A serial killer is roaming around Chicago murdering people in wheelchairs by absorbing them into his chest. A person with a mental disability and his self mutilating friend decide to put a stop to this.
I wanted to like this book, but it didn’t really work for me. The supernatural element of the story, the method of killing, is bizarre and unnecessary. It’s quite confusing and doesn’t add anything to the suspense of the story. The plot would have been easier to follow if the murderer was using a dirty needle or something to kill his victims.
The biggest problem here is that here’s far too many characters. It only becomes clear in the last 3rd of the book who the main characters are. Up until that point the reader is seeing new names every few pages and struggling to figure out which ones are important to remember.
This is one of those books that includes lyrics from songs. I hate when authors do that. Stephen King and Shaun Hutson do it too. It’s lame. We get it. You like music. The problem is that your taste in music sucks. Keep it to yourselves, dorks. The author also gets too literary for his own good. This book features a prostitute with 2 heads. This is not the place for stream of consciousness and diary entries. You’re not James Joyce bro.
I read a short story by Wayne Allen Sallee in the Splatterpunks collection years ago. I can’t remember it specifically, but reading this book definitely reminded me of the stuff in those collections. There’s a kind of edgy self awareness to the writing that feels a bit contrived. At the same time, while most of the writing in the Splatterpunk collections focuses on punching down, this book does not stoop to those depths in its depictions of disabled people. I mean, they do get murdered, but they’re not disparaged or belittled. I wouldn’t say this is a particular tasteful novel, but at least it’s not completely morally repugnant.
It’s been a while since I read something by Sarrantonio, and I thought this title would be suitable for this week.
Bantam – 1990
The first few chapters of this book were a little off putting. They’re about 4 different people who seemingly have no relationship to each other. A famous actor has run away from Hollywood and is hitchhiking across America. A troubled teenager is in trouble with the police. A local professor’s teaching position is at risk, and an old woman is sitting around having a think. To make things more confusing, she has Alzheimer’s and her narrative jumps back and forth. This element reminded me of reading Faulkner back in college. Things take a while to get going, but everything does manage to come together in the end.
It was Sarrantonio’s short stories that made me realize how much he was influenced by Ray Bradbury, and the Bradbury influence is strong here. I also read a review of this book that points out the clear influence of Stephen King’s It, itself a homage to Bradbury. By the end I could definitely see the similarity.
In truth though, this book wasn’t great. My favourite Sarrantonio stuff is his short stories and shorter novels. October wasn’t terrible, but I think it tried a little too hard to be literary and fell a bit short on the thrills. It wasn’t awful or anything, just nothing special. This is the second of Sarrantonio’s October/Halloween books I have read. Maybe next year, I’ll do his Orangefield series.
Some kids in the town of Nebulon start acting up. One of them accuses her mom’s boyfriend of trying to finger her, another tortures a frog to death, and yet another drowns a baby. Their parents aren’t sure what’s going on, but they think it might have something to do with the creepy old woman who the kids hang out with after school.
This book was basically exactly what I expected it to be. It was a bit like dinner before doing the weekly shopping. It filled my hole, but it wasn’t super delicious. I didn’t really love it, but neither did I have a bad time reading it. It was fine. It’s most memorable feature was how mediocre it is. I’ll forget about it in a few weeks. I am in no rush to read anything else by Hugh B. Cave, but I probably will at some point if it’s convenient.
I really don’t have much more to say about this one.
This had been on my radar for a few years. I generally avoid descriptions of books after hearing that they’re good, and apart from assuming it involved a house, I went into Maynard’s House with no idea what it’d be about.
A Vietnam veteran inherits an isolated house from another soldier. He returns to the States and takes up residence there. The house is clearly haunted, and his neighbours are quite weird. He falls in love with a teenage girl who may be a fairy. It’s hard to distinguish between supernatural events and the symptoms of his PTSD.
This book was great. It’s quite funny in parts, and the characters are interesting and believable. This is definitely a cut above a lot of horror novels from this era. Honestly, this was such a breath of fresh air in comparison to the last 2 novels I read. I actually looked forward to sitting down to read this one. If you haven’t read this, you should check it out. I always feel like I have less to say when I enjoy a book, but that’s ok because I have other news for you today!
Weresatan – Infernal Hymns of the Sodomite Cultist
A few months ago, I mentioned that I had been working on a musical project. I recorded 5 songs of ultra-Satanic death metal, and I am happy to announce that tape copies of Weresatan’s first release, Infernal Hymns of the Sodomite Cultist, are now available from Defiled Altar.
While I’ve read a lot of horror novels from the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s, most of these have either been Stephen King novels or relatively obscure texts from authors who only published a few books. I’m actually unfamiliar with the work of most of the popular horror authors of that era. I’ve never read anything by Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, Robert McCammon, John Farris or V.C. Andrews. This is largely because those are the only books I regularly see on charity shop shelves any more, and I’m quite sure all of their work is easily available as e-books. I plan to read them all at some point, but I have been focusing on harder to find stuff because I know those author’s works will be accessible at any point.
The other horror author whose books are always available is John Saul. Like Robin Cook, I had heard that Saul’s work became painfully formulaic as time went on but that his first novel, Suffer the Children was worth a read. It also shares its title with a Napalm Death song, so I decided to give it a go.
Dell – 1977
So the Congers are a weird family with 2 little girls. (This was too close to home for me.) One of the girls stopped speaking because her father assaulted her. The other one gets possessed by the soul of one of her ancestors who was also abused by a parent. This kid tortures some other kids in a surprisingly brutal manner.
I didn’t like this book.
I don’t enjoy reading about kids getting hurt. I get that sometimes this kind of thing is used as a plot device to get the reader to feel a certain way about the bad guy, but when that happens, it usually pays off at the end when he dies horribly. This is not how Saul’s plot works. Here the suffering is the point of the book. It’s truly sadistic stuff.
Some of it’s rather unbelievable too. There’s a part where Mr. Conger tells his wife that he wanted to rape their kid and then tries to rape his wife but his dick won’t get hard. 5 minutes later, the couple are having a friendly chat. The family are cursed, but the curse is never really explained. It’s just a curse that makes people want to rape and murder their kids.
No, I didn’t like this at all. I’m probably not going to bother with any more Saul.
Here’s 2 horror novels about Catholic priests and the roles they play in bringing about the Apocalyspe.
In the Name of the Father – John Zodrow
Dell – 1980
A cardinal finds a little boy in a cave in China and adopts him. The kid, Peter, carries a weird stone idol and speaks of an imaginary friend, but nobody pays much attention to this. People also fail to notice the many accidents that seem to happen to people who get in the kid’s way. When the kid is old enough, he becomes a priest, much to delight of his adoptive father. After being ordained, he begins to work miracles, and anyone who gets in his way soon meets with an unfortunate end. He seems destined to become Pope, and it’s pretty clear from early on that he’s the Antichrist spoken of in the Book of Revelation.
The whole thing is very Omeny, but the difference here is that Peter is actually a good guy. He doesn’t commit acts of violence against anyone. That’s left to 3 teenage girls who taunt and pester him. At one point, he has a dream about one of these girls taking a big shit on his chest. Then he wakes up with a massive boner. This attention to detail really made him a believable character. I’m sure that is a nightly occurrence for Catholic priests.
It’s only been a couple of weeks since I finished this, but I’ve actually forgotten how it ended. I distinctly remember being disappointed though. My goodreads review says that I enjoyed it up until the last 35 pages.
Dark Angel – Sean Forestal
Dell – 1982
When I first read Paperbacks from Hell, I made a list of all the books featured therein that I absolutely had to read. (The Cipher, Feast, Brotherkind, Satan’s Love Child, The Kill Riff and The Satan Sleuth books were all on that list.) At that point, one was still able to go online and find copies of most of those books for relatively cheap. The one exception I found was Dark Angel. The only copy available at the time was more than $1000 dollars. Today, I can’t find a single copy for sale. There has been a scanned pdf version online for years though, and it only took me about a decade to get around to reading it.
This book was really good, and I’m not surprised that it’s sought after. I am surprised that it has not been reprinted. (After writing this review, I saw that Grady Hendrix once listed it as one of his favourite horror novels, so I assume he has tried to get it reprinted under Valancourt’s Paperback From Hell line.)
A Succubus rapes a Vatican Cardinal and gets pregnant. Only Father Joe O’Meara knows about this, and he leaves the Vatican to hunt her down to prevent the end of the world. The problem is that she is a total babe, and he soon falls in love with her. Soon after he loses her virginity to her, he discovers a side to himself that he has long suppressed. This dude loves feet, and pretty soon he is sucking his girlfriend’s toes to warm them up at every given opportunity.
The problem here was that I was invested in this as a romance. (I can’t remember what it was, but I remember experiencing similar emotions when I was reading some other novel about the devil.) I was genuinely happy for the guy. This girl is so dirty that he has to mutilate himself to stop himself from cumming. Imagine being celibate for decades and then finding a partner who satiates all of your kinky desires. They made such a cute couple too. This fucking idiot has to go and ruin his relationship with a rich, extremely horny babe just so that he can save Catholicism. What a stupid loser!
I found this quite well written. It’s long but entertaining, and I genuinely enjoyed the story. It gets into the psychology of Catholic attitudes toward sex, and I wasn’t quite sure what side of the argument the author comes down on. I don’t really think the book is pro Catholicism.
Even though the book doesn’t end as I would have liked (the priest and Succubus riding into the sunset to destroy the Vatican with kinky sex), I did find some satisfaction in the final chapter. I wanted a romance, but this ends as a horror novel should. Honestly, I really enjoyed Dark Angel, and I recommend you read a copy if you can.
The Pinnacle edition of Graham Masterton’s Feast is one of the more sought after paperback horror novels. This is largely due to the awesome stepback cover art, and party due to the full page write up it received in Paperbacks From Hell. When I read about a book that contained a machete wielding dwarf, self-cannibalism and a flaming dog, I knew I had to read it. I immediately ordered a copy of the Graham Masterton Omnibus, a collection containing Ritual (the British title for Feast) and Walkers, a different Masterton novel. To this day, that edition is available for fairly cheap online. Luckily for me though, I soon thereafter found a copy of the Pinnacle edition for just a few dollars in my favourite thrift store. Both lay on my shelf for 8 years until I downloaded an ebook version recently and read that.
Pinnacle – 1988
Feast is about a restaurant critic whose son joins a cult of religious fanatics who are trying to resurrect Jesus Christ by cutting off parts of their bodies and eating them. I had totally forgotten the description of the book that made me want to read it, and I was quite surprised as how similar some of the plot elements here were to those in Brian Evenson’s Last Days.
Inside cover – This is not actually a scene from the story.
The plot is quite ridiculous. The cult gets away with what they’re doing because it contains high ranking government officials. Apparently taking children away from their parents and eating them isn’t technically illegal. I’m no law expert, but I am pretty sure that in the late 80s, parents would have had a strong case to have the police/healthcare officials intervene if their child was posing a danger to themselves by cutting off and eating their own dick. Also, the ending of the book, while satisfyingly gory, really pushes the boundaries of believability. I had just read 350 pages of ludicrous, violent horror, but having Jesus Christ make a personal appearance felt a little excessive.
At the same time, Masterton’s willingness to go all-out was quite refreshing. The last time I read a novel this crazy was probably Masterton’s contemporary William Johntstone’s Toy Cemetary. Masterton’s stories are just as mad, but they’re a little more cohesive.
WALKERS
Time Warner – 2002 (Walkers originally published 1991)
I actually read Walkers a few months ago, and I had similar feelings about how mental it was. There’s no time wasted trying to justify the premise. It’s just thrown at you and you’re expected to roll with it. In this one, a man buys an old mental hospital. The only problem is that all of the old patients of the hospital were involved in a black magic ritual that turned them immortal and forced them into the walls of the building. They can now reach out and pull people into the walls or floors, and when they do, things get messy.
The plot was actually fairly similar to Feast. Both books are about a man who is trying to get his son back from a bunch of weird loonies who are intent on a blood sacrifice. Both also include fiends that are at some point mistaken for newspapers. Walkers was ok, but I definitely liked Feast more.
I have a couple more novels by Masterton on my shelf, and I am sure I’ll get around to them at some point in the future. I actually went shopping for books this week. I haven’t done so in a long time, but I picked up some really good stuff. Let me know if I should be rushing any of these books to the top of my queue.
I was going to start this post by saying that it’s been a long time since I read a Shaun Hutson book, but then I checked and realised that I read both of his terrible Uninvited books only a year ago. They were unbearable garbage, but I quite enjoyed Renegades when I read that in 2024, so I decided to give him another chance. I chose Relics because it’s old. I had no idea what it was about going into it.
Some archaeologists come across a Celtic burial site containing a huge number of decapitated children. This happens near a town where a local group of drug addicted Satanists is commiting a series of horrible animal sacrifices and a local scumbag is breeding violent pitbulls for dogfights. Somebody starts a killing spree. I expected the three different plots of the story to come together into a cohesive whole, but that never happens. I remember having a similar complaint about the plot of Spawn when I read that.
This is fairly graphic stuff. There’s lots of gouts of blood and steaming intestines. Somebody gets their face melted with acid, and a woman is raped in a pile of dogshit. There’s also a few romantic sex scenes. They were perhaps the most uncomfortable parts. Honestly, I can imagine 13-14 year old boys being really impressed with this, but as an adult it was excruciating.
This is not a good book. I wasn’t remotely invested in the plot or characters. I’m not going to say that I won’t read another book by Hutson, but it will probably be a few years before I revisit his work.
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 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.
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.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – 1984
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.
Chick Tracts – 1984
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.
