All Serial Killers are Satanic Pawns of the CIA: David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder

There’s no such thing as serial killers. Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez and the likes were all framed by the government. None of these men committed all of the murders of which they were accused. They were all part of CIA mind control operations. Satanic ritual abuse and murderous Satanic cults exist, but they are just part of the US government’s mind control agenda.

This book starts off with a lengthy section describing different sex crimes committed against children. There really are a lot of sickos out there. The author claims that many of these crimes were committed by the US government to make their victims more susceptible to mind control. He points out that a high percentage of serial killers experienced sexual abuse as children. This was some bleak reading as proof of this. Paedophiles are truly the vilest form of life. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but giggle when a Satanic ritual abuse “victim” described how they were forced to play “poopoo baseball”

The next and longest section of the book details the crimes of America’s most notorious serial killers. McGowan includes all of the big ones with the noticeable exception of the Son of Sam. This is not because he thinks that David Berkowitz was any different to the other killers discussed but because he believes that Maury Terry said all that needed to be said about Berkowitz and his accomplices in The Ultimate Evil. This is fair; that book is exhaustive, and I’d imagine most of McGowan’s readers have probably read Terry, but the phrase “programmed to kill” actually came from one of the Son of Sam letters.

I went through a bit of a serial killer phase as a teenager, so I knew about John Wayne Gacy and Bundy, but most of my serial killer knowledge is limited to the names and lyrics of Macabre songs. I was aware that Edmund Kemper had a horrible temper and that Dahmer used to work in a chocolate factory, but although I knew that Richard Speck had done something outrageous, I didn’t know the specifics. It turns out this Speck guy killed 8 student nurses and was sentenced to life in prison. Some serial killers get murdered in prison due to their reputations, but Richard Speck managed to keep himself alive by injecting himself with estrogen and growing a pair of tits. In the late 80s, a lawyer snuck a video camera into the prison where Speck was locked up and made a video of him wearing blue satin panties, snorting cocaine and giving blowjobs to other inmates. What the heck Richard Speck ?

A lot of the reasoning presented here is utterly ridiculous. The book was written in 2004, just a few years before smartphones became ubiquitous, and the writing here makes that obvious. Whenever I would read about a killer I hadn’t encountered before, I would check their wikipedia page, and in most cases that would make it very obvious how hard the author was trying to put his slant on things. I’d like to assume that a person wouldn’t get away with this kind of distortion of the truth anymore, but unfortunately it seems that more people are buying into this type of shit than ever before. This kind of thinking is a direct precursor to the Pizzagate conspiracy and that kind of nonsense. As soon as you point out how the research is flawed, believers will accuse you of having being duped by the same system that created these “satanic” killers. Some of this book is verifiable fiction too. When discussing Aleister Crowley, the author discusses the story about Crowley performing a ritual that killed his friend and drove him crazy… the one that Dennis Wheatley made up. McGowan also assumes the existence of the Hand of Death, a Satanic cult of assassins that existed only in the mind of Henry Lee Lucas (more on that in matter in a couple of weeks),

The book’s central premise is total madness anyways. The message is that serial killers are made, not born. I get the appeal of that idea. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that some men enjoy murdering children, but it wouldn’t make me feel much better if I found out that it was actually the government putting those sick desires into its citizens’ heads. Also, the notion that the American government is organised enough to do stuff like this is ridiculous.

Programmed to Kill really only covers American killers. I assume other countries do have serial killers, but I can only think of a few. It does seem a bit odd that America has so many. I read an article that claims that the amount of serial killers has been dropping in the last few decades. The CIA must be devoting their attention elsewhere.

This is a ridiculous book. It could only be convincing to a person with no way of verifying the claims made within. I mainly read it because I knew it mentioned the 4 Pi cult, but it didn’t contain anything about that mysterious group that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It did put me onto a few other books about Satanic killers. It also forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about how horrible human beings are, and I started getting nervous leaving my house.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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

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

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

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

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

Cotton Mather – A 17th Century Jordan Peterson

I find reading about Salem Witch Trials a generally unpleasant experience. When I read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible years ago, I felt a horrible combination of claustrophobia, frustration and rage. I’m assume that my readers have a general background of what happened, but if you’re unaware, about 300 years ago, some stupid, bored teenagers in Salem made up stories about their neighbours being witches, and a bunch of innocent people were executed. I’ve had Cotton Mather’s On Witchcraft (Wonders of the Invisible World) on my shelf for a decade, and even though it’s short, I’ve put off reading it until now.

Cotton Mather – On Witchcraft (Wonders of the Invisible World)

**Dorset – 1991 (Originally published 1693)**

Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister at the time of the witch trials. I had thought he was a Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder, figure, but his role in the witch trials was minimal. I think he sent a few letters to the judges or something and then wrote this book as a defence of the court proceedings, assuming the guilt of the witches. It’s an extremely boring book, and I managed to get through it by downloading the audiobook version and forcing myself to listen to it every night for a week while I cleaned my kitchen. This Cotton Mather guy was a stupid asshole, but people seemed to value his opinion because he knew the Bible. He was basically a 17th century Jordan Peterson.

I’ve read about the Salem trials elsewhere, and there’s very little in the narrative of the book that was new to me. The most interesting thing here is what Mather’s writing tells us about how he thinks. Either he’s terrified and/or he wants his audience to be terrified. This was written in 1692. British colonies in America were still very new, and the Puritans were still adapting to their new environment. They had exiled themselves from the iniquity of Catholicism and Anglicanism, and they took the Bible seriously. Half of this book is Biblical references, and these references are not limited to the Gospels. Mather’s audience believed that God had a special interest in their daily affairs. It’s a genuinely chilling prospect to imagine yourself in their position, truly believing that the Devil himself was present and trying to destroy their community. Still, it’s pretty hard to forgive people who were stupid enough to condemn 20+ others to death on the testimony of some hysterical teenagers and jealous farmers.

Wonders of the Invisible World is an extremely important primary source for historians, but it’s generally a pretty dull read. I know that The Crucible isn’t entirely historically accurate, but it does a more entertaining job of telling the same story.

Narcosatanists: Across the Border by Gary Provost

Adolfo Constanzo was a drug dealer and occultist. He and his gang sacrificed humans in bizarre rituals. I had read about him online before, but he never really pops up in any of the books I read about occult murders. There’s a book by Edward Humes called Buried Secrets that came out in 1991 that seems to be a considered the definitive book on the topic, but I had a copy of Gary Provost’s Across the Border, so I went with that.

This is a really horrible story. Constanzo and his gang became known as the “Narcosatanists”, but they weren’t really Satanists. They were practicing a nasty form of Palo Mayombe, an African form of spirituality that came to the USA through Cuba, that involved sacrificing human beings and putting their remains into magical cauldrons. Apparently they had been doing this to rival drug dealers for a while, but things got messy after they kidnapped an American student. (They wanted a victim with a big brain.) They killed at least 20 people. It’s unclear how many of these victims were murdered for the sake of ritual and how many were drug hits. Apparently members of Constanzo’s crew used to drive around without any fear of being caught because they believed their boss had put an invisibility spell on them.

Provost’s book came out just months after Constanzo died, and it seems likely that more details about the crimes have come out since then. I expected this book to present a sensationalized version of the story, but I don’t think that it does. I noticed that Provost never even mentioned the fact that some of Constanzo’s victims were raped before they were murdered. This may not be an exhaustive account, but its not bullshitty either. There’s a section on other Satanic crimes that’s probably unnecessary given the fact that Constanzo and his crew were not actually Satanists, but Across the Border is relatively short, and the crimes and characters described within are fascinating. It certainly wasn’t a boring book. If I ever get my hands on a copy of Hume’s Buried Secrets, I’ll probably give that a go too.

Exposing Satanism or Exploiting Suicide Victims? Beatrice Sparks and Jay’s Journal

I’ve read a lot of messed up books, but Jay’s Journal by Beatrice Sparks is probably the most morally reprehensible piece of writing that I’ve ever come across. I don’t mean that in an ironic or funny way. This book and the story behind it are genuinely disgusting.

A few days ago, I picked up a book at work. It was called Go Ask Alice, and the cover suggested that it would be a bit more interesting than the other stuff on the shelf. It’s supposed to be the real diary of a teenager who gets involved in drugs. I don’t use drugs recreationally, but I’ve read quite a few drug books, and most of them made taking drugs seem pretty cool. This one didn’t. I googled it, and it turns out that it’s not a real diary. It was written by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counsellor. When I was reading about her, I discovered that after this book was published and became a success, the mother of a 16 year old boy who had committed suicide approached Beatrice Sparks and asked her to help get his diary published. The mom hoped that this text would shed light on teenage depression and hopefully prevent further teen suicides.

Suicide is one of the worst things a family can go through, and while publishing the diaries of a suicide victim seems a bit insensitive, I can’t hold this against the mother. Think of the loss she had just suffered and how much that loss must have damaged her own mental wellbeing. I can understand her desperate attempt to prevent other families from feeling her pain.

Beatrice Sparks agreed to “edit” the diary into a publishable form. What this entailed was taking 21 of the 67 entries from the actual diary and supplementing them with 191 entries of Spark’s own imagination. Oh yeah, and at the time of writing her entries, Beatrice Sparks was obsessed with occultism, blood orgies, witchcraft and Satanism. The result is a book about a kid who kills himself after summoning a satanic demon. The real kid who died was a rebellious teenager from a conservative family. Sparks published a book that made him out to be an animal-sacrificing, perverted Satanist.

To do this to the family of the child that died was a shockingly nasty thing to do. The family were extremely upset. This book had other nasty effects too. It was first published in 1978, and while it’s not solely responsible, it is fair to assume that it stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Beatrice Sparks was truly a rotten, shit-smeared asshole.

Even if we manage to put the author aside, this book is awful. The narrator comes across as a tosser. He’s constantly talking about how great he is and how much he loves his parents. He gets into trouble for doing drugs and ends up in a boys’ home. There he meets a paedophile who tells him about his aura and teaches him to move things with his mind. Yes. This is not a book about a kid who gets caught up with realistic occultist types; the bad guys here can levitate objects over a phone. After meeting the new-age child molester, the protagonist falls in love with a witch and attends a blood orgy with her. They secretly get married and their wedding ceremony involves the murder of a kitten. Later, Jay and his friends go and mutilate a bunch of cows and drink their blood to get magical powers. Then an evil demon possesses and murders all of them. The author basically took all of the silliest rumours about occultism that were floating around during the mid 70s and stuck them together with no regard given to reality. Oh, and the suicide note that ends the book is one of the few entries that Beatrice Sparks didn’t completely make up. Think about that. She used the actual suicide note of a mentally ill child to end her novel about astral projection and cattle mutilation. Disgusting.

The worst part is that lots of people actually believed her.

A few years ago, a writer named Rick Emerson wrote a book about Beatrice Sparks and her other horrible books. It’s called Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries. If you want more details, go read that one. I only read the parts about Jay’s Journal, but the other bits I glanced through also made ol’ Beatrice seem like a filthy, lying sack of shit.

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

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

Here are the main rites described in the book:

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

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

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

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

The Beast of Jersey: A Satanic Rapist and Truly Horrible Person

Edward ‘Ted’ Paisnel was a serial rapist, and he committed his horrid deeds while dressed in a terrifying costume which included a rubber mask, a disgusting wig, nail studded wristbands and a nail studded trenchcoat. When police searched his home, they apparently found a black magic shrine dedicated to Gilles de Rais. Most of his victims were children. One of them had a mental disability. Ted Paisnel was as bad as any horror movie villain.

This book, The Beast of Jersey, was written by Ted’s wife. It’s a weird, exploitative, horrible piece of writing. She plays up the Satanic side of things, referencing witchcraft and Dennis Wheatley and including several chapters on Gilles de Rais without ever providing any solid evidence that Paisnel was seriously into that stuff. He supposedly had a few books on the topics, but surely that doesn’t mean a person is a Satanist. She goes so far as to suggest that the reason he got caught was because a car he stole contained a crucifix in the back seat and that this might have had an effect on his evil powers. Also, on top of accusing her husband of being a wizard, she also claims he was gay. This claim is based on the fact that he only raped his victims anally. She also alludes to the fact that he refused to sleep in the same room as her. I’m no expert on the psychology of rapists, but I’m pretty sure that anally raping a female does not make a person gay – it makes them an anal rapist.

I have nothing but disdain for rapists and child molesters, but parts of Ted Paisnel’s story are a little bit funny. When he was caught by the police with his wacky costume in the back of a stolen car, he told the cops that he was going to an orgy. Also, there’s a part in the beginning of the book where Joan describes finding a story that Ted had written. It was about a child being pecked to death by a chicken. LOL. I wish I could read it. Apparently, he wore an eye-patch for months after watching True Grit because he wanted to be like John Wayne. What a freak.

There were some other interesting parts to the book that I hadn’t read anywhere else. During the second World War, Ted worked as a cobbler for the German forces that had invaded Jersey. He later claimed that the real nature of his work was as a midwife/pallbearer for the countless Russian sex slaves that the Germans had smuggled onto the island. Ted wasn’t clear about whether he had to murder their babies or just dispose of their corpses. It seems very unlikely that there is any truth to this story.

Ted’s wife ran a care home for orphans and children in need, and although Ted worked there regularly, he apparently never abused the kids there. I find that hard to believe. Joan spends a lot of time defending herself in the book, but I don’t trust her. Ted Paisnel was apparently one of three men on the island of Jersey who refused to be fingerprinted during the search for the sex maniac, and the police apparently chased him to his house on the night of one of the attacks. Joan knew about this, but didn’t put 2 and 2 together. Honestly, the fact that she even put her name to this horrible book is enough to make me suspicious of her. If my partner was the real-life cross between Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, I’d move to another country and change my name, not try to profit from it. She seems to have been really good at being oblivious. You’d have to wonder about the poor kids who were in her care.

I don’t really buy any of the black magic/Gilles de Rais stuff in this book. It’s not necessary. Ted Paisnel was as horrible as a person can be. Reading the accounts of what he actually did was deeply upsetting. He seemed to relish the fear and discomfort of his victims. He was a sick piece of scum. He was let out of prison 10 years early and went to live on the Isle of Wight because he didn’t feel welcome on Jersey anymore. He died 3 years later of natural causes. Seems a real pity that he wasn’t given a taste of his own medicine by a disgruntled vigilante.

I had wanted to read this book for a long time, but copies online were too expensive. I came across a cheap copy on my holiday to Ireland last month. It included a Dublin Bus ticket from 1995 that the last reader had used as a bookmark. I generally prefer ebooks at this point, but I have to admit, it felt pretty cool to read a 40+ year old book that hasn’t been cracked in almost 30 years.

Peter Haining’s Anatomy of Witchcraft

**T’sandem – 1974 (Originally published 1972)**

I’ve read my fair share of books about the history and practice witchcraft. There’s a lot of them out there, and I’m generally more interested in the slightly trashy ones from the 60s and 70s that blur the line between fiction and reality. I don’t read much stuff like that anymore, but when I was reading about the Son of Sam killings last month, I discovered that David Berkowitz had sent an annotated copy of Peter Haining’s The Anatomy of Witchcraft to police officers who were investigating the case. I also deduced that this book was one of Maury Terry’s sources on the Satanic cults of California in the late 60s, so i thought I’d better give it a go.

Roughly half of the book is about white witchcraft/Wicca and that kind of stuff. I have little interest in this type of thing, but the rest of the book is about black magic and Satanism. It was entertaining enough. I’ve come across most of the information in here before, but some of it is presented in a slightly different light here. Haining basically splits the world up into different areas and then does chapters on the parts which contain the most witchery.

Haining isn’t known for being entirely reliable. He lists Dennis Wheatley as a source of much of his information, and he includes a lengthy letter from noted plagiarist Rollo Ahmed too. Other parts of the book are based on myths (the idea that Catherine De Medici was a Satanic witch), and others are thoroughly mixed up. Haining clearly has a bee in his bonnet about LSD, and at every given opportunity he tries to link it with Satanism. Parts of this book really reminded me of Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin.

Joris Karl Huysmans wrote a novel called Là-bas, in which he describes a black mass. The main satanic character, one Canon Docre, is said to have been based on Joseph-Antoine Boullan, an occultist who was kicked out of the Catholic clergy. Boullan and Huysmans were friends until Boullan died (supposedly because of a magical attack) in 1893.

In Anatomy of Witchcraft, Peter Haining includes a rant from Huysmans that refers to Canon Docre as if he was a real person. I was very confused by this, as he wasn’t being very nice. Why would he shit-talk his dead friend? I did a bit of research though, and it turns out that he was actually referring to a Chaplain from Bruges named Louis Van Haecke. Von Haecke was said to have the cross tattooed on the soles of his feet so he could blaspheme whenever he walked, and it seems like Huysmans explicitly claimed he was the inspiration for Canon Docre elsewhere.

Haining claims that Huysmans wrote Là-Bas as a rejection of the horrors of Satanism. He also claims that Boullan crucified small children during black masses. It’s hard for me to believe that Huysmans, conscientious, reformed Catholic that he was, would be down to hang out with a person who crucified small children. It’s funny. I did a search for the name Boullan through my blog, and it turns out this is not the first post that I’ve written about his alleged misdeeds.

There’s a chapter in here on Satanism in California that discusses the links between Charles Manson, the Process, the Chingons and the mysterious Four Pi cult. I’m planning on writing a separate post on that stuff quite soon though, so I’ll leave it for now. Very curious indeed.

There was some other mildly interesting stuff in here. He discusses the Bernadette Hasler case and the Skoptci, a weird Russian sect who cut off their own dicks. I’ve defintely read about both cases before, but I can’t remember where. Also included in this book is a very questionable quote about voodoo.

Overall, this is a moderately entertaining read. It does not seem particularly reliable though, and I would do a bit of extra research before accepting anything in here as fact.

The Son of Sam a Satanic Assassin? Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil

The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation into America’s Most Dangerous Satanic Cult – Maury Terry

David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was a lunatic who shot and killed a bunch of innocent people. When he was arrested, he admitted to all of the killings. After the arrest, a reporter named Maury Terry started researching the murders and became convinced that David Berkowitz was actually involved with a Satanic cult and that he did not commit the murders alone.

While on his killing spree, the killer (at least one of them) sent letters to the police and the press referring to himself as “the son of Sam”. Berkowitz later claimed that Sam was an ancient demon that had possessed his neighbour’s dog. The neighbour’s name was Sam Carr. Terry became convinced that Sam Carr’s actual sons had been Berkowitz’s accomplices.

I’m no expert on this case, but that idea doesn’t seem absolutely unfeasible to me. Berkowitz was well known to the Carr family, and both sons died unnatural deaths shortly after Berkowitz was arrested. Some people who know lots about the case also believe that Berkowitz did not act alone, and it seems impossible to prove that the Carr brothers were not involved.

I knew that the claims in The Ultimate Evil were controversial before I read it, and I went in assuming that most of it was complete bullshit. I knew that there was a Netlix documentary series about it, and I thought that this series was going to be an exposé on how Terry’s ideas were all nonsense. There’s some stuff in the book (Terry’s decoding of the Son of Sam letters and the Roy Radin stuff) that seemed like utter nonsense as I was reading them, but some of it was actually quite convincing. When I watched the Netflix documentary, I expected it to provide refutations of these ideas, but it doesn’t.

Berkowitz started off claiming he acted alone, but he changed his story after spending a bit of time in prison. To this day he claims that he had accomplices. He doesn’t seem like a particularly reliable person though. He clearly enjoys attention, and the Satanic cult claims were probably the most efficient source of attention for an incarcerated murderer in the early 1980s. Both the book and the Netflix documentary series make it seem like Berkowitz was merely telling Terry exactly what he wanted to hear. This muddies the water, but it doesn’t actually discredit all of Terry’s evidence.

Much of what Terry says is clearly conjecture, but I don’t think the idea that Berkowitz had accomplices should be immediately disregarded. Those Carr brothers were definitely weirdoes. Both were scientologists, and one supposedly had a thing for murdering animals.

The Netflix documentary alludes to the fact that this book fed into the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and it features clips of Maury Terry being interviewed alongside my old friend Phil Phillips. I wanted to be able to write-off Terry’s theory about the role of Satanism in the murders, but if you look at the letters, the killer(s) clearly had some interest in occultism. I don’t buy any of the “large, organised network of powerful Satanists” nonsense or any of the crap about the links between the Son of Sam and Charles Manson, but Berkowitz did seem to have some connections to occultism. Nevertheless, Terry’s efforts to bring attention to his work by jumping on the Satanic Panic bandwagon seem to have backfired. There’s a couple of parts where he mistakes Iron Maiden lyrics written on walls for Satanic prayers. When he’s trying to decode the letters he does the old “reading it backwards” trick, and at one point he even references James Blish’s Black Easter. So much of this book is dumb that he interesting parts seemed pretty uninteresting.

One of the main reasons I wanted to read this book was because I had read it contained information on the elusive Four Pi cult, an evil group of weirdos led by “The Great Chingon” that I previously came across in Ed Sanders’ The Family and Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising. The only information in here that Terry adds is that the group split up at the end of the 60s because some members were too horny. Rereading the passage in question, I realised that Terry’s source was actually Peter Haining’s The Anatomy of Witchcraft, a book which David Berkowitz annotated and sent to the Ward County Sheriff’s Department when they were investigating John Carr’s death. (Needless to say, I have already started reading that book for a future post!)

I actually read the revised edition of The Ultimate Evil. It has a little bit extra on Roy Radin’s death and a few other things. Both editions of this book are extremely long, extremely detailed and ultimately extremely boring. The Netflix documentary is a much clearer way to understand Terry’s ideas. There’s really no need for anyone to slog through this unenjoyable mess (that does, admittedly, make a few good points.)

The Last Days of Christ the Vampire – J.G. Eccarius

**III Publishing – 1990 (First published 1988)**

I first heard of this book a long time ago. The title and extremely childish cover were alluring, but copies were always that little bit too expensive for something that was probably awful. None of the reviews I read made me want to splash out either. I got my hands on a cheap copy recently, and I was pretty excited to get going.

A quick glance through this blog will prove that I have read my share of terrible books. It’s quite a feat to truly disappoint me. In truth, I think that The Last Days of Christ the Vampire might deserve the title of the worst novel I have ever read.

This is anarchist fiction. I’m not an anarchist, but the fact that this book espouses anarchy is not what made me dislike it. The writing here is unreadably poor. It’s like J.G. Eccarius never once considered the fact that novels are supposed to be entertaining. There is a plot here, but the story is so poorly told that it made it very difficult to figure out what was going on. There’s no focus on any specific character, and cast of characters is huge. To make matters worse, some characters change their names throughout the story. The writing itself is bad, and the plot construction is pathetic. This book is unbearably boring.

So Jesus was actually a vampire, and he is still alive today. There are a gang of vampires (including Simon Magus and Aleister Crowley) who have a hand in controlling world affairs. Some MaximumRocknRoll reading punk-rockers decide to put an end to this, so they go to Jerusalem to go vampire hunting. This all ends in a massive attack against the Pentagon.

That summary makes this book sound pretty good. A barely competent writer could have made this into something enjoyable. Unfortunately, the above paragraph contains all of the interesting parts of the book. The author chooses to pass over everything cool about a vampire Jesus and spends his time trying to promote an incredibly naïve political agenda – there’s no chilling descriptions of Jesus drinking his victim’s blood, but there are many paragraphs about mailing anarchist zines. I bet the author wore a bumflap. The action sequences are excruciating. This is awful fiction. It stinks. I wanted to give up, but I forced myself to finish it. Piece of shit.