Joseph McCabe’s A History of Satanism

I’m currently working on a few multi-book posts, and I realised yesterday that I had nothing prepared for this week’s post. I went through the archives looking for something short enough to get through in one day and found a curious pamphlet on the history of Satanism. I had no idea who Joseph McCabe, was, and I assumed this was going to be an evangelical tract, but it turns out that this McCabe guy was actually an important player in the rationalist and secularist movements of the early 20th century. Prior to writing texts like this, he was actually a Catholic priest, and so he has a pretty decent idea of what he’s talking about.

This deceptively dense text was written before the rise of the Church of Satan, and it presents a fairly unique historical perspective. The author doesn’t believe in Satan, but he does accept the notion of Satanic (yet mostly benign) witchcraft being fairly widespread throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. Here’s a chapter by chapter summary:

Chapter 1.
How people started to believe in devils. First they came to believe in their own spirit and then the spirits of things. Then they imagined evil demons were responsible for things going wrong.

Chapter 2.
How Satan went from a friend of God in the book of Job to a prince of demons. McCabe claims it was the due to the influence of Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirt of Zoroastrianism.

Chapter 3.
During the Dark Ages, belief in the devil gave way to belief in vampires and werewolves. This chapter discusses incubi and succubi and the unlikely processes they use to impregnate sinners.

Chapter 4.
McCabe believes that there was a witch cult as described by Margaret Murray but that it was more a revolt against Christianity than a cult dedicated to doing evil. Sure the witches used to hold orgies, but what harm is there in that?

Chapter 5.
How the templars did actually bum each other and how the culprits involved in the Affair of the Poisons in the court of Louis XIV were sincere and genuine Satanists.

Chapter 6.
Describes how people have come to see the freemasons as Satanists. Discusses the Taxil affair. Points out that communists are the modern day Satanists.

Overall, the information in this book is not very accurate, but it offers an interesting insight into the way that people thought about the concept of Satanism before it became a codified system of belief. If you want to give it a read, it’s available to download here.

William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Legion

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

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.

The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland – David M. Kiely and Christina McKenna

It’s Saint Patrick’s day tomorrow, and by sheer coincidence, this week’s book is set in Ireland. I was quite excited when I found a book set in my home country about demonic possession.

I started reading the original edition titled The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland, but later editions were titled Dark Sacrament: True Stories of Modern Day Possession and Exorcism. These editions are identical expect for an additional story in the latter, but this story is set in Kerry, so I’m unsure as to why they dropped the reference to Ireland in the subtitle. The whole time I was reading the book, I felt like the authors had written it to appeal to stupid Irish Americans. I had hoped for horrendous blasphemies, but I got a bunch of hooey about fairy forts, Banshees and druids. I can’t imagine any of the Irish people I know taking this nonsense seriously. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of stupid, religious Irish people, but this stuff is so daft that only an uneducated American pig could possibly accept it as true.

The introduction makes reference to a protestant Canon meeting a girl in Belfast who became possessed when she was initiated into satanic cult as a child. Bullshit. This supposedly happened in the 70s. If you google Satanism in Belfast in the 1970s, the only relevant information that shows up is about stories spread by British disinformation agents as part of a psy-op against Catholic communities. If I am wrong and any knows anything about Satanic groups that were active in 1970s Belfast, please reach out and let me know!

The cases presented in this book appear as short stories, and after finishing the book, I doubt any have any basis in reality. This entire book must be fiction. It’s too stupid to believe.

The first story is about a woman who was neglected and sexually abused as a child. She had attempted suicide twice before the exorcism, and she smelled like piss. The narrative is actually quite scary. Her granny’s ghost visits her house and terrorizes her and her boyfriend. Later, she gets possessed by this ghost and tries to kill herself. The book never really explains why her granny hates her so much. The exorcism was supposedly successful, but the girl hung herself 6 months later, so it seems like she was definitely just a person with severe mental health problems. I liked the story, but it was clearly bullshit.
A woman is repeatedly night raped by a French spirit named Pierre Dubois. This happens after she plays with a Ouija board. Sounds like a case of sleep paralysis.
A young teenager finds a Ouija board by a river. Its planchette floats up into the air, and mesmerized, the kid uses it and comes into contact with a spirit named Tyrannus. Then he starts having seizures and tells his ma to fuck off. The kid is exorcised but it doesn’t work. Now he has suicidal thoughts. Load of bollocks.
A woman buys some smelly wooden balls in a hippy shop that unleash the spirit of a missing child from 200 years ago into her house. The ghost child is mischievous, but after she is dispelled with prayer, she is replaced by an evil spirit that burns the homeowner’s prayers and wrecks their crosses. It turns out the house was built in a fairy ring. This is clearly fictional. Total bullshit.
A child starts seeing ghosts in her house. No possession involved, just ghosts that rearrange video tapes and play peekaboo.
A family moves into a house owned by their ancestors but left to other people. They had to buy it back. It turns out their family were trying to protect them from an evil spirit that lives under the hearthstone that has inhabited that home since the time of the druids.
An old man goes on a cruise after he retires, but when he gets to Egypt he meets a man who is either drunk or possessed. When he gets back to Ireland, the spirit that possessed the drunkard takes possession of the retired man’s next door neighbour. Then the neighbour rapes the old man in front of his family at a barbeque.
The ghost of a German Hessian mercenary rapes a mother and daughter and their Bosnian employee.
A girl meets a creepy guy in a bookshop who gives her a book about Tuesdsy Lobsang Rampa, the fake Tibetan monk, and then teaches her how to astrally project and go back in time with LSD. He is evil, and when she gets scared, he sends evil spirits to attack her. Priest exorcises them away. Not true. Horse shit.
This story is only in later editions of the book. It is the vilest of all. A woman crashes her car into a truck and ends up marrying the truck driver. They have a kid. Turns out that the husband is having a gay affair with his paedophile priest friend. This man was raped by his father and forced to have sex with his siblings. After his dad died, his mom prostituted her own kids out. It turns out this man is raping his own child and letting his priest boyfriend and paedo brothers in on the action. The woman runs away, but the priest dies and haunts her and her child until another Catholic priest gets her to pray for the soul of the child rapist. This story is obviously untrue and deeply perverse, but the fact that it works as a Catholic morality tale is fucked up.

There is a bit on the history of exorcism in Ireland as an afterword, but the above stories make up most of the book.

Honestly, I find it hard to believe that anyone could read this book and take it seriously. This book is trash. I have to say though, when I was looking up the author, I found his youtube channel, and while I didn’t enjoy his book, I did enjoy his singing.

Happy Saint Patrick’s day, you disgusting snakes!

Armageddon is Nigh! The Omen Novelisations

I’m not huge into novelisations. I’ve read the first 2 Halloween novels, the Jaws sequels and Teddy, but those books, or at least certain books in those series are known for being considerably different to the movie versions. I decided to check out the Omen novels as I knew that these ended up in a different timeline to the film series.

The Omen – David Seltzer

The novelisation of the first Omen film was actually written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. It has probably been 20 years since I saw the movie, but I had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen. A baby adopted by the US ambassador to Britain is the Antichrist, and he and his followers are going to fuck up anyone who figures this out. The only way to stop him is to stab him with a set of 7 magic daggers. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t stop me from enjoying this book. It was exciting and atmospheric, and it’s in no way surprising that the movie version was so successful.

Damien Omen II – Joseph Howard

**Futura – 1990 (first published 1978)**

I haven’t seen the second movie, and after reading its novelization, I have absolutely no desire to do so. It’s basically the exact same plot as the first one, but this time Damien is a young teenager. This movie and book were clearly made to make money. There is nothing of interest here.

The Omen: The Final Conflict – Gordon McGill

**Futura – 1983 (first published 1980)**

The third book is a little different. Damien is an adult here, and he has become head of the Thorn Corporation, a huge multinational corporation. He is wealthy and powerful and about to bring about the end of the world. He gets close, but then Jesus shows up unannounced and ruins his plans. There is a scene near the end of the book when he surprises his date by anally raping her. This seems inconsequential at the time, but it’s important in the next book.

Omen IV: Armageddon 2000 – Gordon McGill

So the 4th Omen novel has nothing to do with the 4th Omen movie. It was written as a direct sequel to the 3rd movie, but it was never produced. Damien is dead in this one, but because he was only stabbed with one of the 7 daggers, the reign of the Antichrist was not prevented, and his power was passed down to his son. “His son?”, I hear you say, “but Damien didn’t have a son!” Well, this is where the anal rape from the last book comes into play. It turns out that he actually got his girlfriend anally pregnant when he came up her ass, and nine months later she shat out an evil baby. Literally. This evil bum-baby is now a teenager, and he plays with his father’s corpse in an attempt to blow up the world. He comes pretty close.

Omen V: The Abomination – Gordon McGill

The 5th book is also by McGill and was also never produced. It’s more of the same. Junior is still intent on destroying the world, but a reporter figures out what he is doing and tries to stop him. By the time I got to this book I had had enough.

With the exception of the first book, this series was repetitive garbage. All the novels are about 200 pages, and there’s so many characters that it’s hard to care about any of them. Also, given the fact that the Antichrist’s aim is to bring around the end of the world, there’s not much tension in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th book. You know the end isn’t going to come in that book, and by the time you get to the 5th, you’ll be looking forward to all of these asshole characters dying. I watched the prequel movie that came out last year, and I quite liked it, but I have no desire to go back and watch any of the other movies now.

Aliens are Demonic Soul Suckers that are Feeding Disinformation to the US Government

Final Events and the Secret Government Group on UFOs and the Afterlife – Nick Redfern

Aliens are not extraterrestrials, they are demons that were set loose by Jack Parsons, and they are trying to bring about the end of the world. (They may also be harvesting human souls.) The Collins Elite, a top secret group within the United States government know about this, and they have been working for decades to make sure this doesn’t happen. (Then again, it is possible that all of the information they have been given/putting out has been disinformation. They may unwittingly aid Satan in bringing about the apocalypse.)

There’s some novel details in here, but the basic premise behind this book (that aliens are demons) is one I have encountered a few times before. The most surprising element of Final Events is that its intended audience seems to be conspiracy nuts and fans of Forteana rather than just evangelical Christians (unlike Bob Larson’s UFO book and Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror. The problem is that if you don’t believe in Jesus-hating demons, none of this seems remotely convincing. If you’re not a Christian, there’s no real threat being presented, and all of the people claiming that Aliens are Satan’s henchmen just seem like idiots. Redfern doesn’t come across as preachy, but it does feel like he is trying to frighten his Christian readers. I suppose that is a noble thing to do.

I know that the US government has put money into researching bizarre ideas, and I’m sure there’s some military guys who do think that aliens are evil, but this is clearly a book of bullshit. It’s not even a case of misinterpretations either. Most of this was obviously just made up. I’m not saying that Redfern made it up himself, but if he didn’t, his sources definitely did. The guy who put him onto this story was a priest who had been approached by members of the ultra-secretive Collins Elite. I liked the first few chapters, but after a while it got a little boring. Many of the sources it references are absolute tripe too. It discusses both the work of Kurt Koch and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. It also mentions last week’s book, the bizarre Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. Seeing all these titles mentioned alongside the work of my old friends, Whitley Strieber and Aleister Crowley, was fun. It’s nice to know that there are other people out there who spend their time reading this stuff.

Final Events didn’t exactly blow me away, but I enjoyed reading it. I am quite sure that I’ll be reading more books by Nick Redfern in the future. Apparently he has one in which he claims that the alien bodies found at Roswell were actually those of progeria patients. LOL. Definitely checking that one out soon.

Spacemen Introduced Me to Satan: Cecil Michael’s Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer

A couple of years ago, after I posted about UFOs Satanic Terror, my pal put me on the trail of another book on the same topic called Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. With a title like that, who could resist? I finally got my hands on a copy yesterday.

Cecil Michael, a mechanic, goes out for a walk and he sees a UFO. A few days later, 2 weird men come into his shop and stand there looking at him. They’re tall, strong, handsome looking men, but they’re weirdly silent and they scare Cecil. He gets really freaked out once they start turning transparent in front of him. They stay in his shop all day, disappearing whenever a customer comes in, and then leave at 4.30. Cecil knows almost immediately that they’re from space. The same thing happens the next day, and the day after that.

These lads are really annoying, and Cecil frequently wants to punch them in their fool faces, but he’s too afraid/in awe of them. Despite that fact that they are capable of speaking telepathically, they say almost nothing to Cecil. At one point they show him their insides. They are made of tubes and electronic parts. They’re a real pair of jackasses.

The spacemen do the same thing every day for a couple of months and then take Cecil for a ride in their spaceship. To do so without inconveniencing Cecil, they create a robot clone of him that stays working in his shop while he’s away. Cecil’s brother ties him to the inside of the spacemen’s flying saucer, and they fly away from Earth and land on a red planet that’s mostly on fire.

When they land, the 2 spacemen stay in the UFO, but Cecil gets off and meets a scruffy bum who tells Cecil that he has a job for him. Cecil doesn’t want the job, so the bum gives him some horrible food and introduces him to his other workers. They are small pygmy men. Their job is to throw corpses into a lake that carries the corpses into a fire. Cecil tells the bum again that he doesn’t want the job, and the bum gets angry with him. Then Jesus appears in the sky. Cecil tells the bum that Jesus will make sure that he doesn’t have to work for him.

The aliens take Cecil back to Earth. After a few more days, they stop showing up in Cecil’s shop because he has been smoking too many cigarettes.

That’s what happens in this book. It’s such a ridiculous story that I find it hard to imagine the author thinking that anyone would believe it. Some of the details are so arbitrary that it reads more like a description of a nightmare than a cohesive narrative. The part where his brother helps him into the spaceship makes no sense. Also, it’s very unclear as to whom the spacemen are working for. Cecil is full of praise for them, but it does seem that they are under the employ of scruffy old Satan. If I was going to make up a story about being kidnapped by spacemen and taken to Hell, I would make the story more cohesive. Maybe this account was just a dream and Cecil Michael thought it was real.

This isn’t like the other Satanic alien books that I’ve read in that it’s not preachy. While Jesus acts as a saviour here, it seems like it’s more a hologram of Jesus than the real guy. This book doesn’t come close to Larson or Tyson’s attempts to use aliens to scare people into Christianity. Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer is a unique and truly bizarre book.

Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer came out first in 1955, but it was republished in 1971 in New Zealand. Copies of these editions are very hard to find, but the complete text was republished in Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer: UFO Parasites – Alien Soul Suckers – Invaders From Demonic Realms Paperback, a 2011 anthology on Satanic aliens compiled by Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. I may well turn to that book in the future.

Lucilla Rebecca Hedley’s Mark of the Beast as Revealed by the Shape of the Head

I had initially planned another post for today, but as I was putting the final touches to it last night, I discovered something about the book that necessitated further research. Luckily, I’ve had this post lined up for an occasion such as this for a while. Do you want to know how to tell if a person is a deranged freak just by looking at the shape of their head?

The Mark of the Beast Revealed by the Shape of the Head – Lucilla Rebecca Hedley

The first 30ish pages of this 90 page book are a mildly entertaining description of how to spot a person with a savage instinct by observing the shape of their skull. Much of the amusement comes from the illustrations.

I bet most of my readers look like these absolute weirdos. Ewww.

The two tell-tale phrenological signs of a degenerate are a large gap between the eyes and a protrusion in the middle of the forehead. Spot these two together and you’re likely looking at a subhuman beast.

This is well and good and clearly backed up by science, but the last two thirds of the book descend into a jumble of Biblical hermeneutics and apocalyptic numerology. While the first part of the book deals with the mark of the beast (beast in the literal sense, pumas and lions and that), the rest of the book warns against the promises of the Biblical beasts, Mammon is the main threat here.

Honestly, the latter part of the book made me wonder about the sanity of the author. Phrenology is obviously a pile of nonsense, but there is some cohesion to the idea. The bulk of this book comes across as the incoherent ramblings of a devoutly religious lunatic. I read every word in here, but after the halfway point very little sank in. There’s a whole lot of words in here, but very few ideas.

Unfortunately, there is scant information about this curious text and its author online. I am assuming she was wealthy as she had this masterpiece published herself. There’s a copy online if you want to read it.

Jack Cady’s The Well

John Tracker is hired to demolish his estranged family’s seemingly abandoned mansion. Before tearing it down, he pays a visit and realises it’s still inhabited. Oh, and the house is filled with mazes and booby traps designed to catch the Devil. After a while in the house, it becomes apparent that those traps may have fulfilled their purpose. The Well feels a bit like a Kafka writing a gothic version of Home Alone. The writing is good enough to anchor the story in coherency, but the house of the Trackers is two steps removed from reality. The Well is nightmarish in the most literal sense. It reads just like a bad dream.

It’s a fairly interesting idea for a book, and there were chilling passages and ideas, but the characters were too boring for this to be a great novel. The main guy comes from a weirdo family, but his only character traits are being strong and successful. These aren’t really endearing qualities. I would have liked him a lot more if he was a food vendor who was on the run for rescuing a kidnapping victim from a drug cartel. Give him a speech impediment or a gimpy leg or something… The basic story wouldn’t require huge changes for a change like this, and it might make the reader actually give a damn about the protagonist’s fate.

This isn’t a long book, but it feels dense. I could only manage a few pages before bed each night. A lot of the chapters start with a few paragraphs about dead members of the Tracker family. These were interesting as a literary technique, but didn’t add much to the main narrative. I definitely got the sense that Cady was a capable writer, but I felt like he would have been better off making his characters likeable than trying to be Faulkner. The Well comes close to being really, really good, but it’s exactly how close it comes to greatness that makes it feel so underwhelming. Still though, it’s a lot better than some of the crap I’ve had on here.

Hell on Earth: Golgotha Falls by Frank De Felitta

I bought this at a thrift store a long ago, and it wasn’t until after that I saw that Valancourt Books had reissued it in 2014. That fact together with the old cover art made it seem promising. Soon after picking it up, I read Stephen King shit-talking Frank De Felitta in Danse Macabre, and I knew that this isn’t Frank’s most popular book, so I left it on the backburner for a few years. In the meantime I got a copy of Valancourt’s audiobook version, and just before Christmas I decided I needed to read a book about Satan to get me through the holidays.

This is a story about a church that has been taken over by the Devil. Whenever a priest enters the church, the Devil enters the priest and makes him do horrible things. I was quite surprised by the level of depraved blasphemy featured in here. There’s all kinds of necrophilia and bestiality. There’s even a cool bit where two gay goats come into the church and sodomise each other on the altar. It’s a bit like the artwork on war metal records.

Unfortunately, a Jesuit priest comes to exorcise the church. He allows 2 Harvard parapsychologists to monitor the exorcism. The Devil shows up and starts to fuck with them, but eventually the Pope shows up and saves the day.

Ok, technically, I have just spoiled the ending for you, but it doesn’t seem to me that anything could make that ending any worse. The fucking Pope? The only good thing about the book is the unholy depravity it contains, and de Felitta has to go and ruin that by giving it a “Catholicism saves the day” ending. This would have been such a satisfying book if the Pope had shown up at the end only to become possessed by Satan.

A lot of the novel is taken up with the boring relationship between the parapsychologists. This part sucked. Neither of them are interesting. I want satanic homogoats defiling the house of Christ, not two boring dweebs who get turned on by looking under each other’s chakras.

Overall, this book was quite bad. There’s a few entertaining passages, but it’s mostly quite boring. It took me ages to finish it.

Now, I mentioned above that I had an audiobook version of the book. Unfortunately this was one of the worst audiobook experiences I have ever had, and I had to get through most of it with the physical book. The narrator, for some reason only known to himself, chose to give the Jesuit character a “Scottish” accent despite the fact that the character is from Boston. This is weird, but it’s made excruciating by the fact that the narrator is not capable of speaking with a Scottish accent. He sounds like an Iranian pirate with a mouthful of kiwis pretending to be Shrek. Honestly, it’s shocking how poor it is. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say half the time. There’s an Italian character in here too, and that accent was almost identical. The narrator seems to be capable of two voices: regular and foreign. Bizarrely, the Pope character doesn’t get an accent even though it is explicitly stated that he is Sicilian. The only reason I think it was a Scottish accent that this guy was putting on is that the character’s name is Eamon Malcom. I am assuming the narrator recognised Malcolm as a Scottish name from reading Macbeth in school. Eamon is an Irish name, but if I thought for one second that even a single person in the world thought that I sounded like this twat narrator, I’d kill myself.

Seriously, if you’re going to be a narrator, don’t put on accents unless you can actually do them properly. Even then, don’t do them. It’s the equivalent of a cashier at a supermarket attempting to juggle your groceries while scanning them. It probably won’t work, and even if it does, it won’t make anything better. Just do your job and read the fucking book properly.

Frank de Felitta’s most popular book is Audrey Rose. (This is made apparent by the fact that that title takes up as much space the cover of Golgotha Falls as its own title.) I won’t say I’ll never read it, but I have no desire to do so at the moment. He has another one called The Entity that sounds a bit more interesting. Maybe someday.

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.