2025, The Year in Review

Another year has come and gone, and I’m still here blogging about creepy books. I sometimes wonder if I’m going to run out of weird stuff to read, but as I dig deeper and deeper into the archives of the occult, the horrifying and the Fortean, that seems less and less likely. At the same time, I am always interested in book recommendations, so please reach out if you have any!

For the last few years, I’ve tried to split my posts evenly between fiction and non fiction. This year, I read more trashy novels than anything else, but many of these were by the same authors, so I grouped them. I did posts on Sidney Williams, Ray Garton, and Stephen R. George.and Whitley Strieber. I planned to do the same for John Russo and Jack D. Shackleford, but the books I read by them were so bad that I abandoned my plan. I also read The Omen and The Exorcist series and The Wickerman books.

I ended up reading quite a bit of modern horror too. I used to avoid stuff that was written in this century, but there are still some talented authors alive today. I really enjoyed the books I read by David Sodergren and John Langan.

I read some other fiction that falls outside of the aforementioned categories. I was super excited to finally get my hands on a copy of Otto Fredrick’s elusive Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair, and the research for my post on Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories led me to see a ghost. I really enjoyed doing the reading for my posts on Nicolas Hawksmoor and Jack the Ripper.

I focused on conspiracies last year when it came to non-fiction. I did a few conspiracy texts this year, but also included some crime, some aliens, some cryptozoology and some general Fortean weirdness. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was a bizarre highlight. Also, I apologise to anyone who was deeply offended by my silly post on Fascist Yoga. Perhaps the strangest text I encountered was Martti Koski’s My Life Depends on You! In May, I was interviewed on the Bonversations podcast about some of this stuff.

I also did a few books on occultism and Satanism. I think I’m going to be a bit more picky about the grimoires I choose to review on here in the future. I went looking for something quick to review the other day, and after starting a grimoire, I did a little research on the author and discovered that he was literally mentally disabled. Still, I did enough studying of occult lore in 2025 to learn how to raise some tentacled Elder Gods from their deathly slumber. I was also finally able to read a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch. It was everything I hoped for.

February of this year marked an entire decade of Nocturnal Revelries. For several of those years, this blog was pretty much my only creative output. This summer, I started writing my own music, and I have been focusing more of my free time on that recently. This is partly why I didn’t post as frequently during the summer. Nevertheless, as the year progressed, I managed to balance my 2 hobbies. I will be taking a course in the evenings over the next few months too, so hopefully I’ll find a way to juggle that too. I have a few bizarre texts lined up for the near future, so please check in regularly.

I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. I’ve quite enjoyed the blog recently, so I’m sure I’ll be doing another one of these posts at the end of 2026 too.

Thanks, and happy New Year!

The Books that Villainized Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s

I have no great interest in role-playing games, but I knew that Dungeons and Dragons was associated with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, do I decided to look at the books that contributed to its infamy.

The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III – William C. Dear

Dallas Egbert the Third was a weird teenager. He was highly intelligent, but socially awkward. He tried to make up for this when he went to college by taking drugs. He was gay, and he got involved with some shady characters. His mom was pushy, and wouldn’t have approved of his lifestyle, so he decided to kill himself. He went down into the ventilation tunnels under his college so he could die, but he couldn’t do it, so he went to hide out in some of his gay friends’ homes. He was kept drugged and it seems likely he was sexually abused. A private detective, the author of this book, found him halfway across the United States. They returned home, but Dallas put a bullet in his head a few months later. He never gave his full account of what had happened to him when he was missing.

This book was written by the detective who found Dallas. It wasn’t a great book, and the author’s writing style was grating, but in fairness, it’s not overly bullshitty. There is a horrendously drawn out chapter describing the author’s experience playing Dungeons and Dragons, but despite his intial suspicions, he ultimately dismisses the idea that the game had anything to do with Dallas’s fate. The kid was all kinds of messed up. His interest in fantasy games and science fiction seemed like the only parts of his life he enjoyed.

The book is of its time. It repeatedly makes reference to “the gays”, but it doesn’t do so with any kind of malice. If you want to know about this sad and weird case, this is essential reading.

**Dell – 1982 (Originally published 1981)**

Mazes and Monsters – Rona Jaffe

I had very low expectations when I started reading Mazes and Monsters, and I can say with disappointment that it was exactly what I expected. This is a boring novel with nothing of any value. It’s truly as bad as it looks. Look at that shitty-ass cover again. Fucking lame shit.

This book is about 4 nerds who play “Mazes and Monsters”. All of the chracters are lame and annoying. One is very clearly based on Dallas Egbert, but he isn’t really the protagonist. The main character here gets so involved in the role-playing game that he becomes convinced he’s really a holy magician. He is so strongly convinced of this that he becomes impotent and kills a person. As much of the book is spent describing the backgrounds of the main characters’ parents as is spent on the plot. I assume this was because Jaffe’s audience were mostly middle-aged women with teenage children that needed some point of reference for understanding the plot. This was so, so boring and crap. If I owned a copy of this book, I would take it into the forest and defecate upon’t. The only good part was when one of the main characters’ mothers goes on a date with a gentleman who expresses disappointment over her haircut because her formerly long, curly hair had reminded him of pubic hair. Such a bizarre detail to include. I’m willing to bet that the author’s minge was infested with pubic lice.

Mazes and Monsters was published the year after Dallas Egbert died, and while it does make it seem like role-playing games are probably dangerous for impressionable youths, it doesn’t really try to link role playing games with the occult. Still, it’s a piece of shit, and you shouldn’t read it.

Dark Dungeons – Jack Chick

This is a Chick Tract that came out in 1984 that claims that playing Dungeons and Dragons leads to suicide and Satanism. It’s silly rubbish. Read it here.

**Berkley – 1982 (originally published 1981)**

Hobgoblin – John Coyne

I’m throwing this book in here because other authors have linked it to the furor around RPGs in the 1980s. It’s about a young man who becomes obsessed with a game called Hobgoblin, but none of the really bad stuff that happens in here comes as a result of the game. Coyne’s book is more of an entertaining novel that features an RPG than a statement on the dangers of those games.

So a nerdy kid’s dad dies, and him and his mom have to move to a small town where she can work in the local castle. The caretaker there is a creepy Irish immigrant, and the manager starts fucking the boy’s mom. The boy is a stupid virgin, and chooses to start fights with the local football players instead of banging the hottest girl in school. It turns out there’s a weirdo living near the castle who likes murdering and sexually assaulting people.

So many parts of this book were completely unbelievable, but it was decently entertaining. There’s one part where two of the local jocks kidnap a girl, tear off all her clothes and abandon her, tied to a tombstone on the top of a hill. Then they break into the protagonist’s house and sexually assault his mom. Nobody does anything about this, and they face no repercussions. I know that attitudes toward sexual violence have change since the 1980s, but this was ridiculous.

The Irish elements were mildly interesting. The role playing game here, Hobgoblin, is set in Ireland, and all the characters in the game are supposed to come from Ireland. I didn’t recognize quite a few of them. I looked it up, and one of the main bad guys, the Black Annis, is actually from English folklore. Also, the old Irish caretaker character is very weird. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him or repulsed?

Ok, I’m going to include spoilers in this paragraph, so skip ahead if you want to read the book. I’m a bit confused about the ending. I just finished the book, and I don’t really understand what happened. The main bad guy was a badly brain damaged geriatric who must have been more than 80 years old. Despite this, he was able to brutally murder a bunch of people by himself over the course of about half an hour? Did he have some kind of magical power? Why was he killing people in the first place? Did I miss something?

Hobgoblin was alright. I don’t regret reading it. Mazes and Monsters was a mouthful of salty diarrhea. Dear’s book about Dallas Egbert was interesting as a historical source, but it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable book. I am quite done with books about Dungeons and Dragons.

Whitley Strieber’s Early Horror Novels: The Wolfen, The Night Church and Black Magic

It’s roughly a decade since I first reviewed a book by Whitley Strieber. I hadn’t been into this stuff very long, and I was shocked at how stupid the book was. I read the next book in his series about getting diddled by aliens a few months later, and a couple of years after that I managed to make it through the third book. Although I’ve had the 4th entry in the series on my shelf for years, I’ve never been able to convince myself to open it. What I had read of Strieber made him seem an unbearable twat, a boring, self centered gobshite.

I knew from the outset that he had been an author of horror novels, but his alien books were so cumbersome that I had no desire to read his fiction until. It was only when I became more interested in paperback horror a few years later and discovered that some of his horror novels seemed to be held in high regard that I decided to give his fiction a chance. He wrote 4 horror novels before switching to fantasy in the mid 80s. (It was a few years later that he moved on to “non-fiction” about aliens.) Over the last 8 months, I have read 3 of his 4 early horror novels. The one I didn’t read, The Hunger, seems to be considered one of the better ones, but it has sequels, so I am saving it for a separate post.

**Avon – 1988 (Originally published 1978)**

The Wolfen

I read this a few months ago and didn’t bother taking notes. It’s about a pair of detectives trying to solve a series of grisly murders committed by superwolves (not werewolves). It wasn’t utterly amazing or anything, but it was competently written and definitely of a higher standard than a lot of the paperback horror boom. I quite enjoyed it.

**Grafton – 1988 (Originally published 1983)**

The Night Church

I was expecting to enjoy this one more as it deals with Satanists rather than werewolves. The different covers are really too. Look at the one above! Unfortunately, the story is boring. A young couple falls in love only to discover that they have been bred to breed the Antichrist. I read this a few months after reading all of the The Omen novelizations, and maybe the similarity to those is what made this seem underwhelming. After finishing this, I waited roughly 6 months until I could convince myself to read another book by Strieber.

**Granada – 1983 (Originally published 1982)**

Black Magic

I bought a copy of this book after seeing the cover online years ago. Unfortunately, this is a spy novel with only a touch of occultism. The plot is complicated and involves 4 different story lines. There’s the good guy, the evil, gay, psychic Iranian teenager and then 2 Russian communist generals who hate eachother. They’re all working against each other, and I didn’t care about any of them. This was boring crap, and I was very relieved to finish it.

The Wolfen was pretty good, but The Night Church and Black Magic were a waste of my time. I do plan to read The Hunger in the future as I’ve heard it’s one of his better efforts. I doubt I will ever return to Strieber’s non-fiction.

10 Years of Nocturnal Revelries

After finishing secondary school, I did a degree in English literature, but I really only developed an interest in reading after finishing university. I spent a while reading important works of literature and then started on my area of interest, horror. Once I got my first full time office job and achieved some stability, I started collecting second hand copies of the classics of this genre. After reading a few Dennis Wheatley novels, I began collecting grimoires and books about witchcraft. The only thing cooler than having a bookshelf about Satanic sorcerers was to have the bookshelf of a Satanic sorcerer. I liked the idea of scaring any guests to my apartment with my nefarious collection of sinister tomes. The only problem was that I never really had guests over, so I decided to post my collection online instead. I made my first post on Nocturnal Revelries on February 27th, 2015.

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

After a few years, I realised that there was no way I could ever collect (or afford) all of the books I wanted to read, but I discovered that many of these books are available online. I was immediately able to access books about Satanic communists, death cults and sex magicians. At the same time, I discovered that some books are so rare that the internet doesn’t even know about them. I was able to procure one of the only known copies of Aristotle Levi’s mysterious and extremely elusive occult porno, Spawn of the Devil. (My taste for Satanic porn was dampened soon thereafter when I got my hands on a copy of Raped by the Devil.)

I don’t think I would have read these if not for the internet.

In 2018, 2 important things happened for this blog. The first was getting my hands on a copy of Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s Paperbacks from Hell. My blog was no stranger to paperback horror fiction, but the release of this book set me on the trail of countless trashy horror novels that belonged on this website. (The downside was that it sent countless others after these same books, and now many are ludicrously unaffordable.) I was delighted to play a small part in getting one of these books, Garrett Boatman’s Stage Fright, republished. Fortunately for me, I have been able to get my hands on many of the rarest of the Paperbacks from Hell without paying hundreds of dollars.

I found it really hard to pick which books to feature here.

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

I suppose this is a bit of an odd book blog. I don’t expect to enjoy many of the books that I read, and the most entertaining posts on here are probably on books that are objectively bad. Instead of listing the best books I have read, I generally prefer to highlight the weirdest, most messed up books I have come across:

None of these were good, but all were entertaining.

Sometimes I think that this blog lacks focus. I cover classic horror fiction, trashy horror fiction, books about aliens, conspiracies, murderers, the paranormal and more. I assume that most people who have an interest in any of these fields will probably have a mild curiosity about the others. Going back over the archives for this post was quite entertaining for me. There’s several books on here that I had completely forgotten about. (I don’t know what the exact count is now, but I know it’s approaching 700.) Still, I am always interested in book recommendations.

I don’t understand why you’d want to read anything else.

10 years is a long time, and my life is very different to how it was when I started this blog. Now I’m a respectable member of society. I have a driver’s license, a job, a family and a mortgage. I have to keep my dark passions under wraps for most of the day, putting up a front of normalcy and rationality, but every night, I still make time to read something eldritch, something hideous, something deviant or something Satanic. Long may my dark Nocturnal Revelries continue!

Zebra Horror from 1992: Nightscape and Near Dead by Stephen R. George

I remember talking to some dickhead online a few years back who told me that the book that he wanted most in the world was Nightscape by Stephen R. George. I had never heard of it, but one look at the cover, and I understood.

This started off pretty well. A kid moves in with his mother after his father goes missing, but soon thereafter his skin starts coming off. It gets a bit minging, but the entire book is ruined by a super happy ending. I hate happy endings for horror novels, and this one is the worst. I had enjoyed the rest of the book, but absolutely everyone getting exactly what they wanted is not what should be happening at the end of a novel with this cover. I want pain, violence and misery. Honestly, I was very disappointed.

I had another novel by Stephen R. George on hand though, so I read that too.

Now I read this book maybe 2 weeks ago, but I had to go and read a description online to remember what happened in it. It’s about a lad whose wife and daughter come back as ghosts once their murderer starts killing again. The lad then falls in love with a weird psychic lady. Although it didn’t really leave a lasting impression on me, I definitely quite enjoyed Near Dead. I know it only took me a couple of days to finish. It was definitely better than Nightscape.

I don’t have a huge amount to say about either of these novels. I got pretty much what I expected from the covers. While I didn’t like the ending of Nightscape, both books were very readable. The biggest problem with this author is that old copies of these paperbacks have become very expensive due to their awesome (but largely inaccurate) cover art.

I know I have a copy of Stephen R. George’s Torment, but my books are mostly in storage at the moment, and I wasn’t bothered to root it out. I may well read it or other books by this author in the future.

Gnelfs and Azarius by Sidney Williams

Way back in May 2024, I read Sidney William’s Gnelfs. First published in 1991, this book had recently been republished with its original artwork, and having seen something about this I decided to give it a read.

It’s basically about a little girl whose favourite kids TV show characters come to life and start killing people. This is a pretty neat idea for a horror novel, but I found the book a little dull. It has been a while since I read it, and I have definitely forgotten much of the specifics, but the reason it took so long for me to get around to writing about this book was because I didn’t have much to say about it. I remember the ending going off on a ridiculous tangent that made the whole thing seem muddled. It felt like the author was aiming too high. When I’m reading a book about malicious goblins, I want violence and nastiness, not a grand battle between good and evil. Williams put his protagonists into the underworld instead of putting the gnelfs into a blender.

I decided to read another book by Williams to both give him a second chance and to make sure I’d have enough to say to warrant a blog post. I didn’t have high hopes though, and I put off reading another book by him for 7 months.

Azarius is William’s first novel, and this one was even more boring than Gnelfs. It’s about a demon who is possessing people and getting them to hurt each other. I wanted to like this, I really did, but it’s bloated and slow. It’s also about how demons are bad and how faith in Christ can save you. No thanks.

At least 100 pages could have been cut from both of these books, and the boring romances between the characters should have been replaced with graphic violence and slimy things. Williams wrote a few other horror novels set in the same town as these two. It’ll probably be a while before I get around to them.

I am currently between books. Please give me recommendations in the comments or in my email. Thanks!

Jack MacLane’s Blood Dreams

I read Jack MacLane’s Blood Dreams this week. It’s pretty much exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect from its awesome cover. This is a pretty standard “Paperback from Hell“.

Larry, a 10 year old boy who has premonitions of other people’s (bloody) deaths, moves to a new town and forms a psychic link with Hubert, the local sadistic murderer. Hubert isn’t happy about this and decides to solve the problem in the only way he knows.

There’s a lot of soft drinks being drank in here, and at one point the killer is seen reading Joe Lansdale’s The Drive-In, but other than that, there was nothing particularly surprising about this book. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it though. I finished it over a few days, and while it’s not exactly a masterwork of fiction, I was decently entertained.

This isn’t the book I intended to post about this week. I’m reading an extremely bizarre book about Satanism that is taking me a long time to finish. Hopefully I’ll get a bit of time over Christmas to finish that one off.

Michael McDowell’s The Elementals

I didn’t think I was going to get a post out today, but I managed to abandon my family and read this morning, and I’ve just finished Michael McDowell’s The Elementals. I’ve wanted to read something by Michael McDowell for years, and this didn’t disappoint.

This is very much a haunted house novel, and while that’s not my favourite genre, it can be very enjoyable when done right. McDowell gets the right mix of characterization, suspense and downright nastiness here.

A rich family own three houses on a remote, private beach. One of these houses has something really bad in it. Everyone knows to stay away from it, but when India, the youngest member of the family pays her first visit, she has to go and take a peek inside. The atmosphere builds and builds, and the ending has everything that you could possibly hope for.

If this was 3 years ago, I would have waited until I had read 3 or 4 of McDowell’s novels to post about him, and while I do intend to read more of his books, I just don’t have the time to read multiple books a week anymore. There’s only a week left until Christmas holidays, so hopefully I’ll be able to read more then.

Richard Laymon’s The Wood Are Dark: A Trashy, Tit-filled, Cannibalistic Nightmare

In 2019, I read Flesh by Richard Laymon and quite enjoyed it. 2 years later, I read The Cellar. I didn’t like that one, and I’ve steered clear of Laymon since. Recently a friend suggested that I check out The Woods Are Dark. I had read that the first edition of this book had been heavily censored, and I was very pleased to find a copy of the unedited version that Laymon’s daughter had published after her father’s death.

**Cemetery Dance – 2008 (First published 1981)**

After a freak throws a severed hand into their car, two young females are kidnapped in small town and tied to a tree in a clearing in a nearby forest. There they meet a family of 4 who have met with a similar fate. The kidnappers promptly run away, and it turns out that they were just serving dinner to a tribe of cannibals called the Krulls. Luckily, one of the kidnappers starts to feel guilty because he has fallen in love with one of the girls he kidnapped, so he comes back to save her. He manages to set everybody free, but then the Krulls arrive and things get ugly.

The best part about this book is Lander Dills, the father of the family of 4. The former English teacher goes mad and starts behaving just as poorly as one of the Krulls. His thought process is outlined in one of the crudest lines ever put to paper: “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A rape for a rape.” The only difference between Lander and the savages is that he quotes Shakespeare while raping and skinning his victims. Apparently this guy’s escapades were the parts that were cut from the first edition. Without him, the book would be very dull.

One of the girls who was kidnapped by the hillbillies manages not only to forgive her kidnapper when he comes back to rescue her, but she actually has consensual sex with him hours later and cries at the thought of not being able to spend the rest of her life with him shortly thereafter. Very realistic.

In truth, I was a little shocked at the level of brutality on display in this book. There’s gang-rapes, and cocks being bitten off aplenty. Also, this is a Richard Laymon book, so there is a lot of tit talk. I did a search through an ebook version of the book, and without counting tits, boobs or nipples, the word ‘breast’ appears 58 times. The Woods are Dark is pure trash, but it was relatively entertaining. I’ll probably read more of the Booby man’s stuff in the future.

Killer Cats: Nick Sharman’s The Cats and Berton Roueché’s Feral

Miaow.

Nick Sharman’s The Cats

I’ve had this one for ages, but a few years ago I read another book by the author that wasn’t very good, and I assumed this would be pretty bad too. When it comes to “animals attack” horror, there comes a point where you know what to expect.

Nothing about this book was unexpected. It was like that book about killer bunnies I read a few months ago except this one was about killer cats, and it didn’t have a plot twist. The Cats is actually very, very similar to any of the three books in John Halkin’s Squelch trilogy. I haven’t read it yet, but I assume all of those books are basically rip-offs of James Herbert‘s The Rats. I’m not just saying that because of the line on the cover of The Cats either. There’s something very formulaic and British about all of these books, and The Rats predates them all. I’ve been holding off on that one because it’s part of a trilogy. I’ll get to it someday.

A science experiment gone wrong leads to an army of cats attacking London and killing everyone in sight. My favourite part was when the president of the USA comes over to England and pours a bottle of acid down a cat’s throat. This book is truly ridiculous. It’s not particularly bad or hard to read, but it’s also not a good book at all.

The above didn’t seem sufficient for a post of its own, so I read another book about killer pussies.

Berton Roueché’s Feral.

**Pocket Books – 1975 (First published 1974)**

A young couple moves into an old house in a remote neighbourhood on Long Island, but their peace is shattered when they discover that the woods behind their new home is filled with angry, feral cats with a taste for blood. Imagine Jaws but with cats instead of a shark.

It’s also very similar to The Pack by David Fisher. It’s a warning to summer people not to abandon their house pets after their vacation.

The ending turns into a bloodbath, but it never gets as silly as Sharman’s The Cats. Once the humans start shooting, the kitties never stand a chance. There’s fewer characters in here too, and they’re far more believable. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel about evil puddy tats, but Feral is well written and so short that I really enjoyed it.

I saw that there was a retitled edition of Feral that came out a year after it was first released that was also named The Cats. Herbert’s The Rats was released at the same time as Feral, and it seems that somebody decided to give Feral‘s rerelease a similar name to capitalise on the other book’s success. I haven’t yet read The Rats, but I doubt that Feral is very similar. Either way, it seems like a sign that both of this week’s books tried to ride the coattails of Herbert’s infamous novel. I better take a look at those rat novels soon. I’m sure there’s more horror novels about cats out there, but I’m in no rush to read any more. Cats make my hands itchy.