JFK and Marilyn Monroe dropped Acid with an Alien in Area 51 – George Piccard’s Liquid Conspiracy: JFK, LSD, the CIA, Area 51 & UFOs

Liquid Conspiracy: JFK, LSD, the CIA, Area 51 & UFOs – George Piccard

I bought this based on its title a few weeks ago. It turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be, an attempt to tie every conspiracy theory together. I think that lots of conspiracy theories have roots in real conspiracies, but ascribing responsibility for every shady cover-up to one group is ridiculous. It’s much easier for me to believe that the world is riddled with shady organisations who are competing for power than to believe that there is one shady organisation running the whole show.

Piccard’s main idea is that there’s a group of elites who are running the “liquid conspiracy”. It’s called the “liquid conspiracy” because like liquid, it is constantly changing shape. By constantly changing their plans, this group is able to conceal their identities and goals. This is a stupid idea that makes the author seem like an idiot. Here’s a chapter by chapter breakdown:

Intro
Kilder, a clerk at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), had access to top level security files. He also had a photographic memory, so he remembered everything. There is a secret group controlling the world. He spent years trying to get this info out after JFK got killed, but nobody listened. When he was dying of cancer, the UN sent a Black Ops division to kill him, so he got into email contact with Piccard. Piccard swore to hold off on publishing the information until Kilder was dead. This is pretty funny as it’s very similar to the framing narrative of the Report from Iron Mountain, a work of satire that has profoundly influenced most conspiracy theories since the late 60s. An informant who worked for a top secret division of the government contacts a journalist with classified information before disappearing. The fact that Leonard C. Lewin, the recipient of the Iron Mountain document, was a satirist seems to have gone over many of his readers’ heads. I haven’t been able to find any information Mr. Piccard online. He wrote this piece of crap and later contributed to another book on the Holy Lance. It seems odd that anyone would have sought him out to present him with the top secret information that is revealed in this book.

Chapter 1.
The Knights Templar discovered that the real Jesus hated the god of the Old Testament and thought he was the devil. They set out to find the original gospels but were suppressed by the church for fear of a power struggle.
A group, suspiciously referred to as “the Elders” a group of Rothschilds and Freemasons, started the Illuminati to take over the world with poisonous democracy. They killed Abe Lincoln. There’s a few curious mentions of an Illuminati document called “New Testament of Satan” by Weishaupt. I should track this down.
World War 2 was essentially a front for a battle between the remaining Templars (the Knights of Malta) and the “Elders”, but everythjng got a bit mixed up and some of the parties involved were infiltrated by both groups.
It was at that point that I realised that Piccard wasn’t overly concerned with cohesion. What he’s saying doesn’t make sense, so he basically accuses the Nazis of being on both sides of his secret war. Also, Hitler may have escaped into the Hollow Earth. Piccard ends the chapter by suggesting that the Elders, the Templars and the grey aliens finally ended their rivalry and came together to come up with a plan for world domination.

Chapter 2.
The Nazis had access to extraterrestrial technology. It is unclear as how they got it. Either they found a UFO or the secrets of Vril and implosive (divine) energy had been passed through countless generations of Thuleans. They built and used several flying saucers.

Chapter 3.
The real reason that Nazi scientists were brought to America was because America was being run by the “Elders” who wanted to control the German’s knowledge of Vril. It is likely that many Nazis avoided having to go to America by either going to South America or into the Hollow Earth through a tunnel in Antarctica.
Towards the end of WW2, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA made a deal with Hitler promising to absorb remaining Nazi officers into the US intelligence community. Dulles of course was not really a Nazi. He was working for the “Elders”.

Chapter 4.
Short chapter. Author quotes from The Protocals of the Elders, but doesn’t mention Zion. He’s essentially confirming that the Elders he’s been speaking about are the same “elders” we’ve suspected all along. The Illuminati use mind control. Nazis and Stalin were obstacles to the Illuminati. I’m not sure who the bad guys are supposed to be.

Chapter 5.
The US Government may have been doing LSD experiments for longer than admitted. It’s pretty well known now that CIA did do LSD experiments, so this doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. It is again suggested that Allan Dulles, the head of the CIA may have collaborated with Nazis.

Chapter 6.
This chapter is on MKULTRA and other CIA mind control experiments. It’s difficult to distinguish between the facts and bullshit here as it is well established that MKULTRA did happen and was so fucked up that the CIA deliberately hid as much of it as they could. This chapter discusses the Frank Olsen case, an experiment involving the CIA, prostitutes and LSD that I think I read about in CHAOS, that Manson book, and testimony from a person who was experimented on as a child that reads like an episode of Stranger Things.

Chapter 7.
The author discusses the Maury Island incident. Fred Crisman comes up. Then there’s an explanation of Roswell. It was an alien ship crashed by humans. It had been gifted to us by the Marcabs. Microwave technology and fiber optics were both also gifts from aliens.

Chapter 8.
Discussion on Area 51 and Hangar 18. Both defintiely house aliens. Also, the American government and the Nazis they imported after WW2 had a program where they abducted 75,000 US children every year to turn into mind controlled slaves.

Chapter 9.
The Dulce Base is underground base which houses thousands of alien human hybrids. Sometimes they get out and run amok. Some are reptilian, some are hairy. The reptilian ones may be the descendants of dinosaurs who entered the Hollow Earth through the hole in Antarctica hundreds of millions of years ago. This sounds too mental to be true, and it could be disinformation, but there’s no reason to believe that anything less crazy is actually happening.

Chapter 10.
It wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who killed Kennedy. We’re not sure who it was, but it wasn’t him. There were people talking about it before it happened, and others confessed. It wasn’t Oswald.

Chapter 11.
Marilyn Monroe was actually murdered because the FBI were afraid she would confess to public that JFK had taken her to Area 51 and showed her an alien. JFK’s next lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer used to score cocaine and LSD for him.

Chapter 12.
Sirhan Sirhan (RFK), Hinckley (Reagan) and Chapman (Lennon) were all mind control victims of the CIA. I’m struggling to keep hold of the thread that ties this book together. Any of the ideas in here are cool by themselves, but there’s no real effort to fit them together in a cohesive way. This book is just paranoid ramblings.

Chapter 13.
Cults are all part of the plan. Jonestown was a CIA orchestrated event possibly coordinated by Josef Mengele. The People’s Temple was also the CIA. The Davidians were chill, but the FBI killed them. (Apart from the Mengele part, none of this would be truly shocking.)

Chapter 14.
Ohio became a state later than other US states, and because President Taft was born there when it wasn’t yet a state, any laws he signed into law are obsolete. By the way, he’s the one who introduced income tax. Weird cryptids that originated in genetic experiments have made weird shelters out of wood to give birth in. Ohio is full of monsters like the Loveland creature.

Chapter 15.
AIDs is a man made disease to reduce black population

Chapter 16.
EU identification cards contain a barcode and the number 666. Someday we’ll all have an implant chip.
This is another conspiracy book from the 90s in which the author’s predictions of a dystopian future fall far short of what has actually happened. This chapter also details on black helicopters, HAARP, chemtrails, and fluoride in drinking water.

Epilogue
Unlike the black helicopter books i read recently, this book ends on a downer. The author warns that the New World Order is coming no matter what and there’s nothing we can do to stop it except praying. It’s pretty easy to threaten this when the description of the “Liquid Conspiracists” that he’s warning of is so vague that identifying them is essentially impossible.

This book is total crap, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I’ll deliberately leave out on the coffee table the next time my in-laws are paying a visit.

20 Powerful Voodoo Rites for Fast Cash and Riches by Marcus T. Bottomley, the Piss Wizard

There’s a few authors of the lowest form of magical literature that I have revisited several times over the years. Their work is generally so bad that there’s little to distinguish it from the work of their peers. Before starting another book by Marcus T. Bottomley this morning, I looked back on my blog to remind myself of the crap I’ve read by him. Dark Rites and Encounters with the Devil and 9 Proven Magical Rites had one thing in common apart from being awful. The spells in each of them both utilized piss. Marcus T. Bottomley is the piss guy.

So this week’s book is a collection of 20 rituals to help you get some money. I’m saving up for a holiday this summer, and some extra cash would be useful, so this book seemed quite appealing. Most of the rites herein are boring and stupid. There’s one where you hammer nails into some trees and expect that this will bring you wealth. Fortunately, 3 of the 20 rites involve piss.

1. The First Friday Rite is very simple. You basically just hose some candles in your piss and then dip them into some cinnamon sugar before lighting them.

10. The Sunrise and Urine Rite
Piss in a cup and then splash it around your garden when the sun comes up. You’ll soon be rich!

20. The Money-Hand Voodoo Rite
Piss in a bottle and keep it under your bed for good luck.

There’s another one, rite 5, where you go to a crossroads at night and “drop an egg”. (I assume that “dropping an egg” is a euphemism for doing a poo.) After you drop your smelly egg, a spirit will appear and give you good financial advice.

I also found rite 11 quite strange.

11. The Sulphur Rite to Draw more Customers into a Shop
Close all the doors and windows of your shop and then burn some sulphur. This will attract people into your shop. For a lot of these rituals, my brain was on autopilot, but something about this one broke me out of my stupor. I did a quick google search for “smell burning sulphur” and this short video was the first result. Pretty funny that Bottomley is telling small business owners to do this. You really have to wonder if he is deliberately trying to sabotage his readers.

At this stage, I’ve read enough of Marcus T. Bottomley’s magical rites to have a decent feel for his kind of powerful magic. I’m going to try to combine and tweak a few of these rituals in the pursuit of monetary gain. I’m currently drinking a large pitcher of water. After it has filtered through my kidneys, I’ll hold the fluid in my bladder for half an hour. Then I will perform the cinnamon challenge while holding a silver coin in my left hand. To end such a ritual, I will take my small willy in my other hand, aim it at my face and then do a big hot wee wee all over myself. I’m sure to be a billionaire soon!

Operation Mindfuck Goes Mainstream – John Higg’s KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds

When I was a boy, one of the great privileges of being the oldest child in the family was being allowed to stay up to watch the first half of the Late Late Show on a Friday night. At this point we only had 8 TV stations, and most households in Ireland tuned in to watch Gay Byrne’s long running chat show. I would have watched every Saturday for a few years, but I only have memories of 2 specific episodes. One was an interview with Rael (who was on the show a few times) and one was an interview with a pair of musicians who had burned a million pounds.The latter episode roughly coincided with my 9th birthday, and I remember being as disgusted as both my parents and the members of the live TV audience at the notion of burning that much money instead of donating it to charity. I had never heard of the band.

It was probably about 10 years later that I became interested in a band called Extreme Noise Terror. I’ve mentioned them before on this blog. I read somewhere that they had performed at the Brit awards with some electronic dance act and that the performance had involved somebody shooting a real gun into the crowd. I remember seeing a very blurry video of the performance (here’s a clearer version) and thinking it was really cool. I probably checked the dance act’s wikipedia or something and learned that they were the same guys that burned the million pounds. I don’t think I gave them much more thought, but as a dedicated grindcore fan at that point, I probably had a much easier time accepting the artistic statement of burning a million pounds.

In 2015, I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. I had already started this blog at that point, but that book pushed me past the point of no return. Robert Anton Wilson‘s Discordianism and ideas on chaos magic have had a very significant impact on how I view reality.

I don’t remember how I came to discover the fact that I was in the same boat as the KLF. Because they had deliberately deleted their catalogue to make their music inaccessible, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I first saw the video for Justified and Ancient. It blew my mind. This is a big budget music video featuring a hugely popular country star singing about a sect of Discordians from one of my favourite books of all time, a book that remains relatively unread despite its reputation in conspiracy theory circles. This truly bizarre piece of art had remained hidden for decades at the behest of its creators. In truth, it’s not the kind of music that I enjoy listening to, but I couldn’t help but love it. This is real weirdo stuff, but at one point it had been hugely popular. I was fascinated.

**Blackstone Publishing – 2024 (First version published 2012)**

A couple of weeks ago, I read John Higg’s The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds. It was really entertaining. It’s a strange book to read too because so much of it seems unbelievable. The KLF’s story is so strange that they almost seem like characters from Illuminatus! rather than just fans of the book.

So Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were essentially failed musicians who had been in a few different projects but had taken on non-creative roles in the music industry. Almost as a joke, they started a “hip-hop” project that consisted of them mashing up famous songs and releasing them as singles. They used their contacts in the music press to drum up a bunch of attention and controversy. The music was fairly crap, but they did media stunts and record burnings to keep the attention going. It worked, but it is unclear as to whether they were just extremely lucky or whether the media stunts they were performing were actually extremely potent and successful chaos magic rituals. After getting a number one single with this approach, they turned away from the mash-up genre and started making stadium house. In reality, they only wrote a few songs, but they reworked and remixed these until they became huge hits. They continued doing weird stuff as they released these songs including making a road movie with no plot and burning a giant wicker man in a ritual in front of a bunch of music journalists on a small Scottish island.

In 1992, they were awarded the best British group award at the Brit Awards. It was in response to their growing popularity that they invited Extreme Noise Terror to perform with them. They also left a dead sheep outside the venue. Within a few weeks of that awards ceremony, the band quit the music industry and deleted their music. The money burning happened a few months later.

Higgs’ book is great. It has plenty of detail on the story of the band, but it also gets into odd theories too. There’s a chapter on Alan Moore, who seems to have been friends with the band, and there is even mention of psychogeography in here. The book heavily leans into RAW’s reality tunnel ideas too. The KLF claimed they were members of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAM). (The JAMs were agents of chaos fighting against the Illuminati in Illuminatus!) Anyone who has read Illuminatus! will remember Operation Mindfuck, the Discordian effort to thoroughly mess with people’s heads at any cost. That Drummond and Cauty leaned into the promulgation of chaos is obvious, but Higgs discusses the interesting idea that they were driven to do so by external forces rather than internal ones.

After reading the book, I also watched the 2021 documentary, Who Killed the KLF? I’m used to reading about bizarre stuff, but seeing video footage of what I had just read about was quite weird. These things really happened. The way we consume media is so different now compared to the late 80s/early 90s that it’s really hard to imagine anything as weird as the KLF becoming hugely popular again. I know there are still plenty of brilliant oddballs out there being creative, but I feel like it’s a shame that they’ll never have to chance to share their weirdness with a mainstream audience. At the same time, it was very encouraging to see people really pushing the boundaries of popular entertainment. Markoff Chaney would be proud.

In honesty though, I still think that burning the million pounds was lame.

Jesus was a Vampire and a Dragon – Nicholas De Vere’s The Dragon Legacy

It has been a long time since I gave up on a book. When I started this blog, I had more free time and hence more tolerance for absolute bullshit. The last time I started a book and actually found myself unable to finish it was back in 2016 when I attempted a book called You Are Becoming A Galactic Human. A few years ago, I read a book by Tracy Twyman and a friend recommended I read a book by her pal Nicholas De Vere. I knew it was more on the bloodline of Christ story, but aside from that I had no idea what it would be like.

Before starting, I looked this de Vere guy up. He died a few years ago, but there’s some fairly bizarre claims about him on the internet. He traced his ancestry back and found out that he was descended from royalty, and it seems like he managed to have a royal title legitimately conferred on himself, but I’m not sure of the details there. He also claimed that he was a descendant of Elves, Vampires and potentially Jesus Christ.

I don’t think many people have read this man’s work. Part of this is due to the obscure nature of his claims, and part of it is likely how difficult he made it to understand what he was actually claiming. I spent over a week’s worth of reading on this book and got through less than half of it. The first few chapters weren’t easy to follow, but I could get the basic gist of what they were saying. It became so agonizing after a few hundred pages that I had to give up. My brain wasn’t taking anything in, and I didn’t want to waste another 2-3 weeks staring a book that wasn’t making any sense at all.

I’m going to summarize what I understood of the first few chapters.

Chapter 1
Human beings are dumb idiots. The Dragons (people with dragon blood) are Elves and are a separate species who have been persecuted for the last 1000 years. They are magic and exist on a higher realm that normal humans can’t comprehend. They have better senses than normal people like some animals do. The Grail Code is only applicable between Dragons because everyone else is shit. Dragons ritualistically drink the blood of their kings to gain their knowledge. Literally. Jesus was actually Satanic because Satan was actually good.

Chapter 2
Vampires and witches are all elves. When I was reading the words ‘elf’ and ‘elves’ in the previous chapter, I found it difficult not to think of the elves of Tolkien. It turns out I was right to think this way because those are the kind of elves that the author is talking about.

Chapter 3
Dracula is based in fact. Stoker was actually in the Golden Dawn and based his novel on insider information. Real vampires only drank the menses of beautiful virgins. This would make it likely that Jesus was in fact a vampire.

Chapter 4
The Elves faced a worse holocaust than the Jews. Again, the elves are literally like the elves in Lord of the Rings. The author compares homo-sapiens to hobbits. The elves who kept their bloodline pure weren’t racist because asking them to have sex with a regular person would be like asking a black person to have sex with a monkey. It’s not racist for them to refuse that! (This logic is not mine!)

Chapter 5
Things are getting complicated now. The author seems to think he’s talking to a mate that already understands all of this stuff. He gets into his family history. The de Vere dragon family are far superior to current monarchs who aren’t elven at all. He makes some good points about how garbage collectors never get knighted but provide a much more important service than actors or football managers. I thought this was a very interesting thought.

Chapter 6
Agonizing swill cross referencing grail lore, Irish mythology, kabala and numerology. The main take aways here are the swastika and the Star of David are the same thing. Jews are Aryan. The salmon of knowledge is actually a euphemism for licking the pussy off a beautiful woman. It really seems like the author lives in his own world. He seems to forget that people will have a hard time with him using words that generally mean the precise opposite of how he uses them.

Chapter 7
I cannot read this book anymore. I like the ideas, but the writing is too frantic and confusing.

I am sure there are gems spread throughout the rest of the book, but I am not able to spend any more time reading it. I’m sure de Vere’s fans will say that I’m just a mudblood homo-sapien who wouldn’t be expected to understand intelligent literature like this, but I could trace my ancestry back to the Merovingian Dynasty if I tried hard enough, so I am likely an elf, vampire and a dragon too.

“I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!” – Gef the Talking Mongoose

Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose – Christopher Josiffe

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.

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.

2025, The Year in Review

Another year has come and gone, and I’m still here blogging about creepy books. I sometimes wonder if I’m going to run out of weird stuff to read, but as I dig deeper and deeper into the archives of the occult, the horrifying and the Fortean, that seems less and less likely. At the same time, I am always interested in book recommendations, so please reach out if you have any!

For the last few years, I’ve tried to split my posts evenly between fiction and non fiction. This year, I read more trashy novels than anything else, but many of these were by the same authors, so I grouped them. I did posts on Sidney Williams, Ray Garton, and Stephen R. George.and Whitley Strieber. I planned to do the same for John Russo and Jack D. Shackleford, but the books I read by them were so bad that I abandoned my plan. I also read The Omen and The Exorcist series and The Wickerman books.

I ended up reading quite a bit of modern horror too. I used to avoid stuff that was written in this century, but there are still some talented authors alive today. I really enjoyed the books I read by David Sodergren and John Langan.

I read some other fiction that falls outside of the aforementioned categories. I was super excited to finally get my hands on a copy of Otto Fredrick’s elusive Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair, and the research for my post on Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories led me to see a ghost. I really enjoyed doing the reading for my posts on Nicolas Hawksmoor and Jack the Ripper.

I focused on conspiracies last year when it came to non-fiction. I did a few conspiracy texts this year, but also included some crime, some aliens, some cryptozoology and some general Fortean weirdness. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was a bizarre highlight. Also, I apologise to anyone who was deeply offended by my silly post on Fascist Yoga. Perhaps the strangest text I encountered was Martti Koski’s My Life Depends on You! In May, I was interviewed on the Bonversations podcast about some of this stuff.

I also did a few books on occultism and Satanism. I think I’m going to be a bit more picky about the grimoires I choose to review on here in the future. I went looking for something quick to review the other day, and after starting a grimoire, I did a little research on the author and discovered that he was literally mentally disabled. Still, I did enough studying of occult lore in 2025 to learn how to raise some tentacled Elder Gods from their deathly slumber. I was also finally able to read a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch. It was everything I hoped for.

February of this year marked an entire decade of Nocturnal Revelries. For several of those years, this blog was pretty much my only creative output. This summer, I started writing my own music, and I have been focusing more of my free time on that recently. This is partly why I didn’t post as frequently during the summer. Nevertheless, as the year progressed, I managed to balance my 2 hobbies. I will be taking a course in the evenings over the next few months too, so hopefully I’ll find a way to juggle that too. I have a few bizarre texts lined up for the near future, so please check in regularly.

I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. I’ve quite enjoyed the blog recently, so I’m sure I’ll be doing another one of these posts at the end of 2026 too.

Thanks, and happy New Year!

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.

The Books that Villainized Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s

I have no great interest in role-playing games, but I knew that Dungeons and Dragons was associated with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, do I decided to look at the books that contributed to its infamy.

The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III – William C. Dear

Dallas Egbert the Third was a weird teenager. He was highly intelligent, but socially awkward. He tried to make up for this when he went to college by taking drugs. He was gay, and he got involved with some shady characters. His mom was pushy, and wouldn’t have approved of his lifestyle, so he decided to kill himself. He went down into the ventilation tunnels under his college so he could die, but he couldn’t do it, so he went to hide out in some of his gay friends’ homes. He was kept drugged and it seems likely he was sexually abused. A private detective, the author of this book, found him halfway across the United States. They returned home, but Dallas put a bullet in his head a few months later. He never gave his full account of what had happened to him when he was missing.

This book was written by the detective who found Dallas. It wasn’t a great book, and the author’s writing style was grating, but in fairness, it’s not overly bullshitty. There is a horrendously drawn out chapter describing the author’s experience playing Dungeons and Dragons, but despite his intial suspicions, he ultimately dismisses the idea that the game had anything to do with Dallas’s fate. The kid was all kinds of messed up. His interest in fantasy games and science fiction seemed like the only parts of his life he enjoyed.

The book is of its time. It repeatedly makes reference to “the gays”, but it doesn’t do so with any kind of malice. If you want to know about this sad and weird case, this is essential reading.

**Dell – 1982 (Originally published 1981)**

Mazes and Monsters – Rona Jaffe

I had very low expectations when I started reading Mazes and Monsters, and I can say with disappointment that it was exactly what I expected. This is a boring novel with nothing of any value. It’s truly as bad as it looks. Look at that shitty-ass cover again. Fucking lame shit.

This book is about 4 nerds who play “Mazes and Monsters”. All of the chracters are lame and annoying. One is very clearly based on Dallas Egbert, but he isn’t really the protagonist. The main character here gets so involved in the role-playing game that he becomes convinced he’s really a holy magician. He is so strongly convinced of this that he becomes impotent and kills a person. As much of the book is spent describing the backgrounds of the main characters’ parents as is spent on the plot. I assume this was because Jaffe’s audience were mostly middle-aged women with teenage children that needed some point of reference for understanding the plot. This was so, so boring and crap. If I owned a copy of this book, I would take it into the forest and defecate upon’t. The only good part was when one of the main characters’ mothers goes on a date with a gentleman who expresses disappointment over her haircut because her formerly long, curly hair had reminded him of pubic hair. Such a bizarre detail to include. I’m willing to bet that the author’s minge was infested with pubic lice.

Mazes and Monsters was published the year after Dallas Egbert died, and while it does make it seem like role-playing games are probably dangerous for impressionable youths, it doesn’t really try to link role playing games with the occult. Still, it’s a piece of shit, and you shouldn’t read it.

Dark Dungeons – Jack Chick

This is a Chick Tract that came out in 1984 that claims that playing Dungeons and Dragons leads to suicide and Satanism. It’s silly rubbish. Read it here.

**Berkley – 1982 (originally published 1981)**

Hobgoblin – John Coyne

I’m throwing this book in here because other authors have linked it to the furor around RPGs in the 1980s. It’s about a young man who becomes obsessed with a game called Hobgoblin, but none of the really bad stuff that happens in here comes as a result of the game. Coyne’s book is more of an entertaining novel that features an RPG than a statement on the dangers of those games.

So a nerdy kid’s dad dies, and him and his mom have to move to a small town where she can work in the local castle. The caretaker there is a creepy Irish immigrant, and the manager starts fucking the boy’s mom. The boy is a stupid virgin, and chooses to start fights with the local football players instead of banging the hottest girl in school. It turns out there’s a weirdo living near the castle who likes murdering and sexually assaulting people.

So many parts of this book were completely unbelievable, but it was decently entertaining. There’s one part where two of the local jocks kidnap a girl, tear off all her clothes and abandon her, tied to a tombstone on the top of a hill. Then they break into the protagonist’s house and sexually assault his mom. Nobody does anything about this, and they face no repercussions. I know that attitudes toward sexual violence have change since the 1980s, but this was ridiculous.

The Irish elements were mildly interesting. The role playing game here, Hobgoblin, is set in Ireland, and all the characters in the game are supposed to come from Ireland. I didn’t recognize quite a few of them. I looked it up, and one of the main bad guys, the Black Annis, is actually from English folklore. Also, the old Irish caretaker character is very weird. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him or repulsed?

Ok, I’m going to include spoilers in this paragraph, so skip ahead if you want to read the book. I’m a bit confused about the ending. I just finished the book, and I don’t really understand what happened. The main bad guy was a badly brain damaged geriatric who must have been more than 80 years old. Despite this, he was able to brutally murder a bunch of people by himself over the course of about half an hour? Did he have some kind of magical power? Why was he killing people in the first place? Did I miss something?

Hobgoblin was alright. I don’t regret reading it. Mazes and Monsters was a mouthful of salty diarrhea. Dear’s book about Dallas Egbert was interesting as a historical source, but it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable book. I am quite done with books about Dungeons and Dragons.

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.

Jack D. Shackleford’s Tanith: A Nightmarish Novel of Demonic Possession

I don’t remember how or when I heard of John D. Shackleford’s occult horror novels, but I have been wanting to read them for years. I’m assuming it was the incredible cover artwork that both grabbed my attention and made it so hard to track copies of these books down at a reasonable price. Of all of his novels, Tanith was the most appealing to me. The cover artwork is phenomenal, and although I’m almost certain there is no connection, I’m also a fan of the obscure Irish doom metal band, Council of Tanith. I’ve long thought that their band name was a reference to the Tanith in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and from the titles of Shackleford’s books alone, I find it hard to imagine that he hadn’t read Wheatley’s masterpiece. I was intrigued to see if Shackleford’s Tanith had anything to do with Wheatley’s.

Last week, I received an email from a pal of mine with a pdf copy of Tanith attached. It’s less than 200 pages, so I dove right in.

Virginia has just moved to a cottage in the woods, and after an argument, her husband stormed out of the house and hasn’t come back. Virginia goes out at night and sees an ugly leprechaun. She is almost raped by the leprechaun a few days later, but something scares him away before he can penetrate her with his knobbly cock. A sexy witch named Tanith finds Virginia in the woods and takes her home. Then she nurses her back to health.

At this point the plot gets ludicrous. It turns out that Virginia was a witch before moving to the woods, and Tanith seduces her and convinces her to take part in magical rites with her leprechaun pals because Tanith has cancer and these rituals are the only way to prevent her death. Ultimately the plan fails because Tanith’s grandmother, a good witch, convinces her servants to set the forest on fire.

Promiscuous witches and rapist leprechauns are promising ingredients for an occult horror novel, but the execution here was pitiful. This was muddled, poorly planned garbage. Holding back important facts about a main character could potentially be used to create suspense or surprise, but here it just made it feel like the author was making the plot up as he wrote and wasn’t bothered going back and editing early chapters for the sake of cohesion. There is no link between Shackleford’s Tanith and Wheatley’s Tanith other than them both being sexy witches. Also, the subtitle of the work, “A Nightmarish Novel of Demonic Possession”, is completely inaccurate. There’s no demonic possession in this book.

I have since read that this is the worst of Shackleford’s novels, but it was so bad, I have little motivation to seek out any of the others. I have a copy of The Scourge, so I may read that in the future if I’m feeling generous.