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.

2023, The Year in Review

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.

I sincerely wish you all a happy New Year!

Ivor Watkins’ Demon

**Future – 1994 (First published 1983)**

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.