there is no real evidence that Hawksmoor was a Satanist, he did incorporate obelisks, pyramids and other supposedly pagan symbols into his architecture. He was also extremely picky about the sites where his churches were to be built. When plotted on a map, they are said to form a pentagram, and Hawksmoor had them built in curious historical locations.
From Hell Chapter 4. Note the claim that the stone of the church will ensure the survival of Hawksmoor’s will.
Sinclair is a proponent of psychogeography. Psychogeography, as far as I understand it, is basically the process of walking around an area in an attempt to understand how its layout and architecture affect people. Alan Moore is friends with Sinclair and has openly acknowledged the influence of Sinclair’s ideas on From Hell. (Sinclair himself wrote a book about the ripper murders which I plan to read soon.)
Lud Heat is very much a poem about London. I’ve been to London a few times, but I don’t know the city well enough to really have a feel of what Sinclair is talking about. I also don’t care much for poetry, so while I read through his Hawksmoor poem, it didn’t really do much for me. This poem was published in 1975, and From Hell was finished roughly 20 years later, but halfway through this period, novelist Peter Ackroyd published Hawksmoor, another novel influenced by Sinclair’s ideas on Hawksmoor and psychogeography.
Harper and Row – 1985
Hawksmoor has 2 storylines. One deals with the trials and tribulations of Nicholas Dyer, a cantankerous architect who was initiated into a sinister cult as a child after his parents died of the plague. There’s a few minor discrepancies, but Dyer is clearly based on the real Hawksmoor. This is confusing because the second narrative takes place 200 years later and focuses on a homicide detective named Hawksmoor…
As Dyer’s churches are erected, he commits ritual murder at the site of each of these edifices to instill them with a malignant power. When the narrative switches to the present day, the reader witnesses Hawksmoor investigating similar recent murders that have occurred in the same locations as Dyer’s sacrifices. He is unable to solve these crimes, and the implication is that the sinister power that was imbued into each of the churches is still at work today. It’s not quite clear whether the recent deaths are to reinvigorate the churches with fresh sinister power or whether these crimes are just a grisly echo of evil “reverberating down the centuries”.
Quote from Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (Remember that the Hawksmoor mentioned here is actually a police officer!)
Ackroyd only mentions the Whitechapel murders briefly his novel, but the notion that the design and locations of Dyer’s churches are responsible for violent deaths is central. Also, the fact that the murders in Ackroyd’s book are unsolvable does have an eerie parallel with the Jack the Ripper murders.
Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor is entertaining and at times quite funny, and while it’s more literary than what I usually read nowadays, I quite enjoyed it. I had been going through a bit of a lull with my reading material, and as I was reading this, it got me excited about books again. I have been meaning to read some books about Jack the Ripper for a while now, so I jumped at the chance to reread From Hell, and all of this talk of buildings being imbued with sinister powers caused me to revisit another old favourite.
Psychogeography seemed like quite a novel idea to me at first, but then I realised it was very similar to the mysterious science of megapolisomancy described in Fritz Leiber’s classic Our Lady of Darkness. Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities is a mysterious (and unfortunately ficitonal) book written by an even more mysterious character named Thibaut de Castries. De Castries believed that modern cities were dangerous places because of the materials used to construct their buildings. The layout and architecture of these buildings can drive people mad. De Castries claims that these pieces of architecture attract paramentals, bizarre entities that feed on human terror. A building designed in a particular way could be used to manipulate these entities into doing ones bidding.
Quote from Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness
This is pretty much the exact idea that Sinclair, Ackroyd and Moore use in their respective books works involving Hawksmoor. Compare Thibaut’s thoughts there with the Sinclair’s description of Hawksmoor above. Note the emphasis on location, geometry and ritual.
De Castries dies before the events described in Our Lady of Darkness, but the effects of his work are felt long after he’s gone. Compare the following quote from Megapolisomancy with the events described in Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Moore’s From Hell. The buildings, these talismans of concrete are designed to house a lingering terror whose effects continue long into the future.
Quote from Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness. De Castries probably doesn’t want to commit these “manipulations” to print because they involve ritual murders in the style of Hawksmoor!
In Our Lady of Darkness, the protagonist is terrorised by a paramental entity that had been coded onto the local architecture by an infernal work of neo-pythagorean meta-geometry (God, I love that phrase!). Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor leave rooms for a similar interpretation. The murders in From Hell are commited by a human of flesh and blood, but the murderer himself repeatedly refers to the influence of Hawksmoor’s churches on his heinous acts.
From Hell, Chapter 4 “magic… reverberating down the centuries”
Now at first I thought this was all a coincidence. Fritz Leiber’s first novel was first published before Sinclair, Ackroyd or Moore were born, and Our Lady of Darkness actually came out when Leiber was in his late 60s, 2 years after Sinclair’s Lud Heat had been published. Sinclair did not invent psychogeography, but the similarities between his ideas on Hawksmoor and Leiber’s megapolisomancy seem very specific. How would an old man have gotten wind of this new fangled version of psychogeography and put it into his novel? Now I can’t say for certain, but I’ve come across a potential explanation. Leiber was famous for popularizing the sword and sorcery genre along with English writer Michael Moorcock. These two authors were apparently good friends, and doubtlessly recommended books to each other. In 1995, Moorcock actually wrote an introduction to a new edition of Sinclair’s Lud Heat. He claims that he first met Sinclair as the author of Lud Heat, so it’s a long shot, but it’s not entirely impossible that Moorcock had read Lud Heat and suggested it to Leiber before Leiber wrote his first draft of Our Lady of Darkness. I know that Alan Moore is chummy with Moorcock, and Moorcock has also expressed praise for Ackroyd’s work, so it seems likely that Moorcock likely has some interest in their notion of psychogeography… It’s probably just a coincidence, but it’s fun to connect the dots.
I quite enjoyed writing this post. I’m going to have another post featuring From Hell in the near future. I generally avoid talking about graphic novels on here, but Moore is something of an authority on this stuff and I love him as an author and a person. It was funny reading through the appendix at the end of From Hell and seeing mention of my pal James Shelby Downard. Hawksmoor was initiated in freemasonry a few years before he died. I wonder what Downard would make of that!
I had originally planned a different post for this week, but I got about halfway through writing it and realised I needed to do more research. Luckily enough, I spent last Friday night reading Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black.
Hamish Hamilton – 1983
I had seen the movie version with Daniel Radcliffe when it came out, but I had largely forgotten what it was about. (I do remember quite enjoying it though.)
A solicitor has to go and stay in the house of a recently deceased recluse in an attempt to find some important legal papers that had been in her possession. While he is staying in her isolated, desolate mansion, he starts to see an emaciated woman dressed entirely in black.
This is a good old fashioned ghost story, much in the style of M.R. James. At least one of the chapters is named after a story of his. I love this kind of fiction, especially when it’s done well, and this novel is just that. It starts off with the narrator’s family telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. He leaves the room in a panic when it’s his turn, creating a blissful amount of tension. His tale is so terrifying that he can only tell it through writing, which is exactly what he proceeds to do. This is the kind of book that you want to read under a blanket. It’s very short too, and I find it hard to imagine reading it over more than a couple of sittings. I feel silly for not having read this classic sooner. If you haven’t read it, do so immediately.
Not much else needs to be said. This is an excellent ghost story. There was a novelisation of the sequel film that came out in 2014, but it’s supposed to be crap, so I have no interest.
I read this on a whim recently, and though more modern than a lot of what appears on this blog, Scott Smith’s The Ruins was quite good.
Vintage – 2007 (First published 2006)
A bunch of young people go on vacation to Mexico and end up travelling into the jungle to see their friends who are supposedly working on an archaeological dig. When they get there, they get trapped on a hill that’s covered with an evil plant that won’t let them escape. Things get grizzly pretty quickly.
The plot is a bit silly, but this is well written, and there were a few genuinely scary moments. It really reminded me of The Troop by Nick Cutter. I just looked it up online, and apparently Cutter openly acknowledged that this book directly inspired his. Both books follow a small group’s nightmarish weekend on a remote and lethal location, and both feature the timeless combination of things that burrow inside people and sharp knives.
This kind of survival horror isn’t my favourite genre, but this was enjoyable. I am going to give Smith’s other, more famous, novel, A Simple Plan, a read soon.
Lovecraft Country is an excellent title for a novel. Initially I assumed it was going to be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but with Cthulhu, the nightmarish diary of a drug user as they passed through Innsmouth and Arkham, not being able to distinguish between hallucinations and genuine sinister apparitions. That would have been awesome, but that’s not what this is.
Lovecraft Country – Matt Ruff
Harper – 2017 (First published 2016)
This is a novel that features Lovecraftian entities, but the horror it focuses on is actually that of American racism. First off, let me clarify immediately, that I am not an “anti-woke” asshole who disregards things because they mention race. I understand that racism was and continues to be a huge problem, especially in America. If you disagree with that sentiment, go stick a knife up your shitter. My complaint is not that racism shouldn’t be addressed; it’s that this is not a good way to do it. To me, the appeal of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror lies in its villains’ complete apathy towards human life. In Lovecraft’s best stories, there’s no bad guy who hates people because they were mean to him. He was writing about entities who see human life as nothing more than a mistake. We are slime to the Great Old Ones. What does Cthulhu care for the tribulations of man? To write a story that focuses on race against that backdrop seems absurd. If the world is soon to repopulated with a species of humanoid beetles, why should we care about the immediate suffering of one particular group of people?
In actuality, the Lovecraftian influence on this novel seems to come more from Lovecraft’s fantasy stories than his horror. The amount of Shoggothery in here is minimal. I kept hoping that really bad stuff was going to start happening to everyone, but it didn’t. This novel did not deliver the Lovecraftian horror that I am a fan of. If you want Lovecraftian horror with a black protagonist, I would recommend Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom instead.
I hummed and hawed for a month after finishing Lovecraft Country, trying to figure out if I was going to read The Destroyer of Worlds, the book’s sequel. I eventually decided not to bother. I read that Ruff claimed that the first novel is a better book, and as I found this one quite boring, I decided not to bother with its sequel. I’m not going to bother with the TV show either.
The other thing is that the author is a white man. I’m certainly not of the opinion that an author should only write about characters of their own race, but this is very much a novel about the hardships endured by black people in the 1950s. While I thought that Ruff dealt with the topic in a sensitive manner, I am a white guy, so my opinion isn’t that important here. I guess a cast and crew of mostly black people worked on the TV adaptation though, so it’s probably ok. Personally, I wouldn’t touch this kind of thing with a 10 foot pole in my own fiction. I’d be afraid of being accused of virtue signaling or insensitivity. Ruff, at least in my opinion, manages to walk that fine line successfully, but it seems like the effort required in doing so made it much more difficult to deliver the promises made by the book’s title.
The first time I heard of The Exorcist was when it was unbanned in Ireland in 1998. I was about 12 years old and still very Catholic. What I heard about this film was terrifying, and when I saw it a year or two later in a friend’s house, I was shitting myself. Part of this was due to my deeply ingrained fear of the devil, but it is also a very scary film. Despite losing my faith in the power of Christ, the original film still creeps me out every time I watch it. I first read the novel that the movie was based on just a few months before starting this blog, and I never got around to posting about it. I found an audiobook version recently, and decided to give it another go.
William Peter Blatty – The Exorcist (40th Anniversary Revised Edition)
Harper – 2011 (Originally published 1971)
I’m assuming anyone clicking onto a blog like this knows the story of The Exorcist, but in case you don’t, this is the story of a little girl getting possessed by a demon. The film follows the novel very closely, and if you like one, I’m sure you’ll like the other. The only problem here was that I realised very closely to the end of the book that the audiobook version I was listening to was a revised version. There’s a scene where a fat ghost priest shows up to Karras’s bedroom to warn him about the exorcism that I didn’t remember. This part was cheesy and dumb, and it cheapened the original. The ending is slightly different in the revised version too. The author tries to clarify that Karras is ultimately victorious at the end. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I didn’t compare it with my paperback copy of the original book, and while it’s not a huge change, I don’t like happy endings to horror novels, and I thought this was unnecessary. If you haven’t read The Exorcist before, make sure you read the original text and not the stupid revised version from 2011.
William Peter Blatty – Legion
Simon & Schuster – 1983
Directly after finishing The Exorcist, I read its sequel, Legion. A film version of this was released in 1990 as The Exorcist 3. William Peter Blatty, the author, had nothing to do with the 2nd Exorcist film, and Legion completely ignores the events in that film.
Honestly, I thought this book was trash. It follows the detective character from the first Exorcist novel as he tracks down a serial killer who is supposedly dead. The premise of the story would be fine, but every chapter gets bogged down in amateur philosophizing on the natures of evil and death. It’s painful.
Eventually it turns out that the murderer’s spirit has possessed Damien Karras, the exorcist from the first book. This makes absolutely no sense in the context of the revised version of The Exorcist, as after finishing that, the reader is expected to believe that Karras was victorious in defeating the demon. The functional premise of Legion is revealed to be that the evil spirit was victorious against Karras. This is a stupid horror novel, and while it’s pointless to get too critical here, it’s hard not to do so when the author spends half the book trying to make himself seem clever.
Well, there you go. I’ve finally done the 4 of the creepy children genre: The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Other.
Chainsaw Terror is soon to be rereleased, but a few years ago, the only way to read it without paying a fortune was to buy the Shaun Hutson omnibus containing Come the Night (the alternate title for Chainsaw Terror) and the 2 sequels that Hutson wrote to Clive Harold’s The Uninvited. Seeing as though I already had 2 of the 3 books on my shelf, I decided to give this trilogy a read.
The Uninvited – Clive Harold
Star – 1983 (Originally published 1979)
Clive Harold’s The Uninvited is about a farming family in Wales being disturbed by aliens. They see spaceships that stop their cars from driving, they get a rash, their cows disappear and reappear, they see spacemen in shiny suits, and weird men with waxy foreheads call at their neighbour’s house to ask questions about them. It’s pretty straightforward stuff as far as these things go, and no explanation other than aliens from spaceships is considered.
There were a couple of passages in the book that made me think of how horrible it would be to experience this kind of thing, but I didn’t find any of it convincing. I have seen pictures online of the family this book is about, so it is possible that there was at least some factual basis for this story. I reckon they were bullshitters though.
The book was published in the late 70s, and when I looked up the author, the only thing I could find about his life after publishing this book was that he ended up homeless and selling the Big Issue in the 1990s.
My favourite thing about this book was the amount of tea and coffee the family drink. It genuinely made me care about their wellbeing. Imagine having your evening swally of tae ruined by a disappearing herd of cows. Nightmarish.
The Uninvited 2: The Visitation – Frank Taylor
Star – 1984
This one is about a family who own a pub who get harrassed by aliens. The aliens abduct and rape the mother and send down Men in Black to annoy the family. I was hoping this was going to be like the first book but Shaun Hutsoned, but it’s very similar in its scope. There’s no mutant abortions, IRA men or chainsaws. Although it is suggested that the women are raped, it cuts out after they feel their legs being spread open. This is boring crap, and I sincerely doubt any of it is true.
The Uninvited 3: The Abduction – Frank Taylor
Star – 1985
This time it’s a policeman who sees an alien, but his coworkers don’t believe him. He gets a heat rash after being chased by a spaceship, and 2 aliens try to come into his house. Men in Black show up to tell him to keep things to himself, but these are members of the government rather than aliens Eventually the copper is abducted and raped by a sexy alien woman with red pubic hair. This was boring, definitely fictional garbage. It’s half-assed, and I am not surprised that Shaun Hutson used a pseudonym.
The Uninvited – Nick Pope
Pocket Books – 1998
I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently, and the reason I read the three above books was because I downloaded an audiobook called The Uninvited thinking it was the first book in the series. It turns out it was actually a completely different book about aliens by a researcher named Nick Pope. I was a few chapters in before realising that it was something totally different, but at that stage I had gone too far to turn back.
This is a fairly broad overview of the alien abduction phenomenon. It covers many of the most famous abduction cases and some cases that the author came across when working as a UFO specialist for the British Ministry of Defence. I found the stuff on the older cases quite interesting, but Pope’s willingness to accept obvious nonsense was a bit jarring. A lot of the people he’s talking about were clearly liars or morons, and some of the cases he discusses have long been accepted as hoaxes. Here is a video of him interviewing an alien who has possessed a woman that Pope claims holds the world record for number of times to get abducted. There’s a whole chapter in this book about her.
On a separate note, I found out yesterday that my friend Sandy Robertson died. I first encountered Sandy when he scolded me for pretending to throw my Colin Wilson books in the garbage. We became friends after I interviewed him about his Aleister Crowley book, and I heard from him nearly every week after that. He was a really cool guy, and I was deeply saddened to hear that he passed. Sandy my friend, if your ghost is reading this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is), I will miss you.
I read a few books by the Marquis de Sade when I was in my early twenties. I was thoroughly amused, but I haven’t really felt the need to revisit his work since. A few days ago I was searching through my local library’s collection of audiobooks when I spotted a book called The Curse of the Marquis de Sade. Initially, I thought it might be a light BDSM romance novel, but on closer inspection it seemed to be a history of the manuscript of 120 Days in Sodom, perhaps the most twisted novel ever written and one of my personal favourites.
So de Sade wrote 120 Days in Sodom while locked up in prison. After the storming of the Bastille, he lost the hand-made scroll it was written on and assumed it had been destroyed. It turned up after his death, and while he had spent his remaining years writing other foul books, none of them compared to 120 Days in terms of their meticulous and undiluted cruelty.
It’s the story of 4 perverts who kidnap a bunch of kids and take them to a remote castle. There, they proceed to perform acts of every perversion imaginable. The plot is extremely simple, and as the novel was never actually finished, the version that we have is largely just a list of perverted acts. We’re not talking foot fetish or balloon popping stuff here. This is mostly shit eating, blasphemy, dismemberment and masturbating to scenes of brutal torture. I wrote more about this book a long time ago in case you’re interested.
Warner’s book goes into very little detail on the contents of 120 Days of Sodom and instead focuses on the history of the scroll. Obviously as a one of a kind manuscript, it became quite a collector’s item, and it has been highly sought after and prized by several interesting characters. Warner also gives a biographical account of de Sade. I knew the basic story of his life, but I found this part quite amusing. He was a terrible person, but his pettiness and penchant for blasphemy are quite endearing to me.
The Curse of the Marquis de Sade is a short book about a book. If you have managed to read 120 Days, I would imagine you will find Warner’s book quite entertaining. It has made me think about revisiting de Sade’s work. I’ve had unread copies of Justine and Juliette on my shelf for years. Maybe the time is now right.
Nocturnal Revelries 