I should be packing for my vacation, so I only have time to write a short post this week. Luckily enough, I devoured a particulary nasty novel earlier on in the week.
Scribner – 2020 (Originally published in 2017 as Cadáver exquisito)
This book has been on my radar for a few years. It seems to be considered a classic of modern horror. Somebody at work actually recommended it to me last August, and I’ve been meaning to read it ever since. Tender is the Flesh is set in a world where it is now illegal to eat animals because of a virus, so people are eating humans instead. Factory farms are now filled with people instead of cows and pigs. The plot here centers around an employee in one of these farms. I won’t go into further detail because I reckon you’re better off not knowing much about what will happen.
I am happy to report that what occurs in this book is thoroughly bleak and upsetting. This is a massive bummer from start to finish. I loved it. I read the whole thing in a day. I’ve seen people complaining that it’s too much or that it tries too hard, but those people obviously haven’t read Cows. I feel like Bazterrica’s book is what I wanted Stokoes book to be. This novel is emotionally distressing instead of just gross.
I’m sure this book makes statements on the meat industry, misogyny and capitalism, and while I agree all of those things deserve to be critiqued, I know others more knowledgeable on those topics have already discussed them. As a horror novel, this was excellent. You should definitely read it. I plan on reading more from this author soon.
This had been on my radar for a few years. I generally avoid descriptions of books after hearing that they’re good, and apart from assuming it involved a house, I went into Maynard’s House with no idea what it’d be about.
A Vietnam veteran inherits an isolated house from another soldier. He returns to the States and takes up residence there. The house is clearly haunted, and his neighbours are quite weird. He falls in love with a teenage girl who may be a fairy. It’s hard to distinguish between supernatural events and the symptoms of his PTSD.
This book was great. It’s quite funny in parts, and the characters are interesting and believable. This is definitely a cut above a lot of horror novels from this era. Honestly, this was such a breath of fresh air in comparison to the last 2 novels I read. I actually looked forward to sitting down to read this one. If you haven’t read this, you should check it out. I always feel like I have less to say when I enjoy a book, but that’s ok because I have other news for you today!
Weresatan – Infernal Hymns of the Sodomite Cultist
A few months ago, I mentioned that I had been working on a musical project. I recorded 5 songs of ultra-Satanic death metal, and I am happy to announce that tape copies of Weresatan’s first release, Infernal Hymns of the Sodomite Cultist, are now available from Defiled Altar.
I picked this up last week because I wanted a short horror novel to read and this looked the part. There’s a creepy dude with some devilly looking horns hovering above him and a comparison to Rosemary’s Baby on the cover. I started reading it without hesitation. I assumed it was going to be another horror novel about the birth of the Antichrist.
Nope. This is a book about a guy named Herman who gets pregnant. Well, his wife gets pregnant, but she doesn’t have any of the normal symptoms. The dude gets the morning sickness, cravings and mood swings. It’s implied that he has some weird psychological disorder that makes him believe he is pregnant because he is jealous of his wife. This causes a lot of tension between them.
Sphere Books edition retitled Black Marriage
This was a really weird book. It’s not really a horror novel, but I’m not sure what genre it actually belongs too. It’s far too boring to be a thriller or a fantasy novel, but it’s also far too weird to be a straight drama. The writing is dense, and I spent a long time wondering when things were going to pick up, but there’s never any proper explanation given as to what is going on. Also, none of the characters seem as surprised by what’s happening as you’d expect them to. At no point does Herman contemplate how he will actually give birth when the time comes. That’s the first and main thing I’d worry about if there was a bun in my oven. I’d spend hours a day stretching out my hoop in preparation. There is a Psycho style surprise ending here that is pretty horrific, but that horror lasts for 2 short paragraphs. The hardback edition of the book’s cover is far more suitable for this very odd work of fiction.
W. H. Allen – 1972
Honestly, the most horrifying part of this book was how much alcohol the mother drank while pregnant.
While I’ve read a lot of horror novels from the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s, most of these have either been Stephen King novels or relatively obscure texts from authors who only published a few books. I’m actually unfamiliar with the work of most of the popular horror authors of that era. I’ve never read anything by Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, Robert McCammon, John Farris or V.C. Andrews. This is largely because those are the only books I regularly see on charity shop shelves any more, and I’m quite sure all of their work is easily available as e-books. I plan to read them all at some point, but I have been focusing on harder to find stuff because I know those author’s works will be accessible at any point.
The other horror author whose books are always available is John Saul. Like Robin Cook, I had heard that Saul’s work became painfully formulaic as time went on but that his first novel, Suffer the Children was worth a read. It also shares its title with a Napalm Death song, so I decided to give it a go.
Dell – 1977
So the Congers are a weird family with 2 little girls. (This was too close to home for me.) One of the girls stopped speaking because her father assaulted her. The other one gets possessed by the soul of one of her ancestors who was also abused by a parent. This kid tortures some other kids in a surprisingly brutal manner.
I didn’t like this book.
I don’t enjoy reading about kids getting hurt. I get that sometimes this kind of thing is used as a plot device to get the reader to feel a certain way about the bad guy, but when that happens, it usually pays off at the end when he dies horribly. This is not how Saul’s plot works. Here the suffering is the point of the book. It’s truly sadistic stuff.
Some of it’s rather unbelievable too. There’s a part where Mr. Conger tells his wife that he wanted to rape their kid and then tries to rape his wife but his dick won’t get hard. 5 minutes later, the couple are having a friendly chat. The family are cursed, but the curse is never really explained. It’s just a curse that makes people want to rape and murder their kids.
No, I didn’t like this at all. I’m probably not going to bother with any more Saul.
The Pinnacle edition of Graham Masterton’s Feast is one of the more sought after paperback horror novels. This is largely due to the awesome stepback cover art, and party due to the full page write up it received in Paperbacks From Hell. When I read about a book that contained a machete wielding dwarf, self-cannibalism and a flaming dog, I knew I had to read it. I immediately ordered a copy of the Graham Masterton Omnibus, a collection containing Ritual (the British title for Feast) and Walkers, a different Masterton novel. To this day, that edition is available for fairly cheap online. Luckily for me though, I soon thereafter found a copy of the Pinnacle edition for just a few dollars in my favourite thrift store. Both lay on my shelf for 8 years until I downloaded an ebook version recently and read that.
Pinnacle – 1988
Feast is about a restaurant critic whose son joins a cult of religious fanatics who are trying to resurrect Jesus Christ by cutting off parts of their bodies and eating them. I had totally forgotten the description of the book that made me want to read it, and I was quite surprised as how similar some of the plot elements here were to those in Brian Evenson’s Last Days.
Inside cover – This is not actually a scene from the story.
The plot is quite ridiculous. The cult gets away with what they’re doing because it contains high ranking government officials. Apparently taking children away from their parents and eating them isn’t technically illegal. I’m no law expert, but I am pretty sure that in the late 80s, parents would have had a strong case to have the police/healthcare officials intervene if their child was posing a danger to themselves by cutting off and eating their own dick. Also, the ending of the book, while satisfyingly gory, really pushes the boundaries of believability. I had just read 350 pages of ludicrous, violent horror, but having Jesus Christ make a personal appearance felt a little excessive.
At the same time, Masterton’s willingness to go all-out was quite refreshing. The last time I read a novel this crazy was probably Masterton’s contemporary William Johntstone’s Toy Cemetary. Masterton’s stories are just as mad, but they’re a little more cohesive.
WALKERS
Time Warner – 2002 (Walkers originally published 1991)
I actually read Walkers a few months ago, and I had similar feelings about how mental it was. There’s no time wasted trying to justify the premise. It’s just thrown at you and you’re expected to roll with it. In this one, a man buys an old mental hospital. The only problem is that all of the old patients of the hospital were involved in a black magic ritual that turned them immortal and forced them into the walls of the building. They can now reach out and pull people into the walls or floors, and when they do, things get messy.
The plot was actually fairly similar to Feast. Both books are about a man who is trying to get his son back from a bunch of weird loonies who are intent on a blood sacrifice. Both also include fiends that are at some point mistaken for newspapers. Walkers was ok, but I definitely liked Feast more.
I have a couple more novels by Masterton on my shelf, and I am sure I’ll get around to them at some point in the future. I actually went shopping for books this week. I haven’t done so in a long time, but I picked up some really good stuff. Let me know if I should be rushing any of these books to the top of my queue.
Life has been very busy recently. I’ve been finishing up my coursework and working on music stuff, and consequently, there’s been a few weeks that I haven’t updated this site Sorry. I’ve still been reading quite a lot, but much of what I’ve been reading doesn’t really fit in with this blog. I finished Scott Smith‘s A Simple Plan and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright during the week. Both were good books, and just as dark as anything I’ve reviewed here, but neither comes close to horror in the Nocturnal Revelries sense of the word. Here’s a novel I read a few weeks ago. While not as depressing as the 2 books I just mentioned, it at least contains a haunted house.
PS Publishing 2024 (First published 2015)
Wylding Hall is a good book, but it’s barely a horror novel. It’s about a folk rock band that goes to a remote mansion in the English countryside to write and record an album. Unfortunately, their singer runs away with a ghost. There’s a couple of creepy moments, but overall, it’s not scary. It has a few elements of gothic fiction, but the narration is a little too upbeat for it to seem creepy for long. It’s like horror-lite or sugar free horror. At the same time, I really quite enjoyed reading it. I love those old those classic album documentaries, and this feels like reading one of them. This would be a good book to read on a plane or a bus. I thought it was good fun.
I have some more straightforward horror novels coming up soon, and I recently got my hands on some ridiculous conspiracy theory books, so stay tuned.
I’ve been thinking about doing a post on Brian Evenson for quite a while. I read Last Days about 3 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s more of a thriller than a horror novel, but it’s about a cult who like to amputate their own body parts. Cool! It’s quite messed up. Although I’ve definitely forgotten most of the plot, I have not forgotten how much I enjoyed reading it.
The next thing I read by Evenson was Altmann’s Tongue, his first collection of short stories. I read this shortly after finishing Last Rites. Part of its appeal was that I had heard the contents were so extreme that it led to the author having to leave his job at a Mormon university. In truth, I remember almost nothing about this collection. I can’t say I was overly impressed, and I didn’t read anything else by Evenson for a while.
In December I read Father of Lies. I had seen this one described as a more straight forward horror novel than Evenson’s other books. It is truly fucked. It’s about a paedophile priest who is either insane or possessed by the Devil. I read it in an evening, and it almost pains me to admit that I really enjoyed it. It’s a horrid book, real feel-bad fiction. It was so unpleasant that I picked up and read another book by Evenson a few days after finishing it.
The Warren is more of a science fiction novel than the ones mentioned above, but it’s gloomy existential science fiction rather than Star Wars or the likes. This was another book that took me less than a day to read and has encouraged me to venture outside the realms of straight horror recently. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in contemplating the limitations of identity and what it means to be a person.
So Brian Evenson has also written novels for movie and video game franchises under the pen name B.K. Evenson. I presume this is about separating his “literary” work from the more commercial stuff that he writes. I have no real interest in this books about video games, but after searching my local library’s database for audiobooks by Evenson, I found Feral.
Anchor – 2017
Feral is a collaboration Evenson did with James DeMonaco, the author and director of The Purge movies. I haven’t seen any of those films, but I have a general idea of what they’re about. When you think about it, a story of violent survivalist action/adventure put through the filter of a literary author with a penchant for nastiness could turn out very well. I am happy to say that Feral pulls it off quite successfully.
A pandemic hits the world and turns all men into fast zombies that really hate women. After 3 years, only a few small armoured settlements of women are left. Allie is a scout in one of these settlements, and she spends her days looting abandoned stores for food and goods while dodging, incapacitating and sometimes kidnapping the feral male zombies. She rides around on a motorbike and carries guns and machetes and is basically a total badass. Things get worrying when she notices that there are far more males skulking around her territory than usual. To complicate matters further, one of these males doesn’t seem to be infected.
This is not the kind of horror I usually enjoy. The most similar thing I’ve read was probably Brian Keene’s The Complex, a novel that I wanted to like but struggled to enjoy. Feral was better though. I don’t know the story behind it, but given DeMonaco’s work in film, I assume this was originally an idea for a movie. I think it would work well as a movie, but I understand that the zombie film market was probably oversaturated in the years prior to 2017 when it came out. Also, I can see how the pandemic element to the book may have discouraged studios from considering the idea in the few years after it was released.
Feral is definitely more typical of the horror genre than Evenson’s other works, but it was fast paced and entertaining. I quite liked it. I don’t know if I’ll discuss them here, but I am quite certain I will read more of Evenson’s books in the future.
I have subscriptions to a few different public libraries. Most of the horror that they offer is quite new, and I generally avoid that kind of thing. In recent months, I’ve read a few very enjoyable works of modern horror, and so I’ve been a bit more open to stuff from the library. The other day, I was looking through Libby, and I saw the audiobook for a title named A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper. It seemed liked it would offer a new spin on Robert Chamber’s King in Yellow mythos, and the blurb of the book mentioned S&M, so I downloaded it.
S&S/Saga Press – 2025
Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this book at all.
It’s about a woman who isn’t finding sex with her partner satisfying. This leads to them trying more extreme forms of bondage. These attempts to spice up their sex life don’t work, and so the main character resorts to reading pages from The King in Yellow, a play that drives people insane. This works very briefly, but she overdoes it and falls victim to the King.
The plot is a pretty cool idea, but the main character was a boring, self centered, unpleasant piece of crap. Her negativity drained all tension out the book. I wasn’t able to bring myself to hate or pity her. She was just annoying, the kind of person I would avoid at all costs. I could not have cared less about what was going to happen to her. The other characters were more interesting, but their roles in the book really only served to give an insight into how much of an annoying loser the protagonist was.
There was one part where she overhears the women in her office chatting about how handsome a man is and this makes her look down on them. She’s supposed to be gay, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t be particularly interested in cute guys, but to look down on people for what they like is an asshole thing to do, especially when they’re just having a chat at work to get through the day. I’m not gay, but if I heard my gay or straight female coworkers talking about how cute a guy is, I’d be happy to join in on the chat or at least take a look to see what the fuss is about. Her response to her coworkers is, “Is he what gets you wet, or is he what you’re told to want?” This really reminded me of a lame dork I knew as a teenager who had “You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.” written on their backpack. Go back to Hot Topic, you sniveling, cringey dork.
She was also vindictive, careless about the safety of others, frequently late for work, completely humorless, frigid and sneaky. She was such a dose that I really wanted the book to be over soon after starting.
I’ve wanted to read Fred Chappell’s Dagon for years. I knew it was one of the more esteemed Lovecraftian novels and that it was written by a writer who wasn’t specifically a horror guy. I went into the book thinking that Fred Chappell was a noir fiction writer, but apparently I made that up. He was actually a poetry and literature kind of chap. Dagon confirms this. It’s definitely a bit deeper than tentacle monsters.
This book is categorized as Southern Gothic. I read some books by Faulkner and O’Connor when I was younger, and I mostly remember them being sad, sweaty, claustrophobic things. Chappell’s Dagon definitely contains those elements, but it starts off like half of August Derleth’s Lovecraftian stories: an academic inherits a farm that contains sinister and disturbing secrets. This one has bloody chains in the attic and a family of hideously ugly freaks living in a shack on the edge of the property. There’s also a pile of seemingly indecipherable documents containing references to Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth that seemingly drive the reader insane.
From here on, I’m going to discuss how the book ends, so if you haven’t read it, go and do so before continuing with this post. The book is not a masterpiece, but it was thoroughly unpleasant, and I quite enjoyed reading it.
So after the protagonist reads some of the weird letters in his house, he falls in love with a freakishly ugly young woman and murders his wife. He then spends the rest of the book drinking himself to death and getting tortured by the ugly mutant. After being held down and tattooed in front of a bunch of people, he is thrown in a hole and dies.
My immediate response on finishing the book was that I loved it. I really enjoy when horror novels end horribly. I kept thinking about this one after finishing it though, and in retrospect, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why did the main character kill his wife? They had an argument, but murdering her was a bit excessive. Why was the girl so ugly? Her face is described as fishlike, but are we to believe her ancestors hailed from Innsmouth or was she just minging? Why does the author passively let her destroy him? Who are the people that she involves in his torture? Are they in a cult? Why are the Lovecraftian deities mentioned? Nothing supernatural happens here.
As somebody who mostly reads trashy fiction, it unnerved me to have so many unanswered questions at the end of a book, but none of these issues actually bothered me when I was reading. Things generally do seem more horrific when they don’t make sense, and I think that the omission of these explanations was intentional.
The combination of Lovecraftian horror and Southern Gothic doesn’t really work. (Although it worked a Hell of a lot better here than in Lovecraft Country!) The genres are just a little too far removed from each other to mesh cohesively, but Chappell’s effort to do so was about as successful as we could realistically hope it to be. It’s not a perfect book, but I enjoyed reading it and i am still thinking about it a week later.
I’ve been hitting the fiction hard recently. I read 4 novels this week, and I wasn’t sure which to post first. There’s lots of cool stuff coming up in the next few weeks, so check back regularly!
Another year has come and gone, and I’m still here blogging about creepy books. I sometimes wonder if I’m going to run out of weird stuff to read, but as I dig deeper and deeper into the archives of the occult, the horrifying and the Fortean, that seems less and less likely. At the same time, I am always interested in book recommendations, so please reach out if you have any!
For the last few years, I’ve tried to split my posts evenly between fiction and non fiction. This year, I read more trashy novels than anything else, but many of these were by the same authors, so I grouped them. I did posts on Sidney Williams, Ray Garton, and Stephen R. George.and Whitley Strieber. I planned to do the same for John Russo and Jack D. Shackleford, but the books I read by them were so bad that I abandoned my plan. I also read The Omen and The Exorcist series and The Wickerman books.
I ended up reading quite a bit of modern horror too. I used to avoid stuff that was written in this century, but there are still some talented authors alive today. I really enjoyed the books I read by David Sodergren and John Langan.
I focused on conspiracies last year when it came to non-fiction. I did a few conspiracy texts this year, but also included some crime, some aliens, some cryptozoology and some general Fortean weirdness. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was a bizarre highlight. Also, I apologise to anyone who was deeply offended by my silly post on Fascist Yoga. Perhaps the strangest text I encountered was Martti Koski’s My Life Depends on You! In May, I was interviewed on the Bonversations podcast about some of this stuff.
I also did a few books on occultism and Satanism. I think I’m going to be a bit more picky about the grimoires I choose to review on here in the future. I went looking for something quick to review the other day, and after starting a grimoire, I did a little research on the author and discovered that he was literally mentally disabled. Still, I did enough studying of occult lore in 2025 to learn how to raise some tentacled Elder Gods from their deathly slumber. I was also finally able to read a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch. It was everything I hoped for.
February of this year marked an entire decade of Nocturnal Revelries. For several of those years, this blog was pretty much my only creative output. This summer, I started writing my own music, and I have been focusing more of my free time on that recently. This is partly why I didn’t post as frequently during the summer. Nevertheless, as the year progressed, I managed to balance my 2 hobbies. I will be taking a course in the evenings over the next few months too, so hopefully I’ll find a way to juggle that too. I have a few bizarre texts lined up for the near future, so please check in regularly.
I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. I’ve quite enjoyed the blog recently, so I’m sure I’ll be doing another one of these posts at the end of 2026 too.
Nocturnal Revelries 