A long time ago, I read a book called Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds by a guy named Tom Dongo. When I wrote about it here, I was relatively critical of it. Years later, somebody commented on a blog post I had written on Mac Tonnies’ Cryptoterrestrials claiming that I had given Tonnies preferential treatment to Dongo. This made me think. Had I changed, or was Dongo’s book actually deserving of more disdain than Tonnies’? I thought I’d better give Dongo another chance, so I read The Mysteries of Sedona, the first entry in his Sedona series.
The Mysteries of Sedona: The New Age Frontier
Hummingbird Publishing – 1988
Dongo lives in a place called Sedona in Arizona, and he claims that it’s a hotspot of psychic energy. This very short book describes some of the phenomena he has observed and heard about. There are some bog standard accounts of UFO sightings and psychic channellings that aren’t remotely convincing. He spends a lot of the book describing vortices where you can meditate and become one with the cosmic consciousness. This book reads like a pamphlet for unbearable new-age, hippy-dippy asshole tourists.
Cool spaceship
Honestly, there’s only 2 interesting claims made in this book of trash. The first being that Sedona is actually in the same place as the lost continent of Lemuria and that’s why it has so much psychic energy. Lemuria, of course, never existed, but that doesn’t make much of a difference to the fools who read this garbage.
Dongo also claims that parts of Sedona are inhabited by rock goblins. They aren’t visible to everyone, but Dongo can see them and they look like this:
This reminded me of the Kentucky Goblins case. I recently started watching that Hellier series that came out a few years ago. I was intrigued by the mentions of the elusive Terry Wrist in the first episode, and I liked where things were going with the mothman discussions, but when the team turned to tarot cards to guide their investigation, I turned off the TV in a fit of rage.
Dongo’s work is as bad as I made it out to be all those years ago. This book is utter nonsense. At one point the author suggests that school children be forced to take a class in channelling extraterrestrial spirits. I think I said it best in 2016 when I described Dongo’s writing as “bunch of ridiculous ideas that popped into the head of a stupid weirdo.”
I had initially planned another post for today, but as I was putting the final touches to it last night, I discovered something about the book that necessitated further research. Luckily, I’ve had this post lined up for an occasion such as this for a while. Do you want to know how to tell if a person is a deranged freak just by looking at the shape of their head?
Self Published – 1887
The Mark of the Beast Revealed by the Shape of the Head – Lucilla Rebecca Hedley
The first 30ish pages of this 90 page book are a mildly entertaining description of how to spot a person with a savage instinct by observing the shape of their skull. Much of the amusement comes from the illustrations.
I bet most of my readers look like these absolute weirdos. Ewww.
The two tell-tale phrenological signs of a degenerate are a large gap between the eyes and a protrusion in the middle of the forehead. Spot these two together and you’re likely looking at a subhuman beast.
This is well and good and clearly backed up by science, but the last two thirds of the book descend into a jumble of Biblical hermeneutics and apocalyptic numerology. While the first part of the book deals with the mark of the beast (beast in the literal sense, pumas and lions and that), the rest of the book warns against the promises of the Biblical beasts, Mammon is the main threat here.
Honestly, the latter part of the book made me wonder about the sanity of the author. Phrenology is obviously a pile of nonsense, but there is some cohesion to the idea. The bulk of this book comes across as the incoherent ramblings of a devoutly religious lunatic. I read every word in here, but after the halfway point very little sank in. There’s a whole lot of words in here, but very few ideas.
Unfortunately, there is scant information about this curious text and its author online. I am assuming she was wealthy as she had this masterpiece published herself. There’s a copy online if you want to read it.
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.
After reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians a few years back, I stopped reading new horror. That book was fine, but there was so much hype around it that I felt like I had nothing original to say when I posted about it here. I was in an awkward situation recently in which I had to take a book out of my local library. I saw this near the front counter, and having a ague idea of what it was about, I grabbed it.
Del Rey – 2023
After meeting their favourite film director, pair of movie nerds get sucked into the terrifying world of esoteric Nazi occultism. This director guy made a few weirdo horror movies and then disappeared for decades because one of the films he made was cursed. It was written by a Nazi wizard and never completed. When the 2 friends help edit some of the footage from this film, it activates a spell (or is it a curse?) that the weird Nazi had begun before his death.
So yeah, this book has a Nazi wizard, murders, ghosts, human sacrifices, black magic, occult books, demon dogs and a main character clad in an Iron Maiden tshirt. Hell yeah!
I quite enjoyed Silver Nitrate. Unlike other books about Nazi occultism that I’ve read, the characters in here were fleshed out and generally very likeable. I’d like to see them in a sequel to be honest. Parts of this book do feel a little slow, but overall it’s very easy to digest.
I’m a pedantic dork when it comes to this kind of thing, and I was pretty impressed with the level of detail that went into Silver Nitrate. The bad guy is named Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers. I wondered if this was a reference to Hanns Heinz Ewers when I saw it. The author confirms this in an afterword. (The real Ewers wrote a few horror novels and movie scripts in the early 20th century, but his work has been ignored because he later became involved with the Nazis. I’ve been planning to read his books for a while now.) The attention to detail here made it feel like this book was written for weird nerds like me, but there seems to be some hype about this one. I was only able to borrow it from the local library for 7 days because it’s in such high demand. I’ve seen Silvia Morena-Garica being interviewed by big news websites too. It’s really cool to see an author with a background in Lovecraftian horror getting attention like that.
I find reading about Salem Witch Trials a generally unpleasant experience. When I read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible years ago, I felt a horrible combination of claustrophobia, frustration and rage. I’m assume that my readers have a general background of what happened, but if you’re unaware, about 300 years ago, some stupid, bored teenagers in Salem made up stories about their neighbours being witches, and a bunch of innocent people were executed. I’ve had Cotton Mather’s On Witchcraft (Wonders of the Invisible World) on my shelf for a decade, and even though it’s short, I’ve put off reading it until now.
Cotton Mather – On Witchcraft (Wonders of the Invisible World)
Dorset – 1991 (Originally published 1693)
Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister at the time of the witch trials. I had thought he was a Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder, figure, but his role in the witch trials was minimal. I think he sent a few letters to the judges or something and then wrote this book as a defence of the court proceedings, assuming the guilt of the witches. It’s an extremely boring book, and I managed to get through it by downloading the audiobook version and forcing myself to listen to it every night for a week while I cleaned my kitchen. This Cotton Mather guy was a stupid asshole, but people seemed to value his opinion because he knew the Bible. He was basically a 17th century Jordan Peterson.
I’ve read about the Salem trials elsewhere, and there’s very little in the narrative of the book that was new to me. The most interesting thing here is what Mather’s writing tells us about how he thinks. Either he’s terrified and/or he wants his audience to be terrified. This was written in 1692. British colonies in America were still very new, and the Puritans were still adapting to their new environment. They had exiled themselves from the iniquity of Catholicism and Anglicanism, and they took the Bible seriously. Half of this book is Biblical references, and these references are not limited to the Gospels. Mather’s audience believed that God had a special interest in their daily affairs. It’s a genuinely chilling prospect to imagine yourself in their position, truly believing that the Devil himself was present and trying to destroy their community. Still, it’s pretty hard to forgive people who were stupid enough to condemn 20+ others to death on the testimony of some hysterical teenagers and jealous farmers.
Wonders of the Invisible World is an extremely important primary source for historians, but it’s generally a pretty dull read. I know that The Crucible isn’t entirely historically accurate, but it does a more entertaining job of telling the same story.
I’ve read a lot of messed up books, but Jay’s Journal by Beatrice Sparks is probably the most morally reprehensible piece of writing that I’ve ever come across. I don’t mean that in an ironic or funny way. This book and the story behind it are genuinely disgusting.
A few days ago, I picked up a book at work. It was called Go Ask Alice, and the cover suggested that it would be a bit more interesting than the other stuff on the shelf. It’s supposed to be the real diary of a teenager who gets involved in drugs. I don’t use drugs recreationally, but I’ve read quite a few drug books, and most of them made taking drugs seem pretty cool. This one didn’t. I googled it, and it turns out that it’s not a real diary. It was written by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counsellor. When I was reading about her, I discovered that after this book was published and became a success, the mother of a 16 year old boy who had committed suicide approached Beatrice Sparks and asked her to help get his diary published. The mom hoped that this text would shed light on teenage depression and hopefully prevent further teen suicides.
Suicide is one of the worst things a family can go through, and while publishing the diaries of a suicide victim seems a bit insensitive, I can’t hold this against the mother. Think of the loss she had just suffered and how much that loss must have damaged her own mental wellbeing. I can understand her desperate attempt to prevent other families from feeling her pain.
Beatrice Sparks agreed to “edit” the diary into a publishable form. What this entailed was taking 21 of the 67 entries from the actual diary and supplementing them with 191 entries of Spark’s own imagination. Oh yeah, and at the time of writing her entries, Beatrice Sparks was obsessed with occultism, blood orgies, witchcraft and Satanism. The result is a book about a kid who kills himself after summoning a satanic demon. The real kid who died was a rebellious teenager from a conservative family. Sparks published a book that made him out to be an animal-sacrificing, perverted Satanist.
To do this to the family of the child that died was a shockingly nasty thing to do. The family were extremely upset. This book had other nasty effects too. It was first published in 1978, and while it’s not solely responsible, it is fair to assume that it stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Beatrice Sparks was truly a rotten, shit-smeared asshole.
Even if we manage to put the author aside, this book is awful. The narrator comes across as a tosser. He’s constantly talking about how great he is and how much he loves his parents. He gets into trouble for doing drugs and ends up in a boys’ home. There he meets a paedophile who tells him about his aura and teaches him to move things with his mind. Yes. This is not a book about a kid who gets caught up with realistic occultist types; the bad guys here can levitate objects over a phone. After meeting the new-age child molester, the protagonist falls in love with a witch and attends a blood orgy with her. They secretly get married and their wedding ceremony involves the murder of a kitten. Later, Jay and his friends go and mutilate a bunch of cows and drink their blood to get magical powers. Then an evil demon possesses and murders all of them. The author basically took all of the silliest rumours about occultism that were floating around during the mid 70s and stuck them together with no regard given to reality. Oh, and the suicide note that ends the book is one of the few entries that Beatrice Sparks didn’t completely make up. Think about that. She used the actual suicide note of a mentally ill child to end her novel about astral projection and cattle mutilation. Disgusting.
The worst part is that lots of people actually believed her.
A few years ago, a writer named Rick Emerson wrote a book about Beatrice Sparks and her other horrible books. It’s called Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries. If you want more details, go read that one. I only read the parts about Jay’s Journal, but the other bits I glanced through also made ol’ Beatrice seem like a filthy, lying sack of shit.
I’ve been reading lots recently, but the way things lined up, I found myself without anything to post this week. I had a quick look through the archives and found this, a 17 page pamphlet of magickal rites from Finbarr Publications. It’s terrible. I reviewed another book by its author a few years ago. I recalled it being terrible too, but I actually forgot how much of it revolved around piss until I reread my review of it moments ago. Thankfully, 9 Proven Magickal Rites also relies heavily on the use of urine as a magickal tool.
Here are the main rites described in the book:
To break up a relationship without having to deal with awkward conversations, find your partner’s footprint and fill it with piss.
If you want to attract money, take a bath, but mix some sugar and white lead into the water before you get into it. I thought that maybe white lead was just a misleading name like “fools gold” or something, but minimal research shows that white lead is highly toxic and does cause lead poisoning.
If you want something, anything really, go to a crossroads and say the Our Father while looking at your feet.
To stop a person coming back into your house, flick some sulphur and black pepper at their back as they leave. I would have thought keeping your door closed would be easier, but I’m clearly no wizard.
Piss into a bottle containing your partner’s pubic hairs and bury it your garden. Your partner will never leave you. If you put some nails into the bottle they will become your servant.
Now you may be confused as to why I have only listed 5 rites when the title of the book is 9 Proven Magickal Rites. Well, there are 5 chapters in the book, each focusing on a different magickal procedure, but some of these procedures have variations, and there are actually 13 distinct rites described in the book. (Chapters 2 and 5 have 5 rites each.) No matter what way I counted these, I could not arrive at the number 9.
I’ve read more than a few titles from Finbarr over the years, and I am consistently shocked by their lack of quality, cohesion and moral standards. I sincerely struggle to imagine how this publisher remained active for multiple decades. This book is about taking a bath in lead water and pissing on your sweetheart’s pubes. I read another one from Finbarr about Hitler waggling his mickey in the mirror. Is this some kind of post-modern art project?
Sorry dear readers. Hopefully it will be a while before I have to resort to Finbarr again.
I’ve read my fair share of books about the history and practice witchcraft. There’s a lot of them out there, and I’m generally more interested in the slightly trashy ones from the 60s and 70s that blur the line between fiction and reality. I don’t read much stuff like that anymore, but when I was reading about the Son of Sam killings last month, I discovered that David Berkowitz had sent an annotated copy of Peter Haining’s The Anatomy of Witchcraft to police officers who were investigating the case. I also deduced that this book was one of Maury Terry’s sources on the Satanic cults of California in the late 60s, so i thought I’d better give it a go.
Roughly half of the book is about white witchcraft/Wicca and that kind of stuff. I have little interest in this type of thing, but the rest of the book is about black magic and Satanism. It was entertaining enough. I’ve come across most of the information in here before, but some of it is presented in a slightly different light here. Haining basically splits the world up into different areas and then does chapters on the parts which contain the most witchery.
Haining isn’t known for being entirely reliable. He lists Dennis Wheatley as a source of much of his information, and he includes a lengthy letter from noted plagiarist Rollo Ahmed too. Other parts of the book are based on myths (the idea that Catherine De Medici was a Satanic witch), and others are thoroughly mixed up. Haining clearly has a bee in his bonnet about LSD, and at every given opportunity he tries to link it with Satanism. Parts of this book really reminded me of Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin.
Joris Karl Huysmans wrote a novel called Là-bas, in which he describes a black mass. The main satanic character, one Canon Docre, is said to have been based on Joseph-Antoine Boullan, an occultist who was kicked out of the Catholic clergy. Boullan and Huysmans were friends until Boullan died (supposedly because of a magical attack) in 1893.
In Anatomy of Witchcraft, Peter Haining includes a rant from Huysmans that refers to Canon Docre as if he was a real person. I was very confused by this, as he wasn’t being very nice. Why would he shit-talk his dead friend? I did a bit of research though, and it turns out that he was actually referring to a Chaplain from Bruges named Louis Van Haecke. Von Haecke was said to have the cross tattooed on the soles of his feet so he could blaspheme whenever he walked, and it seems like Huysmans explicitly claimed he was the inspiration for Canon Docre elsewhere.
Haining claims that Huysmans wrote Là-Bas as a rejection of the horrors of Satanism. He also claims that Boullan crucified small children during black masses. It’s hard for me to believe that Huysmans, conscientious, reformed Catholic that he was, would be down to hang out with a person who crucified small children. It’s funny. I did a search for the name Boullan through my blog, and it turns out this is not the first post that I’ve written about his alleged misdeeds.
There’s a chapter in here on Satanism in California that discusses the links between Charles Manson, the Process, the Chingons and the mysterious Four Pi cult. I’m planning on writing a separate post on that stuff quite soon though, so I’ll leave it for now. Very curious indeed.
There was some other mildly interesting stuff in here. He discusses the Bernadette Hasler case and the Skoptci, a weird Russian sect who cut off their own dicks. I’ve defintely read about both cases before, but I can’t remember where. Also included in this book is a very questionable quote about voodoo.
Yikes.
Overall, this is a moderately entertaining read. It does not seem particularly reliable though, and I would do a bit of extra research before accepting anything in here as fact.
A few years ago, I tried read Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Witch. It was terrible nonsense, and I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. One of the reasons I wanted to read it was because I had heard of a ludicrously cringeworthy book that was basically its sequel, Robert Johnson’s The Satanic Warlock. The Satanic Warlock is a pick-up manual for Satanists, a book telling you how to attract women in a Satanic fashion. The idea is so ridiculous that I had to read it.
This book was atrocious. I am extremely unqualified to rate advice on flirting and seduction, but even I could tell that this was 90% awful. The only things that the author got right were the most basic rules of personal hygiene and composure (washy washy bumbum and no rapey).
It starts with an unbearably wordy intro from Peter H. Gilmore, the current leader of the Church of Satan. This is followed by a prologue in which the author boasts about how he has had a lot of sex and how he is like Frank Sinatra. Oh, and apparently he worked with Hans Holzer.
Chapter 1 The intro chapter is where the incel vibes really get going. The author needlessly boasts about how much he hates political correctness and feminism. He goes on to boast about how being a warlock is so cool. He likes boasting. He also likes to make girls pee their pants. Being a warlock is all about believing in yourself and projecting confidence. The author claims you should make a confidence den where you hang pictures of the people you want to be like. When the author was making his confidence den, the doorbell rang. It was a female mail carrier. His vibes were so strong that she came in and sex with him. Sure…
There’s an attempt here to define what a warlock is. Realistically, the people who fit the descriptions here are not the kind of people who are reading the book. The people who fit the descriptions also seem like a bunch of assholes. I would be surprised if the author of this book doesn’t wear a fedora.
Chapter 2 This chapter is about the satanic warlock “archetypes”. There are a few that you can choose from: the occultist, the rake, the metal musician… Imagine and act like you are one of these, and you will be drowning in pussy. This chapter includes pictures of the various archetypes. These pictures are without a doubt the funniest part of the book, and they are what convinced me to read it in the first place. I would post them here, but the tumblr where I originally saw them has been taken down, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this happened due to copyright reasons. An entirely different author threatened to take me to court recently for posting images from his book and leaving a mean review, so I will not be posting any pictures from The Satanic Warlock. If you really want to see them, Internet Archive still has a capture of the original tumblr post. It also has the entire tumblr account in all its hilarious glory.
There’s a section at the end of this chapter providing a list of “cool” names that you can use to introduce yourself. One of them is “Mormo”.
Chapter 3 Confidence is important. Looks don’t matter much, and dick size is almost irrelevant. This was a bit of a relief to me, especially after the author used the phrase “the Irish curse”. I had never heard of this curse before. I am Irish, and most of the penises I have seen in real life have been Irish; I don’t have many points of comparison, and I honestly didn’t know our penises were infamously short. I always thought my 2.5 inches (while hard) was about average. Luckily for me, the author includes some excellent advice for those of us who weren’t blessed with perfectly masculine bodies:
“Why not forget looks entirely and publish a book of your love poetry or learn to play the lute?”
p. 54
Chapter 4 – Style tips In this chapter, the author warns all warlocks to avoid wearing shorts unless they’re trying out for a part in the Little Rascals or live on the equator. Soon thereafter, he goes on to claim that “flowing silk pirate shirts and heavy leather boots create a sexy swashbuckling image.” Does anyone believe this is true? I am certain that at least 95% of all of the adult women I know would go for a guy in a pair of shorts over some wanker in a pirate shirt.
There is some good advice in this chapter. The author advises his readers to wash their willy and bum and to brush their teeth and cut their fingernails.
Chapter 5 Be powerful Challenge bullies “mano a mano”. Honestly, anyone who reads this book in earnest will get their ass kicked 100% of the time they follow this advice.
Chapter 6 – Seduction This chapter features a diagram showing women’s priorities. It lists taste in music as number 3 and intelligence as number 8. Is anyone stupid enough to believe this nonsense? Did the author get this information by surveying a group of teenage girls outside of a Hot Topic?
This chapter also contains a section about how chicks dig sweaty dudes:
“In the throes of passion, some women have said that they can “release their inner slut” when their nose is in close contact with a man’s penis, testicles and anus, often taking deep breaths to amp up the lust.”
p. 118
Chapter 7 – Sex Magic Sex magic is basically bullshit, but it works if it’s satanic enough and you have pentagrams and cool devilly shit around you. It probably works as well with a realdoll as it does with a person too, so that’ll be good news for most of the readers of this book.
Chapter 8 – The Gay Warlock There’s a 10 page chapter on gay warlocks that says nothing of any interest. At least it’s not hateful.
This book is bizarre. Despite it’s very specific nature, it is considered part of the official canon of Church of Satan literature. I suppose this isn’t too surprising. It’s not remotely hard to believe that most male members of the Church of Satan have a hard time attracting a mate. The author holds a Ph.D. in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Sounds impressive, right? The IASHS was a non-accredited institution that was basically shut down because it was unable to meet the minimum requirements of the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education. I don’t have a Ph.D. in human sexuality, but I can still give all you little frigids one excellent piece of advice if you want to get laid: don’t take this book seriously.
Normally, I focus on a book, author or theme in my posts, but once a year I do a post about this blog itself. If that seems goofy to you, piss off until next week. 2022 was a good year for me, but I simply don’t have as much time to blog as I used to. Work and family take up most of my day, and this year I also produced a series of podcasts and got involved in a few musical projects. (I also cursed and un-cursed a youtuber.) I’m still reading as much as ever, but I find it harder to find the time to take and crop book photos, research authors and actually write posts. There were actually a few weeks this year when I didn’t post anything! I have a huge backlog of half-written posts that will appear in the new year.
It’s funny looking at the site’s stats. The amount of visitors on this site has gone up every year, but the rate of growth has decreased substantially over the last year and a half. This blog has been online for almost 8 years now, and there has to be a limited audience for a blog on weird, old books, so maybe it has just reached it’s peak. Then again, the stats reveal more. The amount of on-site comments and likes has decreased dramatically. Maybe the quality of my blog has gone down in the last two years, but I also suspect that people aren’t signing in to wordpress.com to browse through blog posts as much as they used to. I’m not upset at the lack of likes, but it does make me feel a bit old fashioned. Has blogging gone the way of alchemy?
Some of the slow-down might be due to the fact that I’ve pretty much given up on promoting the blog through social media. Being on facebook makes me hate everyone, and twitter is a useless piece of garbage. The more active you are on those sites, the more prominent your posts will be in others’ feeds, and personally, I find this idea abhorrent. They are rewarding loudmouthed fools, and their owners are turds. No thanks. I’ll cut off my own cock before I start a tiktok.
A lot of what I read in 2022 was made up of stand-alone paperback horror novels. These things are usually easy to digest and don’t require serious analysis. Some of them were utter rubbish, but every now and then I’d stumble upon a Throwback or Blood Fever and really enjoy myself. I was delighted to finally read Pierce Nace’s insane Eat Them Alive (while suffocating with COVID), and getting my hands on a copy of Barry Hammond’s extremely rare Cold Front was one of the highlights of my year.
I also did a few posts on specific authors. I read several books by Alan Ryan, Thomas Piccirilli (Part 1, Part 2) and William H. Hallahan. I’m fairly certain that my posts on Kenneth Rayner Johnson and Eric Ericson are the most comprehensive articles about those writers currently available online.
My posts on Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard finished my series of posts on the weird fiction of the members of the Lovecraft Circle. I also read and enjoyed Asamatsu Ken’s more modern work of Lovecraftian horror, Kthulhu Reich. I’m not sure where I’ll go next with this stuff. Maybe Ramsey Campbell’s short stories.
I did a few non-fiction books in 2022. They were all terrible, but The Beginning Was The End by Oscar Kiss Maerth was so terrible that it became my favourite book of all time. It’s a book about cannibal monkeys, and if you haven’t read my review of it, please do so right now.
Well, there you go. Another year older and grumpier. I wrote posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 if you want to take a trip down bad-memory lane. You can also check out my index page for individual links to the 500+ books I have reviewed here so far. Email me at dukederichleau666(at)gmail.com if you have any recommendations or questions. I hope that this blog has been interesting. Happy new year!
Nocturnal Revelries 