Exposing Satanism or Exploiting Suicide Victims? Beatrice Sparks and Jay’s Journal

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.

Urinate in My Footsteps: Marcus T. Bottomley’s 9 Proven Magickal Rites

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.

Peter Haining’s Anatomy of Witchcraft

**T’sandem – 1974 (Originally published 1972)**

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.

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.

Robert Johnson’s The Satanic Warlock: A Pickup Manual for Fedora Goths

The Satanic Warlock – Robert Johnson

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.

2022, The Year in Review

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!

Basil Crouch – The Making of a God and other Works of Black Art

Basil Crouch – The Making of a God and Other works of Black Art
Finbarr – 2010

It’s been a while since I read a grimoire. Here’s some rubbish.

This is little different from the other Basil Crouch books I’ve read. It’s written from the perspective of the publisher rather than Crouch himself, and although it is never explicitly stated, the narration makes it seem like Mr. Crouch was dead at the time of its publication in 2010. I have it on good authority that ol’ Basil died in 2020, so it’s very likely that this was actually written by him. The ridiculous amount of praise for Crouch in the text seems to confirm this suspicion.

Basil Crouch gave his publisher a book he deliberately made up, but the magic therein worked. The narrator, presumably still the publisher, claims that he prints so many books guaranteeing success and happiness not because they don’t work but because the success they provide is addictive.

Shoon is a magical land in Africa like Shambala, but aliens landed there 10,000 years ago. The Chinese had proof of this, but they hid it. Crouch gives some examples of the magic of Shoon being used to improve the lives of others. I haven’t read Crouch for years, but one of these testimonies, a story about a girl getting hurt at a fair and then being miraculously healed sounded familiar. There was another one in which a thalidomide man used Shoon magic to make his arms grow to normal size.

Make a paper-mache doll and fill it with pieces of junk and build it an altar. Name it after an African deity.

Breath in the doll’s mouth, and it will turn into a god. Talk to it, and give it offerings every day. The next portion of book describes appropriate offerings and prayers for each day.

To enslave another person, buy a doll, draw some shitty symbols on it, and pretend it’s the person you want to bum. Then give it to the fetish you have created. It might talk to you in response.

The effort that went into making these illustrations is breathtaking.

You can also use the doll you made to invoke demons. The idea here is remarkably unclear. I think the demons are supposed to possess it.

Now some instructions on how to get a barren woman pregnant. Crouch knows it works because he knew a 12 year old boy and a 9 year old girl who got pregnant this way. Also, a barren woman who was raped by the leader of an African tribe got pregnant this way. To do it, you draw a circle on the ground, bring your partner into it, strip off and then smoke a cigarette. Blow the cigarette smoke on each other, have a ride, and then go out and buy some maternity clothes.

Next up, a weird story about a man who can make himself invisible by moving his hands a certain way. This is followed with unrelated instructions on how to summon the invisibility demon. It’s genuinely hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously.

The book ends with a report about a monkey grave being found in Rwanda that Crouch read in a tabloid. It has nothing to do with anything.

Honestly, this text was so incoherent that it’s difficult to analyze. It starts off with a discussion about Shoon, the secret African city, and then goes on to tell how to make a doll that will solve all your problems. I guess the doll is a Shoonish thing, but I’m not sure this is ever explicitly stated.

Pure shit.

The Devil of DeCourcy Island: The Brother XII. – MacIsaac, Clark and Lillard

The Devil of DeCourcy Island: The Brother XII. – Ron MacIsaac, Donald Clark and Charles Lillard
Porcépic Books – 1989

In the 1920s, a weirdo calling himself Brother XII started a commune for his religious order on Vancouver Island. His cult, the Aquarian Foundation, was a variant of theosophy, and it was mainly made up of old rich stupid people. As time went on, things got awkward at the commune, especially after Brother XII started taking his new girlfriends back with him and telling his followers that these women were reincarnations of Egyptian goddesses. One of these women was quite mean to the people living in the commune. The Aquarians started to suspect that their religious leader might have been taking advantage of them. He was living in a big house with his mistress, and they were living in shacks. They tried to take him to court, but when the court date came around, Brother XII was missing. He had sailed away with as much of their money as he could fit into his boat. Nobody really knows where he went afterwards, but some believe he died in Europe a few years later.

Making the story seem more interesting than it really is.

That’s more or less what happened. It’s a moderately interesting story. Nothing about it seems particularly far-fetched. This is story told in the first half of The Devil of DeCourcy Island by MacIsaac, Clark and Lillard. The book’s narration is horrendous, and it constantly goes back and forward in time. I think this might have been done to create suspense, but it fails. It just makes reading the narrative confusing.

The writing is terrible, but the real problem with this book is that the second half serves as a rebuttal to the first half. The authors spend the final 60 pages showing how parts of the story they’ve just told are slightly inaccurate. There’s no major contradictions that I could pick out though; they’re all little fecky things. It struck me as odd that they would structure the book in such an awful manner. Surely the logical approach would be to simply write a single, accurate account of what they knew about the Aquarian Foundation? I reckon the authors did what they did because the interesting version of a truthful story of Brother XII would only take up 60 or so pages.

The first half of this book is poorly structured. The second half is unbearably boring. I had hoped to read about some weird occult rituals, but it was mostly about how different witnesses reported different amounts of money being taken. I’m not going to rule out reading more books on Brother XII in the future, but I’m not going to go searching them out either.

Eric Ericson’s Esoteric Occult Trilogy – The Sorcerer, Master of the Temple, and The Woman who Slept with Demons

Several years ago, as I was reading Sandy Robertson’s book about Aleister Crowley, I came across the following passage:

I am a fan of both occult lore and biscuits, so I knew I had to find and read this promising book. When I looked it up, I found that the author had written 3 occult novels, and not being a coward, I determined to track down and read all of them. It only took 5 years.

The Sorcerer

NEL – 1978
This book starts off with a scientist realising, much to his dismay, that the orgy he is attending is actually a sex magic ritual being performed by a coven of witches. He’s even more annoyed when he realises the ritual is serving as his initiation into the coven.

The coven leader, a man with scarred face named Frazer, takes a shine to the new lad and renames him Thomas. Frazer is a shifty dude, and although his followers respect him, this respect is borne out of fear. Thomas hates him straight away. It turns out Frazer is on the quest for immortality, and he is willing to sacrifice anything to achieve it. He’s a real scummer. The plot from this point is fairly predictable

I had read a few comments online that suggested that the main thing that set Ericson’s writing apart from the writers of other occult thrillers was his knowledge of ceremonial magic. His theory of magic falls in line with much of what I have read of the topic, but the potency of the magic in this book is pretty fantastic stuff. We’ve got festering zombies, soul transference, astral executions and a poo spell. This is fiction though, and if it were more realistic, the book would suck. Also, in order to figure out his magical powers, Thomas has sex with all of the women in the coven multiple times. Cool.

The fact that the protagonist is a scientist made things more interesting. He kept trying to rationalise what was happening and trying to use scientific reasoning to enhance his magical abilities. He failed at the former, but succeeded in the latter. I don’t know if that was supposed to make a point.

This book is only 224 pages long, but it took me 9 days to finish. I didn’t dread reading it, but I didn’t look forward to it either, and I only ever managed a few chapters at a time. It was alright.

Master of the Temple

1983- NEL
When I look up of a book or series of books and find that there’s little to no information about them online, I get intrigued. Aside from a few brief goodreads reviews, I wasn’t able to find anything about Eric Ericson’s books. Might they be forgotten esoteric masterpieces?

No. The reason that nobody talks about these books is that they’re boring as shit. Honestly, Master of the Temple is one of the worst novels I have ever read. It’s so, so fucking terrible. I’m going to summarise the plot here to save you the trouble of reading this utter hog’s shit.

Jonathan is a sales manager for a company that makes biscuits. He’s also a member of The Masters of the Temple, a secret society of sex magicians. The first part of the book describes his business trips around Europe. He’ll meet up with a biscuit distributor, do a little business and then sneak off for a bit to visit the local lodge of The Masters. There he will have sex with a beautiful woman with large breasts. Unfortunately for Jonathan, his boss, a lad called Braithwaite, is always on his case. Jonathan performs a magical ritual to summon the demon Abaddon to deal with his pesky boss, and poor old Braithwaite ends up in hospital with a horrid stomach condition.

With Braithwaite out of the way, Jonathan is promoted and ends up touring the United States trying to increase the biscuit company’s American presence. Things go pretty much the same way that they did in Europe, but the women here have even bigger tits. He meets one with an enormous rack and falls in love.

When he gets back to England, his aunt calls him and tells him that she’s sick. This triggers a flashback to when he was thirteen and his aunt gave him a blowjob. It turns out that she spent 5 years sexually molesting him. This was a bit of a weird turn, but things soon got weirder still.

Braithwaite, the lad he cursed, jumps out a window and kills himself, so Jonathan goes to his old boss’s secretary’s house and repeatedly rapes her until she goes insane.

Some other members of his order find out about this, so they kick Jonathan out of their clubhouse. Jonathan is so upset by this that he drives his car into a wall and kills himself.

My concern here is that I have made this book sound more interesting than it actually is. It’s nowhere near as interesting as I’ve just made it sound.

Here are some problems:

While the above story is fiction, most of this book is not. I’d say at least half of the book is an account of the history of Western esotericism. No thanks. I’ve read that stuff before.
Sex magic is seriously cringey. I far preferred the biscuit salesman stuff to the extended scenes of Jonathan holding in his cum. Gross. There’s one part where he’s having sex with a prostitute where he says to himself, “I who am a perfect king to the people entrusted to me by god, I who am by God’s command their shepherd, Have never tarried, never rested.” It was a bit like that scene in American Psycho where Bateman is looking in the mirror at his own muscles when he’s fucking a prostitute, only lamer. Honestly, when you think about the arrogance of people who are into this stuff, it’s mortifyingly embarrassing. Human beings are animated filth, and cumming is like shitting and pissing; it feels good because our bodies need to do it. To think that holding in your gip for a while brings you closer to god is downright silly.
Unlike in The Sorcerer, the magic in here is fairly realistic. There’s no astral projection or people getting hit with blue lightning. There’s rituals, and these rituals seem to have effects, but a sceptic could put these effects down to coincidence.
The main character is a preppy fucking douchebag. The gargoyle on the cover of this book should be replaced with a picture of a red-haired twat wearing a scarf.
There is not a single female character in this book whose breasts are not described. The main character of this book is a biscuit salesman, but not a single biscuit is described. I am a fan of tits, but I am also a fan biscuits, and this ratio was fucked up. He should have whipped out a packet of jammie dodgers while he was getting a wank off the old Finnish crone in the sauna. That would have made that scene much more entertaining.
It’s sooooooo fucking long.

Seriously, Master of the Temple is a horrid pile of brown, brown scat from a rotten shitter. Avoid it at all costs.

The Woman Who Slept with Demons

NEL – 1980
After finishing Master of the Temple, I waited a few months before starting on The Woman who Slept with Demons. It has a far cooler title, but I assumed it was going to be terrible. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It wasn’t a great novel, but it was only a novel. It thankfully doesn’t include a lengthy history of western occultism.

Andrew, a promiscuous veterinarian stops to help a woman whose car has broken down. Her name is Bianca, and she asks him to drop her off in some field in the country side. He does so, but after he drives off, he gets worried about her, so he heads back to make sure she can get home ok. When he gets to where he had dropped her off, he finds her having sex with a demon. The demon beats him up. Soon thereafter, Bianca sucks Andrew’s dick and by doing so makes him her slave. She also gains psychic control over him, and he can only get hard for her. This aspect of the book was very similar to Russ Martin’s satanic mind control books.

It turns out that Bianca is one of “the Apart”. The Apart are basically people who have been given powers by demons. With these powers comes a general disregard for decency and societal norms. The rest of the book follows Andrew’s descent into a dark world filled with violence, debauchery, child abuse, rape, incest, flaccid penises and sexy fat women. One scene involves an Egyptian pervert being brutally stomped to death by two horny hags who have been tied up and possessed by a demon. When he’s dead, they grab Andrew and have a threesome in the Egyptian’s viscera.

This book is far trashier than either of Ericson’s other novels, and I found this made it far more tolerable. None of these books are clever, but at least The Woman who Slept with Demons seems to realise this. The occultism on display here is of the far less believable kind, and this makes the book far more enjoyable. I disliked Master of the Temple so much that I’m not sure how much I feel about this book was relief and how much was actual enjoyment. It was decent enough though. This is definitely the best out of the three.

Ericson wrote a history of Witchcraft too, but I don’t feel any desire to track that one down.

Satan Wants Me – Robert Irwin

I kept a diary from the time I was 14 until I was 17. Reading back over it now is excruciating. When I started reading Satan Wants Me, an occult novel in the form of a diary, I felt the same embarrassment for the narrator that I do for myself whenever I read my own old journals. The self-absorbed tone of a diary keeper is spot on.

At first I couldn’t figure out whether this was because Robert Irwin was a skilled writer who understood his character or if he was actually transcribing his own diaries. Some of it is really cringey, but in retrospect, I’m sure this was intentional. You’re supposed to think the narrator here is a bit of a wanker.

Peter is a hippy, an occultist and a PhD Candidate. The book starts off when one of the leaders of an occult order he has joined instructs him to keep a diary. The year is 1967, and Peter is mostly occupied with drugs, sex and rock’n’roll (in that order). He joined the occult order so that he could see a demon, but that doesn’t work out immediately.

Somebody recommended this book to me, and I picked it up knowing nothing about it at all. I ended up spending a large portion of the novel wondering what kind of a book it was going to be. A lot of novels about occultism veer into horror, and the ones that don’t are likely metaphorical wishy washy crap. This book seemed neither. As the novel progresses, the protagonist becomes more and more convinced of the efficacy of magic, but nothing actually happens that couldn’t be explained away by a sceptic. I quite admired this aspect of the novel. I feel like Robert Irwin understood what he was writing about.

Interwoven into the story are a bunch of different aspects of occult history. This novel manages to pull off what Eric Ericson’s The Master of the Temple fails to do. A person who knows nothing of the occult will learn from this book without getting too bored. The Satanism is important to the story, but it’s not overbearing.

This is a book about Satanism, sex, hallucinogenic drugs and rock music. I don’t know how it took me so long to check it out. I read it when I was on holidays, and it seemed to take me ages to get through it, but I thought it was pretty good. It only occurred to me as I was editing this post that I have also reviewed a book called Satan Wants You. That one was crap, as I recall.

7 Years of Nocturnal Revelries

7 years ago, I published my first book review on Nocturnal Revelries. Since then, I have made 360ish other posts and reviewed more than 500 books. During the 2018-2021 period, I posted at least one review per week. By the end of last year, I was getting a bit frustrated with the weekly deadline, and in January 2022, I decided to slow things down a small bit. I’m still reading lots, and I have a ton of future posts planned, but I’m not going to force myself to waste my time reading stuff I’m not interested in just to have something to post on Sundays. This has been pretty good for me. I’ve been working on a few other projects (music, creative writing, and a very dodgy podcast), and I’ll probably use some of these projects for future posts.

Sometimes I get a bit frustrated at the lack of traffic this site actually sees. I work for months on some posts, and it’s usually the posts that I throw together quickly that search engines seem to favour. I’ve tried looking into search engine optimisation and boosting my social media presence to gain traffic, but I lose interest in that stuff very quickly. I’d rather just read a book.

I was going to do a “weirdest books I’ve reviewed” list for this post, but as I looked back over the stuff I’ve written about, I realised there were simply too many to choose from. I’ve done best of posts for every year since 2016, and they might be a good place to look for the most interesting books, but the best place to see the entire range of books I’ve posted about is on the index page. I had a good look over those while writing this post, and it brought back a lot of good memories. Nocturnal Revelries may not be the most popular blog in the world, but I’m damned proud of it, and I reckon there’s another few years left in it still. Thanks to everyone who checks in occasionally. I really hope it’s enjoyable/informative.