Seán O’Connor’s The Mongrel

A horror novel about a Dubliner getting stranded in the Wicklow mountains, written by a Dublin author who plays in heavy metal bands? I really wanted to like this book. Truly, I did. Unfortunately though, it’s not very good.

There’s 4 main parts to this story. The first part, the argument between the protagonist and her boyfriend, is unnecessary and could have been worked into a flashback in the second part where they go on a reconciliatory drive in the mountains. Show, don’t tell. The third section is passable survival fiction and provides the only excitement in the book. The pregnant protagonist is stranded in a broken-down car with with a hungry wolf outside. Things get gooey. The final section descends into utter nonsense. An utterly unbelievable supernatural element is thrown in, and the plot collapses in on itself.

I got the impression that Seán O’Connor wanted to write a book, so he sat down and tried to come up with a story to tell. The plot feels entirely forced. There’s elements that make no sense, and there’s bits that are painfully underdeveloped. How did Phillips best friend end up on Erin’s dad’s team? Why were Phillip’s knives in the boot of his car? A wolf killed her mom? (Ok, this bit is kind of explained at the end, but I actually rolled.my eyes when it was first mentioned). The ending feels rushed and, quite frankly, stupid. I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but another 50-100 pages of plot development could have made this book a lot better.

I don’t read a lot of modern fiction, and I feel like a jerk shit-talking an active writer’s work. I recognize that it takes more work to write a book than to sit here picking it apart, but this novel is an absolute mess. O’Connor has published three other books since this came out, so hopefully they are better.

Fun Halloween Book Recommendations

I’m a big fan of horror fiction. A quick browse through this blog will show you that I don’t really limit myself to any specific subgenres. Halloween and horror are inextricable, but I feel like certain types of horror are more Halloweeny than others. It’s just my personal opinion, but I feel like Halloweeny horror should contain an element of fun. The following is not a list of the scariest books I’ve read. It’s a list of horror novels that both trick and treat, books that will make excellent reading while you’re stuffing your face with the candy that you didn’t give out on the evening of the 31st. These are my recommendations for a good Halloween read.

Al Sarrantonio has written several books about Halloween, but I haven’t read those yet. I read 4 of his other books last year, and Moonbane and The Worms were the most enjoyable. They’re quick, fun reads, perfect for Halloween. One is about werewolves, and the other is about… worms. Even thinking about these makes me want to read more Sarrantonio.

I’m going to take it for granted that my readers are all familiar with H.P. Lovecraft. I read quite a lot of the extended Cthulu Mythos over the last 2 years, and aside from Howard’s own stories, I think my favourite Lovecraftian pastiche is Frank Belknap Long’s The Horror from the Hills. You wouldn’t need to be big into Lovecraft to enjoy this on its own either. It’s imaginative, exciting and a lot of fun. I’m pairing this with T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods as that contains a short story called ‘The Black Man with a Horn’ that features Long as its protagonist and parralels The Horror from the Hills in interesting ways. The other stories in Dark Gods are top notch horror writing. So, so good. (Klein’s The Ceremonies is phenomenal too, but it’s set in summer, so doesn’t really fit in with these Halloweeny vibes.)

I read quite a few Joe R. Lansdale books this year, and my favourite was definitely The Nightrunners. This is a horrible, violent story, but Lansdale’s style of writing is so easy to read that the book feels like fun. Lansdale’s The Drive-In books are fun too, but not quite spooky enough to recommend here.

These William W. Johnstone novels are not good books, but the horror elements at play within these novels are so over the top that I found them rather enjoyable. These are definitely “Paperbacks from Hell”, and if you’re into ridiculous horror B-movies, you might enjoy these. They’re utterly mental though. Seriously. Imagine an x-rated episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark directed by a Ted Nugent who’s high on crack and you might get an idea of what these books are like.

I know he’s an obvious choice, but let’s be real. Stephen King. You understand. I reckon Salem’s Lot and his short stories would be the best for this time of year. It’s probably that I’ve been conditioned to think this since childhood, but Stephen King’s fiction is exactly the kind of thing that I want to read at Halloween. Gross, creepy fun. Perfect.

Ray Bradbury is another obvious choice. His books are less trashy than the others I’m discussing here, but they definitely have the fun element that is key to good Halloween fiction. Something Wicked This Way Comes is an all round awesome book, and it’s set at Halloween. His most famous collection of short horror fiction is called The October Country. These two books are absolutely mandatory Halloween reading. He also wrote a kids book called The Halloween Tree. Bradbury is great.

I’m not going to recommend Dracula or Frankenstein here for a couple of reasons. You already know they exist, but both are also quite serious books. Varney the Vampire, which predates Dracula by about 50 years, is not a serious book. It was serialized over the course of two years, and it’s absolute trash. Characters disappear and turn into different people, the chapters are out of order, and it’s so long that it contradicts itself on several plot points. Despite all this, I found it very enjoyable. It’s bloody long though, so you’d better get started soon if you want to finish by Halloween

Pretty much anything by Harry Adam Knight/Simon Ian Childer would be great for Halloween. Both Harry and Simon were pseudonyms used by John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle. The books they wrote together under these names are trashy, gross out horror novels that are supremely entertaining. I absolutely loved these books. Slimer and Worm were my favourites. Classic stuff.

Michael Slade’s Ghoul is a horror novel with a Lovecraftian tinge about a murderous hard rock band that lives under a graveyard. It’s pure trash. I loved it. I read Brian Keene’s Ghoul last year too. It’s also about a creep that lives under a graveyard, and it too would make for some fine reading on a chilly October’s eve.

A few years ago, I chose my October reading based on the amount of pumpkins the books had on their covers. This was an awful idea. (The only decent book I’ve read with a pumpkin on the cover was the original Halloween novelisation.) Pumpkins are good, but they’re not enough. A good Halloween novel should be fun to read. The books listed in this post are easily digestible, super entertaining horror fiction that do a good job of encapsulating the fun and fear that make an enjoyable Halloween. Hopefully this post will help some indecisive readers find something juicy for All Hallow’s Eve. If you have any recommendations on exciting horror fiction, please leave a comment and let me know.

Jack Williamson’s Darker than You Think

Darker than You Think – Jack Williamson
Bluejay Books – 1984 (First published as a novel in 1948)

Journalist Will Barbee goes to the airport to cover the story of a team of scientists returning from an excavation in the Gobi Desert. He meets April Bell, an alluring redhead, and seems to fall in love on the spot. The leader of the scientists dies moments after getting off the plane, and Will immediately suspects April of playing a part in his death. One thing leads to another and pretty soon there’s a naked babe riding around town on the back of a sabre-tooth tiger.

Hell yes. Hell fucking yes.

Jack Williamson was a science fiction writer, and I’ve seen people refer to this book as his horror novel, but while it does contain werewolves, it reads more like pulp fantasy than anything else. It’s quite exciting, but never really scary. I thought it was great.

Darker than You Think had been on my to-read list ever since I saw it mentioned in a biography of Jack Parsons. By the time I got around to reading the novel, I had forgotten what its connection to the occultist/rocket scientist was. Reading it made this connection pretty clear. This is the story of a normal guy who meets a redhead who awakens his hidden powers. Crowley, Parson’s magickal mentor, had referred to his first wife as his scarlet woman, and Parsons later used this moniker for Marjorie Cameron, his own red-headed second wife, the one he met after the Babalon Working, a sex magic ritual that involved him repeatedly bumming Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard out in the desert.

Parsons was such a fan of the book that he organised a meeting with Williamson in 1941. The novel that I read was first published in 1948, but a shorter version of the story had appeared in Unknown magazine in 1940. Parson’s didn’t meet Marjorie Cameraon until 1946, and when he did he wrote to Crowley saying, “She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified. She is an artist, strongminded
and determined, with strong masculine characteristics and a fanatical independence.” It seems to me that he had been keeping his eye out for a real life April Bell for six years.

Jack Parsons was an influential man in several realms. The extent of Darker than You Think‘s influence on Parsons is unclear, but it seems considerable. All that aside, it’s also a fun book. It’s also pretty easy to find a copy, so give it a read.

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Compleat Vampyre – Nigel Jackson

Compleat Vampyre: The Vampyre Shaman, Werewolves, Witchery & the Dark Mythology of the Undead
Nigel Jackson
Capall Bann – 1995

A few months ago I put out a call for occult book recommendations. I haven’t been as interested in occultism for the last year, and part of me thought that this was from overdoing it over the past few years. I was kindly recommended this book by a pal of mine. It looked pretty cool, so I decided to give it a go.

It’s rather dense, and despite its subject matter, I thought it was very dry. It’s only 180 pages, but it took me a month and a half to get through it. I didn’t take notes as I read through it either, so I don’t even remember much of what the author said in the first half of the book.

This seems like a thoroughly researched book, but the writing does not seem to be very critical. Most of the book is taken up with descriptions of vampires and werewolves from folklore, but the idea that these accounts might not be real is never really discussed. I’m not saying Nigel Jackson believed every word in this book, but he doesn’t do a very good job of clarifying which parts the reader is supposed to believe and which parts are just legends.

Ultimately though, this is presented as a book on occultism rather than one on folklore. Towards the end of the book, the author does give some instructions on how to shapeshift into a werewolf, but these instructions are pretty vague, and one would have to have a detailed knowledge of occultism and ceremonial magic to be able to pull them off.

The most interesting claim in the whole book is that the mysterious large cats seen throughout the English countryside (the ones discussed at length in The Goblin Universe by Ted Holiday) are actually transformed witches and wizards.

Honestly, I couldn’t give a bollocks. I have so little to say about this that I feel bad for wasting your time. I read the whole thing, but reading it felt like trying to paint water. I’d reread the same paragraph 3 times, but I was so uninterested that nothing would stick in my head. “Vampires, shadows, liminal… bleh bleh bleh.” Whatever. I’m not really qualified to judge a book like this. Maybe it’s great if you’re interested in this stuff. I certainly amn’t. I won’t say I’ll never read another occult book, but I doubt that I’ll ever get back into reading 2 a week like I was doing a few years ago.

Richard Jaccoma’s Occult Adventure Trilogy – Yellow Peril, The Werewolf’s Tale and The Werewolf’s Revenge –

The Werewolf’s Tale – Richard Jaccoma
Fawcett Gold Medal – 1988

“This book is quite awful. It’s about a New York detective who turns into a werewolf while investigating a team of vampires, a Nazi occultist from Atlantis and the mummy of an Egyptian black magician. There’s a few references to Lovecraftian entities, and the werewolf detective has sex with a lot of women. This might have worked as a series of comic books, but there’s too much stuff going on for this to function as a cohesive novel.”

I wrote the above paragraph in August, right after finishing The Werewolf’s Tale. Looking back, I think I might have been overly harsh. I had just finished reading Bari Wood’s excellent The Tribe, and that novel had enough in common with this one to make Jaccoma’s book seem awful in comparison. They’re very different books, but they’re set in the same place and both feature Rabbis as important characters, and I reckon these similarities made the shift from grim thriller to ludicrous adventure novel seem extra jarring.

richard jaccoma werewolf's revenge The Werewolf’s Revenge – Richard Jaccoma
Fawcett Gold Medal – 1991

By the time I got around to reading the sequel, The Werewolf’s Revenge, I found it much easier to enjoy Jaccoma’s supernatural parody of noir fiction. The events in here are even more sensational than the first novel, but I knew what to expect by this point and was able to enjoy the ride.

Honestly, it’s only been a few months since I read The Werewolf’s Revenge, but I can’t say that I remember much about the plot. It’s more of the same crap. It features all the characters from the first novel (the Atlantean sorcerer, the evil Egyptian mummy, the sexy Jewish vampire, the sexy Nazi werewolf…) but this one also features Jacques De Molay of Knight’s Templar fame, along with some Satyrs and other mythical beasts. Oh yeah, and at one point, one of the characters finds the Necronomicon. While I can’t remember the precise details of the complicated plot, I do remember enjoying it far more than I had expected. It’s not high literature, but it’s not unbearable.

Things got a bit uncomfortable for me when a character called John Weymouth-Smythe appears in the story. I recognised that name from somewhere. It turned out to be from the inside cover of the paperback I was holding. Aside from the two Werewolf books I’ve just reviewed, Richard Jaccoma had only written one other novel, the dubiously titled “Yellow Peril” The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe. It quickly became apparent that while Yellow Peril and The Werewolf’s Tale are unrelated works, The Werewolf’s Revenge is actually a linking sequel to both novels. I had been looking forward to finishing the pair of Werewolf novels and being done with Richard Jaccoma, but when I saw Yellow Peril being described as an erotic occult adventure about a secret agent fighting satanic Nazis, I knew that I was going to have to complete the trilogy. It was quite annoying though because it was actually written way before both of the books I had already read, and I hate reading a series out of sequence.

richard jaccoma yellow peril Yellow Peril: The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe – Richard Jaccoma
Berkley Books – 1980 (First published in 1978)

Ok, it’s currently 2020, so let’s just address the obvious racism straight away. This is clearly an outdated piece of writing that crosses all kinds of boundaries that don’t need to be crossed. Richard Jaccoma actually apologizes for the racist attitudes of the book’s characters in a short preface, but this apology falls short of what we’d expect today. While it is the characters in the book who voice racist opinions, the author was ultimately marketing these ideas as entertainment, regardless of whether he believed in them himself. This book was written 42 years ago though, and I don’t think that Richard Jaccoma was intentionally being a horrible person. The guy went on to write 2 books about a Nazi-hunting werewolf, and it’s actually the Jewish and Chinese characters in this book who actually turn out to be good, so I reckon he’s probably not a bigoted hatemonger.

Racism aside, is Yellow Peril any good? It’s pretty much the same thing as the Werewolf books, but here the narrator is British rather than American. He doesn’t have any super powers, but he works alongside the head of the Golden Dawn, a crew of Satanic Nazi paedophiles, a horde of Yetis and some very strange Asian occultists. The conflict in this novel is driven by the quest for the Spear of Destiny, and yes, I mean the version of the Spear of Destiny written about by Trevor Ravenscroft. The narrator is a bit of an idiot, and the story itself is pretty dumb, but it wasn’t absolutely horrible to read.

Richard Jaccoma used to work as the managing editor for Screw Magazine, a pornographic weekly newspaper, and he wrote the screenplay for a 1977 porno called Punk Rock. Yellow Peril advertises itself as “A porno-fairytale-occult-thriller” on the cover, but I felt like it actually had less sex than the Werewolf books. I skimmed over the sex-scenes, as I wanted to get through this quickly, but I couldn’t help but notice that one of these scenes contains a lengthy description of the protagonist anally raping an evil Nazi. As soon as he finishes raping her, another Nazi, who has been peeping on them, cums all over the rapists back.

richard jaccoma werewolf trilogy
I’ll just leave it at that. The fact that these books aren’t hugely popular isn’t really surprising.

Man Into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy – Robert Eisler

Man Into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy
Robert Eisler
Spring Books – 1951

While this book may not look as interesting as the stuff I reviewed in last week’s post, it is more original, more suited to this blog and infinitely more interesting. Don’t let that pale blue cover fool you; this is mental.

The collective unconsciousness, as far as I understand it, is a postulated pool of ancestral memories to which each human being has limited access. This theory is supposed to explain some of the strange ways in which we act. For example, it suggests that modern humans are afraid of the dark because a part of our unconscious mind remembers our distant ancestors being attacked by wild animals in the dark of night. I see the reasoning behind the idea, but I think it’s mostly understood to be pseudoscience at this stage.

Why the discussion of outdated psychology? Well, the theory of the collective unconsciousness is central to the claims of Man into Wolf by Robert Eisler, a 1948 lecture that was turned into a book. I can’t remember where I first read about this strange text, but I remember spending a lot of time tracking down an affordable copy. (This was during the stage of my life when I preferred physical books to digital copies.) Once I found a copy, it lay on my shelf for 5 years.

man into wolf sadism masochism lycanthropy eisler

Eisler claims that human beings originally lived in a Rousseauian state of harmony. Our primitive ancestors were pygmys that lived in small tribes, eating only fruits and vegetables, having sex with everyone and generally having a great time.

Unfortunately, these peaceful tribes were very vulnerable to attacks from predators, and early humans were often attacked and killed by wolves and lions. Eisler claims that in order to defend themselves from these attacks, the primitive humans started to emulate the behavior of the wolves. They started wearing wolf skins and began to eat meat themselves. This is where things started to go wrong for us. This was the real fall from grace behind the Genesis story. Once we developed a taste for blood, when we became wolf men, we started attacking other tribes and stealing their women. We thus created war and expelled ourselves from the garden of Eden.

As naive as this theory sounds, parts of it are true. The diets of large apes are largely vegetarian, and early humans were the same. Ancient hunters and warriors from around the world also wore the skins of wolves in an attempt to harness their predatory powers. Despite the inclusion of these historical truths, Eisler’s narrative remains unconvincing.

He claims that our ancestor’s change of diet and wolf skin clothes are to blame for recent acts of sadism, masochism and lycanthropy. The sadist and lycanthrope are responding to the desires of the wolf man that remain in our collective unconscious. By whipping or eating their sex partner, they are responding to the desire to inflict suffering on their peaceful vegetarian ancestors.

The masochist harbours, at a deep unconscious level, the memories of the peaceful pygmies who looked on as the savage wolf-skin clad warriors invaded their territory and raped and kidnapped any viable mates. While they may fear the sadist’s brutality, they are also drawn to it. They know that they may win approval if they submit to the wolfman’s every desire. It’s no coincidence that the most famous work of masochism is titled Venus in Furs!

Eisler concludes this work with a call to return to the peaceful ways of our ancestors. He claims that if men had always been murderous savages, we would have no chance for redemption, but since our ancient ancestors were peace loving monkey-men that changed only due to extreme conditions, we can, through massive social change, return to our former state of harmony.

The central idea of this lecture is utterly ridiculous. Fortunately the text of the lecture makes up only a small portion of this book. The rest consists of detailed notes and appendices. After perusing these, the reader will be forced to admit that while Eisler’s argument is unconvincing, his book was at least well researched. While I’m not sure that I’ll ever read the lecture again, I will be keeping this book for the information it contains on De Sade, Masoch, mass murderers, ancient blood rituals, perverts and werewolves.

The Satan Sleuth Series – Michael Avallone

michael avallone satan sleuth series Philip St. George III, aka the Satan Sleuth, is wealthy, vengeful, sexy, equipped with ridiculous gadgets, and he loves solving spooky mysteries. Yeah, he’s basically a mix of Batman, James Bond and Scooby Doo. This is a series of three novels that I first read about in Paperbacks from Hell. I spent a stupid amount of time and money tracking down old paperback copies, but I saw a few days ago that you can actually buy kindle versions off Amazon.

satan sleuth fallen angel avallone The Satan Sleuth #1: Fallen Angel
Mews Books – 1976 (First Published 1974)
This is the Satan Sleuth’s origin story. A gang of weirdos break into a young millionaire’s house and kill his wife in the name of Satan. He gets super upset and decides to hunt them down for revenge. Luckily for him, the Satanists come back to his house right after he has filled it with Satanist catching equipment. What follows is essentially a slightly less violent version of Home Alone.

This is the most dated book in the collection. Of the four criminals, one is described as “A walking moron, even if she was the best and free-est piece of tail in the world. With the biggest boobs.” She is repeatedly and brutally beaten and berated by her boyfriend for being dim. The Satan Sleuth shows her no leniency despite the fact that she was clearly coerced into partaking in the murder by her brutal and manipulative partner.

Another of the Satanists is “gay as a green goose when the bare asses were down”. He is also referred to as a “Fruitman”, and a “damn pineapple”, and it is insinuated that he gets off on brutally murdering a woman because he is gay. This kind of stuff is pretty distasteful in 2019, but this book was a written almost half a century ago by a man who was approaching 50. It’s hardly surprising.

satan sleuth avallone

Early on in the novel, the hero decides to do some research on Satanism so that he can understand his enemies. He gives his lawyer a list of books on the occult and has him track these down. I recognised a few of the names on the list, but some I had never heard of before, despite their amazing titles. I had to do some sleuthing myself to figure out which were real and which were Michael Avallone’s own creations.

satan sleuth book list.jpg

Possession by T.K. Oesterreich, The Satanic Mass by H.T.F. Rhodes, During Sleep by Robert Crookall, The Magus by Francis Barrett, Timeless Earth by Peter Kolosimo, Gypsies, Demons and Divinities by Elwood B. Trigg, Your Sixth Sense by Brad Steiger and The Satanic Rituals by Anton La Vey are all very real books.

Where the Devil Walks by Marcel Alevoinne sounds great, but the author’s name struck me as rather similar to Michael Avallone. It turns out that Marcel Alevoinne was actually a pseudonym that Avallone used to use to order take-out.

Lucifer, My King by Jean-Anne de Pré also sounds incredible, but I discovered that Avallone used Jean Anne de Pré as a pseudonym for several gothic novels including The Third Woman, A Sound of Dying Roses, Warlock’s Woman, Die, Jessica, Die and Aquarius, My Evil. Unfortunately, I can find no evidence to suggest that a book called Lucifer, My King was ever written

Mark Dane, the author of Beyond our Ken is yet another of Avallone’s many pseudonyms.

This leaves one book, The Blask Mass (sic) by Sidney Stuart. I couldn’t find anything on this one online. It turns out that Sidney Stuart was the name of one of Michael Avallone’s early agents, so it’s likely that book is also a fake.

The Satan Sleuth #2: The Werewolf Walks Tonight
Warner Paperback Library – 1974

This one is about a werewolf instead of Satanists. It was not published as part of the UK Mews edition of the series, so my copy of this book and my copy of Devil, Devil (the third book in the series) are both labelled #2 on their covers. I didn’t like this one as much as the other two. Maybe the Brits felt the same and that’s why they chose to leave it out.

satan sleuth number 2 Two #2s

The most interesting part of this book was the way it pushes the reader back and forth between believing/not believing in the supernatural. There are times when the text flat out says that nothing supernatural is occurring and other times when it says the opposite. In truth, I’m a bit unsure as to whether this was intentional or just sloppy writing. The time sequence in this one is confusing too, and I can’t help but feel that it would have benefited with a bit of proofreading.

Oh, and this book features another mentally challenged woman with “splendid round breasts” being brutally raped. She is referred to as both “a peacherino” and “prime cut beef”.

The Satan Sleuth #3: Devil, Devil
Mews Books – 1976 (First Published 1975)

This was probably my favourite out of the three. Not only does the Satan Sleuth find himself in the clutches of a coven of evil Satanists, but the ringleader of the coven is named Catharine Copely! Any Satan Sleuth worth their salt will surely recognize the Satanic relevance of the name Copely. Canon Copely-Syle, the strange mix between Montague Summers and Aleister Crowley, is the antagonist in Dennis Wheatley’s classic To the Devil – a Daughter. The Satan Sleuth series was written more than 20 years after Wheatley’s book, so maybe Avallone had read it and decided to pay homage. (If not, there’s some weird synchronicity going on. Copely Woods is also name given by Budd Hopkins to an area of high UFO activity in the Eastern United States.)

The women in this one still have big jugs, but they’re not as dim as the ladies in the other entries of this series. The main antagonist here is female, but unfortunately, she meets her doom after being charmed by the Satan Sleuth’s snake. She decides not to sacrifice him to Satan after seeing him lying naked, unconscious and strapped to the altar. “But this man – this intruder – whoever he truly was – was gifted in every conceivable department. He was superbly endowed. Pan would envied him for his incredible appendage. The principal male tendon was a thing of beauty, even dormant and idle. The Ram’s staff!” Sister Sorrow may not have been mentally deficient, but she was unable to resist a nice juicy cock.

Avallone is infamous for the rate at which he wrote paperback fiction. To be honest, I got the sense that these three books were churned out fairly quickly. There’s a few spelling mistakes in each of these novels, and Avallone is remarkably fond of sentence fragments. Really. So many it’s silly. Seriously. Also, in the last book it seems that he’s using the word “cockamamie” at least once every two pages.

When my copies of these books arrived, I saw the following line on the back cover of Fallen Angel and was instantly satisfied with my purchase.
satan sleuth dennis wheatley Dennis Wheatley, for any Philistines reading this, is the author that made me want to start this blog. After having read all three Satan Sleuth novels, I have to say that aside from dodgy writing and less than progressive depictions of women and homosexuals, Avallone’s books have very little in common with Wheatley’s. Black magic is a powerful force in Wheatley’s novels, but the supernatural is always presented as a farce in the Satan Sleuth series. Avallone would later claim that this was the reason that this series didn’t get more attention (source). I reckon he was right about this. By the time I got to the third book, I knew that anything spooky that happened would be explained away later on. This cuts out a lot of suspense. Why did he write his books this way? Well, I reckon that it had something to do with the fact that Avallone, despite what it says on the blurb at the back of Fallen Angel, was not nearly as knowledgeable on Satanism and Black Magic as our Dennis.

satan sleuth avallone occult expert

At one point he refers to the werewolf as a Lycanthrophobe, and when his hero is going up against a team of Satanists, Avallone has him read a bunch of books on ESP, Ancient Aliens and fairies. There’s no rhyme or reason to the Satanism presented in the Satan Sleuth novels either. The Satanists in the first novel are Satanists by name only. Sure they murder a woman for the glory of Satan, but there’s no real spiritual or philosophical motivation behind their crime. None of them believe in what they are doing. They’re just a bunch of drugged out social outcasts who occasionally say dumb things like, “God sucked. Lucifer was right. Make way for Beelzebub!”

The last book presents a Satanism far closer to the Satanism presented in Wheatley’s novels, but unlike Wheatley, Avallone doesn’t manage to explain why the Satanists are acting the way they are. They’re just bad for the sake of being bad here. There’s a few references to the Church of Satan that suggest that Avallone didn’t really know what he was talking about.

Anton LaVey’s Satanism deserves to be criticized, but it’s not fair to present his followers as the kind of people who murder and decapitate young women. I’m not misrepresenting things here either. Sister Sorrow, the villain of Devil, Devil is seen reading from The Satanic Bible only a page after Avallone quotes from the Satanic Rituals, LaVey’s companion text to his Satanic Bible. I can’t imagine any way of reading this that doesn’t suggest that the fiends in this book are LaVeyan Satanists.

satan sleuth lavey quote

Satanism exists in so many forms, and it’s such a silly concept to begin with, that I’m not going to hold it against an author if they mix it up a bit. The Satan Sleuth series is far more straight forward than Paradise Lost or Goethe’s Faust. In Avallone’s work, Satan and his followers are categorically bad. I’m fine with this. I wasn’t exactly expecting profound philosophical fiction when I bought these books. These are fun adventure stories, and they work as such.

In Paperbacks from Hell, Grady Hendrix writes that “Avallone planned two more Satan Sleuth novels—Vampires Wild and Zombie Depot—but Warner Books never bought them, so he never wrote them.” This is not true. Both Vampires Wild and Zombie Depot were written, but as of today they remain unpublished. David Avallone, Michael’s son, has confirmed that he is working on having the final two Satan Sleuth novels published later on this year. (David also helped me figure out where some of the books mentioned in Fallen Angel came from. Thanks David!) I’ll be reviewing the final entries in the series as shortly after they’re released as possible!

Hail to the King!

Towards the end of last year, I wrote a long post about the work of Stephen King. I had read nothing but King for a few weeks prior to writing that, and so I decided to give him a break for a while. He has been showing up in the news recently due to his hilarious behaviour on twitter and for the record breaking new trailer for It, and so I decided to indulge myself with a smattering of his marvelous brand of trashy horror fiction.

it stephen king It – 1986

I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time. I remember being thoroughly creeped out by the video box of the 1990 movie version when I was a kid but being a little disappointed when I actually got to sit down and watch It. With the new movie coming out in September, I decided that I had better read the book now so that I can act cool and knowledgeable to anyone who mentions it to me in the coming months.

In some ways, It is a brilliant novel. The characters are great, the scary bits are very scary, and the transitions between past and present are really well executed. I also have personal reasons for enjoying the story of a gang of losers getting into rock fights with bullies, building hideouts in the woods, and breaking into abandoned houses. I was a little older than the characters in the book when I went a very similar, although significantly less supernatural, set of adventures myself.

Several scenes in the book involve the kids breaking into an abandoned house only to meet It in different ghoulish forms. When I was 18, my friends and I broke into an abandoned house and went rummaging through the cellar. When we were down there, we saw a strange light glimmering on the wall by the stairs. This was rather frightening as it was well after dark, and that set of stairs was our only escape route. We grabbed what we could from the debris on the ground (a stick, a rope, a rusty grill…) and prepared to do battle with whatever it was that was coming down the stairs.

We waited in silence for several minutes, but nothing moved and the light eventually went away. Afterwards, as we sat on some chairs that we had fashioned from old breezeblocks, we came up with a story to explain the peculiar glare. It had been the ghost of the former resident of the house, an old woman who was none too pleased with our presence in her home. We wrote a song about it that began:

In the hoose (sic), the times we had.
Our antiques (sic) made the Granny mad.
Her toilet, it was brown and crappy;
in the bin, her vaginal nappy.

shitty toilet
Her toilet was indeed both brown and crappy.

Anyways, there are several genuinely creepy scenes and ideas in here, but It is a very long book, and in truth, it’s a little incohesive. By 1986, Stephen King was the most popular novelist in the world. He could have written complete rubbish, had it published and sold a million copies. I’m not saying that this is rubbish, but I reckon it could have done with a bit of editing. Some bits aren’t really unnecessary to the lengthy plot, and some crucial plot elements (It‘s origin, the Turtle, how some adults can see Pennywise) are given scant explanation. This doesn’t detract too much from the book however; when a novel’s opening scene depicts a clown dragging a small child into a sewer to eat him, one aught to adjust their expectations accordingly. Don’t question the plot’s coherence; just turn your brain off and enjoy the trashy horror goodness.

When reviewing an extremely popular work, I try not to repeat information or ideas that will be available from thousands of other blogs and websites, but I will say that the infamous sex scene towards the end of this novel was damn weird.

I tried to rewatch the old movie version right after finishing the novel, but it’s very long and aside from Tim Curry, the acting is awful. I lasted about 20 minutes before watching a best-bits compilation on youtube. I will definitely be going to see the new version when it comes out.

cycle of the werewolf stephen king Cycle of the Werewolf – 1983

This story is packaged as an illustrated novel, but in reality, it’s shorter than some of King’s short stories. It’s about a werewolf on the loose in a small town. There’s nothing in here that you wouldn’t expect from the title and cover of the book. It’s not an unpleasant read, but I don’t think anyone would say that this is King at his finest. I read it on my commute to work one day.

carrie stephen king Carrie – 1974

King’s first novel, Carrie, is also one of his best. I started it one morning last week and had finished it by that afternoon. Obviously, this is a very popular work, one that has spawned 3-4 movie versions, and I was familiar with the plot before reading it, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it immensely.

This is nowhere near as ambitious as a novel like It, but I reckon Carrie is actually the better book. The reader quickly comes to understand Carrie’s plight and to lust for her revenge, but this book also encourages its readers to consider how they treat the Carries in their own lives. It’s a simple formula, but it’s entertaining and effective.

I love Stephen King, but I’ll probably leave him alone for another few months. He’ll doubtlessly appear on this blog again. Oh, and sorry for the recent lack of posts; there should be a few new ones popping up fairly soon.