Happy Halloween! Short stories from Al Sarrantonio

Happy Halloween, freaks! It’s been quite a while since I featured a book with a pumpkin on the cover. So here’s something by Al Sarrantonio.

I went through a Sarrantonio phase a few years ago. I enjoyed all of the books I read by him, but most of the ones I haven’t read seem to have Halloweeny titles. This gives me limited window during the year to check them out. I gave his short story collection Halloween and Other Seasons a go this October. Here’s what I remember from the stories:

Summer	Summer gets hotter and hotter until everyone dies. The fact that this is literally happening made this story less enjoyable than it probably was when it was written.
Sleepover	Kids abandoned by their parents into a realm of blackness.
Eels	Unpleasant dad takes kid out to sea to drown him, but kid is an eel.
Letters from camp	Summer camp run by bad robots.
Roger in the Womb	Baby refuses to be born. Uses morse code to contact outside
The Return of Mad Santa	exactly what you’d think.
Baby Boss and the Underground Hamasters	Bizarre screenplay about talking hamsters and a chicken. I let my children listen to this. They loved it.
Trail of the Chromium Bandits	Western that turns into sci-fi.
The Man in the Other Car	Excellent story about man getting mad driving his family to park. This was the absolute highlight of this collection. Grim ending.
Hedges	Awful teacher becomes part of a bush. Weird. Not in a good way.
The Silly Stuff	Reporter meets Charles Fort who is an alien
The New Kid	A new kid shows up and stops the bullies bullying the old new kid. Then old new kid turns into new new kid. A story so predictable and not interesting that it made me want to quit this book.
Ahead of the Joneses	Jealous neighbours outdo each other. Silly.
The Artist in the small room above.	Weird sci-fi. An emotional muse inspires music so emotional it kills.
The Dancing Foot	Guy pushes girl in front of train. Her foot comes back for revenge.
Liberty	Another western. A nasty guy takes advantage of pioneer Americans.
Dust	A family enters a dust cloud while driving through some mountains. It becomes considerably more difficult to deal with than they imagined.
The Pumpkin Boy	This is the longest story by far, and it’s actually part of Sarrantonio’s Orangefield cycle. I haven’t read those books yet, and while I got the feeling it was referencing those stories now and again, this story does work by itself. A weird pumpkin robot boy shows up and some kids go missing.

I quite enjoyed this collection. I don’t think it was quite as consistent as Toybox (the only other collection of Sarrantonio’s short fiction that I’ve read). Halloween was published over a decade after Toybox, but some of the stories are considerably older than the ones in that earlier collection. A few of these older stories clearly weren’t good enough for Toybox. That said, I was still decently entertained throughout. I might try to read the rest of the Orangefield books next year.

Have a spooky one!

John A. Keel’s Our Haunted Planet

I’ve been having a busy time juggling work, family and studying recently, and I’m struggling to find time to read for entertainment. Audiobooks are ideal for my current situation, but I find it difficult to find free non-fiction audiobooks that are even slightly relevant to my interests. When I found an audiobook copy of Keel’s 1971 book Our Haunted Planet, I thought I’d give it a go.

**Futura – 1975 (Originally published 1971)**

The only other book I’ve read by Keel was The Mothman Prophecies, and this is a far less focused book than that one. There’s a lot of stuff about UFOs, ancient archaeology, and most other Fortean phenomenon in here. The main idea is that there were civilisations on Earth before humans evolved. This was entertaining enough to listen to while I washed the dishes, but the stuff in here that I’ve encountered before is so ludicrous that it was hard to take any of the other information seriously. This is very much in the same vein as Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians and that kind of crap.

Very few of the ideas in this book have any basis in reality. Our Haunted Planet is more than 50 years old at this point, and the immediate availability of more accurate information on the internet renders it obsolete. I can only recommend reading this if you want to understand what people on the fringes of thought were into half a century ago. I do quite enjoy thinking about that, and I will probably read more Keel in the future.

Normally I only post on Sundays, but I have a seasonal post lined up for Thursday. Check back then if you’re interested!

Aron Beauregard’s The Cuck

I saw this cover and couldn’t resist.

Two lads go to a lonely woman’s house to have sex with her. When they get there, an old man watches them. Afterwards, the old man appears any time the lads do anything sexual and convinces them to mutilate their genitalia.

This was published as its own book, but it’s really just a short story. My expectations weren’t particularly high going in, and I can happily say that I was in no way disappointed. This book does contain a perverted old man and some disgusting dick abuse.

The only thing that confused me was the title. The old man is not actually married, so he isn’t really a cuckold. It’s funny to call people (or demons) a cuck, but multiple characters arrive at this appellation independently. Weird. Again though, I didn’t expect much in terms of sensibleness when I started this book.

The Cuck was not high literature, but it gave me a few chuckles.

On a marginally related note, I came across this book online a few days ago. There’s no ebook versions and hard copies cost about $100, so I’m probably never going to read it, but it looks seriously bizarre. (If somebody wants to buy it for me, I will review it here!)

Be careful. There are clearly some real sickos out there.

Take the Backward Masking Challenge! Jacob Aranza’s Backward Masking Unmasked: Backward Satanic Messages of Rock and Roll Exposed

Backward masking, in case you don’t know, is when a musician thinks of an evil satanic thing to say, and then somehow writes and records a seemingly unrelated song lyric that when reversed gives this evil message. The story goes that if you play Stairway to Heaven backwards, it says “my sweet satan”. There’s a part of Judas Priest’s cover of Better by You that apparently sounds like an order to, “Do it!” when played backwards. This message apparently caused a couple of teenagers to make a suicide pact in 1985. One of Ozzy’s songs apparently tells the listener to get their gun.

It’s hard for me to understand how somebody like Ozzy Osbourne would have the intelligence to write a lyric that could run both ways. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ozzy but he’s no Weird Al. (Not only did Weird Al write an entire song of palindromes he also put backwards messages into 2 of his songs.)

So this idea suggests that a bunch of drugged up 70s rockstars were far smarter than they really were, but it also suggests that the fans of this music were so smart that their brains could decode these hidden messages. Seriously, if our brains are smart enough to subconsciously extract backwards words that are intermixed with guitars and drums, wouldn’t we be able to listen to something backwards and then be able to figure out what it said? What kind of evolutionary function would this serve? Here, take the backwards masking challenge!

There’s no sense in digging into this issue too much. The very notion of stadium rock bands attempting to get their fans to kill themselves is ludicrous enough to dismiss this as nonsense. You’d have to be a real moron to take this crap seriously.

Unfortunately, only the first chapter really deals with the backward masking stuff. The explanation given is half-hearted stupid rubbish. The rest of the book is a more general screed on the dangers of rock. This book was actually written before the Judas Priest/Ozzy suicide pact. I watched the Dream Deceivers documentary years ago. It’s truly depressing stuff, and this book probably exacerbated the trauma of the families who were devastated by that tragedy.

Looking through the list of bands at the end of this book is pretty amusing. Bob Larson’s Book of Rock had a very similar list if I remember correctly. They’re mostly inane soft rock groups being painted as depraved Satanists. I’m quite sure that this kind of scaremongering provided the blueprint for bands like Venom and Mercyful Fate. Those guys must have seen this and thought, “That’s a great idea!”

This book was a stupid pile of crap. Keep listening to heavy metal and worshipping the Devil.

Please Don’t Finger Me: Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac

I don’t remember how The Hands of Orlac ended up on my to-read list, but I’ve wanted to read it for years. Although it was a popular novel in France, and a few movie versions have been made, copies of the English translations were hard to come by (up until very recently).The first translation came out in 1929, but a second translation by Iain White was published in 1981. A new one by D.H. Bernhardt came out more recently, and that one is widely available as an ebook. I read White’s translation.

**Souvenir Press – 1981 (first published 1920)**

So a famous pianist is hurt in a train accident. When his wife shows up at the wreckage, she sees a ghost hovering near her bloodied and unconscious husband. A doctor manages to save him, but his hands are all messed up. Stuff starts to go missing from their house and bloody daggers keep showing up.

Reading this novel was a chore. It took me 2 weeks to get through the first hundred pages. The main character is the pianist’s annoying wife, and for every paragraph of plot there are 3 pages of her emotions. Maybe the translation had something to do with it, but I found this book to be unbearably overwritten. I rarely managed more than a couple of pages before turning the lights off to go to sleep. I wanted to give up, but forced myself to power through the last 20 pages over a couple of evenings last week.

There’s a few mysterious things happening in the book, but none of them are interesting except the suggestion that a decapitated murderer has been revived and that he has started to kill again. At this point my interest was piqued, but a few pages later it turns out there is another, far less cool, explanation. By the end of the book, everything has been explained rationally.

I hate it when that happens.

I don’t know. Maybe mystery fans will enjoy this, but I thought it was crap. If you want to read a better book about evil hand transplants, I would suggest Martin Thomas’s The Hand of Cain.

Gary Brodsky’s How to Use Black Magic to Get Women (to lick your crack)

How to use Black Magic to Get Women – Gary Brodsky

Honestly, I sometimes forget where I get my books. I’ll buy or download a bunch and come across them years later when looking for something to read. Thus was the case with Gary Brodsky’s How to use Black Magic to Get Women. I’ve read a lot of books, but the only other pick-up manual I’ve read was Robert Johnson’s absolutely terrible The Satanic Warlock. I’m not looking to “get women”, but I decided I’d see what Brodsky had to say on the topic.

This was pathetic, even in comparison to the other crap I review here. Truly, it is hard to imagine anyone taking anything in this piece of garbage seriously, and even harder to imagine anything in here actually working.

Brodsky comes across as a true idiot. I’m not exaggerating or trying to be mean here. He actually seems like a very stupid person. At one point he describes himself as “someone who knows a thousand times more than” his readers on the topic of Black Magic. He later goes on to explain that understanding the actual workings of the spells he is presenting is entirely irrelevant to their efficacy. At no point does he offer any explanation as to how his spells operate. It’s enough to just rub some oil on your feet. That will convince the nameless spirits to help you get the woman of your dreams.

The actual “spells” presented are garbage. Light a candle with your true love’s name engraved on it. Take a bath and think of the girl you like. The weirdest one involves stealing crumbs off her plate and then pissing on them. This will make her find you irresistible.

The language he uses is revolting and telling of the kind of man that this book is written for.

She has rejected you so often, and yet soon, she will not be able to swallow enough of your penis, she will not be able to get her tongue deep enough into the crack of your ass, no matter how hard she tries, she simply will not be able to get enough of you.

I don’t know. People can like what they like, but wanting to make a woman lick your crack because she doesn’t like you is pretty nasty.

Gary Brodsky obviously had a very limited knowledge of Black Magic, and this book is obviously aimed at horny incels rather than true students of the occult. It turns out that nearly all of his other books are pick-up manuals, including How To Dominate Women, Charm The Pants Off Any Woman, The Alpha Male Guide and How To Pick Up Exotic Dancers. Yuck. While his books are vile, his youtube videos are even worse. Featuring such classic lectures as GARY BRODSKY GOES SUPER ALPHA, GARY BRODSKY RIPS FEMINSM TO SHREDS, MEN ARE BECOMING SISSYS and WHY WOMEN ACT LIKE BITCHES, Brodsky’s youtube channel is filled with gold. It seems like he used to get drunk and record himself ranting for hours at a time about feminism, being alpha, getting sexy women and any other nonsense that would pop into his head. I clicked on one of his videos, but turned it off to ruminate after he said,

“The PC bullshit agenda ok, is steroids, not steroids, I mean, is communism with tits. that’s all it is.”
– GARY TAKES ON THE SATANIC AGENDA

One of the most interesting features of Gary’s videos is the cross he wears in many of them. You’ll also notice him frequently talking about the Bible and the importance of God and Jesus. In one of the videos he discusses how homosexual acts are an abomination to God. I wonder how a god who hates gay people feels about a man making a woman lick his hairy asscrack out of spite.

I could go on, but Gary did a pretty good job of showing what kind of a person he was. Watch his videos if you can stomach them. He died in 2016.

Bits and Pieces from the Tomb: Thomas K. Johnson’s Graveyard Wanderers

Thomas K. Johnson is an academic who translated 37 books of Swedish folk magic as part of his PhD thesis in 2010. These books comprised of spells that had been passed down through generations of the “wise people” From these translations, Johnson picked out all of the spells involving stuff that comes from graveyards (dirt, bones, coffin nails…) and compiled them into this macabre collection.

The Graveyard Wanderers: The Wise Ones + The Dead in Sweden

**Society of Esoteric Endeavour – 2013**

There’s spells to stop birds moving, to hex and un-hex a gun, to turn invisible and to kill a tree. Most of these spells involve mixing graveyard dirt into different things and then spreading it on whatever you want to affect. Another common way to invoke the magic of the dead is to hammer a used coffin nail into something. Doing so to a horse shoe will render the horse lame, and doing so to a piece of shit will give the shitter a bad case of diarrhea. Seriously. If you can’t find a coffin nail, but still want to give somebody the trots, you can also fill a human bone with your victim’s shit and then let a river flow through the bone. (My advice would be to let it flow over your hands too, unless you want to be a Mr. Shitty Brownfingers.) If you want help from the dead in raping a woman, stick a coffin nail in her piss. (I’ve heard from a reliable source that a more efficacious way of achieving this goal is to drink a pint of bleach.)

Speaking of piss, to cure a child who has had a stroke, their mom should piss in a skull and then give it to the kid to drink. If there’s no skulls handy, mom can just piss in her hand and give it to her thirsty whippersnapper that way. (It was only a year ago that I reviewed another grimoire that used a lot of piss magic.) If you want to turn invisible, plant some peas in a human skull and when they grow, put them in your mouth. If you want to get really close to a bird without it flying away, make a mask out of a human skull and approach the bird while looking through the eye sockets of the deceased. There’s also a cool section in here that describes making a belt from the skin of a corpse’s abdomen. When created properly, this belt allows its wearer to turn into a werewolf.

I quite enjoyed this book. Many of the spells are ridiculous, but this is folk magic, and it made me think about what ordinary people valued and how they tried to make sense of the world a few hundred years ago. It reminded me of The Black Books of Elverum, another collection of Scandinavian spells. Only 180 copies of the fancy embossed cover hardback of Graveyard Wanderers were printed, but a paperback copy is now available for anyone who wants this in their library.

The Grimoire Inspired by a Children’s Book written by a Sex Pest: Var Von Brennos’ Gravelording

Long time readers of Nocturnal Revelries may recall an era (mostly 2018 – 2019) when the blog focused on strange grimoires of black magic. Most of these books are boring garbage, and I don’t read many anymore, but occasionally I come across something that piques my curiosity. Such was the case when I found a copy of a book called Gravelording by Var Von Brennos. What the Hell is Gravelording? The book in question was short, so I decided to find out.

Gravelording – Var Von Brennos

Gravelording is becoming a Lord of a Graveyard. Being a Gravelord allows one to converse with the dead and to order them around to do ones bidding. To become a Gravelord takes a huge amount of time and effort, and I am entirely certain the process outlined in this book has never been carried out by any human being. The basic idea is that you spend your nights in a Graveyard and limit your sleep and food intake to bring you closer to death. There’s also instructions on how to make a wand, how to open a Ghoul Gate, and how to reanimate a corpse. The reanimation part is very vague about why you would want to do so.

Most of the book is written in deliberately archaic English, but Var Von Brennos occasionally lapses into the vernacular and tells his readers not to be sloppy (when exhuming corpses from abandoned graveyards).

I enjoyed reading this book for the most part. It reads like something out of a horror story. It advocates the kind of behaviour that you’d expect from a ghoul. This is not surprising considering the fact that the only webpage I can find that discusses the author claims that his background is in Lovecraftian Sorcery. My only real critique of this book is that it seems to be creepiness for the sake of creepiness. The whole concept of this book is so far away from anything that a normal person would ever want to do that it almost felt like a prop book from the set of a horror movie. If I’m wrong about this, I’d love to hear from any true Gravelords out there.

When I got to the end of the book, I glanced through the bibliography and saw some old friends. There, beside the works of Lovecraft were listed Leilah Wendell’s The Necromantic Ritual Book and Liber Falxifer. There were a few other grimoires listed and a book by Neil Gaiman called The Graveyard Book. This caught my eye as I had actually glanced through a copy of the graphic novel version of Gaiman’s book on that very same day. I’d been meaning to read something by Gaiman for a while, so I decided to give it a look. One does not ignore such synchronicities! Once I started reading The Graveyard Book, Gravelording began to make a lot more sense.

The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman

**Harper Collins – 2018 (First published 2008)**

The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod Owens, a child who grows up in an abandoned graveyard after his parents are murdered. He converses with the dead, travels through Ghoul Gates and has the spirits of the dead protect and empower him. It’s a book written for 9-12 year old children, but it has clearly been a huge inspiration on Von Brennos’ work of sinister black magic. Some of the magical incantations in his grimoire are directly lifted from Gaiman’s novel.

Some panels from the graphic novel version of *The Graveyard Book* and some lines from *Gravelording*.

So, to tell the truth, I actually haven’t finished The Graveyard Book yet. I’m listening to the audiobook, and I still have a few chapters left. I’m a bit annoyed though because I was really enjoying the book, and I googled it to see what age group it was initially aimed at. I saw that this book is currently in the news because Disney have just stopped a movie version being produced. Apparently Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual misconduct by 5 different women. Now I obviously don’t know the ins out outs of Gaiman’s sex life, but from what I have read, he does seem to have been quite the creep. This is quite disappointing. Still though, The Graveyard Book is an enjoyable read. If you want to check it out, make sure you pirate a copy so you’re not giving any money to Greasy Gaiman.

Horror Double Feature (Bugs and Slugs): Lovers Living Lovers Dead and The Morgow Rises!

I read 2 books this week, and I don’t have a huge amount to say about either, so I’m putting them both in one post:

Lovers Living Lovers Dead – Richard Lortz

On December 29th, 2019, I received an email recommending that I read this book. I got around to it this week. This is the story of Michael and Christine’s messed up marriage. Christine is way younger than Michael, and she’s a bit weird. She acts like a freak, and small, flying creatures are irresistibly drawn to her. Michael makes her go to a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist convinces him to look into his wife’s secret box. He doesn’t like what he finds in there. Oh no, he doesn’t.

I quite enjoyed this up until he opens the forbidden chest of secret mystery. I got a bit grossed out after that part. It reminded me a bit of Craig Jones’ Blood Secrets. I read the book very quickly, and finished it just 3 or 4 days ago, but to tell the truth, I can’t really remember how it ended. It was an entertaining read though. Thank you to Александр for the recommendation!

The Morgow Rises! – Peter Tremayne

After finishing Lovers Living Lovers Dead, I immediately started reading Peter Tremayne’s The Morgow Rises! This book has become a collector’s item because of the awesome cover art, but as a novel, it’s bottom of the barrel muck. This is terrible, unimaginative tripe.

A big slug kills some people. There’s a witch, some nuclear waste and the least memorable characters I’ve ever come across. Overwritten shit. I’ve read my fair share of trashy horror novels about worms, and this is definitely the worst I’ve come across. I really didn’t want to read past the first few chapters and ended up just skimming the last half of the book. The cover is a gross misrepresentation of the majority of what happens in this book. It’s mostly about opportunistic newspaper reporters and Cornish men drinking pints.

I read this after coming across a mention of the Morgow in Jenny Randle’s Mind Monsters. I looked it up online, and apparently the “Morgawr” lake monster was invented in 1975.

Jenny Randle’s Mind Monsters: Invaders from Inner Space?

This is a confusing and stupid book about cryptids and aliens. After starting off with a completely unbelievable yet moderately interesting account of ninja goblins attacking a gang of teenagers in England, the author provides accounts of pretty much every cryptid you can imagine. She covers the Jersey Devil, Mothman, Bigfoot, fairies, lake monsters and lots of aliens. Randle even mentions some of the weird happenings at Cannock Chase. The idea here is that nearly all cryptids and aliens are part of the same phenomena.

Unfortunately, Jenny Randle never provides a clear account of what that phenomena is. She notes that many, if not most, sightings of the unexplained occur near fault lines where the air may be being ionized by chemical changes in the rocks. Also, she notes that most of the people who see these weird creatures are of a similar type. These folks are generally more artistic, psychic and generally imaginative than others. Although she concedes that these sightings are happening in places where the environment is supposedly altering these imaginative people’s consciousnesses, she does not mean to detract from the reality of what these people are seeing.

The reasoning here is ridiculous. The author takes the phenomena of monster sightings and tries to clarify what is happening by saying that it only happens to certain people in certain places. Despite this, she maintains that there is some substantive reality behind these sightings. She’s actually making the issue more complicated rather that clarifying it. According to Randle’s outlook, monster sightings are by their very nature entirely unverifiable.

Honestly, this book was dumb and boring. The only part I found remotely interesting was an account of some cursed stones that really reminded me of the plot of Paul Huson’s The Keepsake.