Hell on Earth: Golgotha Falls by Frank De Felitta

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.

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.

2023, The Year in Review

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.

I sincerely wish you all a happy New Year!

Ivor Watkins’ Demon

**Future – 1994 (First published 1983)**

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.

Melanie Tem’s Prodigal and Blood Moon

Here’s Melanie Tem’s first 2 novels.

Prodigal

I was expecting more from this book than what I got.

Lucy’s brother has disappeared, but something that may be his ghost keeps showing up at her house and attacking Lucy and her mom. Her brother was troubled, and he’d been assigned a social worker before disappearing. A few months later, Lucy’s older sister starts acting up and seeing the same social worker. She goes missing too, but Lucy occasionally finds new messages from her in her diary.

Read no further if you want to avoid spoilers.

Now it’s Lucy’s turn to start misbehaving. She gets assigned the same social worker. It turns out he’s a fat vampire paedophile/balloon who literally feeds on children’s misery. He doesn’t kill the kids completely though. Even after Lucy’s brother’s corpse is buried, part of him is still alive enough to crawl into his mother’s pussy. Is this not making sense to you? It didn’t make any to me either.

By the time I got to the end of this book i was very confused.

Blood Moon

A woman adopts a kid who believes he can move stuff with his mind. Then she gets pregnant. Her dad is a jerk.

This book was a boring pile of shit. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Nothing interesting or scary happens. None of the characters were likeable, and the supernatural element that’s hinted at might just be figment of the characters’ imagination. Pure crap.

Prodigal was Tem’s first novel, and it was released under the “cool” Dell Abyss line. Her third novel, Wilding, was also put out by Dell. Blood Moon came between these 2 books, and it was released by The Women’s Press, a feminist publishing company from England. I’m all for feminist horror, but this is barely a horror novel, and I don’t know if it’s really a feminist novel either. The male characters are all chodes. Is that enough?

Honestly, I wanted to like these books, but I was very disappointed. Prodigal had some weird bits, but Blood Moon was downright unenjoyable. Tem’s writing isn’t horrible, but these novels just didn’t do it for me. This might have something to do with the fact that both books are about abused, at-risk children, one of the topics I least want to read about during my free time. Maybe I’ll give this author’s short fiction a go in the future.

Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World

I had an afternoon to myself a few weeks ago, and I decided to spend it doing housework. I need an audiobook for that kind of thing, so I went to my local library’s app and browsed through the horror section. It was 85% Stephen King and Dean Koontz with 5-6 other books. I had seen the cover of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World online a few times, but I had no idea what it was about. I decided to give it a go.

I finished the audiobook that evening. I really enjoyed it.

A family of 3 are vacationing in a cabin in the woods. 4 strangers come to their house and give them a choice; either they pick a member of their family to sacrifice or the world will end. This is a horrible, miserable book that can only end a few ways, and none of them are happy.

That’s the set up. It’s straightforward and horrible, and it makes for a tense read.

There’s little hints at cosmic/supernatural creepiness, but this is very much a psychological horror novel. You expect to be given an explanation as to how and why these events are happening, but the author doesn’t bother with that, and I reckon the book is far more effective for it. We rationalise to mitigate horror, and by avoiding explanations Tremblay keeps his readers uncomfortable.

The less you know about this one, the better it will work, so I won’t go into particulars. I did find a few of the characters’ reactions unbelievable at certain points, but I guess you can’t be too picky about realism with a book with a premise like this.

I only saw after finishing the book that M. Night Shyamalan recently put out a film version. I really liked the book, but I have no interest in seeing the movie. I might well give Paul Tremblay’s other books a go in the future.

Sorry for not posting last week. I started back at school, and I was involved in a car accident. (Nobody died.) I’ve been reading loads, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend any more time in front of a computer last Saturday. Maybe I’ll make up for it with an extra Halloween post.

Rare Canadian Horror Fiction: Bradley Snow’s Andy

This is a hard one to find because it was self-published, and I don’t think many copies were ever printed. It took me a few years to find a copy for less than 20 dollars. It absolutely was not worth the wait.

A family of four move to a new house in a remote part of Eastern Canada. The mom gets raped by a dream ghost, and the dad starts having an affair with his ex. Their son starts a gang and makes friends with a demented cannibal that lives in the woods and acts as a puppet for a psychic vampire. Oh, and this psychic vampire is apparently a paedophile too because he tries to marry the family’s daughter. In a hilarious turn of events, the woman who the father is having an affair with reveals that she has a son that belongs to him from their previous tryst. She tried to abort him, but it didn’t work so he just came out mentally disabled.

There’s far too much going on in here for any cohesion. We’ve got ghosts, vampires, mind control, cannibalism and a child molester. The plot doesn’t make any sense, none of it is remotely realistic and there are no likeable characters. This is pure crap.

This does feel a little different to a lot of the paperback horror I discuss here though. It was self published, and this gave the author the freedom to have it illustrated. There are 5 or 6 illustrations in the text. The cover art is striking, probably what made me want to read the book, but I thought the illustrations actually took away from the story. The below image faces the scene in which the mom gets raped by a ghoul.

Also, the text on the back of the book makes some very bold claims.

It was for me. I read a few chapters before bed each night. Reading it literally made me feel sleepy.

See above. It was very, very easy to stop reading it. The only thing that made me want to continue reading was the idea of finishing it. I did not care about what happened to anyone in the book. Picking it up was the hard part. I’m so glad I never have to read this shit again.

I googled Bradley Snow and found some interesting results. When he’s not befriending scammers posing as beautiful women on facebook and retweeting Tucker Carlson, he’s accusing Brian Keene and Stephen King of stealing his ideas (and being racists). He also wrote a book about how a big publisher ruined his life. Of the six other books he has published since Andy, only one has any reviews on goodreads. Both gave it a one star rating. I don’t want to come across as too mean here, but this guy’s lack of self awareness is depressing. He describes himself as, “the World’s greatest living Horror Writer”. He’s the kind of person that makes me think that there should be a similar licensing system for internet users as there is for drivers.

Just a taste of the author’s social media presence

The cover of this book is the only good thing about it. Andy is excrutiatingly bad.

B.W. Battin’s Mary, Mary

I started reading this book because it has a creepy cover.

Mary suffers from blackouts, brief periods during which she loses control over what she is doing and retains no memories. Also, she can’t tell anyone about these blackouts or she gets sick and passes out. When a murderer tries to kill her, Mary’s blackouts become more frequent and bad stuff starts happening to the people around her.

That’s the set-up. It’s a bit silly, but it has potential. It turns out that Mary was orphaned and has barely any memories of the mysterious orphanage where she grew up. Pretty much the only thing she does remember about it is that it was run by a Satanic nun. These details are revealed early on in the text, and in context, they set up the story in such a way that one ending seems inevitable. The writing is competent, and there is one particularly effective scene in a closed hardware store, but I was hoping that the author would drop in some shocking twists to elevate this beyond the realm of predictable thrillers. He didn’t.

This book ends almost exactly the way I thought it would. I say “almost exactly” because I thought there would be a slightly cheesy horror twist ending. There wasn’t though. This horror novel has a neat, complete happy ending. Yuck. No fucking thanks. In light of the predictable ending, the other faults of the book seem less forgiveable too. Why didn’t Mary just write her thoughts down instead of having to struggle to verbalise them to every new person she encounters? Also, why was she so afraid to tell her caring husband that she was seeing a psychiatrist? Stupid.

There’s a bit of suspense towards the middle of the book, but there is no real supernatural horror, novel depictions of Satanism, or extreme violence. Mary, Mary was a big let down. A few more of B.W. Battin’s books have cool covers, but I don’t feel any desire to check them out now.

Wrestling Splatterpunk: Edward Lee and John Pelan’s Goon

I’m on my holidays at the moment, and I actually seem to have less time for reading than I usually do. Here’s a quick review of a quick little book that I quite enjoyed.

**Overlook Collection – 2003 (First published 1996)**

I haven’t read anything by Edward Lee since I gave up on his Bullet Through Your Face collection in 2020. I don’t mind vulgarity, but the amount of cocksnot in that book was tiresome. I recently came across a free copy of Goon, a book he co-authored with John Pelan, and it was short enough to convince me to give Lee another chance.

This is a brief splatterpunk novel about a serial killer/professional wrestler. It actually contains less wrestling than I was expecting.

I read 2 of the 3 stories in Bullet Through Your Face, but I gave up when I got to The Refrigerator full of Sperm, a story that was taken from Lee’s Splatterspunk: The Micah Hays Stories collection. You can imagine my disappointment when Micah Hays showed up as a character in Goon. Fortunately, it’s only a brief cameo appearance.

Things get weird at end (as they usually seem to in Lee’s books), but most of the plot of Goon is pretty much what you’d expect. There’s an instance of race-baiting in here that dates the book. I don’t think the authors were espousing racial hatred, but I don’t see two (sane) white guys feeling comfortable putting the same words to paper in 2023.

If you like wrestling and gross stuff, you’ll probably like Goon. It was quite a silly book, but it was short enough that I enjoyed it. It contains just the right amount of cocksnot, not too much, not too little.

Sean Costello’s Horror Novels: The Cartoonist, Eden’s Eyes and Captain Quad

In honour of Canada Day next Saturday, here’s some books by a Canadian author. Exactly one year ago, I read a horror novel by Sean Costello. It was great. I discovered that Costello had written two other horror novels, so I decided to read those too. Doing so was an excellent decision. I greatly enjoyed all three of these books.

The Cartoonist

Scott, a successful psychiatrist with a horrible secret, meets a strange patient at his hospital. This drooling geriatric can’t walk or speak, but he can draw. At first the drawings seem random and unconnected, but Scott soon realises this is not the case.

I really enjoyed this novel. It’s set in Canada, and at its core, it’s about a father trying to protect his little girl. Both the antagonist and protagonist are horribly flawed people, but it was difficult for me not to empathise with both of them, and parts of this novel really got to me. In the 3 days leading up to me reading this book, I read 3 other “paperback from hell”-esque novels (The Kill, Joyride, and The Scourge) , and I had enjoyed each one less than the one before it. I was expecting the same from this one, but it was way, way better. It’s not perfect (my friend Micah made some valid criticisms when he reviewed it), but I found it very entertaining.

Eden’s Eyes

This book starts off with a father signing the consent forms to donate his recently deceased son’s organs. The eyes go to a blind author, the kidneys go to a sick child, and the heart goes to a homeless alcoholic. Unfortunately for everyone, the donor’s mother is not happy about the organ transplants, not happy at all.

That’s the basic premise of the book. That probably doesn’t make it sound like anything special, and in truth, it didn’t really feel like anything special for the first 50 or so pages. Then things started to get darker and weirder by the chapter. It ramps up and up and up, and the ending is bloody glorious. This is a slasher at heart, but the characters are interesting, and there’s weird supernatural elements that make it quite exciting.

I was so excited after the ending that I spent about 15 minutes trying to talk my wife into reading this one. (She wasn’t remotely interested.) Eden’s Eyes was a lot of fun to read.

Captain Quad

I think this book may have the most off-putting title and cover of any horror novel ever. I didn’t want to read it, but I’m glad I did. It’s very dark, and I quite enjoyed it.

Peter Gardener is just about the greatest guy ever. He’s smart, athletic, handsome and kind. Unfortunately for him, he falls off his motorbike and breaks his neck. Being paralyzed from the neck down does two things to him. It gives him the opportunity to develop the ability to leave his body at will, and it also turns him into an evil psychopath.

That’s a horrible idea. It’s horrible because part of it is understandable. If I went from having the world in my pocket to losing the use of my body along with most of my relationships and dreams, I’m sure I’d become bitter. Hopefully not bitter enough to kill my mom, rape my ex, and shove an ice auger (basically a giant corkscrew) up an old friend’s anus, but definitely bitter.

Yes, this book gets very nasty. It was a bit like Eden’s Eyes in the way it transformed, fairly suddenly, from a gripping thriller to a gorefest.

Also like Eden’s Eyes, this one is about a person who develops psychic powers after going to a hospital. Sean Costello worked as an anesthesiologist, so this explains why sizeable parts of all three of these books take place in hospitals. The other books that came to mind when I was reading this were Trumbo’s Johnny Get Your Gun and Hallahan’s Keeper of the Children.

Captain Quad is unpleasant because Peter starts off as the good guy. He’s an extremely sympathetic character. You don’t want him to do the bad stuff he does, but it’s not too hard to understand why he does it. It’s difficult to read the book without imagining the same thing happening to yourself. I ride a bike to work every day, and the idea of getting hit by truck and paralysed is far more terrifying than a poltergeist. Honestly, the idea is almost a little too scary for a horror novel. I read these books to forget about my life, not to worry about it.

I really enjoyed these books, and I was really impressed with Costello’s writing. These are a step above a lot of the crap I read. Luckily for everyone, these three Canadian classics are now available as ebooks.

More Potato Famine Horror: Alan Ryan’s Cast A Cold Eye

I reviewed Alan Ryan’s The Kill and Dead White last winter. I was originally going to talk about Cast a Cold Eye in the same post as those two books, but I realised that that pair were set in the same village and shared characters, so I kept Cast a Cold Eye for later.

Sphere – 1986 (Originally published 1984)

Jack, a successful American author, goes to Ireland and rents a house so that he can research and write his new novel. He’s staying in Doolin, a little village on the west coast of the island, and shortly after arriving, he sees some old men pouring a bottle of blood into a fresh grave. Soon thereafter, he starts to see ghosts of victims of the potato famine.

Alright. Let’s stop there. More potato famine horror? I was not a fan of the last book I read within that very niche genre. Fortunately, Alan Ryan’s writing is far, far better than Ann Pilling’s, and the story here is more intriguing, even if it does also feature very skinny ghosts.

I want to make it clear that my disdain for potato famine horror isn’t because I’m offended by the author turning the suffering of an oppressed group of real people into entertainment. It’s more the fact that the potato famine is the only thing a lot of North Americans know about Ireland. This is like an Irish author writing a horror novel set in America about a hamburger monster or a story set in Australia about a zombie kangaroo. (I think the only other horror novel set in Ireland that I’ve read by a non-Irish author was Paul Huson’s The Keepsake. Thankfully that one had no hungry ghosts. It was about a stone that turns into a vampire. Cool!)

In fairness though, Ryan does a pretty good job of making it seem that he really likes Ireland, and I would be shocked if part of this story isn’t autobiographical. He has to have been there to write some of the things he writes. Trust me. He references tea 45 times throughout the 350 pages.

I was 23 when I left Ireland. I wasn’t planning on a long term move, but things ended up that way, and I still miss Ireland greatly. It’s strange going back. I’ve been gone for long enough that little things that I grew up with seem foreign. There’s moments when I feel like a tourist in my home country.

It was interesting reading this book. Some of the descriptions about the landscape were great. I tend to travel more in Ireland when I return now than I ever did when I lived there, and the only time I’ve visited Clare, the county where this book is set, was as a tourist. Ryan gets the countryside right.

At the same time though, there were definitely a few cringey bits. I didn’t like the author’s idea of “Irish time”. Granted, the buses in Dublin are shit, but I don’t think Irish people are less punctual than anyone else. Not everyone wears woolen jumpers either. Also, the parts where people would say “I am” instead of “yes” annoyed me.

Of the three books I’ve read by Ryan, this one is probably the best horror novel. Dead White is good, but clowns aren’t scary. Skinny little children running around at night are scary. This is, at its heart, a good old-fashioned ghost story. The ending was ok, but things didn’t come together quite as much as I was hoping for. I really enjoyed reading this book, but I think a large part of my enjoyment stemmed from the fact that I’m going to Ireland in a few weeks, and all of the talk of rainy days and cups of tea made me really excited. I will try to track down Ryan’s short stories in the future.