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.

Vlad the Impaler’s Demon Cock: John Shirley’s Dracula in Love

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a novel less than I enjoyed Dracula in Love. I started it during the hectic last week of my summer holidays and finished it over a nasty bout of jetlag, and I’m sure these circumstances had something to do with me struggling to get through more than a few paragraphs at a time. Also, I got through a fair bit of the text with an audiobook from Encyclopocalypse. I love when publishers put out old books like this as audiobooks, but the narrator did silly voices for each character, and that really annoyed me. To be honest, a lot of things have been annoying me recently.

Lucifer visits Dracula’s son (His name is Vlad Horescu. Sounds a lot like that guy who wrote that other book on Dracula, doesn’t it?) and asks him to help trapping the King of the Vampires. Dracula rapes a few women with his demon cock and inspires rape waves wherever he goes. It turns out he only got back in touch with his son because Vlad Junior is high up in a computer company and is capable of hijacking software that will give Dracula enough influence over the economy and politics of Brazil that he will be able to become an Emperor there. His plan is foiled when he is sucked into Lucifer’s giant vagina.

On the plus side, this is gory and gross and features sentient genitalia. Unfortunately though, the plot is confusing, the characters are unlikeable, and the whole thing is overwritten. I have a high tolerance for crap, but I really had to force myself to get through this one. In fairness, the author was only 18 when it was written, so maybe his other books are better. It’ll be a while before i get around to them.

Richard Laymon’s The Wood Are Dark: A Trashy, Tit-filled, Cannibalistic Nightmare

In 2019, I read Flesh by Richard Laymon and quite enjoyed it. 2 years later, I read The Cellar. I didn’t like that one, and I’ve steered clear of Laymon since. Recently a friend suggested that I check out The Woods Are Dark. I had read that the first edition of this book had been heavily censored, and I was very pleased to find a copy of the unedited version that Laymon’s daughter had published after her father’s death.

**Cemetery Dance – 2008 (First published 1981)**

After a freak throws a severed hand into their car, two young females are kidnapped in small town and tied to a tree in a clearing in a nearby forest. There they meet a family of 4 who have met with a similar fate. The kidnappers promptly run away, and it turns out that they were just serving dinner to a tribe of cannibals called the Krulls. Luckily, one of the kidnappers starts to feel guilty because he has fallen in love with one of the girls he kidnapped, so he comes back to save her. He manages to set everybody free, but then the Krulls arrive and things get ugly.

The best part about this book is Lander Dills, the father of the family of 4. The former English teacher goes mad and starts behaving just as poorly as one of the Krulls. His thought process is outlined in one of the crudest lines ever put to paper: “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A rape for a rape.” The only difference between Lander and the savages is that he quotes Shakespeare while raping and skinning his victims. Apparently this guy’s escapades were the parts that were cut from the first edition. Without him, the book would be very dull.

One of the girls who was kidnapped by the hillbillies manages not only to forgive her kidnapper when he comes back to rescue her, but she actually has consensual sex with him hours later and cries at the thought of not being able to spend the rest of her life with him shortly thereafter. Very realistic.

In truth, I was a little shocked at the level of brutality on display in this book. There’s gang-rapes, and cocks being bitten off aplenty. Also, this is a Richard Laymon book, so there is a lot of tit talk. I did a search through an ebook version of the book, and without counting tits, boobs or nipples, the word ‘breast’ appears 58 times. The Woods are Dark is pure trash, but it was relatively entertaining. I’ll probably read more of the Booby man’s stuff in the future.

Aliens are Demonic Soul Suckers that are Feeding Disinformation to the US Government

Final Events and the Secret Government Group on UFOs and the Afterlife – Nick Redfern

Aliens are not extraterrestrials, they are demons that were set loose by Jack Parsons, and they are trying to bring about the end of the world. (They may also be harvesting human souls.) The Collins Elite, a top secret group within the United States government know about this, and they have been working for decades to make sure this doesn’t happen. (Then again, it is possible that all of the information they have been given/putting out has been disinformation. They may unwittingly aid Satan in bringing about the apocalypse.)

There’s some novel details in here, but the basic premise behind this book (that aliens are demons) is one I have encountered a few times before. The most surprising element of Final Events is that its intended audience seems to be conspiracy nuts and fans of Forteana rather than just evangelical Christians (unlike Bob Larson’s UFO book and Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror. The problem is that if you don’t believe in Jesus-hating demons, none of this seems remotely convincing. If you’re not a Christian, there’s no real threat being presented, and all of the people claiming that Aliens are Satan’s henchmen just seem like idiots. Redfern doesn’t come across as preachy, but it does feel like he is trying to frighten his Christian readers. I suppose that is a noble thing to do.

I know that the US government has put money into researching bizarre ideas, and I’m sure there’s some military guys who do think that aliens are evil, but this is clearly a book of bullshit. It’s not even a case of misinterpretations either. Most of this was obviously just made up. I’m not saying that Redfern made it up himself, but if he didn’t, his sources definitely did. The guy who put him onto this story was a priest who had been approached by members of the ultra-secretive Collins Elite. I liked the first few chapters, but after a while it got a little boring. Many of the sources it references are absolute tripe too. It discusses both the work of Kurt Koch and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. It also mentions last week’s book, the bizarre Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. Seeing all these titles mentioned alongside the work of my old friends, Whitley Strieber and Aleister Crowley, was fun. It’s nice to know that there are other people out there who spend their time reading this stuff.

Final Events didn’t exactly blow me away, but I enjoyed reading it. I am quite sure that I’ll be reading more books by Nick Redfern in the future. Apparently he has one in which he claims that the alien bodies found at Roswell were actually those of progeria patients. LOL. Definitely checking that one out soon.

Spacemen Introduced Me to Satan: Cecil Michael’s Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer

A couple of years ago, after I posted about UFOs Satanic Terror, my pal put me on the trail of another book on the same topic called Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. With a title like that, who could resist? I finally got my hands on a copy yesterday.

Cecil Michael, a mechanic, goes out for a walk and he sees a UFO. A few days later, 2 weird men come into his shop and stand there looking at him. They’re tall, strong, handsome looking men, but they’re weirdly silent and they scare Cecil. He gets really freaked out once they start turning transparent in front of him. They stay in his shop all day, disappearing whenever a customer comes in, and then leave at 4.30. Cecil knows almost immediately that they’re from space. The same thing happens the next day, and the day after that.

These lads are really annoying, and Cecil frequently wants to punch them in their fool faces, but he’s too afraid/in awe of them. Despite that fact that they are capable of speaking telepathically, they say almost nothing to Cecil. At one point they show him their insides. They are made of tubes and electronic parts. They’re a real pair of jackasses.

The spacemen do the same thing every day for a couple of months and then take Cecil for a ride in their spaceship. To do so without inconveniencing Cecil, they create a robot clone of him that stays working in his shop while he’s away. Cecil’s brother ties him to the inside of the spacemen’s flying saucer, and they fly away from Earth and land on a red planet that’s mostly on fire.

When they land, the 2 spacemen stay in the UFO, but Cecil gets off and meets a scruffy bum who tells Cecil that he has a job for him. Cecil doesn’t want the job, so the bum gives him some horrible food and introduces him to his other workers. They are small pygmy men. Their job is to throw corpses into a lake that carries the corpses into a fire. Cecil tells the bum again that he doesn’t want the job, and the bum gets angry with him. Then Jesus appears in the sky. Cecil tells the bum that Jesus will make sure that he doesn’t have to work for him.

The aliens take Cecil back to Earth. After a few more days, they stop showing up in Cecil’s shop because he has been smoking too many cigarettes.

That’s what happens in this book. It’s such a ridiculous story that I find it hard to imagine the author thinking that anyone would believe it. Some of the details are so arbitrary that it reads more like a description of a nightmare than a cohesive narrative. The part where his brother helps him into the spaceship makes no sense. Also, it’s very unclear as to whom the spacemen are working for. Cecil is full of praise for them, but it does seem that they are under the employ of scruffy old Satan. If I was going to make up a story about being kidnapped by spacemen and taken to Hell, I would make the story more cohesive. Maybe this account was just a dream and Cecil Michael thought it was real.

This isn’t like the other Satanic alien books that I’ve read in that it’s not preachy. While Jesus acts as a saviour here, it seems like it’s more a hologram of Jesus than the real guy. This book doesn’t come close to Larson or Tyson’s attempts to use aliens to scare people into Christianity. Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer is a unique and truly bizarre book.

Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer came out first in 1955, but it was republished in 1971 in New Zealand. Copies of these editions are very hard to find, but the complete text was republished in Round Trip To Hell in a Flying Saucer: UFO Parasites – Alien Soul Suckers – Invaders From Demonic Realms Paperback, a 2011 anthology on Satanic aliens compiled by Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. I may well turn to that book in the future.