I remember seeing the cover of this book a few years ago and being intrigued. It looked like the kind of thing I’d enjoy reading. Last December I decided that I’d give it a go, but when searching for a copy I read a couple of reviews that described it as unbearably bleak and depressing. I wasn’t exactly having a holly jolly Christmas, so I decided to postpone reading anything that might make me feel any worse. A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing my local library when I found a copy of Negative Space sitting on the bottom of a shelf. I took it home and spent the weekend with it.
So yeah, this is about a town where the local teenagers are all killing themselves. There are three narrators who weave the narrative of the final months of their friend Tyler, a particularly deranged youth. Most of these teens are fucking each other and getting fucked up on whorl. Whorl is a hallucinogenic that seems to have bizarre mystical qualities.
One of the characters is trans, but their transition is never actually addressed, and the reader is left to figure out that Lou and Lu are the same person. This goes with the quasi-philosophical element of the book that questions stuff like existence, identity and relationships. I think this is where a lot of the horror of the book is supposed to lie. I can imagine this being a real bummer to a person who didn’t already have a dim view of existence. There is an actual supernatural element to what’s going on, but it’s really not the scary part.
There are quite a few graphic depictions of self harm. I’d definitely avoid this book if that might upset you. In truth I was a little surprised at my own capacity to take it in. This is horrendous bloody stuff, but it’s happening to characters with more depth than the victims of most gory splatterpunk.
Overall, I was entertained by Negative Space. It is by no means a pleasant book, but reading it didn’t ruin my weekend. I know that B.R. Yeager has written a couple of other books. Maybe I will read them in the future.
After finishing secondary school, I did a degree in English literature, but I really only developed an interest in reading after finishing university. I spent a while reading important works of literature and then started on my area of interest, horror. Once I got my first full time office job and achieved some stability, I started collecting second hand copies of the classics of this genre. After reading a few Dennis Wheatley novels, I began collecting grimoires and books about witchcraft. The only thing cooler than having a bookshelf about Satanic sorcerers was to have the bookshelf of a Satanic sorcerer. I liked the idea of scaring any guests to my apartment with my nefarious collection of sinister tomes. The only problem was that I never really had guests over, so I decided to post my collection online instead. I made my first post on Nocturnal Revelries on February 27th, 2015.
After a few years, I realised that there was no way I could ever collect (or afford) all of the books I wanted to read, but I discovered that many of these books are available online. I was immediately able to access books about Satanic communists, death cults and sex magicians. At the same time, I discovered that some books are so rare that the internet doesn’t even know about them. I was able to procure one of the only known copies of Aristotle Levi’s mysterious and extremely elusive occult porno, Spawn of the Devil. (My taste for Satanic porn was dampened soon thereafter when I got my hands on a copy of Raped by the Devil.)
I don’t think I would have read these if not for the internet.
In 2018, 2 important things happened for this blog. The first was getting my hands on a copy of Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s Paperbacks from Hell. My blog was no stranger to paperback horror fiction, but the release of this book set me on the trail of countless trashy horror novels that belonged on this website. (The downside was that it sent countless others after these same books, and now many are ludicrously unaffordable.) I was delighted to play a small part in getting one of these books, Garrett Boatman’s Stage Fright, republished. Fortunately for me, I have been able to get my hands on many of the rarest of the Paperbacks from Hell without paying hundreds of dollars.
I found it really hard to pick which books to feature here.
I suppose this is a bit of an odd book blog. I don’t expect to enjoy many of the books that I read, and the most entertaining posts on here are probably on books that are objectively bad. Instead of listing the best books I have read, I generally prefer to highlight the weirdest, most messed up books I have come across:
None of these were good, but all were entertaining.
Sometimes I think that this blog lacks focus. I cover classic horror fiction, trashy horror fiction, books about aliens, conspiracies, murderers, the paranormal and more. I assume that most people who have an interest in any of these fields will probably have a mild curiosity about the others. Going back over the archives for this post was quite entertaining for me. There’s several books on here that I had completely forgotten about. (I don’t know what the exact count is now, but I know it’s approaching 700.) Still, I am always interested in book recommendations.
I don’t understand why you’d want to read anything else.
10 years is a long time, and my life is very different to how it was when I started this blog. Now I’m a respectable member of society. I have a driver’s license, a job, a family and a mortgage. I have to keep my dark passions under wraps for most of the day, putting up a front of normalcy and rationality, but every night, I still make time to read something eldritch, something hideous, something deviant or something Satanic. Long may my dark Nocturnal Revelries continue!
Way back in May 2024, I read Sidney William’s Gnelfs. First published in 1991, this book had recently been republished with its original artwork, and having seen something about this I decided to give it a read.
Pinnacle – 1991
It’s basically about a little girl whose favourite kids TV show characters come to life and start killing people. This is a pretty neat idea for a horror novel, but I found the book a little dull. It has been a while since I read it, and I have definitely forgotten much of the specifics, but the reason it took so long for me to get around to writing about this book was because I didn’t have much to say about it. I remember the ending going off on a ridiculous tangent that made the whole thing seem muddled. It felt like the author was aiming too high. When I’m reading a book about malicious goblins, I want violence and nastiness, not a grand battle between good and evil. Williams put his protagonists into the underworld instead of putting the gnelfs into a blender.
I decided to read another book by Williams to both give him a second chance and to make sure I’d have enough to say to warrant a blog post. I didn’t have high hopes though, and I put off reading another book by him for 7 months.
PInnacle – 1989
Azarius is William’s first novel, and this one was even more boring than Gnelfs. It’s about a demon who is possessing people and getting them to hurt each other. I wanted to like this, I really did, but it’s bloated and slow. It’s also about how demons are bad and how faith in Christ can save you. No thanks.
At least 100 pages could have been cut from both of these books, and the boring romances between the characters should have been replaced with graphic violence and slimy things. Williams wrote a few other horror novels set in the same town as these two. It’ll probably be a while before I get around to them.
I am currently between books. Please give me recommendations in the comments or in my email. Thanks!
2024 is almost over, and in truth, it was a pretty bad year for this website. Google changed the way it searches, and I’ve seen another big drop in traffic here. I’ve also mostly abandoned social media. I know I should be staying up to date with that kind of stuff, but I’m too busy. I’ve been taking courses for my job and my family life is hectic at the moment. I’m still getting through a book a week, but I’ve only been able to do so by listening to audiobooks at double speed while I am doing the dishes at night.
When I started this blog, I was in my twenties, and I was working at a radio station for 3-4 hours a day. I was able to spend hours studying arcane lore in the library on my days off. Now, I am an adult with a real job and a driver’s license. My life is good, and I have no regrets, but at this point I’m lucky if I can sneak in a chapter from my devil books when my kids are in swimming lessons.
I’ve always done a mix of fiction and non-fiction on this blog, but there were a couple of years (2020-2021) when I focused mostly on horror novels. I tried to rectify that last year aiming for a 50-50 split, and this year I actually did more posts on non-fiction. Many of these were on conspiracy theories.
I got really into conspiracy stuff at the beginning of the year. I had steered away from that field for a few years, but the time was right to return. I think James Shelby Downard’s book probably pushed me over the edge. I only realised while writing this post that I planned a post about his essays too. I did the reading, but apparently never got around to writing about it. Maybe I’ll return to that soon. It’s truly mad stuff. Obviously, I did some books about aliens too. Most of these have a conspiracy edge to them too:
Last year, I started reading true crime, and I read a few more books from that genre (mostly on the Zodiac Killer).
I don’t to buy many old paperback horror novels anymore, but I read a fair few of them this year. I still have quite a few on the shelf left to read, thank goodness. I think The Rats may have been my favourite.
Also, I am a powerful magician, so I read a few grimoires. (I didn’t include the one on using black magic to get a rim job below because the cover would make this post look like garbage.)
There were a few books that don’t really fit in the above categories else. Some of these were great. I absolutely loved reading Robert Westall’s stories and everything by David Case.
The end of February will mark a decade of this blog. I made my 500th post a few weeks ago, and I’ve covered more books than I care to count at this point. I’m not sure how much longer it will last to be honest. One of the reasons I haven’t allowed the decline in traffic to end this site is the fact that aside from reading creepy books I genuinely don’t know what else to do with my free time. Any recommendations, please send them my way! Anyways, if you want to take a scroll through memory lane, I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
I read Jack MacLane’s Blood Dreams this week. It’s pretty much exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect from its awesome cover. This is a pretty standard “Paperback from Hell“.
Larry, a 10 year old boy who has premonitions of other people’s (bloody) deaths, moves to a new town and forms a psychic link with Hubert, the local sadistic murderer. Hubert isn’t happy about this and decides to solve the problem in the only way he knows.
There’s a lot of soft drinks being drank in here, and at one point the killer is seen reading Joe Lansdale’s The Drive-In, but other than that, there was nothing particularly surprising about this book. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it though. I finished it over a few days, and while it’s not exactly a masterwork of fiction, I was decently entertained.
This isn’t the book I intended to post about this week. I’m reading an extremely bizarre book about Satanism that is taking me a long time to finish. Hopefully I’ll get a bit of time over Christmas to finish that one off.
I didn’t think I was going to get a post out today, but I managed to abandon my family and read this morning, and I’ve just finished Michael McDowell’s The Elementals. I’ve wanted to read something by Michael McDowell for years, and this didn’t disappoint.
Avon – 1981
This is very much a haunted house novel, and while that’s not my favourite genre, it can be very enjoyable when done right. McDowell gets the right mix of characterization, suspense and downright nastiness here.
A rich family own three houses on a remote, private beach. One of these houses has something really bad in it. Everyone knows to stay away from it, but when India, the youngest member of the family pays her first visit, she has to go and take a peek inside. The atmosphere builds and builds, and the ending has everything that you could possibly hope for.
If this was 3 years ago, I would have waited until I had read 3 or 4 of McDowell’s novels to post about him, and while I do intend to read more of his books, I just don’t have the time to read multiple books a week anymore. There’s only a week left until Christmas holidays, so hopefully I’ll be able to read more then.
I don’t read a lot of recent horror, but somehow I got the idea that Nick Cutter’s The Troop would be worth reading. I got an audiobook version from my local library, and spent a week listening to this as I was lying in bed. I enjoyed it immensely.
Gallery Books – 2014
A troop of boy scouts is on a camping trip on a remote Canadian island. Unfortunately for them, a man with a minging, extremely contagious worm parasite ends up on the same island and ruins their trip.
I’ve read plenty of books that exist for the sole sake of grossing the reader out. A lot of splatterpunk stuff tries so hard to be disgusting that it completely neglects the elements of suspense and character. The Troop left me feeling nauseous, but it’s also a very enjoyable story. I’ve seen some criticism directed at the fact that the characters are all stock characters (the nerd, the jock, the troubled youth, the nice guy and the weirdo), and while this is a fair criticism, the scouts do have enough depth to make the reader care about them. The novel is partly epistolary, and the chapters are interspersed with newspaper documents and excerpts from a court case. I thought this worked really well in creating tension and setting the tone.
This novel is disgusting body horror done properly. Seriously, one scene (the bit with the monkey) literally made me sit up in bed because I thought I was going to vomit. The Troop is gross and entertaining. I had a great time reading it.
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.
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.
Zebra – 1990 (First published 1979)
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.
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.
Nocturnal Revelries 