Jack MacLane’s Blood Dreams

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.

Michael McDowell’s The Elementals

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.

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.

Turn Invisible and Invite God over for Tea: Graeme D. Brown’s Invisibility: Also The Evocation of God

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”*.

*He has brown fingers because pickypicky bumbum.

Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom

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

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.

No Gary, your Dad was not the Zodiac Killer. Gary L. Stewarts The Most Dangerous Animal of All

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.

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 got worms.” – Nick Cutter’s The Troop

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.

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.

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.

Invisibility; Also The Evocation of GodA Magickal Treatise by The Master DesiliusGraeme D. Brown (2006)

The Ballad of Black Tom – Victor LaValle

Invisibility; Also The Evocation of God
A Magickal Treatise by The Master Desilius
Graeme D. Brown (2006)