Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country

Lovecraft Country is an excellent title for a novel. Initially I assumed it was going to be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but with Cthulhu, the nightmarish diary of a drug user as they passed through Innsmouth and Arkham, not being able to distinguish between hallucinations and genuine sinister apparitions. That would have been awesome, but that’s not what this is.

Lovecraft Country – Matt Ruff

**Harper – 2017 (First published 2016)**

This is a novel that features Lovecraftian entities, but the horror it focuses on is actually that of American racism. First off, let me clarify immediately, that I am not an “anti-woke” asshole who disregards things because they mention race. I understand that racism was and continues to be a huge problem, especially in America. If you disagree with that sentiment, go stick a knife up your shitter. My complaint is not that racism shouldn’t be addressed; it’s that this is not a good way to do it. To me, the appeal of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror lies in its villains’ complete apathy towards human life. In Lovecraft’s best stories, there’s no bad guy who hates people because they were mean to him. He was writing about entities who see human life as nothing more than a mistake. We are slime to the Great Old Ones. What does Cthulhu care for the tribulations of man? To write a story that focuses on race against that backdrop seems absurd. If the world is soon to repopulated with a species of humanoid beetles, why should we care about the immediate suffering of one particular group of people?

In actuality, the Lovecraftian influence on this novel seems to come more from Lovecraft’s fantasy stories than his horror. The amount of Shoggothery in here is minimal. I kept hoping that really bad stuff was going to start happening to everyone, but it didn’t. This novel did not deliver the Lovecraftian horror that I am a fan of. If you want Lovecraftian horror with a black protagonist, I would recommend Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom instead.

I hummed and hawed for a month after finishing Lovecraft Country, trying to figure out if I was going to read The Destroyer of Worlds, the book’s sequel. I eventually decided not to bother. I read that Ruff claimed that the first novel is a better book, and as I found this one quite boring, I decided not to bother with its sequel. I’m not going to bother with the TV show either.

The other thing is that the author is a white man. I’m certainly not of the opinion that an author should only write about characters of their own race, but this is very much a novel about the hardships endured by black people in the 1950s. While I thought that Ruff dealt with the topic in a sensitive manner, I am a white guy, so my opinion isn’t that important here. I guess a cast and crew of mostly black people worked on the TV adaptation though, so it’s probably ok. Personally, I wouldn’t touch this kind of thing with a 10 foot pole in my own fiction. I’d be afraid of being accused of virtue signaling or insensitivity. Ruff, at least in my opinion, manages to walk that fine line successfully, but it seems like the effort required in doing so made it much more difficult to deliver the promises made by the book’s title.

William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Legion

The first time I heard of The Exorcist was when it was unbanned in Ireland in 1998. I was about 12 years old and still very Catholic. What I heard about this film was terrifying, and when I saw it a year or two later in a friend’s house, I was shitting myself. Part of this was due to my deeply ingrained fear of the devil, but it is also a very scary film. Despite losing my faith in the power of Christ, the original film still creeps me out every time I watch it. I first read the novel that the movie was based on just a few months before starting this blog, and I never got around to posting about it. I found an audiobook version recently, and decided to give it another go.

William Peter Blatty – The Exorcist (40th Anniversary Revised Edition)

**Harper – 2011 (Originally published 1971)**

I’m assuming anyone clicking onto a blog like this knows the story of The Exorcist, but in case you don’t, this is the story of a little girl getting possessed by a demon. The film follows the novel very closely, and if you like one, I’m sure you’ll like the other. The only problem here was that I realised very closely to the end of the book that the audiobook version I was listening to was a revised version. There’s a scene where a fat ghost priest shows up to Karras’s bedroom to warn him about the exorcism that I didn’t remember. This part was cheesy and dumb, and it cheapened the original. The ending is slightly different in the revised version too. The author tries to clarify that Karras is ultimately victorious at the end. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I didn’t compare it with my paperback copy of the original book, and while it’s not a huge change, I don’t like happy endings to horror novels, and I thought this was unnecessary. If you haven’t read The Exorcist before, make sure you read the original text and not the stupid revised version from 2011.

William Peter Blatty – Legion

Directly after finishing The Exorcist, I read its sequel, Legion. A film version of this was released in 1990 as The Exorcist 3. William Peter Blatty, the author, had nothing to do with the 2nd Exorcist film, and Legion completely ignores the events in that film.

Honestly, I thought this book was trash. It follows the detective character from the first Exorcist novel as he tracks down a serial killer who is supposedly dead. The premise of the story would be fine, but every chapter gets bogged down in amateur philosophizing on the natures of evil and death. It’s painful.

Eventually it turns out that the murderer’s spirit has possessed Damien Karras, the exorcist from the first book. This makes absolutely no sense in the context of the revised version of The Exorcist, as after finishing that, the reader is expected to believe that Karras was victorious in defeating the demon. The functional premise of Legion is revealed to be that the evil spirit was victorious against Karras. This is a stupid horror novel, and while it’s pointless to get too critical here, it’s hard not to do so when the author spends half the book trying to make himself seem clever.

Well, there you go. I’ve finally done the 4 of the creepy children genre: The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Other.

Armageddon is Nigh! The Omen Novelisations

I’m not huge into novelisations. I’ve read the first 2 Halloween novels, the Jaws sequels and Teddy, but those books, or at least certain books in those series are known for being considerably different to the movie versions. I decided to check out the Omen novels as I knew that these ended up in a different timeline to the film series.

The Omen – David Seltzer

The novelisation of the first Omen film was actually written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. It has probably been 20 years since I saw the movie, but I had a pretty clear idea of what was going to happen. A baby adopted by the US ambassador to Britain is the Antichrist, and he and his followers are going to fuck up anyone who figures this out. The only way to stop him is to stab him with a set of 7 magic daggers. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t stop me from enjoying this book. It was exciting and atmospheric, and it’s in no way surprising that the movie version was so successful.

Damien Omen II – Joseph Howard

**Futura – 1990 (first published 1978)**

I haven’t seen the second movie, and after reading its novelization, I have absolutely no desire to do so. It’s basically the exact same plot as the first one, but this time Damien is a young teenager. This movie and book were clearly made to make money. There is nothing of interest here.

The Omen: The Final Conflict – Gordon McGill

**Futura – 1983 (first published 1980)**

The third book is a little different. Damien is an adult here, and he has become head of the Thorn Corporation, a huge multinational corporation. He is wealthy and powerful and about to bring about the end of the world. He gets close, but then Jesus shows up unannounced and ruins his plans. There is a scene near the end of the book when he surprises his date by anally raping her. This seems inconsequential at the time, but it’s important in the next book.

Omen IV: Armageddon 2000 – Gordon McGill

So the 4th Omen novel has nothing to do with the 4th Omen movie. It was written as a direct sequel to the 3rd movie, but it was never produced. Damien is dead in this one, but because he was only stabbed with one of the 7 daggers, the reign of the Antichrist was not prevented, and his power was passed down to his son. “His son?”, I hear you say, “but Damien didn’t have a son!” Well, this is where the anal rape from the last book comes into play. It turns out that he actually got his girlfriend anally pregnant when he came up her ass, and nine months later she shat out an evil baby. Literally. This evil bum-baby is now a teenager, and he plays with his father’s corpse in an attempt to blow up the world. He comes pretty close.

Omen V: The Abomination – Gordon McGill

The 5th book is also by McGill and was also never produced. It’s more of the same. Junior is still intent on destroying the world, but a reporter figures out what he is doing and tries to stop him. By the time I got to this book I had had enough.

With the exception of the first book, this series was repetitive garbage. All the novels are about 200 pages, and there’s so many characters that it’s hard to care about any of them. Also, given the fact that the Antichrist’s aim is to bring around the end of the world, there’s not much tension in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th book. You know the end isn’t going to come in that book, and by the time you get to the 5th, you’ll be looking forward to all of these asshole characters dying. I watched the prequel movie that came out last year, and I quite liked it, but I have no desire to go back and watch any of the other movies now.

B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space

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.

10 Years of Nocturnal Revelries

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.

I didn’t get a huge response when I started posting, but I liked the process of cataloguing my collection. Doing so made me want to expand my horizons, and pretty soon I had moved on from witchcraft to books about the spirit of Elvis and a Catholic Saint who ate her own shit. I started picking up books from Library sales about cryptids, Cabala and channelling aliens. My studies led me to a hunting lodge on a mountaintop in Ireland and a graveyard in Western Canada, both sites where the Devil has appeared.

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.

The other big change from around this time was my discovery of a treasure trove of black magic grimoires in pdf form. I try not to let myself be surprised by human stupidity, but the sheer idiocy of these instructional books of malicious magic was addictive. I’ve read grimoires containg spells that will force women to rim your ass, piss puddle magic, a ritual to impregnate a woman without having sex with her, how to summon a rape demon, sex magic with a corpse, a rapist magician named “Smelly”, Hitler’s naked mirror-magic, anti-fascist Satanic executioners and an anal vampire. An author of one of these grimoires got so mad over my post that he threatened me with legal action.

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!

Gnelfs and Azarius by Sidney Williams

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.

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.

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, The Year in Review

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.

Happy New Year!

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.

“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.