It is a rare occurence that a week goes by without a new post on this website. I try to arrange my reading so that I have something to post about every Sunday. Things have been a little busy recently, and while I have several posts started for the near future, I am waiting to finish other books before posting them. Last night, I found myself scrolling through my archives of magical texts in the hopes of finding short enough to digest before my deadline today. I’ve been in this situation many times before, and I’m generally able to find some ridiculous pamphlet from Finbarr books about playing with wee or waggling your dick in the mirror to post about.
International Imports – 1999 (Originally published 1975)
Last night, I found 2 short grimoires compiled by Anna Riva. The first was a text called Secrets of the Magical Seals. It was extremely disappointing. It was just a collection of seals and pictures that Anna took from other books. I have an old Dover edition of Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs & Signets, and just a glance through that proved that it was the source of many of the images in Riva’s book. The actual instructions in Riva’s book are dull and uninteresting.
International Imports – 2002
I was disappointed, but not discouraged, so I read another of Riva’s magical texts, this one called Domination: The Art of Casting Spells. I thought this might be a little juicier, but it’s not. It describes how to manipulate a person with a doll stuffed with their pubic hair, but nothing else of any interest.
Anna Riva put out crap like this for decades. What a load of shit. I am sorry for this dreadful, lackluster post. I just didn’t want you to think that I haven’t been doing my homework.
It’s Saint Patrick’s day tomorrow, and by sheer coincidence, this week’s book is set in Ireland. I was quite excited when I found a book set in my home country about demonic possession.
Gill & Macmillan – 2006
I started reading the original edition titled The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland, but later editions were titled Dark Sacrament: True Stories of Modern Day Possession and Exorcism. These editions are identical expect for an additional story in the latter, but this story is set in Kerry, so I’m unsure as to why they dropped the reference to Ireland in the subtitle. The whole time I was reading the book, I felt like the authors had written it to appeal to stupid Irish Americans. I had hoped for horrendous blasphemies, but I got a bunch of hooey about fairy forts, Banshees and druids. I can’t imagine any of the Irish people I know taking this nonsense seriously. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of stupid, religious Irish people, but this stuff is so daft that only an uneducated American pig could possibly accept it as true.
The introduction makes reference to a protestant Canon meeting a girl in Belfast who became possessed when she was initiated into satanic cult as a child. Bullshit. This supposedly happened in the 70s. If you google Satanism in Belfast in the 1970s, the only relevant information that shows up is about stories spread by British disinformation agents as part of a psy-op against Catholic communities. If I am wrong and any knows anything about Satanic groups that were active in 1970s Belfast, please reach out and let me know!
The cases presented in this book appear as short stories, and after finishing the book, I doubt any have any basis in reality. This entire book must be fiction. It’s too stupid to believe.
The first story is about a woman who was neglected and sexually abused as a child. She had attempted suicide twice before the exorcism, and she smelled like piss. The narrative is actually quite scary. Her granny’s ghost visits her house and terrorizes her and her boyfriend. Later, she gets possessed by this ghost and tries to kill herself. The book never really explains why her granny hates her so much. The exorcism was supposedly successful, but the girl hung herself 6 months later, so it seems like she was definitely just a person with severe mental health problems. I liked the story, but it was clearly bullshit.
A woman is repeatedly night raped by a French spirit named Pierre Dubois. This happens after she plays with a Ouija board. Sounds like a case of sleep paralysis.
A young teenager finds a Ouija board by a river. Its planchette floats up into the air, and mesmerized, the kid uses it and comes into contact with a spirit named Tyrannus. Then he starts having seizures and tells his ma to fuck off. The kid is exorcised but it doesn’t work. Now he has suicidal thoughts. Load of bollocks.
A woman buys some smelly wooden balls in a hippy shop that unleash the spirit of a missing child from 200 years ago into her house. The ghost child is mischievous, but after she is dispelled with prayer, she is replaced by an evil spirit that burns the homeowner’s prayers and wrecks their crosses. It turns out the house was built in a fairy ring. This is clearly fictional. Total bullshit.
A child starts seeing ghosts in her house. No possession involved, just ghosts that rearrange video tapes and play peekaboo.
A family moves into a house owned by their ancestors but left to other people. They had to buy it back. It turns out their family were trying to protect them from an evil spirit that lives under the hearthstone that has inhabited that home since the time of the druids.
An old man goes on a cruise after he retires, but when he gets to Egypt he meets a man who is either drunk or possessed. When he gets back to Ireland, the spirit that possessed the drunkard takes possession of the retired man’s next door neighbour. Then the neighbour rapes the old man in front of his family at a barbeque.
The ghost of a German Hessian mercenary rapes a mother and daughter and their Bosnian employee.
A girl meets a creepy guy in a bookshop who gives her a book about Tuesdsy Lobsang Rampa, the fake Tibetan monk, and then teaches her how to astrally project and go back in time with LSD. He is evil, and when she gets scared, he sends evil spirits to attack her. Priest exorcises them away. Not true. Horse shit.
This story is only in later editions of the book. It is the vilest of all. A woman crashes her car into a truck and ends up marrying the truck driver. They have a kid. Turns out that the husband is having a gay affair with his paedophile priest friend. This man was raped by his father and forced to have sex with his siblings. After his dad died, his mom prostituted her own kids out. It turns out this man is raping his own child and letting his priest boyfriend and paedo brothers in on the action. The woman runs away, but the priest dies and haunts her and her child until another Catholic priest gets her to pray for the soul of the child rapist. This story is obviously untrue and deeply perverse, but the fact that it works as a Catholic morality tale is fucked up.
There is a bit on the history of exorcism in Ireland as an afterword, but the above stories make up most of the book.
Honestly, I find it hard to believe that anyone could read this book and take it seriously. This book is trash. I have to say though, when I was looking up the author, I found his youtube channel, and while I didn’t enjoy his book, I did enjoy his singing.
I’m not huge into novelisations. I’ve read the first 2 Halloween novels, the Jaws sequels and Teddy, but those books, or at least certain books in those series are known for being considerably different to the movie versions. I decided to check out the Omen novels as I knew that these ended up in a different timeline to the film series.
The Omen – David Seltzer
Signet – 1976
The novelisation of the first Omen film was actually written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. It has probably been 20 years since I saw the movie, but I had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen. A baby adopted by the US ambassador to Britain is the Antichrist, and he and his followers are going to fuck up anyone who figures this out. The only way to stop him is to stab him with a set of 7 magic daggers. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t stop me from enjoying this book. It was exciting and atmospheric, and it’s in no way surprising that the movie version was so successful.
Damien Omen II – Joseph Howard
Futura – 1990 (first published 1978)
I haven’t seen the second movie, and after reading its novelization, I have absolutely no desire to do so. It’s basically the exact same plot as the first one, but this time Damien is a young teenager. This movie and book were clearly made to make money. There is nothing of interest here.
The Omen: The Final Conflict – Gordon McGill
Futura – 1983 (first published 1980)
The third book is a little different. Damien is an adult here, and he has become head of the Thorn Corporation, a huge multinational corporation. He is wealthy and powerful and about to bring about the end of the world. He gets close, but then Jesus shows up unannounced and ruins his plans. There is a scene near the end of the book when he surprises his date by anally raping her. This seems inconsequential at the time, but it’s important in the next book.
Omen IV: Armageddon 2000 – Gordon McGill
Futura – 1983
So the 4th Omen novel has nothing to do with the 4th Omen movie. It was written as a direct sequel to the 3rd movie, but it was never produced. Damien is dead in this one, but because he was only stabbed with one of the 7 daggers, the reign of the Antichrist was not prevented, and his power was passed down to his son. “His son?”, I hear you say, “but Damien didn’t have a son!” Well, this is where the anal rape from the last book comes into play. It turns out that he actually got his girlfriend anally pregnant when he came up her ass, and nine months later she shat out an evil baby. Literally. This evil bum-baby is now a teenager, and he plays with his father’s corpse in an attempt to blow up the world. He comes pretty close.
Omen V: The Abomination – Gordon McGill
Futura – 1985
The 5th book is also by McGill and was also never produced. It’s more of the same. Junior is still intent on destroying the world, but a reporter figures out what he is doing and tries to stop him. By the time I got to this book I had had enough.
With the exception of the first book, this series was repetitive garbage. All the novels are about 200 pages, and there’s so many characters that it’s hard to care about any of them. Also, given the fact that the Antichrist’s aim is to bring around the end of the world, there’s not much tension in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th book. You know the end isn’t going to come in that book, and by the time you get to the 5th, you’ll be looking forward to all of these asshole characters dying. I watched the prequel movie that came out last year, and I quite liked it, but I have no desire to go back and watch any of the other movies now.
I remember seeing the cover of this book a few years ago and being intrigued. It looked like the kind of thing I’d enjoy reading. Last December I decided that I’d give it a go, but when searching for a copy I read a couple of reviews that described it as unbearably bleak and depressing. I wasn’t exactly having a holly jolly Christmas, so I decided to postpone reading anything that might make me feel any worse. A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing my local library when I found a copy of Negative Space sitting on the bottom of a shelf. I took it home and spent the weekend with it.
So yeah, this is about a town where the local teenagers are all killing themselves. There are three narrators who weave the narrative of the final months of their friend Tyler, a particularly deranged youth. Most of these teens are fucking each other and getting fucked up on whorl. Whorl is a hallucinogenic that seems to have bizarre mystical qualities.
One of the characters is trans, but their transition is never actually addressed, and the reader is left to figure out that Lou and Lu are the same person. This goes with the quasi-philosophical element of the book that questions stuff like existence, identity and relationships. I think this is where a lot of the horror of the book is supposed to lie. I can imagine this being a real bummer to a person who didn’t already have a dim view of existence. There is an actual supernatural element to what’s going on, but it’s really not the scary part.
There are quite a few graphic depictions of self harm. I’d definitely avoid this book if that might upset you. In truth I was a little surprised at my own capacity to take it in. This is horrendous bloody stuff, but it’s happening to characters with more depth than the victims of most gory splatterpunk.
Overall, I was entertained by Negative Space. It is by no means a pleasant book, but reading it didn’t ruin my weekend. I know that B.R. Yeager has written a couple of other books. Maybe I will read them in the future.
After finishing secondary school, I did a degree in English literature, but I really only developed an interest in reading after finishing university. I spent a while reading important works of literature and then started on my area of interest, horror. Once I got my first full time office job and achieved some stability, I started collecting second hand copies of the classics of this genre. After reading a few Dennis Wheatley novels, I began collecting grimoires and books about witchcraft. The only thing cooler than having a bookshelf about Satanic sorcerers was to have the bookshelf of a Satanic sorcerer. I liked the idea of scaring any guests to my apartment with my nefarious collection of sinister tomes. The only problem was that I never really had guests over, so I decided to post my collection online instead. I made my first post on Nocturnal Revelries on February 27th, 2015.
After a few years, I realised that there was no way I could ever collect (or afford) all of the books I wanted to read, but I discovered that many of these books are available online. I was immediately able to access books about Satanic communists, death cults and sex magicians. At the same time, I discovered that some books are so rare that the internet doesn’t even know about them. I was able to procure one of the only known copies of Aristotle Levi’s mysterious and extremely elusive occult porno, Spawn of the Devil. (My taste for Satanic porn was dampened soon thereafter when I got my hands on a copy of Raped by the Devil.)
I don’t think I would have read these if not for the internet.
In 2018, 2 important things happened for this blog. The first was getting my hands on a copy of Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s Paperbacks from Hell. My blog was no stranger to paperback horror fiction, but the release of this book set me on the trail of countless trashy horror novels that belonged on this website. (The downside was that it sent countless others after these same books, and now many are ludicrously unaffordable.) I was delighted to play a small part in getting one of these books, Garrett Boatman’s Stage Fright, republished. Fortunately for me, I have been able to get my hands on many of the rarest of the Paperbacks from Hell without paying hundreds of dollars.
I found it really hard to pick which books to feature here.
I suppose this is a bit of an odd book blog. I don’t expect to enjoy many of the books that I read, and the most entertaining posts on here are probably on books that are objectively bad. Instead of listing the best books I have read, I generally prefer to highlight the weirdest, most messed up books I have come across:
None of these were good, but all were entertaining.
Sometimes I think that this blog lacks focus. I cover classic horror fiction, trashy horror fiction, books about aliens, conspiracies, murderers, the paranormal and more. I assume that most people who have an interest in any of these fields will probably have a mild curiosity about the others. Going back over the archives for this post was quite entertaining for me. There’s several books on here that I had completely forgotten about. (I don’t know what the exact count is now, but I know it’s approaching 700.) Still, I am always interested in book recommendations.
I don’t understand why you’d want to read anything else.
10 years is a long time, and my life is very different to how it was when I started this blog. Now I’m a respectable member of society. I have a driver’s license, a job, a family and a mortgage. I have to keep my dark passions under wraps for most of the day, putting up a front of normalcy and rationality, but every night, I still make time to read something eldritch, something hideous, something deviant or something Satanic. Long may my dark Nocturnal Revelries continue!
I remember talking to some dickhead online a few years back who told me that the book that he wanted most in the world was Nightscape by Stephen R. George. I had never heard of it, but one look at the cover, and I understood.
Zebra – 1992
This started off pretty well. A kid moves in with his mother after his father goes missing, but soon thereafter his skin starts coming off. It gets a bit minging, but the entire book is ruined by a super happy ending. I hate happy endings for horror novels, and this one is the worst. I had enjoyed the rest of the book, but absolutely everyone getting exactly what they wanted is not what should be happening at the end of a novel with this cover. I want pain, violence and misery. Honestly, I was very disappointed.
I had another novel by Stephen R. George on hand though, so I read that too.
Zebra – 1992
Now I read this book maybe 2 weeks ago, but I had to go and read a description online to remember what happened in it. It’s about a lad whose wife and daughter come back as ghosts once their murderer starts killing again. The lad then falls in love with a weird psychic lady. Although it didn’t really leave a lasting impression on me, I definitely quite enjoyed Near Dead. I know it only took me a couple of days to finish. It was definitely better than Nightscape.
I don’t have a huge amount to say about either of these novels. I got pretty much what I expected from the covers. While I didn’t like the ending of Nightscape, both books were very readable. The biggest problem with this author is that old copies of these paperbacks have become very expensive due to their awesome (but largely inaccurate) cover art.
I know I have a copy of Stephen R. George’s Torment, but my books are mostly in storage at the moment, and I wasn’t bothered to root it out. I may well read it or other books by this author in the future.
A few weeks ago, while I was reading Jim Keith’s Saucers of the Illuminati, I came across a mention of a text called My Life Depends on You! by a guy named Martti Koski. After immigrating to Canada from Finland, Martti realised that the Canadian police were firing microwaves into his brain to control his mind. When I looked for a copy at my ordinary book sources, I couldn’t find anything. After a little digging I realized it wasn’t actually a book. It was a self published pamphlet that was reprinted in different zines in the 1980s. Luckily, I found a copy archived online.
1980
After 4 years of hearing voices from the apartment upstairs from him, Martti started losing control of his body. He lost his sense of smell and control over his bum and willy. He couldn’t work anymore because the air at his work place was contaminated with carbon dioxide and was making him foam at the mouth. He stopped sleeping and was admitted to hospital after a “heart attack”. (His quotation marks, not mine).
During his stay at the hospital, he heard a new voice, this one claiming to be a spokesman for the RCMP. It told him that he had been chosen as a candidate for spy training. He had been brought to the hospital as this was a similar environment to the Russian insane asylum where he was going to be deployed.
The voice repeatedly told him that the food at the hospital was poisoned and to avoid a certain room. He was later taken to this room where the doctors hooked up a machine to his dick and gave him electric shocks to the tadger. The electronic voice told him to have a wank when this was happening. He tried, but he couldn’t come to a climax. The voice told him that if he didn’t gip, the doctors would stretch his bollocks out. On returning to his room after this experiment, an old man flashed his bollocks at Martti to show him a 15cm long ball-sack as a warning.
artist’s rendition
When he got out of the hospital, Martti started getting bad headaches and couldn’t sleep. He went to live in a hotel, but he ruptured his bladder there twice because the RCMP were stopping him from knowing when to do his wee-wee.
He went back to the hospital for round 2 of spy-training. After leaving a second time, his apartment was flooded with poison gas that caused his mouth to fill with blood.
He decided to leave Canada, but he had to travel to another province to get a passport. The voices and RCMP followed him on his journey. The voices told him that he had no limit on his credit card, and when he got to Finland the voices changed to female voices. These voices were actually aliens from the Star Sirius.
He soon went back to Canada, and there were more gas attacks at his apartment.
After getting sick of being circled by firetrucks, Martti realised that the microwaves that were controlling his body weren’t as powerful when he was outside. This is where the story ends.
Martti contacted the authorities but they never took him seriously. He spent all his money printing leaflets detailing his plight. At one point, he put out a call for others affected by telepathic amplifiers that work with microwaves, and he met some other victims, half of whom got exposed to these experiments in prison. Martti feels he was chosen because he didn’t have any friends or family in Canada.
“Leaders of the Canadian parliament are silently backing brutal human experiments, very similar to those done by the Nazis, the only difference being the use of immigrants instead of Jews.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because there are now communities of people who are making these claims online. 7 years ago, Vice made 2 popular documentaries about “Gang Stalking” and “Targeted Individuals“. I knew about paranoid schizophrenics before reading this, but I wasn’t aware of their online communities. There’s thousands of people experiencing this kind of thing and using the internet to network and share their stories. I started looking into these communities, but it got very depressing very quickly. While it’s nice to think of people having a network of support, some of these groups are echo chambers that probably make things far worse for their members.
One piece of good news that I found during my brief look down that rabbit hole was that Martti Koski is still alive and posting. I sent him a message, but got no response. I sincerely hope that he is doing well.
This has been on my radar for years, but a cover like that will make finding a book difficult regardless of its contents. I assumed it was going to be kitschy trash, and never considered paying more than a few dollars for a copy. Luckily for everyone, Dr. Jerrold Coe, the guy who runs the fantastic Paperbacks of the Gods blog uploaded a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch to archive.org.
I was very pleased to read this for free, but its contents lived up to my expectations. This is drivel. It’s mostly a collection of recipes for a woman to cook when she’s having a lover over for dinner. Some are given witchy names (Samhain Soup, Satan’s Steak…) but most are just normal recipes (green bean salad, cauliflower curry…) and some are just gross:
Aside from recipes, there’s a few spells and rituals included. Most of these involve muttering inane rhymes, but there was a couple that involve ingesting period blood and piss. (You mix both into salad dressing or something to mask the taste.)
One section I found amusing was the chapter on “Getting Rid of a Freddy”. This chapter gives you some recipes to use when you want to scare a man away. One of them involves giving him some damp biscuits. It’s a bit bizarre.
This book is definitely of its era. It advises the prospective witch to feed her man dessert but not to take it herself because she should want to be skinny. I feel like most modern witches would probably not appreciate that advice.
There’s little of interest to a real student of the occult in here, but this is an interesting little book because of what it tells about the time when it was published. Occultism and witchcraft were becoming sexy, and women were being encouraged to be promiscuous, but self empowerment still took the form of learning how to cook for a man and keeping thin. It’s nice that the book is now available to look through online, because it’s certainly not worth paying collectors prices for.
Go back and take a look at the cover there. Look at her grip on that candle. Hell yeah.
After a decade of running this blog, I have encountered most of the leading figures and concepts in the realms of conspiracy theories, occultism and the UFO phenomenon. When I found this short book that seeks to organise all of these elements into a cohesive narrative, I started reading it immediately.
Illuminet Press – 1999
The alien abduction phenomena may well be a psyop perpetrated against the citizens of the world by a secret society that maintains control of many major government institutions. They are doing this as part of an occult ritual to maintain their control. They may possibly be doing so with the aid of actual extraterrestrials. It is also possible that the extraterrestrials that they are dealing with are actually demons. The Illuminati have had so much disinformation spread about this stuff that it’s basically impossible to know what is real and what isn’t. (Disney’s The Lion King is actually a movie about the coming Messiah.)
This book was ridiculous nonsense. I mean, that seems pretty obvious, and anyone expecting anything else from a book with this title would have to be buffoon. I didn’t expect to walk away convinced of anything when I started this, but I had hoped to be more entertained.
Jim Keith tries to synthesize ideas from the writings of Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Michael A. Hoffman II, Philip K. Dick, Robert K.G. Temple, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail guys and James Shelby Downard. The above authors are legitimately some of the loopiest nut jobs around, and while it’s fun to try to see similarities and connections in their work, the resulting narrative is so ridiculous that it’s barely worth reading. The freemasons killed JFK with mind-controlled assassins as a sacrifice to their Satanic alien accomplices. Parts of the proof of this idea are the ramblings of a science fiction author who was going through a nervous breakdown and the religious beliefs of a remote tribe in Africa.
This is the third book by Jim Keith that I’ve read in the last few months. He also compiled The Gemstone File and Secret and Suppressed, but he actually wrote Saucers of the Illuminati by himself. I get the impression that it’s the most out there of all of his books. There was some interesting ideas in here, and it gave me the names of a few other weird texts to find, but there’s too much going on in here for it to be even remotely convincing. I reckon I’ll give Keith’s other books a look at some point in the future.
I would imagine that I have read more books on aliens than most sensible people, but in truth, I have only scratched the surface of UFO literature. Within ufology, there are texts that get mentioned again and again, and there are certain cases that many UFO writers expect their readers to be familiar with. One of the foundational texts of the field (maybe because of its role in John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies, another classic) is Woodrow Derenberger’s Visitors from Lanulos.
Originally published 1971
In truth, it has been many a twelvemonth since I read Keel’s Mothman book, but one of the things I do remember from it was the name Indrid Cold. Indrid Cold was a spaceman from a planet called Lanulos. He appeared and spoke telepathically to a salesman named Woodrow Derenberger when Woody was driving one night. After this Woody’s life changed forever. This book tells Woody’s story.
The first half of the book describes Woody’s encounters with Indrid Cold and his alien buddies and their trips around the universe in the spacemen’s spaceship. The latter half is mostly rants about how the government can’t be trusted because they are covering up the existence of our benevolent space brothers. Here’s my summary:
Ch.1 Woody meets an alien on the road and has a telepathic chat. The alien is nice. Woody tells his mates and becomes famous. Ch. 2 NASA won’t disclose their alien info to public in case it causes a wave of suicide and women throwing their babies in front of trains. Ch. 3 Indrid Cold and his buddy show up on the author’s doorstep and tell him about their world’s religion. They have no wars because they communicate telepathically and everyone loves everyone. Humans can learn telepathy too. The author can talk telepathically with 2 of his mates. Ch. 4 Woody goes for a ride on a spaceship. They go to the Amazon, then Saturn and then Indrid’s mother ship. Woody meets lots of nice people there and eats alien potatoes. They take him to their planet but don’t let him get off because he’s not immunized. They tell him that they can let him live on Mars or Venus if he wants. It’s strange to me that these aliens are just men. Ch. 5-7 Woody goes back to Lanulos and goes to Indrid’s home and meets his kids. Indrid has a daughter who was born shortly after Christmas. How that makes any sense to an alien is confusing. Woody goes out for a walk. The streets have built in escalators like at the airport. All the aliens are nude, and when Woody takes his clothes off to fit in, they stare at him because they have never seen a fat person before. Their existence is paradise. These aliens from a different planet eat beef and drink coffee. They don’t have sex outside of marriage. They are Christians and believe they will be with jesus when they die. A bit odd… Ch. 8 Woody tells of the humanoids, a different race of aliens who like to steal things from people. Indrid Cold and his buddies chase these pesky (although not malicious) aliens out of the universe for annoying woody. Ch. 9 Another alien takes Woody for a spaceship ride around the world. Their first stop is Iraq. Ch. 10 Woody recounts some amusing events including the time that John Keel fell into a cowpat in his garden and having to deal with a rumour that the aliens had impregnated him. Ch. 11 Woody describes the alien’s relationship with his family. His wife and kids were initially terrified, but once Indrid and his buddy dressed up as salesmen and tricked his wife into letting them into her home, she came to trust them… Woody boasts how he would get the space people to track his wife when she left the house alone. Quite a creepy thing to think about. Was he just following her himself and gaslighting her for fun? Ch. 12 Woody goes to Venus. It is covered in vegetation and rivers and lakes. It’s always 100 degrees there. (It’s actually usually over 800 degrees and has no water.) Ch. 13 Woody and his wife go to a party with a bunch of other freaks who constantly see spaceships. Unsurprisingly some aliens come to spy on them but run away when the partygoers start making spaceship noises. Ch. 14 A few stories from other contactees including a mentally ill housewife who was cured of her neuroses on a trip to Lanulos and a doctor who gets telepathic advise from a Martian doctor on how to treat his patients. At one point aliens broke into this doctors house and scared his children when he wasn’t home. Ch. 15 A race of dwarfs from the planet Jammu come to Earth and take blood samples from people under the orders of a dwarf named “Marma”. Men in Black are members of government agencies who want to maintain the status quo. Ch. 16 The Government knows all about the aliens, but they keep it secret for control. They are liars. At this point the book is taking a very conspiratorial turn. Ch. 17 Details a bunch of UFO sightings Ch. 18 Men in Black call Woody and his family. There are no bad aliens visiting Earth because bad aliens wouldn’t be able to get a flight license from the Intergalactic Federation. Ch. 19 Some more UFO reports Ch. 20 The government know everything and are keeping it all a secret. Ch. 21 Government scientists can’t be trusted. The military have alien crafts, but these weren’t from crashes or shot down. The aliens gave them to the military.
Obviously, the whole book is a bunch of nonsense. The visits to Lanulos were only marginally less ridiclous than Cecil Michael’s Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. I know that John Keel had a reputation for being willing to twist facts to suit his narrative, but it’s hard to believe that any sensible person would give any credence to Derenberger’s insane ramblings. This is cuckoo- crazy rubbish. Much of the attention paid to this book nowadays comes from Derenberger’s description of Indrid Cold’s creepy smile, but I don’t recall that being mentioned in the book, and if it is, it must have been a brief mention. The only part about Indrid’s face that I can find is where in the first chapter it says his expression changed sometimes. Maybe Derenberger did mention it, but it seems that the internet has really blown that tiny detail out of proportion. According to Woody, ol’ Indrid was a super-genuine, nice fellow.
Nocturnal Revelries 