Way back in May 2024, I read Sidney William’s Gnelfs. First published in 1991, this book had recently been republished with its original artwork, and having seen something about this I decided to give it a read.
Pinnacle – 1991
It’s basically about a little girl whose favourite kids TV show characters come to life and start killing people. This is a pretty neat idea for a horror novel, but I found the book a little dull. It has been a while since I read it, and I have definitely forgotten much of the specifics, but the reason it took so long for me to get around to writing about this book was because I didn’t have much to say about it. I remember the ending going off on a ridiculous tangent that made the whole thing seem muddled. It felt like the author was aiming too high. When I’m reading a book about malicious goblins, I want violence and nastiness, not a grand battle between good and evil. Williams put his protagonists into the underworld instead of putting the gnelfs into a blender.
I decided to read another book by Williams to both give him a second chance and to make sure I’d have enough to say to warrant a blog post. I didn’t have high hopes though, and I put off reading another book by him for 7 months.
PInnacle – 1989
Azarius is William’s first novel, and this one was even more boring than Gnelfs. It’s about a demon who is possessing people and getting them to hurt each other. I wanted to like this, I really did, but it’s bloated and slow. It’s also about how demons are bad and how faith in Christ can save you. No thanks.
At least 100 pages could have been cut from both of these books, and the boring romances between the characters should have been replaced with graphic violence and slimy things. Williams wrote a few other horror novels set in the same town as these two. It’ll probably be a while before I get around to them.
I am currently between books. Please give me recommendations in the comments or in my email. Thanks!
I’ve read a fair few Satanic Panic texts. They’re all pretty ridiculous, from the Devil’s rhymes in Michelle Remembers to the creepy illustrations in Don’t Take Me Back, Mommy to the cattle mutilation claims in Jay’s Journal. Those are all pretty silly, but none of those books are quite as ludicrous as Rebecca Brown’s He Came to Set the Captives Free. This is not a novel, but it has werewolves.
Just a bit of background before I start the summary. Rebecca Brown, the author, was actually a doctor, but her doctor’s license was revoked after she started telling cancer patients that they were possessed by demons. She told these patients that she was the only doctor who could help them as she would share their satanic illness. Sharing an illness apparently necessitates sharing treatment too, so Rebecca started giving her patients and herself opioids, and she became badly addicted to painkillers. After this a fellow doctor diagnosed her with schizophrenia. This is all a matter of public record. In fact, if you’re interested, here is the actual documentation detailing the loss of her medical license.
Ok, now that we have established that Rebecca Brown was actually a mad person, let’s look at the contents of her book about spiritual warfare.
Chapter 1. Rebecca is a nurse with a muscular disease. One day, a pastor is brought to her emergency room. He has been tortured and crucified. Rebecca discovers there is a coven of Satanists nearby and one of the head nurses is doing their work at her hospital. This witch convinces sick people to die so they can be reincarnated, but she’s actually summoning demons to take their souls. She sends demons to attack Rebecca. They make her so sick she has to stop working. She almost dies.
Chapter 2. Elaine, another woman, was born with a hair lip. Her mom couldn’t afford surgery, but a nurse at the hospital offered to pay for it in exchange for a vial of the baby’s blood. A high priestess of The Brotherhood, a satanic cult, drank the baby’s blood and in doing so allowed demons into the baby. Elaine grew up with extra strength and magical powers which she used to beat up a footballer player and a lesbian.
Chapter 3. Elaine meets a girl at church camp who introduces her to the Brotherhood. She goes to a camp with a bunch of other psychic teens, and there she is forced to join the Brotherhood. She finds out that they sacrifice humans and this scares her, so armed guards beat her and lock her in a dark room. When she still refuses to join, a witch summons a scary demon to threaten her. This does the trick. She joins the cult and a different demon goes into her body.
Chapter 4. As a member of the Brotherhood, Elaine is given ninja training. She is told that there are 1000 members of the cult in her city. She starts to summon demons by herself. They are physical monsters. One demon, Mann-chan, possesses her and takes control of her life. Elaine gets her demons to beat up another woman. Then she meets Satan. The actual Satan appears as a man and they hang out. Later he shows up in front of Elaine and 1000 other people to stab a baby to death and take out its heart. Then Satan fucks Elaine. This deformed, cleft-palate loner is so important that the devil, the 2nd most powerful entity in the universe shows up to coach her in his evil ways.
Chapter 5. Elaine becomes a high priestess, and her and the most powerful witches get together in meetings that are guarded by literal werewolves. Even though demons possess her body, Elaine will not involve herself in sacrifices. As punishment for this stubbornness, Satan gives her cancer 4 times.
With a click of her fingers Elaine can turn a cat into a rabbit and back again. She later stands in front of a gun that’a fired 6 times, but some demons stop the bullets from hitting her. She is sent to kill a family who are bringing satanists to Christ, but a host of angels form an impenetrable barrier around this family’s house. These angels ask Elaine to come to Jesus.
Chapter 6. Satan chooses Elaine as his bride so she can mother his son. She gets more power and uses her mind to a woman into a wall so hard that the woman’s body literally goes into the wall. Elaine makes friends with most of the famous (but here nameless) rockstars of the day, every one of them a servant of Satan.
Chapter 7. This chapter is an insane rant about how demons torture each other and molest children in front of their parents and how werewolves, zombies and vampires are all real.
Chaper 8. This section is all about human sacrifices. These are performed on Halloween, a holiday that the author traces back to the Druids in England. Elaine and her friends torture a hitchhiker, make him wear a crown of thorns, whip him and then crucify him. When he’s on the cross the high priest does a wee on him and then the congregation shit in their hands and throw it at him. Then they stick a spike into his head and Satan appears. Then they have an orgy and eat the dead man’s shitty flesh.
Chapter 9. Some demons beat Elaine up. The devil orders her to infiltrate and destroy a church, but when she goes into the church, she is almost immediately converted.
Chapter 10. Elaine gets sick and meets Rebecca, the Christian doctor, in the hospital. They make friends but Elaine throws a Bible at Rebecca when she is prescribed reading the Bible.
Chapter 11. While in the hospital Elaine realises that some of the doctors are satanists who are trying to kill her. Even though she is now a Christian, she uses her demons to beat one so badly he can no longer work, and she astrally projects herself into another doctors apartment and unplugs his fridge to annoy him. The good doctor speaks to god, and he tells her that Elaine is a satanist.
Chapter 12. Elaine and Rebecca move in together. Man-chann and another demon possess Elaine. Satan comes in person to threaten Rebecca. (Keep in mind that in the real world, Rebecca actually lost her medical license because she was caught shooting up with Elaine.)
Chapter 13. Elaine is possessed by demon and tries to kill Rebecca, but Rebecca makes a Jesus-forcefield and Elaine can’t touch her. As a result, Elaine tries to hang herself and cut herself. Eventually she goes into a coma. Rebecca exorcises her by reading the bible. The next day Rebecca comes home to find Elaine blue faced on the couch strangling herself with a belt. Later Elaine is possessed by a woman named Sally who tries to stab Rebecca to death. Elaine again tries to strangle Rebecca. A sexy guardian angel appears to Rebecca. Some demons and satanists using astral projection attack Rebecca and Elaine, but some angels pick them up and carry them to their car. They go to a church and have a 10 hour exorcism.
The rest of the book is less focused on the story of Elaine and Rebecca. The remaining chapters contain the following useful information for concerned Christians:
Demons are passed from one person to another through sexual intercourse. Incest within a family and any participation in homosexuality always leads to demonic infestation. Board games, cartoon, rock music, meditation are all satanic. Getting raped is a guaranteed way to get possessed by a demon. Being a vegetarian is satanic. Christians are god’s servants and Jesus owns them. Satanists are infiltrating and destroying most local churches with great effect. Most illnesses and depression are caused by demons. If your dad rapes you when you are a child, a demon will possess you. Demons, satanists’ astral projections, were-wolves, vampires and violent satanists are the most dangerous threats to Christians.
In these final chapters, the author also describes a conversation she had with a actual werewolf that she met on a road at night. The werewolf is about to kill her, but she tells him that she believes in Jesus and then the werewolf runs away. She tells of a warlock coming to her house and giving her cat an evil spirit too. (Apparently satanists repeatedly try to murder her pets.) She also tells a story about a “negro couple” called “The Blacks” whose 4 year old daughter was skinned alive in front of them by satanists.
There’s a lot going on in this book, but I think that the important points to remember are that the authors of this book claim to have met with Satan, one of them had sex with Satan, and they both met werewolves. In reality, one of these women lost her job because she was injecting opioids into herself, her co-author, and her co-author’s mentally disabled child. So while it’s quite possible that Elaine and Rebecca saw the things they are describing, the fact is that they most likely witnessed these events while rolling around on Elaine’s apartment floor high on Demerol.
There’s no evidence for any of the claims made in this book, and it has been denounced as garbage by many Christian organizations. Unsurprisingly, there’s no record of any of the multiple assaults, kidnappings and murders detailed herein, and vampire sightings are still pretty rare. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but it is genuinely astounding that anyone could write something like this and expect people to believe it. I’m amused by the idea of these 2 junkie lunatics believing that that they’re so important that the devil, the adversary of the creator of the universe, would drop into their kitchen to visit them. It’s cuckoo-crazy nonsense. Unfortunately though, plenty of people did and do believe this crap. This book is still in print after almost 40 years, and it’s available from all big bookstores. The author went on to have a successful career as a preacher. She’s dead now though. May she burn in Hell eternally!
2024 is almost over, and in truth, it was a pretty bad year for this website. Google changed the way it searches, and I’ve seen another big drop in traffic here. I’ve also mostly abandoned social media. I know I should be staying up to date with that kind of stuff, but I’m too busy. I’ve been taking courses for my job and my family life is hectic at the moment. I’m still getting through a book a week, but I’ve only been able to do so by listening to audiobooks at double speed while I am doing the dishes at night.
When I started this blog, I was in my twenties, and I was working at a radio station for 3-4 hours a day. I was able to spend hours studying arcane lore in the library on my days off. Now, I am an adult with a real job and a driver’s license. My life is good, and I have no regrets, but at this point I’m lucky if I can sneak in a chapter from my devil books when my kids are in swimming lessons.
I’ve always done a mix of fiction and non-fiction on this blog, but there were a couple of years (2020-2021) when I focused mostly on horror novels. I tried to rectify that last year aiming for a 50-50 split, and this year I actually did more posts on non-fiction. Many of these were on conspiracy theories.
I got really into conspiracy stuff at the beginning of the year. I had steered away from that field for a few years, but the time was right to return. I think James Shelby Downard’s book probably pushed me over the edge. I only realised while writing this post that I planned a post about his essays too. I did the reading, but apparently never got around to writing about it. Maybe I’ll return to that soon. It’s truly mad stuff. Obviously, I did some books about aliens too. Most of these have a conspiracy edge to them too:
Last year, I started reading true crime, and I read a few more books from that genre (mostly on the Zodiac Killer).
I don’t to buy many old paperback horror novels anymore, but I read a fair few of them this year. I still have quite a few on the shelf left to read, thank goodness. I think The Rats may have been my favourite.
Also, I am a powerful magician, so I read a few grimoires. (I didn’t include the one on using black magic to get a rim job below because the cover would make this post look like garbage.)
There were a few books that don’t really fit in the above categories else. Some of these were great. I absolutely loved reading Robert Westall’s stories and everything by David Case.
The end of February will mark a decade of this blog. I made my 500th post a few weeks ago, and I’ve covered more books than I care to count at this point. I’m not sure how much longer it will last to be honest. One of the reasons I haven’t allowed the decline in traffic to end this site is the fact that aside from reading creepy books I genuinely don’t know what else to do with my free time. Any recommendations, please send them my way! Anyways, if you want to take a scroll through memory lane, I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
I read Jack MacLane’s Blood Dreams this week. It’s pretty much exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect from its awesome cover. This is a pretty standard “Paperback from Hell“.
Larry, a 10 year old boy who has premonitions of other people’s (bloody) deaths, moves to a new town and forms a psychic link with Hubert, the local sadistic murderer. Hubert isn’t happy about this and decides to solve the problem in the only way he knows.
There’s a lot of soft drinks being drank in here, and at one point the killer is seen reading Joe Lansdale’s The Drive-In, but other than that, there was nothing particularly surprising about this book. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it though. I finished it over a few days, and while it’s not exactly a masterwork of fiction, I was decently entertained.
This isn’t the book I intended to post about this week. I’m reading an extremely bizarre book about Satanism that is taking me a long time to finish. Hopefully I’ll get a bit of time over Christmas to finish that one off.
I didn’t think I was going to get a post out today, but I managed to abandon my family and read this morning, and I’ve just finished Michael McDowell’s The Elementals. I’ve wanted to read something by Michael McDowell for years, and this didn’t disappoint.
Avon – 1981
This is very much a haunted house novel, and while that’s not my favourite genre, it can be very enjoyable when done right. McDowell gets the right mix of characterization, suspense and downright nastiness here.
A rich family own three houses on a remote, private beach. One of these houses has something really bad in it. Everyone knows to stay away from it, but when India, the youngest member of the family pays her first visit, she has to go and take a peek inside. The atmosphere builds and builds, and the ending has everything that you could possibly hope for.
If this was 3 years ago, I would have waited until I had read 3 or 4 of McDowell’s novels to post about him, and while I do intend to read more of his books, I just don’t have the time to read multiple books a week anymore. There’s only a week left until Christmas holidays, so hopefully I’ll be able to read more then.
I’ve had a pretty mad week, and I put all of my reading time into finishing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It was a pretty good book, but it’s a bit far removed from the theme of this blog. To make sure I got a post out this week, I sat down last night and read another pamphlet from Finbarr Publications. This one was of an even lower quality than their usual fare.
Invisibility; Also The Evocation of God A Magickal Treatise by The Master Desilius Graeme D. Brown (2006)
The text is split into 2 parts. The first is a spell to become invisible.
The introduction to this section is baffling. It claims that true invisibility is impossible, but it also states that the author’s method of turning invisible shrouds the magician in a cloak of darkness which renders them invisible. It then warns that the invisibility ceremony should not be used “just whenever one wants to”, but in the very next sentence the ceremony is described as a “method which can always be used.”
Part One of the text outlines the author’s philosophy of existence. It’s extremely stupid. He gets very wishy-washy, talking about dimensions of reality. It’s absolute bullshit that ends with the claim that the only way forward is to perform Satanic rituals to tame demons to stop them from interfering with our thoughtforms.
Part Two focuses on developing your chakras so you can better control your thoughtforms so they don’t turn into poltergeists.
Part 3: don’t wank or have sex for a few weeks, then perform a Satanic ritual that summons a demon to give a ring the power of invisibility. Be careful that the demon doesn’t hypnotize and kill you.
It might seem like I’ve left big parts out or completely misunderstood the text here, but I really haven’t. It’s actually that stupid. It makes no sense at all.
In the second text, the author gives instructions on how to evoke God. We’re not talking a demon or a spirit here. This is the big one, the actual creator of the universe. The instructions are poorly written scraps that have been cobbled together from other magical texts. They’re so silly they’re not even worth summarizing. It’s about 10 pages of crap that only the most mentally deficient moron could take seriously. I’m not even being mean. This is extremely silly garbage.
This “Magickal Treatise” was quite disappointing. There was no effort put into the writing here. Spells to turn invisible and to evoke the creator of the universe should be more entertaining than this. Also, I am not sure why the author refers to himself as “Master Desilius in the book’s title. A more apt appellation would have been “Graeme D. Brownfingers”*.
The Horror at Red Hook is probably H.P. Lovecraft‘s most racist story. Sure, there are dodgy cats and demeaning comments in other tales, but Red Hook is as much a rant on how disgusting Howard found immigrants as it is a horror story. It’s not even a particularly good story, relying on the threat of black magic rather than the cosmic horror which fuels Lovecraft’s more effective nightmares.
A detective, Malone, goes insane after investigating Robert Suydam, a black magician who has been cavorting with the immigrant scum of Red Hook, a slum in New York. The story involves much of the usual Lovecraft stuff, subterranean vaults, reanimation and a protagonist who loses his mind… It’s pretty forgettable, but it comes up frequently as an example of Lovecraft’s hateful views. It’s bad, but it pales in comparison to his poem, “On the Creation of …”.
I have been planning to read something by Victor LaValle for a while, and when I found an audiobook version of his retelling of Red Hook, I snatched it. It’s been a while since I read anything Lovecraftian, and this novella won a Shirley Jackson award.
The Ballad of Black Tom – Victor LaValle
Tor – 2016
In this version of the story, Suydam enlists the help of Black Tom, a hustler turned guitar player. Tom becomes the main character, and the black magic of the original story is replaced with Cthulhu cult stuff that we’ve all come to expect (and desire) from a modern Lovecraftian tale.
LaValle takes an infamously racist story and gives it a black protagonist. While it does deal with the discrimination this character faces because of his race, the story never feels preachy or overly didactic.
In truth, there’s nothing hugely revolutionary about this tale, but it delivered pretty much everything I wanted. I was entertained from start to finish, and it made me want to read more Lovecraftian stuff and also more by Victor LaValle. Check it out if you can.
Also, I didn’t realise this until after I made the post, but last week’s post on the Zodiac Killer was actually my 500th blog post on this site. That’s a lot of books.
I’m no expert on the Zodiac killer, but I have read Graysmith’s books and least have a sense of how complicated the case is and what kind of evidence would be required to confirm the killer’s identity. A new Netflix documentary recently came out confirming Graysmith’s claim that Arthur Leigh Allen was the killer, and while I am not convinced that it definitely wasn’t Arthur Leigh Allen, the claims put forth in that documentary are so damning that I find them suspicious. Either way, there are lots of reasons to think that Arthur Leigh Allen might have been the Zodiac, and until concrete evidence arises, Allen will be the measuring stick for all other Zodiac suspects.
I think I have mentioned this before, but I am very busy these days, and I am having to rely on audiobooks from my local libraries to get any reading done. Unfortunately, my Libby account doesn’t really offer many books that fit in with the theme of this blog. The horror is all modern, and the occultism is all new-age. When I checked the true crime section, I found The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a book by a man who believes his father to be the Zodiac Killer. I thought it might be worth a read.
Harper – 2014
This book sucks. There’s nothing remotely convincing about any of the author’s claims, and many of these claims have been proven to be false. On reading about the author after finishing the book, I realized that there is a 4 part documentary on this book that basically proves that it’s complete bullshit. His dad was in Austria when the Zodiac did most of his killing. Even if the claims in here were all true, Allen is still a better suspect.
Ok, so the book is bullshit, but so are many of the books I enjoy. Is there anything interesting about this at all? Well, the author claims that his father was good friends with Anton LaVey and that he jammed with Bobby Beausoleil. His dad was a convicted paedophile (that much is beyond doubt), and so these links cast darker shadows on the high Priest of Satanism and Charlie Manson’s pal than they do on the author’s sicko father.
Also, the author is a whiny little weiner. Most of the book is about his boring, pleasant life with a nice family and how he acted like a wanker when he met his birth mother. He also repeatedly brings his faith into the story and makes himself sound like a twat. If the author’s father was actually in the Zodiac’s vicinity, it’s a real pity that the Zodiac didn’t murder him too. A child wouldn’t have been raped, and this awful book would never have been written.
I don’t read a lot of recent horror, but somehow I got the idea that Nick Cutter’s The Troop would be worth reading. I got an audiobook version from my local library, and spent a week listening to this as I was lying in bed. I enjoyed it immensely.
Gallery Books – 2014
A troop of boy scouts is on a camping trip on a remote Canadian island. Unfortunately for them, a man with a minging, extremely contagious worm parasite ends up on the same island and ruins their trip.
I’ve read plenty of books that exist for the sole sake of grossing the reader out. A lot of splatterpunk stuff tries so hard to be disgusting that it completely neglects the elements of suspense and character. The Troop left me feeling nauseous, but it’s also a very enjoyable story. I’ve seen some criticism directed at the fact that the characters are all stock characters (the nerd, the jock, the troubled youth, the nice guy and the weirdo), and while this is a fair criticism, the scouts do have enough depth to make the reader care about them. The novel is partly epistolary, and the chapters are interspersed with newspaper documents and excerpts from a court case. I thought this worked really well in creating tension and setting the tone.
This novel is disgusting body horror done properly. Seriously, one scene (the bit with the monkey) literally made me sit up in bed because I thought I was going to vomit. The Troop is gross and entertaining. I had a great time reading it.
The crash at Roswell is surely the most infamous UFO incident of all time. The story goes that a spaceship full of aliens crashed on a ranch and the government recovered parts of the craft and its pilots’ corpses. Much of the controversy and allegations of a cover-up stem from the government’s own initial reports that they had recovered a flying disc. Days later they claimed it had been a weather balloons.
Gallery Books – 2005
During the summer, I read a book by Nick Redfern in which he claims that Satanic aliens are in league with the US government, so I was a little surprised to find that his book, Body Snatchers in the Desert, claims that the government didn’t find any aliens at Roswell. No, here he claims that much of the UFO lore that has been spread over the last 75 years has been government disinformation. The reality of what crashed in Roswell is much more sinister than a gang of unlucky instellar adventurers.
The crash at Roswell was actually an experimental nuclear aircraft that was piloted by a team of physically and mentally disabled people that the American government had retrieved from Japan’s infamous Unit 731 in China. Unit 731 was the Japanese equivalent to Nazi concentration camps in terms of the scientific experiments performed on human beings. Supposedly the American government gave the scientists working there a choice. They could either be executed for crimes against humanity, or they could come and work in the USA. After they joined Team America, the scientists and their remaining test subjects were covertly brought to the US and set to work on calculating how much radiation a person could be subjected to.
During this work, there was a mishap with an experimental airship that was being piloted by a group of disabled people, and when the government realised how bad this would look, they deliberately spread disinformation about aliens because that would cause them less trouble. Redfern accepts the testimony of the soldiers who saw the alien corpses, but insists that these were merely Asian people who had progeria.
This is so revolting an idea that it’s hard not to laugh. At the same time, it is a more believable explanation to the Roswell story than aliens. The United States government did perform radiation experiments on disabled people at this time, and it did harbour international criminals for its own benefit after the second world war. It also definitely spread misinformation to its own people and agencies. Most of the elements of Redfern’s story are based in fact, and it’s only when they’re put together that they become hard to swallow.
Redfern wrote a follow up to this book a few years ago, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. The actual message of Body Snatchers in the Desert can be summed up as above, but most of the book is made up of testimony from mysterious insiders. Redfern provides some legitimate looking documentation, but it’s impossible to judge how trustworthy this kind of material is. If the US government was spreading disinformation, I would assume that they would not only cover their tracks by not documenting certain things, but they would also do their best to obfuscate any other information on the topic. Nothing proves anything when it comes to stuff like this, and you can never tell who is lying and what is true. (Not lying doesn’t mean true!) Redfern’s premise sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense, and while I don’t necessarily buy his story, I wouldn’t put it past those bastards at the Pentagon!
Nocturnal Revelries 