I’ve had a pretty good 2023, but it was an odd year for this blog. In March, Google updated its algorithm and decimated the amount of traffic this site sees. This is particularly disappointing as I had more fun with this blog in 2023 than I’ve had for ages. After a few years of largely focusing on fiction, I forced myself to alternate between fiction and non-fiction on a weekly basis. This led me to some very weird books indeed. (All of the following images are links to the respective blog posts.)
I did a trilogy of posts on bizarre books about bizarre cryptids. How I wish I could ring in the New Year with Pigman, Goatman and Lizardman.
I also read a lot of true crime books this year. I don’t know why I hadn’t paid more attention to this genre earlier. Nearly all of the crime books I read had an occult/satanic/conspiracy angle to them. Some of these books were very upsetting to read, but they definitely renewed my interest in blogging. It’s terrifying how frequently texts, characters and authors I have covered here popped up in these books.
I think I read less than 15 non-fiction books during 2021 and 2022, so it was refreshing to spend so much time learning about the real world this year. I read plenty of fiction too, and most of it was of the Paperbacks from Hell variety. Some of these books were good. Others, especially Bradley Snow’s Andy, were truly awful.
My annual blog traffic. The beginning of the end?
It has been a bummer to see my traffic dropping. I blame google for this, but I have also been cutting down on social media in the last few years, and that may have made things worse too. Twitter was the only site I was still using last year, but Elon Musk is a piece of dog’s filth, so I only use twitter to link my weekly post at this point. (Even that is almost useless.) I guess we’re living in the era of the podcast now. I’d move on and try that, but I’d have nobody to do it with. I put a lot of work into this blog, and although it’s ultimately for my own enjoyment, it’s nice to get a bit of recognition now and then. Please share this website with anyone you know who would be interested, and comment or email me if you have suggestions.
Here are some more from this year:
Another thing I’ve noticed this year is an increase in requests from authors for me to read their novels. This always amuses me. Have these stupid bastards ever looked through the blog? I rarely read new books, and I trash 95% of the books I review. Keep your shitty steampunk zombie novel to yourself, you sad virgins. Also, speaking of bad amateur fiction, I don’t think many people got around to reading the short story I put out this year.
I’ll end this the same way I do every year. I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. You can also check out my index page for individual links to the 500+ books I have reviewed here so far. Also, check back soon. I have some good stuff coming up.
Aside from Ken Rayner Johnson’s The Cheshire Cat, Demon is the only horror novel set in Wales that I can remember reading. Aside from that, there is nothing noteworthy about this book.
An ancient evil escapes from a Welsh mountainside after a spot of bad weather and proceeds to possess the village idiot. The moron is granted power over the weather, and he uses it to kill a local vicar and a male stripper. An English engineer who has recently moved to town has to try to defeat this evil before it kills his dog.
This is a very silly premise for a book, but it could have been entertaining if the author had made it ridiculously violent or something. He didn’t though. The writing isn’t particularly painful, but it’s nothing special either. The most interesting character, the vicar’s repulsive yet sexy sister, never reaches her potential. The male stripper was an interesting addition, but I would have liked a bit more detail. I feel like this book would have been far better if it was written by Edward Lee.
Demon was not the worst book I’ve ever read, but I can’t say anything about it was particularly good. Ivor Watkins wrote another horror novel called The Blood Snarl. It’s 100 pages longer than Demon though, and I’ve read that it’s a bit long-winded. I doubt I’ll ever read it.
This is a hard one to find because it was self-published, and I don’t think many copies were ever printed. It took me a few years to find a copy for less than 20 dollars. It absolutely was not worth the wait.
A family of four move to a new house in a remote part of Eastern Canada. The mom gets raped by a dream ghost, and the dad starts having an affair with his ex. Their son starts a gang and makes friends with a demented cannibal that lives in the woods and acts as a puppet for a psychic vampire. Oh, and this psychic vampire is apparently a paedophile too because he tries to marry the family’s daughter. In a hilarious turn of events, the woman who the father is having an affair with reveals that she has a son that belongs to him from their previous tryst. She tried to abort him, but it didn’t work so he just came out mentally disabled.
There’s far too much going on in here for any cohesion. We’ve got ghosts, vampires, mind control, cannibalism and a child molester. The plot doesn’t make any sense, none of it is remotely realistic and there are no likeable characters. This is pure crap.
This does feel a little different to a lot of the paperback horror I discuss here though. It was self published, and this gave the author the freedom to have it illustrated. There are 5 or 6 illustrations in the text. The cover art is striking, probably what made me want to read the book, but I thought the illustrations actually took away from the story. The below image faces the scene in which the mom gets raped by a ghoul.
Not scary.
Also, the text on the back of the book makes some very bold claims.
It was for me. I read a few chapters before bed each night. Reading it literally made me feel sleepy.
See above. It was very, very easy to stop reading it. The only thing that made me want to continue reading was the idea of finishing it. I did not care about what happened to anyone in the book. Picking it up was the hard part. I’m so glad I never have to read this shit again.
I googled Bradley Snow and found some interesting results. When he’s not befriending scammers posing as beautiful women on facebook and retweeting Tucker Carlson, he’s accusing Brian Keene and Stephen King of stealing his ideas (and being racists). He also wrote a book about how a big publisher ruined his life. Of the six other books he has published since Andy, only one has any reviews on goodreads. Both gave it a one star rating. I don’t want to come across as too mean here, but this guy’s lack of self awareness is depressing. He describes himself as, “the World’s greatest living Horror Writer”. He’s the kind of person that makes me think that there should be a similar licensing system for internet users as there is for drivers.
Just a taste of the author’s social media presence
The cover of this book is the only good thing about it. Andy is excrutiatingly bad.
I started reading this book because it has a creepy cover.
Mary suffers from blackouts, brief periods during which she loses control over what she is doing and retains no memories. Also, she can’t tell anyone about these blackouts or she gets sick and passes out. When a murderer tries to kill her, Mary’s blackouts become more frequent and bad stuff starts happening to the people around her.
That’s the set-up. It’s a bit silly, but it has potential. It turns out that Mary was orphaned and has barely any memories of the mysterious orphanage where she grew up. Pretty much the only thing she does remember about it is that it was run by a Satanic nun. These details are revealed early on in the text, and in context, they set up the story in such a way that one ending seems inevitable. The writing is competent, and there is one particularly effective scene in a closed hardware store, but I was hoping that the author would drop in some shocking twists to elevate this beyond the realm of predictable thrillers. He didn’t.
This book ends almost exactly the way I thought it would. I say “almost exactly” because I thought there would be a slightly cheesy horror twist ending. There wasn’t though. This horror novel has a neat, complete happy ending. Yuck. No fucking thanks. In light of the predictable ending, the other faults of the book seem less forgiveable too. Why didn’t Mary just write her thoughts down instead of having to struggle to verbalise them to every new person she encounters? Also, why was she so afraid to tell her caring husband that she was seeing a psychiatrist? Stupid.
There’s a bit of suspense towards the middle of the book, but there is no real supernatural horror, novel depictions of Satanism, or extreme violence. Mary, Mary was a big let down. A few more of B.W. Battin’s books have cool covers, but I don’t feel any desire to check them out now.
When you’ve read a few of these “animal attacks” books, you start to see patterns emerging. This is set in England, and the set up was very similar to the slimey, squelchy, slithery books by John Halkin (which I assume are very similar to James Herbert’s Rats.) Peaceful rural scenes are interrupted by brutal maulings at the hands of hitherto mild-mannered wildlife. The attacks in The Folly were quite bloody, but there was nothing else to note until the end of the book.
Spoilers ahead:
So it turns out that the bunnies are a laboratory experiment gone wrong. A lad who wanted to control the rabbit population in his neighbourhood hired a scientist to genetically engineer a disease that would kill rabbits. Once accomplished, this pair continued their genetic experiments, resulting in a chamber of freaks. The book ends with the protagonist stumbling into a secret room in the scientist’s laboratory which houses his half-human, half-chimpanzee lover (Maybe it’s his love-child: I read this a few weeks ago, and I can’t honestly remember.) The inclusion of this freak is needless and out of place in the story, but I thought it was a stroke of genius. It was like giving somebody a sneaky finger up the bum at the end of a blowjob – the reader’s not expecting it and probably doesn’t really want it, but they shan’t deny it makes things more exciting!
In truth, this is a ridiculous book, but if you’re the kind of person who is willing to read a book about evil bunny rabbits, I don’t think you’ll be terribly disappointed.
In honour of Canada Day next Saturday, here’s some books by a Canadian author. Exactly one year ago, I read a horror novel by Sean Costello. It was great. I discovered that Costello had written two other horror novels, so I decided to read those too. Doing so was an excellent decision. I greatly enjoyed all three of these books.
Pocket Books – 1990
The Cartoonist
Scott, a successful psychiatrist with a horrible secret, meets a strange patient at his hospital. This drooling geriatric can’t walk or speak, but he can draw. At first the drawings seem random and unconnected, but Scott soon realises this is not the case.
I really enjoyed this novel. It’s set in Canada, and at its core, it’s about a father trying to protect his little girl. Both the antagonist and protagonist are horribly flawed people, but it was difficult for me not to empathise with both of them, and parts of this novel really got to me. In the 3 days leading up to me reading this book, I read 3 other “paperback from hell”-esque novels (The Kill, Joyride, and The Scourge) , and I had enjoyed each one less than the one before it. I was expecting the same from this one, but it was way, way better. It’s not perfect (my friend Micah made some valid criticisms when he reviewed it), but I found it very entertaining.
Pocket Books – 1989
Eden’s Eyes
This book starts off with a father signing the consent forms to donate his recently deceased son’s organs. The eyes go to a blind author, the kidneys go to a sick child, and the heart goes to a homeless alcoholic. Unfortunately for everyone, the donor’s mother is not happy about the organ transplants, not happy at all.
That’s the basic premise of the book. That probably doesn’t make it sound like anything special, and in truth, it didn’t really feel like anything special for the first 50 or so pages. Then things started to get darker and weirder by the chapter. It ramps up and up and up, and the ending is bloody glorious. This is a slasher at heart, but the characters are interesting, and there’s weird supernatural elements that make it quite exciting.
I was so excited after the ending that I spent about 15 minutes trying to talk my wife into reading this one. (She wasn’t remotely interested.) Eden’s Eyes was a lot of fun to read.
Pocket Books – 1991
Captain Quad
I think this book may have the most off-putting title and cover of any horror novel ever. I didn’t want to read it, but I’m glad I did. It’s very dark, and I quite enjoyed it.
Peter Gardener is just about the greatest guy ever. He’s smart, athletic, handsome and kind. Unfortunately for him, he falls off his motorbike and breaks his neck. Being paralyzed from the neck down does two things to him. It gives him the opportunity to develop the ability to leave his body at will, and it also turns him into an evil psychopath.
That’s a horrible idea. It’s horrible because part of it is understandable. If I went from having the world in my pocket to losing the use of my body along with most of my relationships and dreams, I’m sure I’d become bitter. Hopefully not bitter enough to kill my mom, rape my ex, and shove an ice auger (basically a giant corkscrew) up an old friend’s anus, but definitely bitter.
Yes, this book gets very nasty. It was a bit like Eden’s Eyes in the way it transformed, fairly suddenly, from a gripping thriller to a gorefest.
Also like Eden’s Eyes, this one is about a person who develops psychic powers after going to a hospital. Sean Costello worked as an anesthesiologist, so this explains why sizeable parts of all three of these books take place in hospitals. The other books that came to mind when I was reading this were Trumbo’s Johnny Get Your Gun and Hallahan’s Keeper of the Children.
Captain Quad is unpleasant because Peter starts off as the good guy. He’s an extremely sympathetic character. You don’t want him to do the bad stuff he does, but it’s not too hard to understand why he does it. It’s difficult to read the book without imagining the same thing happening to yourself. I ride a bike to work every day, and the idea of getting hit by truck and paralysed is far more terrifying than a poltergeist. Honestly, the idea is almost a little too scary for a horror novel. I read these books to forget about my life, not to worry about it.
I really enjoyed these books, and I was really impressed with Costello’s writing. These are a step above a lot of the crap I read. Luckily for everyone, these three Canadian classics are now available as ebooks.
Don’t deny it. Those covers are one the coolest things you’ve ever seen.
I remember seeing the covers of these books and immediately looking them up to buy them. This would have been 7 or 8 years ago. At that point, there were no copies available for less than 10 dollars, so I decided to wait. I just checked, and the cheapest available copy of Satan’s Surrogate available at the moment is just less than 300 dollars. Thanks a lot Paperbacks From Hell!
Star Edition 1981
Satan’s Love Child (1977)
A reporter for a small town newspaper discovers the horrendously mutilated corpse of a reclusive old man in a town that has recently been overrun by weird, taciturn hippies. Around the same time, the reporter figures out that her husband has been cheating on her, partly because he hates his weird stepdaughter.
As a horror novel, Satan’s Love Child is pretty mediocre. On the plus side, it has plenty of Satanism, a weird monster, a reanimated corpse, and even a few mentions of Yog-Sothoth. Unfortunately, the characters are transparent and don’t really act the way normal people would, even when they’re not under the influence of witchcraft. It’s not perfect, but I enjoyed it.
This was originally published as porn though. The author was initially asked to write a rip off of The Omen and then forced to insert graphic sex scenes before it was published. There’s only 3 or 4 sex scenes, but they’re full on hardcore porn. Honestly, I skimmed through these bits. They don’t add anything important to the book. There is a lengthy anal rape scene towards the end of the book that I wasn’t sure about. Was that bit supposed to be sexy or horrible? It came across as horrible.
Star Edition 1981
Satan’s Mistress (1978)
A dead wizard is reincarnated through incestuous rituals and then attempts to summon the Old Ones discussed in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft after sexually assaulting some teenagers.
This book is trash, but it’s quite entertaining. I knew it was supposed to be Lovecraftian horror, but I didn’t realise quite how Lovecraftian. Lovecraft plays a similar role here as he does in Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons, not as a mere author of pulp fiction but as a prophet.
Despite the titles, this book has absolutely nothing to do with Satan’s Love Child. While the cover here is equally as sexy as its unrelated predecessor, the gratuitous sex scenes are absent. There is a similar unpleasantness running through the books. McNaughton wasn’t a happy ending kind of guy.
Star Edition 1981, Carlyle Edition 1980
Satan’s Seductress (1979)
Satan’s Seductress is a direct sequel to Satan’s Mistress. Its cast is almost entirely made up of characters who survived Satan’s Mistress. It’s more of the same. The evil wizard and his mistress are searching for the Necronomicon, and they are prepared to do some pretty horrendous stuff to get it.
This is not a great book, but it contains knife-wielding cultists, reanimated corpses, portals to other dimensions and eldritch tomes of forbidden mystery. This is precisely the kind of trash that I want to read after a hard day at work.
Carlyle Edition 1982
Satan’s Surrogate (1982)
While there is not much point in reading Satan’s Seductress if you haven’t read Satan’s Mistress, Satan’s Surrogate, like Satan’s Love Child is entirely separate, standalone novel. The plot has similarities with Mistress, and it’s similar in tone to the other books, but it’s far more complicated. Honestly, I found it a little disappointing. The story is too busy. There’s a lot of characters, and they’re largely uninteresting. There’s also a lot of plot elements, probably too much really. It has vampirism, wizards, alternate dimensions, cannibalism and references to Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft, but it has a weird folklore thing running through it too. It wasn’t a total pain to read, but I never looked forward to sitting down with at night. This is particularly disappointing, as I paid more for my copy of this book than I did for any of the others mentioned here. As far as I know there was only one edition published under this title, so this is is the hardest to find of the Satan series.
I realise that I said very little about the plots of these books. That’s not laziness. There’s really not very much to say. These books are trash. The reason they are hard to find is because they look so damn cool.
The first editions of Satan’s Love Child, Satan’s Mistress and Satan’s Seductress all had the same face on them.
The sexy covers pictured at the top of the post appeared on the Star editions between 1980 and 1981. Satan’s Surrogate came out in 1982, and it never got a sexy cover. When it came out, it seems that Carlyle put out new editions of the earlier books with new covers. I have not been able to find an image of the cover of Satan’s Love Child from this run. I am not sure it even exists. That book is more pornographic than the others, so it might have been left out. Then again, the other books are numbered, so it seems unlikely that they left out #1.
If anyone has a copy of the Satan’s Love Child from this run, please scan it and let me see!
All editions of these books are pretty scarce at this point, but the sexy Star ones are the hardest to find. Fortunately, Wildside rereleased the original texts with their original names in the early 2000s. These are all available as ebooks on amazon for a few dollars. The first book in the series won’t include the gratuitous sex, but I doubt that will affect anyone’s enjoyment much. I thought about getting the new (actually old) editions too and comparing the texts to the Satan versions, but the books aren’t actually good enough to warrant doing that.
Satan’s Love Child is now Gemini Rising
Satan’s Mistress is now Downward to Darkness
Satan’s Seductress is now Worse Things Waiting
Satan’s Surrogate is now The House Across the Way
Honestly, these books are alright, but you’ll probably never end up with the full collection. Get the ebooks and save your money. Getting my hands on the full set of Star editions took more time than it did money, but they have only become scarcer since then. I have copies of a few of McNaughton’s short story collections too. I may get to them at some stage, but I’m in no rush.
I knew nothing about this book when I started reading it, but if you had asked me to guess the plot, my guess would have been very accurate. Honestly, this says more about the book than my expertise.
This is a book about a swarm of genetically altered flies who turn bad and start killing everything in sight. It was so similar to Gila! by Kathryn Ptacek that I wondered if both Kendall and Ptacek had attended the same “write your own animal attacks horror novel” workshop. One book is about lizards and the other flies, but episodically they’re almost identical. When I looked through the goodreads reviews after finishing the book, I noticed that I was not the only person to notice the similarities here. Killer Flies came out two years after Gila! too, so it looks like it was the rip-off. Apparently Mark Kendall is a pseudonym for a writer called Melissa Snodgrass, and it seems like she is not hugely proud of this work.
Honestly, this was pure trash. It’s exactly as bad as it looks. In the end, the main characters, 2 men and a woman who are involved in a ridiculous love triangle, kill the flies by playing a song at them.
Apparently this was quite a difficult book to track down for a while, but it was recently republished by Encylopocalypse. I love that there are publishers getting this kind of crap back into print. It would be a great shame for a person to have to pay more than a few dollars for trash like this.
The above comments may seem quite critical, but although they are all true, I did actually quite enjoy this very silly piece of trash novel about killer flies.
I really got into this book when I was reading it, but the ending was a let down.
The novel starts off with a child being murdered in the woods near a place named Deacon’s Kill. This scene is deeply unpleasant, but it does a good job of engaging the reader. Soon after the kid dies, a young professional buys a house in “the Kill” and invites all her friends for a party. One of them goes out to pee in the woods and gets murdered. A young couple who had been at the party then start living in the farm house and making friends with the locals, but it’s not long before they realise something bad is in the woods near their house.
That’s a pretty solid set up. I was totally invested at this point. I read the first 200 pages of the book in one sitting. Unfortunately, the ending of the book happens too fast, and the explanation given for the kills in The Kill is bizarre and unsatisfying. I’m going to talk about it in the next paragraph, so maybe skip that until you’ve finished the book.
A prehistoric, invisible, almost invincible man was fossilized inside a stone until it rolled down a hill and cracked open. I’m not a geologist or historian or anything, but the last time that the Eastern part of the United States was under water was the Cambrian period, about 50 million years ago. This guy is pretty old. Also, if he doesn’t weigh enough to make a footprint, how does he exert enough force to kill people? There’s no explanation given to this extremely mysterious antagonist. It just doesn’t work.
Dead White
Tor – 1983
I had planned to include two of Ryan’s novels in this post, but I didn’t realise when I started Dead White that it is also set in Deacon’s Kill and features some of the same characters as The Kill. It’s not a sequel, but the town itself is as much a character here as in The Kill, and I would strongly recommend reading these books together. The text also references Charles L. Grant’s Oxrun Station and Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel as if they were real places. I thought that was pretty cool.
The events in Dead White take place only a little while after the events of The Kill. A big snow storm hits the town of Deacon’s Kill at the same time that a circus train full of diseased, bloodthirsty clowns arrives at the town’s abandoned railway station. This sounds silly (in the best possible way), but the writing is good enough to fill the book with suspense and atmosphere. The chapters are all fairly short too, and every time I would tell myself, “One more before bed.”, I’d end up reading 7 or 8.
I really enjoyed reading The Kill, but the ending fell flat. Dead White is just as enjoyable, but the ending here is more cohesive while remaining just as bizarre. It is a book about murderous clowns, but it predates both King’s It and Killer Klowns From Outer Space., so it doesn’t really feel like the cheesy clownsploitation horror that I’m sure we’re all sick of. I really enjoyed it. I’ll definitely be reading Ryan’s Cast a Cold Eye in the future.
I started Snowman because i wanted something short. After reading the first few chapters and realising this was a novel about a team of Native Americans and Vietnam veterans hunting a yeti who attacks a ski lodge, I considered giving up. Thomas Page’s The Spirit was based on an almost identical premise, and I wasn’t a huge fan of that book.
Things picked up a bit as I kept reading. The main bigfoot hunter here is called away from a weird drug cult he has started on a Native American reservation, and he’s armed with miniature nuclear weapons. The bigfoot in question is also really, really big, and he’s half-dragon. Yes. He has heat rays and sparks come out of his mouth.
Honestly, this book was entertaining enough when I got into it, but realistically, it’s drivel. There’s a whole bunch of subplots and ideas that go absolutely nowhere. There are some cool bits, but Bogner didn’t seem to understand that these ridiculously over the top elements are the only thing that make the book enjoyable. Too much of the book is filler. Why the fuck would I want a chapter on a love interest in a book in which a peyote munching wacko melts a fire-breathing yeti’s arm off with a tiny nuclear warhead shot from a crossbow at the top of a mountain? I think Bogner should have played up the trashier elements, maybe added a some wheelies, laserbeam and guitar solos.
This book was like airplane food, unappealing at first, but tolerable after the first few bites. It also gave me diarrhea.
Nocturnal Revelries 