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?
Self Published – 1887
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Longmans, Green and Co. – 1940
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.
The Rectory
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!
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.
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.
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.
Cover detail
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.
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.
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.
Arkham House – 1981
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.
Valancourt – 2015
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.
Valancourt – 2015
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 Talesof 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.
I was still in school when I saw Loose Change, one of the documentaries that popularised the 9/11 truther movement. It was a formative experience for me. I was convinced that it was real for a few days, but after reading up on it, I came to realise that it was nonsense. I accept that the American government is a deceit machine that was at least partly culpable, but if they were deliberately going to do this to their own country, they wouldn’t leave as many clues and discrepancies as conspiracy theorists would have us believe.
I ignored the topic for almost 20 years, even after taking an interest in conspiracy theories. If the 9/11 attacks were staged, it could only have been political. There were no aliens or Satanic cults involved, so I wasn’t interested.
Trine Day – 2012
The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual
A few years ago, I saw this book and it caught my attention. Not only is the title unutterably stupid and potentially offensive, but it also promises a scintillating layer of black magic to the 9/11 truth movement. I knew I’d have to read it, but it seemed pretty long. The introduction was also written by Peter Levenda. I’ve read a few of his books, and my least favourite was his book on conspiracies. After recently reading and enjoying the Heck out of Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, another lengthy book about insane conspiracy theories, I decided to dive into Bain’s work.
I’m really glad I did. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting, and I finished it in just a few days. Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a convincing book at all, but it’s easy to read, and its claims are so outrageous that I consumed it very quickly
The US government is run by Illuminati disciples of Aleister Crowley. These creeps organised the 9/11 attacks as a massive black magic ritual to usher in a new era of Satanic glory. The details that give this information away were not accidents. They were deliberately left there because the Satanic Elite are mocking us. I’ll just give a few examples.
George Bush found out that the planes had flown into the World Trade Center while he was visiting a school. Footage exists of him listening to the children reading a story called “The Pet Goat” as he is told that “America is under attack.” This is not a coincidence. The Pet Goat is a symbol of Lucifer. Even the text of the story depicts this particular goat as rebellious and violent. Also, the children in the classroom were mostly black. Seeing the pattern yet? (Bain’s insinuation, not mine!)
One of the many illustrations in this very important and serious book
The school that Bush was in was also close to the flight school where the terrorists had trained and a clown college with links to the Freemasons and the CIA. You think this is a coincidence? Guess again, idiot!
Flight 93, the plane in which the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who were armed with shanks), crashed down in a place called Shanksville. Bill Crowley (yes, CROWLEY!!!) was a Pittsburgh FBI guy who had jurisdiction in Shanksville. Flight 93 too! 93 was one of Aleister Crowley’s favourite numbers. You might brush this off and say that there’s loads of Crowleys out there and that the FBI guy’s name has nothing to do with anything, but Bill wasn’t the only Crowley involved.
Korean Airlines Flight 85 was supposed to land in Alaska on September the 11th, 2001, but because of some miscommunication, it was redirected to the airport in Whitehorse in the Yukon. The air traffic controller at that airport was one Tim Crowley. As if that wasn’t enough, please recall the lyrics to Mr. Crowley, one of the most famous songs about Aleister Crowley:
Mr. Crowley Won’t you ride my white horse? Mr. Crowley It’s symbolic, of course
Ozzy Osbourne 1980
White horse? Whitehorse! The song was written more than 30 years before the events it describes, and the songwriter was at the peak of his legendary drug use, but to me, it seems almost impossible that Ozzy didn’t foresee the Korean pilot of flight 085 misunderstanding the message from the groundstation in Alaska. He is clearly in league with the Illuminati overlords.
Ozzy isn’t the only heavy metaller involved here. Judas Priest’s Some Heads are Gonna Roll forecasts the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Arizona in 2012. Rob Halford was in on it too.
Oh, by the way, if you’re reading that last bit and you’re wondering why you don’t remember the nuclear bomb detonating in Arizona in 2012, that’s because it never happened. Half of this book deals with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but the other half describes what was supposed to happen in 2012, the year after the book was published. None of this stuff actually happened, but that’s probably only because Bain had predicted it, and the Illuminati backed off. It’s ironic that the subtitle of this work is “The World’s Most Dangerous Book” when it actually saved millions of lives.
There’s a lot more in here that I’m not mentioning. The Skull & Bones Society, the JFK assassination and the Insane Clown Posse all play their part. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty actually depicts Lucifer? This is ridiculous stuff, and trying to refute the claims made in this book would be entirely pointless. It was an entertaining read though.
The hole in the ozone layer was made by people to let excess heat escape into space. There are colonies on the moon and mars. JFK was killed by his driver because he was going to tell the public about aliens. Whitley Strieber is an agent of the CIA. 600 aliens live with Bo Gritz in Area 51. Tobacco is purposely grown in fields covered in uranium so that more smokers will get cancer. Timothy Leary was an MK ULTRA agent. The Pope made the gas canisters used in German concentration camps.
Oh and the Illuminati run everything, AIDs was invented to kill homosexuals and black people, and the human race is just an alien experiment, but I’m assuming you knew all of that already.
Behold A Pale Horse – Milton William Cooper
Light Technology Publications – 1991
Yes, I finally got around to reading Bill Cooper’s conspiracy classic, Behold A Pale Horse, the book that served as a blueprint for the X-Files. I’ve known of its existence for a long time, but it’s over 500 pages of intense paranoia, and I didn’t want to put myself through it. What I didn’t realise was that it’s not exactly a cohesive work, and you don’t actually have to read every single part of it to get the idea. Much of it is scans of letters, newspaper clippings and bizarre documents.
To try and summarise this book would be pointless. Cooper is so paranoid that he doesn’t really commit to any specific theory. At times he seems confident that there are aliens living on Earth, but then he points out that he might only think that because that’s what the Illuminati want him to think. At one point he claims that the apparition at Fatima was a warning in which aliens showed children a hologram video of the actual crucifixion of Christ. He then ruminates on whether the aliens actually travelled back in time to record the crucifixion or if they just animated it themselves. He then goes on to point out that if they have the power to do either of those things, they may have staged the entire Jesus thing for their own purposes. Trust no-one.
Ultimately, I quite enjoyed Behold A Pale Horse. I also got the names of several other books I’ll be trying to track down in the near future. I assume that those books will also be complete rubbish, and I only hope that they are as sincere as this bizarre masterpiece. I don’t know if it’s the frenzied nature of Cooper’s writing or the knowledge of what happened to him after writing this book that makes his writing captivating.
Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America – Mark Jacobson
Blue Rider Press – 2018
Directly after finishing Behold A Pale Horse, I read Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider, a book that analyzes Cooper’s life and works. Much of what it covers is contained in Behold A Pale Horse, but it’s reassuring to have somebody sane confirm that Cooper did actually mean the things that you’ve just read in his book.
Pale Horse Rider also covers Cooper’s radio show, his surprisingly powerful following in the hip-hop community, his shockingly accurate prediction of 9/11, and his unfortunate end. William Cooper spent his last months living alone on a mountaintop convinced the police were going to come and kill him. The police eventually came up the mountain and shot him in the head.
One thing that this book briefly mentions about Cooper’s life that is not included in Behold A Pale Horse is the time he spent in a mental institution after returning from Vietnam. He was crazy in the literal sense. He also seems to have been an unpleasant person to be around, an angry, paranoid mad man. I’d say I wish he was still alive, but part of him still is. Alex Jones is basically a poor man’s Bill Cooper, and a lot of the right-wing militia style conspiracists seem to have admired Cooper. Timothy McVeigh came to visit him before bombing Oklahoma. Cooper did include a photocopy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold A Pale Horse, and he loved the 2nd amendment, but his politics weren’t as cut-and-dry as many of his ilk today. I’d like to think of him dismissing Q-Anon and Pizzagate as Bilderberg disinformation campaigns to make truth-seekers look stupid. (I mean… that’s what they are, right?)
I recommend reading both Cooper’s own book and Jacobson’s book about Cooper, but if you are a normal person, the latter will probably suffice. It’s very entertaining.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been really into conspiracy theories since reading Programmed to Kill and JFK and UFO recently. It’s a field I’ve been avoiding for a few years, but I’m quite enjoying it at the moment. More to come soon!
Nocturnal Revelries 