Beware the Cryptocracy! Michael A. Hoffman II’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

When I was reading 9/11 as Mass Ritual, I noticed repeated references to a book called Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffman II and put it on my to-read list. Recently, I’ve been researching a particularly bizarre conspiracy-theorist named James Shelby Downard, and it turns out that his most infamous piece of writing, an essay called Kill King 33°, was co authored by Hoffman. I did a little research on this Hoffman chap, and it turned out that most of his other books are about how much he dislikes the Jews. He’s a holocaust denier and a key proponent of the Irish slavery myth. I’m not interested in reading crap like that, but this particular text is focused on more esoteric topics, and it seems pretty influential among cuckoo crazy conspiracists. Bill Cooper spent a couple of episodes of his radio show on this text. I had to read it.

**Wiswell Ruffin House – 1992 (First published 1989)**

Michael A. Hoffman II – Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

The world is ruled by a shadow government. It’s not exactly clear who makes up this cryptocracy, but it’s almost definitely the Freemasons. This satanic cabal uses the media, shadow language and psychodrama to control the unthinking masses.

Hoffman claims that the cryptocracy produce traumatic events to scare the public and then wait a few years to leak information that basically admits their guilt. Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Kennedy assassination were all examples of this. It’s this idea that 9/11 as Mass Ritual is based around. I covered the Son of Sam stuff before, and I’m going to be revisiting the JFK stuff with Hoffman’s pal Downard real soon. I’m also thinking of doing a deep dive into Ripperology at some point in the future. The main thing holding me back is the sheer volume of books about Saucy Jack. I don’t know where to start.

Shadow language is method by which the cryptocracy deliberately drop hints that they have done something terrible. Remember that time when an Ozzy Osbourne song contained the name of an airport where a plane landed on 9/11? You think it’s coincidence that Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed is on the 33rd parrallel and that there are 33 degrees in Freemasonry? I suppose crazy people forget that there is a finite number of words in and that some words will pop up in conversations about entirely different things.

Hoffman also claims that the murder of Sharon Tate was a sacrifice to the moon goddess after the first astronauts to land on the moon desecrated her by loading 50lbs of moon rocks into their shuttle back to earth. I hadn’t heard that one before.

In general, there are two big problems with Hoffman’s writing. The first is that it’s bad. I’m a big fan of clarity. My approach to argumentative writing has always been to state things as clearly and simply as possible. Don’t beat around the bush. Say what you mean and then provide examples and clarifications. Hoffman doesn’t do this. There’s no clear central thesis to this work. It reads like a frustrated rant.

The second problem is that most of what Hoffman says is glaringly obvious. In fact, many of his claims about the manipulability of the public seem understated given the events of the last 30 years. Human beings are exactly as stupid as Hoffman portrays them, but in reality, the forces that govern them are considerably more powerful (and sinister) than the freemasons. It would be pretty easy for a stupid person to read this book and see it as prophetic. In that way, it’s similar to the Unabomber’s manifesto. It came as no surprise to see that Hoffman actually contributed an essay on the Unabomber to the second volume of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture.

People are dumb idiots, but I cannot believe that there is a well coordinated effort by a shadow government to control them. That idea gives us too much credit. Everybody is stupid, absolutely everybody. The Illuminati, if they exist, are morons too. As mentioned above, I am currently reading more of Hoffman’s work on conspiracies. It’s leading me to a lot of bizarre texts and sketchy characters. Take care. There’s a lot of freaks out there.

JAWS: The Books

I saw Jaws 3 at a friends house when I was 5 or 6. I don’t remember anything about the movie, but I know that it left me permanent fear of swimming in the sea. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I saw the original movie, and I never bothered watching the sequels. I have read that each sequel is significantly worse than the movie that came before it. Over the last few years, I have read a lot of books about killer animals. It’s not a good genre of literature, but its rise in popularity seems to have stemmed from 2 novels published in 1974, James Herbert’s The Rats (review of this series forthcoming) and Peter Benchley’s Jaws. While Benchley never wrote a sequel to Jaws, Hank Searls wrote novelisations for two of the Jaws movie sequels.

Jaws – Peter Benchley

Jaws was a bestseller when it came out, but its fame is largely due to the movie version that came out a year after its release. Spielberg’s classic is significantly different to the novel. The basic plot (giant shark attacks small town) is the same, but the focus of the book is more on the characters than the killer fish. There’s more politics and adultery going on. I know some people think that the book pales in comparison to the film, but it has been so long since I’ve seen the film that I was able to read and enjoy the book as its own entity. After finishing, I did go back and watch a few clips, and I’m quite sure the film is more important than the book, but the book is still a decent read.

Jaws 2 -Hank Searls

The relationship between the movie version of Jaws 2 and its novelisation seems to be the inverse of the relationship between the original book and its adaptation. I haven’t seen Jaws 2, but the consensus online seems to be that it’s a pointless, if moderately entertaining, retelling of the first movie without Quint, the best character. It’s the same story as the first installment, but this time the shark is even bigger. The novelisation is based on an early version of the screenplay that’s supposedly quite different to the movie, and this book is supposedly better than its film version. I really enjoyed most of it. It’s scarier than the original book. There was one part where the sharks shows up that genuinely frightened me. Searls seems to have had a better understanding of the thrill that a reader wants from a book about a killer shark than Benchley did. The only problem with this book, and it is a big one, is the Deux ex machina ending. The suspense ramps up and up and up, and then suddenly it’s all over. This probably wasn’t Searl’s fault. If it was in the screenplay, he would have had to stick with it. Still though, he could have set it up a little better. As we will soon see, Searls was well capable of adding to the source material to make it more entertaining.

Jaws 3 was not based on a book, nor did it get a novelisation. Again, I haven’t seen it in more than 30 years, but I’ve read that it’s utter shit. I was delighted that I didn’t have to read it.

A few weeks ago, I decided to treat myself to a day of book-shopping. I took the train into town so that I could look through all of my favourite second hand bookstores. Most of them have closed down, and the ones that are left are trash. You’d be lucky to find a few Dean Koontz books in their horror sections. I think I went to 4 different shops and found fuck all. On my way home though, I found this on a wall beside the train station. I thank the trash Gods for looking down kindly on me that day!

Jaws: The Revenge – Hank Searls

Jaws 4, or Jaws: The Revenge, is an infamously bad movie. It’s about another giant shark who is trying to kill off the Brody family specifically. (Brody was the police chief who killed the sharks in the first two movies.) Somehow another giant shark is able to follow Ellen Brody from Amityville to the Bahamas so that he can kill her. Think about that. A big fish follows the path of an airplane to kill one of its passengers because her husband killed some other fish in the past. It doesn’t make any sense, and the movie’s tagline of, “This time it’s personal.” is truly hilarious when you think about it. How did Searls make sense of this in his book? Voodoo and cocaine!

Jaws: The Revenge is a stupid book. A few years ago, I would have said that if this wasn’t the novelisation of a Hollywood movie, it wouldn’t have been made. Since then though, I have actually read lots of horror novels that are significantly worse than this. The story was sufficiently entertaining to hold my interest, but reading this book has the added appeal of watching an author struggle to make a coherent story out of a bloody squirt of shark shit.

So another shark comes to Amity and kills Brody’s son. Then Ellen, the dead guy’s mom, flies to the Bahamas to be with her other son who is working as a marine biologist. It turns out that he has insulted a local witchdoctor, and the witchdoctor has summoned a spirit to possess a shark to kill him. This doesn’t really make sense though. Why would the witchdoctor summon a shark in Amity when his enemy is in the Bahamas. How would he even know that his enemy had family in Amity? Also, the shark is the son of the shark from Jaws 2. What are the chances?!

In the second book, Searls describes how a sharks consciousness is limited mostly to the instincts that help it feed. The shark in The Revenge is a fan of reggae music and cannot resist a tropical calypso beat. He also feels seriously miffed when he is harpooned.

Apparently, the voodoo aspect was included in an earlier version of the movie’s screenplay but it was deemed “too corny” to actually film. I can’t comment on whether this was a good decision or not. I went back and watched some clips from Jaws 4 after finishing the novel, and I am quite certain that the novelisation, although deeply silly and not “good” in any sense, must be a lot better than the film.

I have a fondness for reading the book versions of my favourite movies, but I’m not a fan of doing things the other way around. If I’ve read the book, I usually don’t have any interest in seeing the movie. I definitely feel the same about the Jaws sequels, especially when I read that the books are supposedly better than the movies. These books were alright, but in truth, the movie version of the original Jaws is the only version of any of these stories that you need to witness.

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.

IRA vs. Gilles de Rais: Shaun Hutson’s Renegades

Happy Saint Patrick’s day. I’ve read a few horror novels set in Ireland over the years, but I’ve been saving Shaun Hutson’s Renegades for a special occasion. I bought this book a few years ago because the back of it mentioned Irish terrorism, ultra violence and Gilles de Rais. I was looking for something to read the other day when I took it down for another glance. Again I was intrigued by the blurb on the back, but when I saw the author’s portrait on the inside I started to read immediately. Holy shit, look at that bad-ass!

A dissident group of terrorists shoot up a political meeting in Belfast with the aim of stopping peace talks. They are being paid to do so by an English arms dealer who has been profiting from the conflict. Sean Doyle, an English counter terrorism operative with a very Irish name is sent in to Ireland to kill the bad guys.

This would be a fairly straightforward mission only the arms dealer has also recently come into possession of an evil stained glass window inhabited by an evil demon summoned by Gilles de Rais.

There is a supernatural element here, but this is 95% a crime novel. There’s occasional scary bits, but apart from the last few chapters, these ALL turn out to be “oh it was just a dream” sequences. This was written by the author of Chainsaw Terror though, so the whole book is ludicrously violent. Every bullet wound, and there are lots of them, is described in detail.

This book, which is mostly set in Ireland, was written by an English author in the early 90s. I was a little apprehensive starting out. I certainly don’t want to condone everything that the IRA did during the troubles, but let’s remember that they were fighting a foreign force that had stolen their land and oppressed their people. Fortunately, Hutson doesn’t take sides. Everyone is a piece of shit in this book, but it’s the Brits causing all the trouble here.

There’s a few scenes where the Gardai (Irish police) show up and pull their guns on the bad guys. In reality, regular Irish police officers have never had guns.

The protagonist, Doyle, is an unrepentant bad-ass. He quotes heavy metal lyrics, bangs hot babes, kills anything he doesn’t like and generally doesn’t give a fuck. He has long hair, and he’s covered in scars. He’s supposedly based on the author. Scroll up and take another look at that cool motherfucker. Hell yeah! Hutson wrote a few other novels featuring sean Doyle as a protagonist, but I’m not going to seek them out. (I felt similar about his sequel to Spawn.) I don’t think the other Sean Doyle books have any supernatural elements.

Looking back, the supernatural element in Renegades is actually pretty unnecessary to the plot. The lore of Gilles de Rais is briefly summarized, but the demon that appears in this book is a bog standard evil spirit. It kills, eats or possesses everyone in sight. I’m glad it was there though. (If you like trashy novels about Gilles de Rais, I recommend Philip José Farmer’s Image of the Beast.)

Renegades is pure trash, but I really enjoyed it. May you have a snake-free Saint Patrick’s day. If you’re interested, I’ve written about quite a few other books set in Ireland, about Ireland or by Irish authors over the years.

Up the Ra!

Killer Cats: Nick Sharman’s The Cats and Berton Roueché’s Feral

Miaow.

Nick Sharman’s The Cats

I’ve had this one for ages, but a few years ago I read another book by the author that wasn’t very good, and I assumed this would be pretty bad too. When it comes to “animals attack” horror, there comes a point where you know what to expect.

Nothing about this book was unexpected. It was like that book about killer bunnies I read a few months ago except this one was about killer cats, and it didn’t have a plot twist. The Cats is actually very, very similar to any of the three books in John Halkin’s Squelch trilogy. I haven’t read it yet, but I assume all of those books are basically rip-offs of James Herbert‘s The Rats. I’m not just saying that because of the line on the cover of The Cats either. There’s something very formulaic and British about all of these books, and The Rats predates them all. I’ve been holding off on that one because it’s part of a trilogy. I’ll get to it someday.

A science experiment gone wrong leads to an army of cats attacking London and killing everyone in sight. My favourite part was when the president of the USA comes over to England and pours a bottle of acid down a cat’s throat. This book is truly ridiculous. It’s not particularly bad or hard to read, but it’s also not a good book at all.

The above didn’t seem sufficient for a post of its own, so I read another book about killer pussies.

Berton Roueché’s Feral.

**Pocket Books – 1975 (First published 1974)**

A young couple moves into an old house in a remote neighbourhood on Long Island, but their peace is shattered when they discover that the woods behind their new home is filled with angry, feral cats with a taste for blood. Imagine Jaws but with cats instead of a shark.

It’s also very similar to The Pack by David Fisher. It’s a warning to summer people not to abandon their house pets after their vacation.

The ending turns into a bloodbath, but it never gets as silly as Sharman’s The Cats. Once the humans start shooting, the kitties never stand a chance. There’s fewer characters in here too, and they’re far more believable. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel about evil puddy tats, but Feral is well written and so short that I really enjoyed it.

I saw that there was a retitled edition of Feral that came out a year after it was first released that was also named The Cats. Herbert’s The Rats was released at the same time as Feral, and it seems that somebody decided to give Feral‘s rerelease a similar name to capitalise on the other book’s success. I haven’t yet read The Rats, but I doubt that Feral is very similar. Either way, it seems like a sign that both of this week’s books tried to ride the coattails of Herbert’s infamous novel. I better take a look at those rat novels soon. I’m sure there’s more horror novels about cats out there, but I’m in no rush to read any more. Cats make my hands itchy.

Harry Price and Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England

It was roughly a year ago that I reviewed The Amityville Horror. That book is an unconvincing piece of trash, but if you read it as a novel (which it is), there are some genuinely creepy ideas. I recently saw somebody posting about this book, Harry Price’s The Most Haunted House in England, and I thought I’d give it a go in the hopes that it would creep me out.

The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory,

So Borley Rectory was a big house where a bunch of ghost sightings and poltergeist activity supposedly occured. From 1929 until 1939, Harry Price, a paranormal investigator, catalogued a bunch of the weird stuff that happened there.

People reported seeing a ghost nun walk across the garden. Others saw a black coach ride through the same area. Guests at the rectory heard creaking noises during the night and saw weird messages written on the walls. The people who lived there saw things falling off shelves without having being touched. One of the women who lived there claimed that a ghost punched her in the eye and flipped her out of her bed.

The (entirely fake) story of Borley Rectory could be interesting if told by the right author, but Harry Price’s book is very boring. He does his best to make the paranormal happenings seem unscary. These ghosts don’t mean any harm. They just want attention. I hate this idea. If I wanted a friendly fucking ghost, I’d watch Casper.

The other thing is that none of what Price claims in here is remotely convincing. There’s a part where the woman who owns the house goes upstairs to bed because she’s feeling sick, and then a few minutes later a ghost throws something down the stairs. Price claims that it couldn’t have been the woman because she was too sick. Shortly after this, the people below hear a clattering noise coming from upstairs. When they run up to the old lady’s room, they find her and mattress on the ground. Apparently the ghost had pushed her out of bed! Nice try Granny.

Not only is the book not convincing, but Price’s close associates came out after it was published and claimed it was lies. Price set most of it up. One man went into the house with Price to witness poltergeist activity. When he was walking in front of Price, he thought he felt small objects bouncing off his back. When he turned around, Price abruptly started whistling and checking his watch. Later on, the man noticed a bunch of pebbles falling out of Price’s pockets when he was taking off his jacket. When confronted, Price said that a ghost must have put them there.

Price wrote another book about Borley Rectory a few years after this one, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. The Rectory actually burned down before the first book was published, so I can’t imagine the next book has anything of substance to add. I saw a trailer for a movie based on Price’s story. I couldn’t be bothered watching the movie, but it looks a lot more entertaining than this boring book of lies and nonsense.

I got a notification from WordPress during the week telling me that this blog is now 9 years old. I don’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed. There’s been ups and downs, but I’ve been really enjoying it for the last year though, so I’ll probably keep it going for a while longer. There’s still so many books left to read. Please let me know if you have any recommendations!

Jesus was the Leader of a Satanic Sex Cult: Tracy Twyman’s The Merovingian Mythos and the Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau

Back in 2017, I reviewed Disinformation’s Book of Lies. Boyd Rice’s essay about the Book of Enoch, the Merovingian Dynasty and sea monsters turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. That essay was originally published in an edition of Dagobert’s Revenge, a magazine about the Holy Grail, Merovingian kings and Priory of Sion stuff, that ran from 1996 until 2003. I gathered that it covered the more far out elements of that conspiracy, and I wanted to dig deeper, but at this stage it’s impossible to track down a complete run at a reasonable price. Tracy R. Twyman, the editor of Dagobert’s Revenge, published a book about the Merovingians the year after the final edition of her magazine came out, so I thought that would be the best place to get her version of the Holy Grail story.

It’s been a while since I’ve read any Holy Grail stuff. Just to remind you, some authors believe that the Holy Grail was a cup, some believe it was a rock from the crown of Satan, and some believe it was the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Twyman believes it was all of these things at once. I’ve read some pretty far-out stuff recently, but this book really surprised me with how far it pushes the subversion of accepted beliefs and ideas. This isn’t just round the bend stuff, it’s topsy-turvy silly-season over here.

First of all, we have to accept that the traditional Biblical narrative is muddled. This doesn’t sound too ridiculous, and I’m sure some Bible scholars would agree that certain Old Testament characters are actually the same people, and that the chronology is confused. Wait and see where Twyman takes this though.

In reality, Satan and Jehovah were actually rival Kings from the island of Atlantis. Cain was actually the son of Satan, not Adam. Enoch, the son of Cain was actually Cain and Noah. Jehovah tried to kill everyone because they had learned too much from Satan. (He had been teaching them light language through the Tower of Babel which was actually a quantum crystal computer.) Jesus Christ was indeed a descendant of Abraham, but Abraham was actually of the line of Cain, the son of Satan. Yes, Jesus Christ was actually a direct descendant of Satan. (One of his ancestors had also hooked up with a Jehovite, but I won’t get into that now. It involves the Nephilim, the race of mutant giants who were excised from more recent versions of the Old Testament.)

So Jesus was actually a descendant of Satan, and he was also the leader of a Satanic sex magic cult. Mary Magdalene was his scarlet woman, and they had Judas (or possibly Jesus’s twin brother) crucified in his place so that he could continue to perform Satanic sex magic rituals.

Jesus’s Satanism here isn’t really sinister in any way. He’s still the good guy, but somewhere along the way the church made Satan out to be the bad guy. This is one of the main ideas of Gnosticism. The Gnostics play their part in this story of course. The Cathars knew the truth and this is what led to their downfall, but they were able to pass on their secrets and the Grail before their defeat.

Anyways, Jesus had kids who had kids and eventually his ancestors became kings in France, the Merovingians. The Merovingians were a line of French kings who were traditionally said to have been descendants of a sea creature. This is technically true as they are descended from Satan who lived in Atlantis. The Merovingians were supposedly wiped out after King Dagobert was shot through the eye with an arrow, but this was just a cover up.

From this point in the story, Twyman follows the Holy Blood, Holy Grail narrative. I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but I have, and I can confirm that it’s utter bollocks. It’s based on a confirmed hoax. At one point Twyman describes how she contacted one of the authors of that book only to have him immediately disregard her ideas because they were so crazy. If one of those lads takes that stance on your work, you must be onto something special.

As entertaining as a Satanic sex-magic Jesus is, there’s nothing remotely convincing in this book. The narrative is based on a series of ridiculous conditionals, each one more bizarre than the last. At several points in the book, elves are mentioned. (Stories of elves may have originated from the mutant offspring of Atlantean “angels” and mud-blood humans.) I was actually quite surprised that Twyman never linked her Kings from the Sea stuff with Temple’s Sirius aliens.

Yes, this book was really stupid, but it was entertaining in its own crazy way. I’ve been recommended Tywman’s novel Genuflect, but I get the sense that it gets into that Pizzagate child abuse stuff, so I don’t think I’ll bother. Twyman died recently, and there seems to be some speculation online that she got too close to the truth and was murdered. I have no doubt that researching the stuff she did brought her into contact with some real sickos. This book was trash, but it’s a shame that Twyman died so young. It is quite likely I will look at more of her other non-fiction books in the future.

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.

Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery: Did Mermaid Aliens from the Sirius Star System Save Humanity?

**Destiny Books – 1987 (Originally published 1976)**

The Sirius Mystery: Was Earth visited by intelligent beings from a planet in the system of the star of Sirius? – Robert K.G. Temple

I frequently come across mentions of the star Sirius in my reading, and I have long planned to read Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Connection. I’ve had a copy for ages, but I overdid it on ancient aliens books a few years ago, and I’m usually a bit hesitant to start books over 300 pages. I’ve read a few long books recently that I had been putting off and I ended up enjoying them. One of them, S.K. Bain’s 9/11 as Mass Ritual, references Sirius, and this gave me the encouragement I needed to finally pick up Temple’s book.

Jesus, this was atrocious, truly a pile of shit.

There’s a tribe in Mali, the Dogon people, that claim that amphibious aliens from the Sirius Star system came down to Earth around 5000 years ago. We should believe them because they know about a tiny little star in that system that’s invisible without a telescope. If you look back at the myths of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians, they all confirm this.

Most of the book is dedicated to proving the last (and least interesting) sentence in the above paragraph. Temple discusses every myth he can find that mentions Sirius, dogs, the number 50 or anything that rhymes with those words in ancient Greek, Egyptian or Sumerian. There’s nothing of any substance here at all, and the writing is extremely dense. If you don’t have a strong knowledge of mythology, most of the “evidence” will be too boring to meaningfully contemplate. I know a bit about mythology, and I couldn’t tolerate it at all. The chapters in this section are all followed by a summary because Temple acknowledges that what he has written is confusing. I mostly skimmed over these chapters and focused on the summaries, but nothing jumped out at me as even remotely convincing.

The idea of the fishy aliens is pretty cool, but Temple largely sticks to discussing the myths of the Dogon tribe and doesn’t speculate much. He mostly just talks about mermaids from mythology. Honestly, I didn’t get much out of this book that isn’t available on its wikipedia entry. At this point, it seems generally accepted that the Dogon people had been fed the information about Sirius B, the invisible star, by a European visitor.

Sirius does pop up a lot in my field of interest. It’s central to Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian tradition, and Robert Anton Wilson believed that aliens in the Sirius system have been sending humans, including himself, telepathic messages for millennia. I was never particularly hopeful that Temple’s book would provide a convincing argument for his claims, but I had hoped that it would approach the mysterious star system in a more interesting manner. I would far prefer to read a bat-shit crazy book about ludicrous beliefs than this pseudo-scholarly cowpat. There’s a few editions of this book. I looked through the original edition, an abridged version and an updated version from the late 1990s. Don’t waste your time with any of them.

David Case: The Third Grave, The Cell and Fengriffen

I’ve slowly made my way through 3 David Case books over the last 2 years. I read his novel, The Third Grave, in a day, but then I started on his short stories, and they were so good that I decided to pace myself. Pretty much everything I read by him was extremely enjoyable. His horror is weird, dark and scary, but it’s also well written. I actually don’t have much to say about Case’s books other than that I loved them. This post is more a collection of notes for my own personal reference rather than a detailed review. Read all of these books if you get the chance.

The Third Grave

The Third Grave had been on my to-read list for a long time when I got around to it. It was a very entertaining mystery about a man’s quest for immortality. It has zombies and mummies. It starts off in Egypt, but most of the story takes place in a small village in England. There’s some fairly predictable turns, but I enjoyed it overall. This originally came out on Arkham House, but it was recently republished by Valancourt Books.

Valancourt also put out 2 collections of Case’s short stories. The stories in The Cell are linked by a werewolf theme. They’re not strictly about werewolves, but there are wolves or dangerous wolf-like creatures in all of them. I was really impressed with the standard of writing in this collection. Every story was enjoyable.

The Cell & other Transmorphic Tales

The Cell
This a werewolf story told in first person. The narrator has a cell in the downstairs of his house where locks himself on full moons. (I think I read a similar story by Elizabeth Massie.) The narrator is such a piece of trash, so nasty about his wife and women. LOL. Excellent character development. Very Poe-ish in ways. I loved this story.

Strange Roots
Quirky story about a scientist obsessed with researching werewolf DNA. Well crafted, humourous story.

Amoung the Wolves
Awesome story about a series of horrible murders. Eugenics murderer who kills after getting caught in a bear trap aand axing off own leg to escape from wolves. Horrid but good.

Cross to Bear
Delivery to missionary in Africa who doesn’t listen to the natives’ warnings about jaguar-men

The Hunter
A novella about 2 old hunting friends who get involved in a murder mystery in the English country side. Pretty good.

Fengriffen & other Gothic Tales

Fengriffen is a collection of Case’s gothic stories. Again, I really enjoyed this book.

Fengriffen
Very gothic story about a cursed manor. The rich guy is a real piece of trash. Excellent. I love this stuff.

Anachrona
Short story about some lads meeting a robot. Not a painful read or anything, but quite different to the other stories here.

Foreign Bride
Another very gothicy story about a rich man and his female companions.

Dead End
This one is pretty long, but very enjoyable. A lad who works in a museum goes on a trip to South America to research some weird creature sighting. Meets a famous scientist over there who is clearly up to something shady. Far more similar to the stories in the other collection, but has a element of genetic engineering that makes it Frankensteiny and therefore gothic?

The above collections were put out by Valancourt in 2015. Collections with similar titles were released in the past, but they contain different stories. The 1969 collection called The Cell: Three Tales of Horror contains ‘The Cell’, ‘The Hunter’, and ‘Dead End’. The 1971 collection called Fengriffen and other Stories contains ‘Fengriffen’, ‘Strange Roots’, and ‘Among the Wolves’. I’d recommend reading the Valancourt versions just because they contain all of these stories and more. I have my eye on a few other books by Case that I’ll hopefully get around to in the future.