I’ve been doing a lot of non-fiction recently, so here’s a couple of novels about the Devil:
Falling Angel
Warner Books – 1986 (First published 1978)
Falling Angel is a classic. There’s at least 70 editions of the book, and it was turned into a big Hollywood movie in the 80s with Robert DeNiro and Mickey Rourke. I’ve had a copy on my bookshelf for a long time, but I only sat down to read it recently. It was great. I had seen the movie years ago, and I had an idea where it was going, but I still found the book very suspenseful and very enjoyable.
Harry Angel is a private detective who has been hired to find a missing popstar named Johnny Favourite. The guy who hired him is a rich weirdo named Louis Ciphre. Harry finds himself in a world of murder, voodoo and Satanism pretty quickly.
It’s more of a hard-boiled detective novel with supernatural elements than a straight horror novel, but that’s what makes it so great. There’s lots of suspense, and I got through it in a couple of sittings. It’s a really fun book to read. It made me realise exactly what Richard Jaccoma was going for when he wrote his werewolf novels. (The first of those books came out a year after Angel Heart, the movie version of Fallen Angel, and I doubt this was a coincidence.)
If you haven’t read Falling Angel, you should.
Angel’s Inferno
No Exit Press – 2020
More than 30 years after Falling Angel was published, Hjortsberg started work on a sequel. He finished Angel’s Inferno shortly before he died in 2017. It wasn’t published until 2020.
It wasn’t great. It starts where the last book left off, and the main character is now on the run. He heads to Paris and buys a lot of expensive clothes and eats some fancy food while plotting revenge. The characters and their interactions are enjoyable enough, but the suspense and mystery of the first book is almost entirely absent. The plot is modelled on that of the first book too, but the twist ending here was just a bit too ridiculous for my taste. This book was far longer too. It wasn’t absolutely horrible to read, but it pales in comparison to Falling Angel. I’m glad I didn’t spend 40+ years waiting in anticipation for this.
When I saw Altered States in my early 20s, I was blown away. It was a big budget Hollywood movie about a scientist who took psychadelics until he turned into a monkey. I also realised it was the source of the “my heart is being touched by Christ” sample from that Ministry song and the cover of Godflesh’s first album. Cool!
A friend told me that the movie had been based on a real set of experiments that had been performed in the 60s, but I wasn’t sure of what these experiments actually entailed. I hadn’t thought about this for years, but I was recently reading a book by Robert Anton Wilson that mentioned John C. Lily and his sensory deprivation tank experiments, and I realised these were what Altered States was based on. John C. Lily did write some books on his experiments, but I think they focus on using the tanks to speak to dolphins as opposed to turning into an ape, so I decided to read the horror novel instead.
It’s at least 15 years since I saw the movie, but as far as I can remember, the book is pretty close to the film. I read that there was conflict between the author, Paddy Chayefsky, and Ken Russell, the director, on the set of the movie. Chayefsky got so mad that he had his names removed from the credits of the movie.
The book is pretty good. The main character is such a dickhead that I was rooting for him to die the whole way through. The author uses a lot of technical jargon for effect, but all the multisyllabic words in the dictionary don’t change the fact that this is a book about a man who gets so high that he turns into a giant slug. I was going to write a more detailed plot synopsis, but there’s really no need.
The visuals from the movie make it a more memorable version. If you’ve seen that and really enjoyed it, give the book a go.
One night, when I was 11 or 12 years old, my parents left me downstairs in front of the TV. I didn’t concern myself with what they were doing because I had the opportunity to potentially see some boobs on the tv. I switched on to MTV, and to my great delight, I found a show that was basically a compilation of videos that MTV wouldn’t play during the day. I remember it had Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin and that black and white, sexy Wicked Game video. This was incredible. This was the best stuff I had ever seen. The next video that came on was for a song called “Devoured by Vermin” by a band named Cannibal Corpse. I’m assuming most of the people who read my blog what death metal is, but as a child growing up in 1990s Ireland, I did not. The “heaviest” music I had ever heard at that point had probably been the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something similar. This video was the most disgusting, depraved thing I had ever seen. It didn’t make sense to me. Why would a person make those noises? This wasn’t singing! This wasn’t music! This was evil. This was sick. I hated it. I remember going out with my friends the next day and telling all about it.
too much for 12 year old me
A few years later, I started getting interested in classic rock. Then I moved on and got some White Zombie and Korn cds. I liked that stuff, but I kept thinking back to that Cannibal Corpse song I had heard. My musical tastes were getting heavier, but I would never listen to that crap. It was just too much.
Then I got the internet. I spent about a month downloading the video for Devoured by Vermin off of Kazaa. I showed it to one of my best friends, and he was repulsed. I showed it to my cousin. She hated it. Their response was exactly what mine had been. Seeing this, I started to enjoy it. Part of it was seeing how people reacted, but another part of it was googling the band and reading their lyrics. Good grief! I very quickly became a fan of death metal.
Ok, but this is a book blog, why am I harping on about this music video?
Well, recently, I read James Herbert’s The Rats, a super influential horror novel from 1974 about a bunch of rats that attack London and start eating people. It only took a couple of chapters to realise that this book was the inspiration for the death metal song that got me hooked.
Ruthless gnawing vermin, feed Cleaning off my bones while I breathe Stenching greasy rodents, swarm My body is losing its form
– Cannibal Corpse
While I can’t find anything online stating that the book was the inspiration for these lyrics, it is well known that Alex Webster, bassist and lyricist for the band is a huge horror fan, and the words to the song could be describing several of the scenes in this infamous book.
The Rats
Signet – 1975 (First published 1974)
Like the song it inspired, this book is not subtle. It’s extremely violent to the point. I had read Herbert’s The Fog before, and while I enjoyed parts of it, I felt it dragged a little bit. The Rats is less than 200 pages, and they’re all good. There’s no surprises with this book. It’s exactly what you think it’s going to be. Go read it if you haven’t already.
Lair
New American Library – 1979
Lair is a very predictable sequel. It’s 4 years after the first rat attack, and the rats have migrated to a nature reserve outside of London. None of the characters from the first book appear except for the rats. It’s so derivative of the first novel that I’d call it pointless if it didn’t contain the scene in which a priest is seen vomiting into an open grave where a bunch of mutant rats are eating the corpse of an old woman. Total redemption! While I definitely enjoyed Lair, it’s easily the worst book in the series.
Domain
New English Library – 1996 (First published 1983)
Domain is a much more ambitious book than its predecessors. Not only are the rats back, but 5 nuclear bombs have also fallen on London for totally separate reasons. This is a post apocalyptic disaster novel where the protagonists have to be as wary of other humans as they do with the hideous, mutated, blood thirsty rodents that are trying to eat everything. This is highly enjoyable trash. I read these books in quick succession, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this one.
The City
Pan Books – 1994
The final entry in the series is a comic book called The City. I really enjoyed it, but it feels more like a separate work that was inspired by the trilogy of novels rather than a continuation of the story. The rats here are no longer just eating the humans; they have now become our masters. It’s horrendously bleak, and the art is cool. Definitely read this one if you get a chance.
This series, particularly the first book, is both infamous and influential in the field of horror literature, so I don’t feel pressed to say too much more about it. I’ve mentioned a few times when reading other horror novels about killer animals that I assumed they were rip-offs of Herbert’s work. I can now confirm that most the “animal attacks” books by John Halkin, Simon Ian Childer, Harry Adam Knight, David Anne and Nick Sharman that I have read are all knock-offs of The Rats. I feel like I’ve read a lot of these silly animal books in the last few years, and I’m planning on giving this particular genre a break for a while. It took me about 4 years to get around to The Rats after finishing Herbert’s The Fog, but I don’t think I’ll wait that long before returning to his work. I had a lot of fun reading these books.
Happy Saint Patrick’s day. I’ve read a few horror novels set in Ireland over the years, but I’ve been saving Shaun Hutson’s Renegades for a special occasion. I bought this book a few years ago because the back of it mentioned Irish terrorism, ultra violence and Gilles de Rais. I was looking for something to read the other day when I took it down for another glance. Again I was intrigued by the blurb on the back, but when I saw the author’s portrait on the inside I started to read immediately. Holy shit, look at that bad-ass!
A dissident group of terrorists shoot up a political meeting in Belfast with the aim of stopping peace talks. They are being paid to do so by an English arms dealer who has been profiting from the conflict. Sean Doyle, an English counter terrorism operative with a very Irish name is sent in to Ireland to kill the bad guys.
This would be a fairly straightforward mission only the arms dealer has also recently come into possession of an evil stained glass window inhabited by an evil demon summoned by Gilles de Rais.
There is a supernatural element here, but this is 95% a crime novel. There’s occasional scary bits, but apart from the last few chapters, these ALL turn out to be “oh it was just a dream” sequences. This was written by the author of Chainsaw Terror though, so the whole book is ludicrously violent. Every bullet wound, and there are lots of them, is described in detail.
This book, which is mostly set in Ireland, was written by an English author in the early 90s. I was a little apprehensive starting out. I certainly don’t want to condone everything that the IRA did during the troubles, but let’s remember that they were fighting a foreign force that had stolen their land and oppressed their people. Fortunately, Hutson doesn’t take sides. Everyone is a piece of shit in this book, but it’s the Brits causing all the trouble here.
There’s a few scenes where the Gardai (Irish police) show up and pull their guns on the bad guys. In reality, regular Irish police officers have never had guns.
The protagonist, Doyle, is an unrepentant bad-ass. He quotes heavy metal lyrics, bangs hot babes, kills anything he doesn’t like and generally doesn’t give a fuck. He has long hair, and he’s covered in scars. He’s supposedly based on the author. Scroll up and take another look at that cool motherfucker. Hell yeah! Hutson wrote a few other novels featuring sean Doyle as a protagonist, but I’m not going to seek them out. (I felt similar about his sequel to Spawn.) I don’t think the other Sean Doyle books have any supernatural elements.
Looking back, the supernatural element in Renegades is actually pretty unnecessary to the plot. The lore of Gilles de Rais is briefly summarized, but the demon that appears in this book is a bog standard evil spirit. It kills, eats or possesses everyone in sight. I’m glad it was there though. (If you like trashy novels about Gilles de Rais, I recommend Philip José Farmer’s Image of the Beast.)
I’ve had this one for ages, but a few years ago I read another book by the author that wasn’t very good, and I assumed this would be pretty bad too. When it comes to “animals attack” horror, there comes a point where you know what to expect.
Nothing about this book was unexpected. It was like that book about killer bunnies I read a few months ago except this one was about killer cats, and it didn’t have a plot twist. The Cats is actually very, very similar to any of the three books in John Halkin’s Squelch trilogy. I haven’t read it yet, but I assume all of those books are basically rip-offs of James Herbert‘s The Rats. I’m not just saying that because of the line on the cover of The Cats either. There’s something very formulaic and British about all of these books, and The Rats predates them all. I’ve been holding off on that one because it’s part of a trilogy. I’ll get to it someday.
A science experiment gone wrong leads to an army of cats attacking London and killing everyone in sight. My favourite part was when the president of the USA comes over to England and pours a bottle of acid down a cat’s throat. This book is truly ridiculous. It’s not particularly bad or hard to read, but it’s also not a good book at all.
The above didn’t seem sufficient for a post of its own, so I read another book about killer pussies.
Berton Roueché’s Feral.
Pocket Books – 1975 (First published 1974)
A young couple moves into an old house in a remote neighbourhood on Long Island, but their peace is shattered when they discover that the woods behind their new home is filled with angry, feral cats with a taste for blood. Imagine Jaws but with cats instead of a shark.
It’s also very similar to The Pack by David Fisher. It’s a warning to summer people not to abandon their house pets after their vacation.
The ending turns into a bloodbath, but it never gets as silly as Sharman’s The Cats. Once the humans start shooting, the kitties never stand a chance. There’s fewer characters in here too, and they’re far more believable. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel about evil puddy tats, but Feral is well written and so short that I really enjoyed it.
I saw that there was a retitled edition of Feral that came out a year after it was first released that was also named The Cats. Herbert’s The Rats was released at the same time as Feral, and it seems that somebody decided to give Feral‘s rerelease a similar name to capitalise on the other book’s success. I haven’t yet read The Rats, but I doubt that Feral is very similar. Either way, it seems like a sign that both of this week’s books tried to ride the coattails of Herbert’s infamous novel. I better take a look at those rat novels soon. I’m sure there’s more horror novels about cats out there, but I’m in no rush to read any more. Cats make my hands itchy.
John Tracker is hired to demolish his estranged family’s seemingly abandoned mansion. Before tearing it down, he pays a visit and realises it’s still inhabited. Oh, and the house is filled with mazes and booby traps designed to catch the Devil. After a while in the house, it becomes apparent that those traps may have fulfilled their purpose. The Well feels a bit like a Kafka writing a gothic version of Home Alone. The writing is good enough to anchor the story in coherency, but the house of the Trackers is two steps removed from reality. The Well is nightmarish in the most literal sense. It reads just like a bad dream.
Cover detail
It’s a fairly interesting idea for a book, and there were chilling passages and ideas, but the characters were too boring for this to be a great novel. The main guy comes from a weirdo family, but his only character traits are being strong and successful. These aren’t really endearing qualities. I would have liked him a lot more if he was a food vendor who was on the run for rescuing a kidnapping victim from a drug cartel. Give him a speech impediment or a gimpy leg or something… The basic story wouldn’t require huge changes for a change like this, and it might make the reader actually give a damn about the protagonist’s fate.
This isn’t a long book, but it feels dense. I could only manage a few pages before bed each night. A lot of the chapters start with a few paragraphs about dead members of the Tracker family. These were interesting as a literary technique, but didn’t add much to the main narrative. I definitely got the sense that Cady was a capable writer, but I felt like he would have been better off making his characters likeable than trying to be Faulkner. The Well comes close to being really, really good, but it’s exactly how close it comes to greatness that makes it feel so underwhelming. Still though, it’s a lot better than some of the crap I’ve had on here.
I’ve slowly made my way through 3 David Case books over the last 2 years. I read his novel, The Third Grave, in a day, but then I started on his short stories, and they were so good that I decided to pace myself. Pretty much everything I read by him was extremely enjoyable. His horror is weird, dark and scary, but it’s also well written. I actually don’t have much to say about Case’s books other than that I loved them. This post is more a collection of notes for my own personal reference rather than a detailed review. Read all of these books if you get the chance.
Arkham House – 1981
The Third Grave
The Third Grave had been on my to-read list for a long time when I got around to it. It was a very entertaining mystery about a man’s quest for immortality. It has zombies and mummies. It starts off in Egypt, but most of the story takes place in a small village in England. There’s some fairly predictable turns, but I enjoyed it overall. This originally came out on Arkham House, but it was recently republished by Valancourt Books.
Valancourt also put out 2 collections of Case’s short stories. The stories in The Cell are linked by a werewolf theme. They’re not strictly about werewolves, but there are wolves or dangerous wolf-like creatures in all of them. I was really impressed with the standard of writing in this collection. Every story was enjoyable.
Valancourt – 2015
The Cell & other Transmorphic Tales
The Cell This a werewolf story told in first person. The narrator has a cell in the downstairs of his house where locks himself on full moons. (I think I read a similar story by Elizabeth Massie.) The narrator is such a piece of trash, so nasty about his wife and women. LOL. Excellent character development. Very Poe-ish in ways. I loved this story.
Strange Roots Quirky story about a scientist obsessed with researching werewolf DNA. Well crafted, humourous story.
Amoung the Wolves Awesome story about a series of horrible murders. Eugenics murderer who kills after getting caught in a bear trap aand axing off own leg to escape from wolves. Horrid but good.
Cross to Bear Delivery to missionary in Africa who doesn’t listen to the natives’ warnings about jaguar-men
The Hunter A novella about 2 old hunting friends who get involved in a murder mystery in the English country side. Pretty good.
Valancourt – 2015
Fengriffen & other Gothic Tales
Fengriffen is a collection of Case’s gothic stories. Again, I really enjoyed this book.
Fengriffen Very gothic story about a cursed manor. The rich guy is a real piece of trash. Excellent. I love this stuff.
Anachrona Short story about some lads meeting a robot. Not a painful read or anything, but quite different to the other stories here.
Foreign Bride Another very gothicy story about a rich man and his female companions.
Dead End This one is pretty long, but very enjoyable. A lad who works in a museum goes on a trip to South America to research some weird creature sighting. Meets a famous scientist over there who is clearly up to something shady. Far more similar to the stories in the other collection, but has a element of genetic engineering that makes it Frankensteiny and therefore gothic?
The above collections were put out by Valancourt in 2015. Collections with similar titles were released in the past, but they contain different stories. The 1969 collection called The Cell: Three Talesof Horror contains ‘The Cell’, ‘The Hunter’, and ‘Dead End’. The 1971 collection called Fengriffen and other Stories contains ‘Fengriffen’, ‘Strange Roots’, and ‘Among the Wolves’. I’d recommend reading the Valancourt versions just because they contain all of these stories and more. I have my eye on a few other books by Case that I’ll hopefully get around to in the future.
I bought this at a thrift store a long ago, and it wasn’t until after that I saw that Valancourt Books had reissued it in 2014. That fact together with the old cover art made it seem promising. Soon after picking it up, I read Stephen King shit-talking Frank De Felitta in Danse Macabre, and I knew that this isn’t Frank’s most popular book, so I left it on the backburner for a few years. In the meantime I got a copy of Valancourt’s audiobook version, and just before Christmas I decided I needed to read a book about Satan to get me through the holidays.
This is a story about a church that has been taken over by the Devil. Whenever a priest enters the church, the Devil enters the priest and makes him do horrible things. I was quite surprised by the level of depraved blasphemy featured in here. There’s all kinds of necrophilia and bestiality. There’s even a cool bit where two gay goats come into the church and sodomise each other on the altar. It’s a bit like the artwork on war metal records.
Unfortunately, a Jesuit priest comes to exorcise the church. He allows 2 Harvard parapsychologists to monitor the exorcism. The Devil shows up and starts to fuck with them, but eventually the Pope shows up and saves the day.
Ok, technically, I have just spoiled the ending for you, but it doesn’t seem to me that anything could make that ending any worse. The fucking Pope? The only good thing about the book is the unholy depravity it contains, and de Felitta has to go and ruin that by giving it a “Catholicism saves the day” ending. This would have been such a satisfying book if the Pope had shown up at the end only to become possessed by Satan.
A lot of the novel is taken up with the boring relationship between the parapsychologists. This part sucked. Neither of them are interesting. I want satanic homogoats defiling the house of Christ, not two boring dweebs who get turned on by looking under each other’s chakras.
Overall, this book was quite bad. There’s a few entertaining passages, but it’s mostly quite boring. It took me ages to finish it.
Valancourt – 2014
Now, I mentioned above that I had an audiobook version of the book. Unfortunately this was one of the worst audiobook experiences I have ever had, and I had to get through most of it with the physical book. The narrator, for some reason only known to himself, chose to give the Jesuit character a “Scottish” accent despite the fact that the character is from Boston. This is weird, but it’s made excruciating by the fact that the narrator is not capable of speaking with a Scottish accent. He sounds like an Iranian pirate with a mouthful of kiwis pretending to be Shrek. Honestly, it’s shocking how poor it is. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say half the time. There’s an Italian character in here too, and that accent was almost identical. The narrator seems to be capable of two voices: regular and foreign. Bizarrely, the Pope character doesn’t get an accent even though it is explicitly stated that he is Sicilian. The only reason I think it was a Scottish accent that this guy was putting on is that the character’s name is Eamon Malcom. I am assuming the narrator recognised Malcolm as a Scottish name from reading Macbeth in school. Eamon is an Irish name, but if I thought for one second that even a single person in the world thought that I sounded like this twat narrator, I’d kill myself.
Seriously, if you’re going to be a narrator, don’t put on accents unless you can actually do them properly. Even then, don’t do them. It’s the equivalent of a cashier at a supermarket attempting to juggle your groceries while scanning them. It probably won’t work, and even if it does, it won’t make anything better. Just do your job and read the fucking book properly.
Frank de Felitta’s most popular book is Audrey Rose. (This is made apparent by the fact that that title takes up as much space the cover of Golgotha Falls as its own title.) I won’t say I’ll never read it, but I have no desire to do so at the moment. He has another one called The Entity that sounds a bit more interesting. Maybe someday.
I’ve had a pretty good 2023, but it was an odd year for this blog. In March, Google updated its algorithm and decimated the amount of traffic this site sees. This is particularly disappointing as I had more fun with this blog in 2023 than I’ve had for ages. After a few years of largely focusing on fiction, I forced myself to alternate between fiction and non-fiction on a weekly basis. This led me to some very weird books indeed. (All of the following images are links to the respective blog posts.)
I did a trilogy of posts on bizarre books about bizarre cryptids. How I wish I could ring in the New Year with Pigman, Goatman and Lizardman.
I also read a lot of true crime books this year. I don’t know why I hadn’t paid more attention to this genre earlier. Nearly all of the crime books I read had an occult/satanic/conspiracy angle to them. Some of these books were very upsetting to read, but they definitely renewed my interest in blogging. It’s terrifying how frequently texts, characters and authors I have covered here popped up in these books.
I think I read less than 15 non-fiction books during 2021 and 2022, so it was refreshing to spend so much time learning about the real world this year. I read plenty of fiction too, and most of it was of the Paperbacks from Hell variety. Some of these books were good. Others, especially Bradley Snow’s Andy, were truly awful.
My annual blog traffic. The beginning of the end?
It has been a bummer to see my traffic dropping. I blame google for this, but I have also been cutting down on social media in the last few years, and that may have made things worse too. Twitter was the only site I was still using last year, but Elon Musk is a piece of dog’s filth, so I only use twitter to link my weekly post at this point. (Even that is almost useless.) I guess we’re living in the era of the podcast now. I’d move on and try that, but I’d have nobody to do it with. I put a lot of work into this blog, and although it’s ultimately for my own enjoyment, it’s nice to get a bit of recognition now and then. Please share this website with anyone you know who would be interested, and comment or email me if you have suggestions.
Here are some more from this year:
Another thing I’ve noticed this year is an increase in requests from authors for me to read their novels. This always amuses me. Have these stupid bastards ever looked through the blog? I rarely read new books, and I trash 95% of the books I review. Keep your shitty steampunk zombie novel to yourself, you sad virgins. Also, speaking of bad amateur fiction, I don’t think many people got around to reading the short story I put out this year.
I’ll end this the same way I do every year. I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. You can also check out my index page for individual links to the 500+ books I have reviewed here so far. Also, check back soon. I have some good stuff coming up.
Aside from Ken Rayner Johnson’s The Cheshire Cat, Demon is the only horror novel set in Wales that I can remember reading. Aside from that, there is nothing noteworthy about this book.
An ancient evil escapes from a Welsh mountainside after a spot of bad weather and proceeds to possess the village idiot. The moron is granted power over the weather, and he uses it to kill a local vicar and a male stripper. An English engineer who has recently moved to town has to try to defeat this evil before it kills his dog.
This is a very silly premise for a book, but it could have been entertaining if the author had made it ridiculously violent or something. He didn’t though. The writing isn’t particularly painful, but it’s nothing special either. The most interesting character, the vicar’s repulsive yet sexy sister, never reaches her potential. The male stripper was an interesting addition, but I would have liked a bit more detail. I feel like this book would have been far better if it was written by Edward Lee.
Demon was not the worst book I’ve ever read, but I can’t say anything about it was particularly good. Ivor Watkins wrote another horror novel called The Blood Snarl. It’s 100 pages longer than Demon though, and I’ve read that it’s a bit long-winded. I doubt I’ll ever read it.
Nocturnal Revelries 