Lovecraft vs. "Sax Rohmer"

By a strange coincidence, three books fell into my lap over the last two weeks and, in reading them, I began to see a curious set of parallels forming. All three books concern themselves with supernatural forces emerging from the darkness of Ancient Egypt, but there was more than this going on to make me think of them as somehow connected.

The first was The Bat Flies Low by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Henry “Sarsfield” Ward, 1883-1959). The book was originally written in 1935 and deals with industrial espionage and Ancient Egyptian knowledge, a decidedly unusual combination.

“Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Henry “Sarsfield” Ward), The Bat Flies Low, Caxton House, New York NY, 1939.

Octavo; hardcover, spine titles on a red label; 314pp., top edges dyed red. Moderate wear; slightly rolled; spine extremities mildly softened; boards a little scuffed with a glass ring to the upper board; text block and page edges mildly toned; previous owner’s contemporary ink inscription to the flyleaf. Dustwrapper rubbed and edgeworn with light chipping to the spine panel extremities and flap-turns; a small tear to the bottom edge of the lower panel with associated creasing; a few spots to the flaps; now backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected by non-adhesive polypropylene wrap. Very good.

The story involves a wealthy American – Lincoln Hayes - lured by a mysterious Oriental woman, Hatasu, on a quest to obtain information stolen from the Book of Thoth (but not THAT Book of Thoth!). En route, he encounters a mysterious stranger to whom his beloved is in thrall who seeks to thwart him, and learns that not only is he, Lincoln, intent upon the secrets from the Book, but that a competitor in the energy business back in New York is also after it. The secret knowledge involves a powerful light source which uses unending energy from the sun (which sounds a bit ho-hum nowadays but work with them here). Repeatedly attacked by enemy agents at every turn, Lincoln and his band of trusty friends are finally convinced to act on the side of Good and help bring things to a satisfying conclusion.

The story is replete with all of the things for which Sax Rohmer is known, but interestingly, he tones down his usual bigoted agenda and strives to keep things straight for once, at least as far as describing foreign civilizations is concerned – there are no kris-wielding Manchus here! The women are all on-point as far as Rohmer’s material goes – all frail things to be protected, or vampish pawns of evil Svengalis – but the main feature of his writing here is simply how lazy he is. From the outset, he tells us that Lincoln Hayes is deathly taciturn, unreadable as far as his emotions are concerned, and prone to dropping articles and subjects when he speaks: this frees Rohmer from the exigencies of having to craft any sort of interiorality for this character and causes Lincoln to come across as a mere block of wood – except for when Hatasu gets her claws into him. As well, Rohmer introduces us to the bizarre character of Ulric Stefanson, bespectacled scientific wunderkind with a photographic memory and a soft spot for Liebfraumilch, who is also saddled with a stutter until about halfway through the book: our Egyptian nemesis hypnotizes this trait away for no particular reason. I guess Rohmer got sick of wr-wr-writing it in t-t-too! Having ploughed through this pulpy extravagance, I turned to my next windfall:

Lovecraft, H.P. (Margaret Ronan, ed.), The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror, Scholastic Book Services/ Scholastic Magazines Inc., New York NY, 1971.

Octavo; paperback; 255pp. Moderate wear; covers rubbed and lightly edgeworn; staple holes to the front cover, penetrating through about the first third of the text block. Very good.

No surprises here, but it’s always good to find a copy of Lovecraft’s stuff that I don’t already have in my collection, especially when the cover art has been so deliberately poached from F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu”. My main interest in this collection was the editor – Margaret Ronan – who was one of HPL’s circle of correspondence and one of many writers whom he encouraged to pursue the art. I was keen to see how she’d speak of him in her Introduction and muse over the stories she’d chosen to present. Seeing that “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” was here, and having just finished with Rohmer, I turned to it pretty much straight away. Bells began to ring almost immediately.

Now, this is not my favourite Lovecraft tale by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, it’s one I don’t really like at all. It’s fairly obvious to see where Houdini leaves off and where HPL begins. For my money, it’s too cute and, since it was designed as a promotional jag for Harry Houdini, I can never read it without hearing axes grinding in the background. This time though, there were all of these familiar terms jumping off the page – places, things, people – that I had just been reading about in Rohmer’s book and I began to look at the whole piece askance. Had HPL ripped off Rohmer in writing this piece for Houdini?

A quick check of dates sorted this out fairly quickly – HPL’s ghost-written short story appeared in 1924; Rohmer’s book was first published in 1935, two years before HPL popped his clogs. I admit, when I started reading The Bat Flies Low I hadn’t checked the publication date at all, but I have a bunch of first edition Rohmers that date from around 1917, so I sort of knee-jerk drop his stuff into a between-the-Wars mental category which is simply not justified – Rohmer was still pumping out his pulp well into the 50s. So, correcting myself, instead of thinking that HPL plagiarized another writer, it looked as though Rohmer had copied HPL. Here’s my evidence (which is completely shaky, but bear with me):

First, Rohmer’s tale reads as though it was meant to be something else. As a narrative about two energy magnates vying for control over a revolutionary power source (the Sun! Incroyable!) it could have been a straightforward tale of industrial espionage along the lines of Rohmer’s Re-enter Fu Manchu (1957), which is a Bond-esque story of agencies trying to seize control of an advanced missile shield as the Cold War intensifies, all the while being manipulated by the Devil Doctor. There’s no need for the story to shift gears and jump to Cairo in the middle of everything, and the secret cabal of Egyptian mystery-protectors feels a bit tacked-on and spurious. I have to say though, that Rohmer needs little encouragement to hop over to the Mysterious East – Re-enter Fu Manchu also starts off in Cairo for no discernible reason. It feels as if Rohmer - with The Bat Flies Low - was trying to capitalize on the fact that “The Mummy” had just jumped off the silver screen in 1932 and that he was cashing in on all the Mummy-mania that followed afterwards. Even here though, the story is bog-standard “Sax Rohmer” with little to differentiate it from his usual material.

Next, take a look at the locales within Cairo that both authors focus on. As a heads up, HPL lets us know (writing as Houdini) that a copy of Baedeker was crucial in the planning of the Cairene trip:

“Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter…”

This travel guide was indispensable for any European traveler beginning in 1827 and was issued in huge print runs every year and in fact continues to do so. Originally published in German, the company saw a significant benefit in publishing their guides in English and did so from about 1859. To this day, the word ‘Baedeker’ is synonymous with the term ‘travel guide’. We can be fairly secure in the knowledge that, if he said - as Houdini - that he had a Baedeker guide to Egypt, then HPL certainly had one beside him as he wrote this tale.

What we can therefore also be fairly certain about is that Sax Rohmer had a copy nearby as well – or, if not, he had a copy of “Weird Tales” (May, 1924) containing “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” somewhere to hand. We can tell because both stories mention the exact same places. Now, this is quite likely because foreign travelers in the 20s and 30s were a cliquish lot and they all went to the same places, saw the same sights and stayed in the same hotels, but it’s just as likely that Rohmer just copied the territory in HPL’s work, perhaps checking it with his own Baedeker volume. We know that Houdini came up with the basic plot of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” and it was passed along to HPL by J.C. Henneberger, editor of “Weird Tales” at the time, and we can assume that some autobiographical details were provided as well. Certainly HPL works the story into the real facts of Houdini’s travels – in 1910, the escapologist did travel to Australia to enthuse his fans and tear up the skies in his aeroplane; here’s a shot of him taken on February 19^th, 1910, being chained up and pushed off Queen’s Bridge into the Yarra River in Melbourne:

Accordingly, there are references to all the same locales in Cairo. Lovecraft says:

“We stopped at Shepheard’s Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad, smartly built-up streets…”

Rohmer gives us:

“On the terrace of Shepheard’s the following evening, just as dusk was falling…”

Lovecraft says:

“The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel.”

Rohmer says:

“He stared in the direction of the steps. Paddy Rorke and Ann Wayland were saying good-bye to a party of three leaving for Mena House…”

Rohmer goes on:

“The crickets were very audible in the garden outside, and also the croaking of the frog. But human interference was distant and muffled. Sometimes he could hear the trams over by the Esbikeyeh Gardens…”

And:

“True that the Mûski has lost much of its Oriental character, but yet it retains, and can never lose, while those narrow ways and overleaning houses remain, some faint perfume, now growing a little vague, of the great days of the Caliphs.”

…referencing places HPL has name-checked in the quote above and lending them more than a touch of Lovecraftian flavor what with the overhanging-gable thing that HPL enjoys so much.

As noted, all of these places are famous in Cairo and notable also for being hang-outs for travelers in the 20s and 30s. The Mena House Hotel started life as a hunting lodge in 1869 before being converted into a swanky hotel in 1886. It was named “Mena” after the Egyptian King Menes. In World War One the place was requisitioned as accommodation by Australian troops and they liked it so much that they took it over again in 1939, eventually converting it into a wartime hospital. It was restored to its former glory as an hotel in 1972 and is still going strong. Shepheard’s Hotel was opened in 1841 as the Hotel des Anglais by Samuel Shepheard and a Mr. Hill who sold his interest to Shepheard in 1845, allowing it to be re-named as “Shepheard’s”. Shepheard himself sold the Hotel in 1861 and retired to Warwickshire leaving the place in capable hands: it was a booming business all the way up until 1952 when it was burnt to the ground. A new Shepheard’s was opened later, but at a new location in the city.

The Mouski, or Mûski, is actually the Sharia Al Muski (more formally known as the Sharia Gawhar Al Qaid) and is as busy today as it ever was. Both writers whistle up a fairly convincing word-picture of the place although HPL, writing a short story rather than a novel, is a bit pressed for time. They both also mention the Esbikeyeh as well, once an ornamental garden and site of Cairo’s first opera house, now (under a different spelling) an upmarket residential suburb of the city.

You’ll notice that both authors mention trees at some point too:

“The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the island of Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees… we drove between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological Gardens” (HPL)

“As they left the avenue of lebbekh trees and neared the outskirts of Cairo, all became silent.” (Rohmer)

These are (despite the variation in spelling) members of the Albizia lebbeck species, as far as I can make out. I can only assume that there was a significant stand of mature representatives of these trees noted in a Baedeker of the time, since – while these trees do grow in Africa – I can’t find a source that tells me that they’re native to Egypt. It’s possible that they are some other type of tree, a local variety with a local name. Still, HPL and Rohmer both took the time to note them down.

Finally, there’s another telling detail. Writers writing about places they’ve never been to - and are unlikely or unable to see firsthand - often rely on reference material – sometimes images – to spur their creative imaginations. Both scribes here mention a ‘bazaar of the Coppersmiths’ in passing:

HPL gives us:

“The native crowds were thinning, but were still very noisy and numerous when we came upon a knot of reveling Bedouins in the Suken-Nah-hasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths”

While Rohmer says:

“And then the clatter of the market of the Coppersmiths, with clinking of numberless hammers; very, very old men whose eyes appeared to be quite sightless tapping out intricate patterns upon vases and caskets.”

Why should this be? Well, from what I can tell, both of them went in search of inspiration and found the same engraving somewhere and latched onto it. That image is David Roberts “Bazaar of the Coppersmiths, Cairo” executed in 1838 and still selling today. Here it is:

Any word search in Google Images will bring up scores of these Victorian Orientalist images of romanticized Cairene communities and it’s clear that both of our authors stumbled onto the same image somewhere, or that HPL found it and Sax Rohmer copied him. Interestingly, if you search for the name of the place which HPL provides, the only results you get are for this particular short story, so I’m guessing he had a dodgy translator helping him, or that he just took a wild stab at it himself.

A final indicator of Rohmer’s possible indiscretion springs from the following quote from Lovecraft’s ghost-written tale:

“I was in the grip of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks and saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery…”

There’s no direct parallel in Rohmer’s book, but what happens in the novel is a direct reflection of it. In the course of The Bat Flies Low, our team of heroes is skillfully embroiled by our sneaky Egyptians; small incidents and seemingly inconsequential happenings all snowball into a final resolution (in fact, to be fair, it’s also Lincoln’s commercial opponents who do a lot of this stuff as well). It reads much as if Rohmer had read HPL’s text here and said, “Our hero enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously? I can do that”. And so, he did. The party’s nemesis in the tale also seems to have been inspired by Lovecraft’s work:

“This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself Abdul Reis el Drogman, appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name for any person in authority, whilst ‘Drogman’ is obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties – dragoman.”

Mohammed Ahmes Bey, leader of our Egyptian cabal, is a similarly noble-seeming and powerful figure, also strangely unidentifiable by agents of the law. At one point too, a dragoman dupes the party allowing one character to be drugged.

Lovecraft has a good deal of negative press to retail about the Great Sphinx of Giza too and Rohmer is also willing to jump on that bandwagon. Unlike HPL though, rather than having the thing come to some kind of mocking hideous unlife, he suggests mystical and hidden purposes behind the monument and ladles on the superstition:

“The Arabs are insanely superstitious. To this day they call the Sphinx ‘the Father of Terror.’ Fortunately, Hassan ès-Sugra is more up-to-date…”

And later:

“It is told, sir,” said Hassan ès-Sugra, “that the Path of Harmachis ends at the foot of these mountains. It is an old superstition – like the name of the path. I cannot say where it comes from, but they say that the Sphinx watches over the path to these mountains; that here – and not Gizeh – lies the secret of the Father of Terror.”

This, incidentally, is sort of true. In Arabic, the name for the Sphinx is Abū al-Hawl, or “Father of Terror.”

This brings me to that third book I mentioned I’d discovered recently. It’s this:

Bloch, Robert, “The Opener of the Way”, Panther books Ltd./Granada Publishing Ltd., St. Albans Herts. UK, 1976.

Octavo; paperback; 172pp. Mild wear; covers lightly rubbed; light toning to the text block edges. Very good.

“Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”, by all accounts, is what really turned Robert Bloch into a Lovecraft fan and compelled him to get into contact with the author. The Egyptian influence is strong in much of his Mythos work as such stories as “The Opener of the Way”, “Beetles”, “The Dark Demon” and “The Faceless God” reveal. This last story especially plays off references in the Lovecraft narrative and toys with the notion that HPL dangles temptingly before the reader in “Imprisoned” as to what the face of the Sphinx might have looked like before Khephren had his own face carved there instead.

*****

The upshot from all of this is pretty inconclusive. Sax Rohmer’s book is a fairly close parallel to Lovecraft’s short story in some ways, but did he pillage it for inspiration? It’s probably a question that will never have an answer, and the only halfway strong piece of evidence is that “coppersmiths” engraving, which is also pretty flimsy. That being said however, Rohmer wrote a history of the occult in 1914 entitled The Romance of Sorcery, after which Houdini contacted him and they became best friends; Rohmer invented a magician-detective character called “Bazarada” based upon him. If Rohmer did plagiarize Lovecraft, he certainly couldn’t have confessed the fact to Houdini (who died in 1926), but you can probably bet that Houdini told Rohmer about the short story he ‘wrote’ for “Weird Tales” magazine. So there’s that.

And, if you’re going to copy from someone, best to do it from a someone who’s (almost) dead, and who was known for their meticulous attention to detail:

“I went the limit in descriptive realism in the first part. Then when I buckled down to the under-the-pyramid stuff, I let myself loose and coughed up some of the most nameless, slithering, unmentionable HORROR that ever stalked cloven-hooved though the abysses of elder night.”

-Lovecraft, writing about putting together “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”

Review: American Psycho

Bret Easton ELLIS, American Psycho, Picador/Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2000.

Octavo; paperback; 399pp. Moderate wear; covers rubbed and edgeworn with some creasing; text block and page edges lightly toned. Very good.

This book first appeared in 1991 and it was a headache from the word “go”. Due to the content, it was required that the book, when sold new, had to be enclosed in shrink-wrap, so that no-one could just browse through it inadvertently and be offended. This had an impact upon retailers’ attempts to reduce their carbon footprint – causing some distributors to fork out for shrink-wrapping equipment – and the costs were necessarily passed on to the consumers. A buzz soon generated and for many - at least here in Australia, anyway, where our bullshit threshold is particularly low – it seemed as though this was just a marketing strategy to boost notoriety and, therefore, sales. You can bet that every major bookshop in the world though, had an opened copy tucked away somewhere that had been ‘accidentally’ damaged down at the receiving dock and which did the rounds of the staff.

For me, I had just slogged through the crapulous fascination, generated in the 80s and pushed on into the 90s, for serial killers. We had been thoroughly saturated with the life stories of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, presented to us as super-beings and whose evil existences had been strip-mined to produce Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, all of Patricia Cornwell’s books and even the “X-Files”. Deranged multiple murderers were everywhere, and the concept was becoming stale and had started to devour itself. So, the last thing I wanted to do was to read yet another book about a psychotic repeat killer. As far as American Psycho and I were concerned, my only role was to make sure it stayed like Laura Palmer – wrapped in plastic.

Then of course, the movie came out and the book was re-launched, this time without the gloomy Francis Bacon cover. I was once more convinced that the plastic wrap schtick was just hype – if the book was so notorious, how come it was allowed to be filmed? – but the headache over ‘to wrap or not to wrap?’ was back and I was grateful to be working in a part of the book world where such things were not an issue. To this day, I have been unsure about whether – as a secondhand book dealer – the rule has to be followed within my area of expertise. Given that most injunctions of this nature in Bookland are rarely, if ever, policed (with the sole exception – in my experience – of the timed release of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels), I’ve always assumed that it doesn’t apply if the book is being sold used; however, the book so rarely shows up on the secondhand market that it’s not really been an issue.

(This is a disturbing thing, in and of itself. There are books that are sold new by the millions that almost never get surrendered to secondhand dealers – the complete works of Sir Terry Pratchett for instance – and the assumption is that they are always read into the dirt and so are only ever thrown out as unusable, or are so wildly popular that readers refuse to give them up, or are so outrageous that no-one really wants to be identified as having read them. I’m assuming that American Psycho fits into the latter category – any thoughts otherwise are too horrible to contemplate.)

The other week however, a copy did materialize from somewhere and, after I spotted it on the ‘specials’ table out in front of the shop with a $5 sticker on it, I withdrew it from sale and my boss and I had a conversation about it, mainly about whether it should be wrapped up or not. We agreed to differ, and I decided to take the book home with me – it’s a perk of the job being able to take any of these well-used books home if they catch my eye. I chucked it on a shelf and forgot about it until the recent bushfires demanded that I do something to distract myself from the enclosing ring of flame that seemed to be pushing inevitably towards my home (it’s alright now; the worst has passed). Here are my thoughts:

This is a terrible book. It’s also a horrible book, in that it deals with horrific and horrifying things, but it’s a terrible book in that it is a thing designed to instill terror – terrible in the Old Testament sense, in other words. It’s a book that can be read on multiple levels and – like all such things – it is dangerous in the hands of those who approach it in the wrong way. This is not a story about a young would-be Hannibal Lecter committing crimes in New York and getting away with it; this is absolutely not a Patricia Cornwell slick and sassy serial killer “airport read” or potboiler. This is an unflinching condemnation of an entire lifestyle and attitude to existence that Easton Ellis was vilifying in the 80s and which we are heirs to right now. In that it veils its message in copious amounts of sexual and violent pornography is truly worrying and, having now read it, I see that the decision to shrink-wrap this monster was more than just a sales ploy.

Having been exposed to ‘serial killer chic’ through everyday media, we know – whether we’re conscious of it or not – a lot about how the psycho-killer’s mind works. We know that they display a distinct lack of empathy, or ability to relate emotionally to those around them, despite being able to hide their true natures with relative ease. We are aware that they tend to be hyper-intelligent and that they display ritualistic behaviours and “magical thinking”. We have learned that they escalate their behaviour over time becoming more reckless, in tune with their growing sense of being immune to consequences. What Easton Ellis is trying to show us with this book is that all of those traits and mannerisms are alive and well in the business culture that grew and perpetuated in the 80s. Yuppies – especially New York Yuppies – are trained to be sociopathic monsters by the very nature of the work they do and the institutions which support them. In making one of their breed a serial killer, he highlights this parallelism and displays the consequences to our culture and our society of this attitude.

Patrick Bateman – the serial killer in this novel – is a merchant banker (although he doesn’t need to be – we learn that he is supported by a massive trust fund and has never needed to work) and spends his days working out at the gym and spending time lunching at various fashionable eateries across New York, often well into the night. He spends time in the company of his peers, well-dressed young men with whom he vies to appear to be the most conspicuously wealthy and well-appointed, in terms of everything from their haircuts to their girlfriends. In his circle, he is treated as something of an authority on fashion and answers many mind-numbing queries as to the required width of braces or the appropriateness of a pocket square. In detailing these endless useless conversations, Easton Ellis shows us how Bateman’s mind works:

We never get a description of anyone in the story – no faces or discussions of height or weight are provided, rather Bateman provides excruciating detail about clothes and who’s wearing what: designer names; styles; materials – it’s an eye-glazingly endless list of brands. So too are descriptions of meals, apartments and other environments – brand names, food and fashion trends occupy Bateman completely. This shows us that he never actually thinks of people in terms of who they are, just what they have. The Yuppie obsession with conspicuous consumption is paralleled with the serial killer’s lack of empathy with clinical skill.

Society is also given the serial killer treatment: Bateman’s peers are all identical to himself, therefore he regards them as equals (although he is first among them, in his own opinion). Women with whom he dines are all potential girlfriends – if they are also employed by financial agencies, or come from money; otherwise they are “hardbodies”, if sexually stimulating; “girls” if they are about to be tortured and killed by him; or else, invisible – and definitely better off that way. His bigotry extends even further, and he displays an open hatred of Jews, blacks and homosexuals. Waiters, taxi-drivers and doormen are all treated with disdain and the poor and homeless are scorned, vilified and randomly tortured and/or murdered. In Bateman’s world, money and power are the only roads to success and he fights a constant battle to ensure that he is on top.

According to criminologist and former prison governor David Wilson in his work A History of British Serial Killing (Sphere Books, 2009), such killers are promulgated in societies where certain elements of society are promoted over, and at the expense of, others, meaning that some sectors of the community are not privy to the protections offered to others and have had “bonds of mutual support … all but eradicated”. He says that such groups as the elderly, the poor, racial minorities, religious groups, sex workers, the homeless, even children, consequently don’t get the protections that they deserve or need. This view is more than adequately depicted as real and functioning in this book, where white, male, privilege is tacitly (and not so tacitly) supported at all times. Bateman kills and tortures just about everybody – women, men, children, animals – and he gets away with it all because the world around him lets it happen.

That I think is the most disturbing thing about this book: he gets off scot free. Towards the end, I was turning pages in the increasingly forlorn hope that someone would see what he was doing, that someone would call the police, and that Justice would be seen to be done. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t happen. So hollow, so ethically and morally barren is this book, that Bateman just enters a new decade (the 90s) with no comebacks, and no consequences for his repellent actions. Nothing. By the book’s end, Bateman is so repulsive to us that even his friends and associates can’t help but be tainted by his career of evil – we simply cannot believe that they can be so blind and so they must be complicit. As are we all, since, apparently, we’ve all ignored the call-to-arms that this book represents.

(And speaking of complicity, I’m amazed that this book wasn’t suppressed upon release, not because of its content – which is truly vile – but because of who it ropes in through association. There are extended discussions of noted musicians of the day – Genesis and, by extension, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and Mike & The Mechanics; Whitney Houston; Talking Heads; INXS; U2; Belinda Carlisle; Huey Lewis & the News – movie stars – Tom Cruise: Bateman has a chat with him in an elevator; Sylvester Stallone – and political figures – Ronald Reagan; Oliver North and George Bush – none of whom are painted particularly sympathetically, since they all share in Bateman’s approval. I guess they (or their agents) all decided that any promotion is good promotion. It should surprise no-one that Donald Trump is an inspiration to Bateman and that his name crops up all over the place as the object of Bateman’s fawning adulation: I’m pretty sure that Trump wouldn’t choose to see a negative spin on his depiction in this work; I’m also pretty sure that Trump hasn’t even read this. In fact, if he ever did, he probably wouldn’t see anything wrong with it.)

(Actually, the resounding silence from all of these performers and their agencies says more about the prevailing attitudes represented here than anything else. If these people had a moral core - or even a defensible position upon their involvement - they would have spoken up well before now.)

Easton Ellis uses a particularly pared-down style in this work. It’s no-nonsense and clinical, spared the need of descriptive passages or internal struggle. The constant litany of clothing types styles and brands, along with lists of furnishings, accoutrements and restaurant dishes, is designed to blunt the reader’s sensations, causing a kind of comatose state that is often, startlingly broken when Bateman pulls out a knife and gets to work. Even here though, the clinical and often off-hand lists of ruination and dismemberment are coloured by this pedantic background of wardrobe identification and dissection: Bateman works both literally and metaphorically. Drugs, cocaine and prescription brands (brands, brands, brands!) are crucial to Bateman’s world and his struggles to dose himself into acceptability, or out of his meltdowns, is the closest we see to anything resembling his inner emotional state.

There are some problems, not least of which it’s way too long: at three points in the novel, chapters appear that provide a complete review of various musicians and their bodies of work throughout the 80s. These are seemingly randomly thrown in and, except for the last of these chapters which focusses on Huey Lewis & the News, don’t overtly seem to originate from within the mind of Bateman. In the context of the material which bookends them, they are disturbing and partake of the clinical mentality that inexplicitly drives them (ie., Bateman’s) but just one of these would surely have been enough (if only because I won’t be able to hear any of these performers without this context from now on!). Too, an extended passage occurs when Bateman shoots a busking saxophone player in the street during which his silencer fails to work and the noise of which summons two policemen driving by. The ensuing mayhem as Bateman desperately flees capture is pulled out of the first person perspective into the third person point of view, obviously designed to display the psychological disassociation which Bateman feels at having made an error in judgement; however it reads like the bad narration of a sequence from an action movie and jars as a result. So too, do a lot of the sex scenes which unfold across the book, reading like third rate porn for the most part before descending into infernos of splatterpunk excess. There are sex scenes which involve Bateman and potential girlfriends (or the girlfriends of his so-called friends) which are quite different in tone to these other brutal dismemberments. Easton Ellis obviously chose a technique with which to relate his narrative; he should have stuck with it doggedly, because these excursions and deviations come across as obvious tricks and defeat the intent of his not-so-obvious ones.

There is some confusion too. It becomes clear to the reader at some point in the narrative that Bateman is using pseudonyms to hide who he is from many of the people he encounters. Most people call him "Patrick" or "Bateman", some call him "Marcus", others call him "Davis". Given that Bateman often misidentifies people he sees across crowded rooms, and that no-one of his acquaintance is given a physical description to personalise them, the reader is often at a loss as to who is saying or doing what to whom, and when it's a case of Bateman being deliberately misleading, the problem compounds and confusion reigns. 

I hate this book. I think it’s disgusting and repulsive. That being said - and given where we are as a society these days (Trump! President!) - I also think it’s an important document, a searing alarm-call to action which was ruthlessly ignored and watered down by the Powers That Be. I think it needs to be handled carefully and read with a measuring eye – if anyone came up to me and tried to tell me how “cool” they thought Patrick Bateman was, I would punch them in the nose. In fact, I still think it needs to be shrink-wrapped, secondhand or otherwise. You may not agree with me; that’s your right. Regardless, there’s no going back after having read this, so choose your next step wisely.

Review: “Lights Out”

David F. SANDBERG (Dir.), “Lights Out”, New Line Cinema/Grey Matter/Atomic Monster, 2016.

There’s a term used in writing that doesn’t get much of an airing, although it should. It’s “scaffolding”. This word refers to the writer’s research and indicates the background material upon which the narrative rests. The material is necessarily “background” because it remains unobserved, understood in the scenery of the story but – ideally – never, ever highlighted. A good writer respects their audience and trusts them to know what’s going on, never needing to point out or highlight the amount of research that they’ve undertaken. A good writer knows that, despite the hours of research that they’ve done, very little of it will appear in the final product. That sounds weird so let me try to explain it graphically. Here’s a ‘cloud’ breakdown of “Lights Out”:

Essentially, all of the terms and words in this graphic (and it’s not comprehensive) are used in telling this story. A lot of these subject headings are not explicitly mentioned or described during the story. However, you know absolutely that the writers of the screenplay checked out and looked up every topic on offer. Once they had their background information, they then pieced together a story that didn’t need to directly mention UV-light treatments of clinical depression; or discuss the regulations concerning Child Welfare in the US; or even mention the candlepower of the screen of an average mobile telephone. They were confident in their research, and they were confident that it would ring true for their audience: they could then toss out their scaffolding. The amount of blue in my diagram simulates the (approximate) amount of time that an overt reference to the background material crops up in the dialogue of the film.

Now here’s another ‘cloud’ (see if you can tell what story it’s based on):

Stephen King can’t let go of his research. If he discovers something in the course of writing a book, he has to let you know about it, and he has to let you know that he knows. Essentially, he likes to show off. What this means is that his books are bloated – bogged down with extraneous information that he isn’t able to trust you to take for granted – and they carry on interminably, well after the point when they might have been entertaining. This is why there are editors out there.

Some writers are so popular that they stare down any notion of editorial trimming, They get all Jack Kerouac on their publishers and demand to include all and everything that they scrawl down, when what they really need is someone with clear vision and a shiny-new red Sharpie. By the time King wrote It, he was able to demand that editors stay away – and publishers were willing to go “okay!” because messing with something that doesn’t seem to be broken is often a bad move. But the books that show up are bad – they are flabby; overwrought; self-involved. It happened to King’s books; it happened to J.K Rowling’s books; even Charles Dickens suffered from it – he was padding like crazy to fill column-inches in his own magazines.

Some readers enjoy it if the book that they’re reading is a huge brick of a thing – it means that, for them, the enjoyment of reading lasts longer. But wading through a bog of interminable prose is never as satisfying as gliding across words that sing with clarity – even if it’s only a short story. Try reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, or Theophile Gautier’s The Jinx, or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and you’ll see what I mean. Strange to say, King himself knows this – his short stories are some of the best things he’s ever written.

Getting on to the point of this post, “Lights Out” is a vehicle that has left its support structure far behind. It doesn’t preach, or talk down to its audience, and it assumes that we will all understand and keep up. There is depth to the film, because what little backstory there is that is flagged to us, we are able to follow up at our leisure should we so choose. Like all of the best movies out there, it’s tight; controlled; and fitted together like a Rolex. Writing of this calibre is few and far between in movieland these days.

The story concerns Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) a strong-willed and self-reliant young woman, negotiating the parameters of her relationship with her well-smitten boyfriend, Bret (Alexander diPersia). She is summoned to the school of her much younger half-brother Martin (Gabriel Bateman), after Child Services is unable to reach their mother, and is told that he keeps falling asleep in class. It turns out that, every time the lights go out, something prowls around his home; something dark and disturbing; something that his mother Sophie (Maria Bello) – having stopped taking her medication – talks to and treats as a friend.

The creature that stalks the darkness is Sophie’s mysterious companion Diana. She cannot exist in light and vanishes whenever they come on, but when the lights are out, she rampages ferociously, teleporting to distant locales and slipping past locks and other restraints. We learn, from the pre-credit sequence, that Diana is responsible for the death of Sophie’s second husband (Martin’s father), which has been attributed to less supernatural causes, and we discover much later that Rebecca’s father – believed absconded – has most likely been scratched off Diana’s hit-list as well. Things quickly escalate to a confrontation but there are problems: Martin wants Rebecca to help rescue his mum; Rebecca couldn’t care less about her mother but refuses to bail on Martin; and Sophie wants all of them – Martin, Rebecca and Diana – to just get along. Diana of course, just wants Sophie all to herself. Locked up. In a very dark place.

The situation unfolds with everyone trying to keep the lights on while Diana remorselessly finds ways to ensure that she stays in her element. As things progress, Rebecca unearths more and more clues about Diana’s origins and why Sophie seems so helpless in Diana’s grip. The final resolution is grim and completely logical but only arrives after the body count starts inexorably to climb.

Much of the horror here is of the “jump scare” variety, with Diana showing up dramatically whenever the lights fail, and some might be inclined to roll their eyes a bit at this. However, while these frights are a regular occurrence, they happen against a background of sustained dread and rising fear: I guarantee, in every scene of this flick, you will end up ignoring the actors while you scan the background over their shoulders, waiting for the horror to spring forth. Many of these kinds of films generally make sure that the characters do something stupid in order to facilitate a gag later on: not here. The rising tension of this movie never, ever resorts to making the characters do something illogical just to ensure a kill. We are right there with our heroes and our dismay when Diana gains the upper hand is as palpable as their own. This is real skill: sustaining this kind of emotion is tricky and this is a masterclass in how to do it.

There’s a bit with a UV blacklight that didn’t make a lot of sense to me – someone dropped the ball a bit with their science research, I think – but it’s a small quibble when balanced against everything else that’s working so damned well. This film takes all of the most primal human fears about what’s out there in the dark (in the closet; under the bed) and embodies them in a devastating fashion, without kneecapping credibility and without breaking the mood with inappropriate humour (there are some funny bits but they’re impeccably handled and they never ruin things). This is a small budget movie and, like most small films, is relatively small in its scope – I suspect that’s why it probably didn’t get as much hype as it deserved. The director has gone on to make “Shazam”, and its upcoming sequel, so it was definitely a useful springboard, I guess. Personally though, I could do with fewer grown men in tights and more of this. Please.

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

Review: "Occult Detective Magazine", Issue #6 - Fall 2019

GRANT, John Linwood, & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective Magazine #6 – Fall 2019”, Cathaven Press, Peterborough UK, 2019.

Octavo; paperback; 208pp., with monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Fine.

ODQ is back but I’m somewhat confused – the name of the magazine has been changed from “Occult Detective Quarterly” to “Occult Detective Magazine” which means it’s either issue number 6, or issue number 1, depending upon how you count these things. The front cover clearly identifies itself as “issue 6”, so I guess we’ll go with that. The rationale – as provided by the Editorial by Dave Brzeski and the tribute to Sam Gafford by John Linwood Grant - is that changing the magazine’s name is somehow a mark of respect to the publisher who steered the vehicle through from its earliest days. I would have thought that you’d double-down and keep the name, but that’s just me. My main concern in the aftermath of this decision was that I’d go online and try to find out what was happening in ODQ-land, only to discover dead links and websites becoming increasingly less relevant as time went by. Of course, if you search for Occult Detective Magazine, you’ll see it’s all happening, which is a cause for delight. As it is, I discovered the situation only because I was contacted by John Linwood Grant to be told that an article which I had forgotten I’d even written was about to be published in this instalment.

I guess that, the sort of confusion that results when a publisher and facilitator of this kind of publication dies, it leads to a lot of sifting and sorting out as other people take over and try to fill capacious shoes. That’s all to be expected. I’d also expect that keeping clear lines of communication would be paramount, so name changes and alterations to the online presence would be kept to a minimum and perhaps shelved until a later date, after plenty of heads-up announcements. That’s just me. In the meantime, I’m extremely glad to have been kept in the loop about the appearance of my work. Anyway, I’m sure that there were solid reasons for all of these changes and I’m glad to have received my copy.

Pleasingly, the smaller format – octavo, rather than quarto – has been maintained from the previous issue and the cover artwork and design is suitably dramatic. There are adverts aplenty inside (which always bodes well for continued existence), although the artwork is a little sparse. Of course, this is often due to a lack of contributors and isn’t something that editors can usually just address at need, so it’s no big issue. The ‘skull dingus’ that graced previous issues has gone and that’s probably not a bad thing – while cute, and something of a brand logo, it certainly must have been a headache for the layout compositors trying to squeeze it in all the time. As for content, there’s a wide array of good fiction and articles, and a swathe of reviews. Let’s unpack:

First cab off the rank is Melanie Atherton Allen’s “The Rending Veil” which continues the adventures of her erstwhile investigator Simon Wake. After enjoying her story “Cowherd” in volume three of ODQ, I was looking forward to this. The story is taken from the point of view of one of Wake’s unsympathetic cronies – a member of one of Wake’s London clubs – who feels that Wake’s magical shenanigans are somewhat of an imposition upon the status quo. That this tale involves a very real threat to Reality itself seems to blow his objections out of the water. Wake – thought to have passed irredeemably into the lands of the Fey – summons his club associates to a remote train station and from there into a forest where disturbances in the nature of the universe are bringing grotesque manifestations into the world from the Faery realms. Wake co-ordinates a plan of attack with his buddies and they do their bumbling best to see things through to completion. First and foremost, this is a bit of fun and obviously written as such. Allen is one of very few American authors I’ve spotted who is able to trot out cod-Wodehouse dialogue with any facility, and her efforts in the British idiom are virtually faultless. Unfortunately, I was starting to hear the Benny Hill theme music in my mind towards the end, what with our characters tearing around a graveyard hotly pursued by a Headless Horsemen, so it began to feel as though the story had outstayed its welcome. Like her previous efforts though, the story is soundly researched and constructed and effectively executed.

For something a little different, next comes “Komolafe” by Tade Thompson, a prose poem which tells the tale of the titular hunter whose associate, Arowolo, was taken by a vampiric wilderness entity and for whose hideous death Komolafe is accused. The tale is a harrowing one and steeped in its African setting. Komolafe is sentenced to a trial by beating – one hundred strokes by a rod during which he mustn’t cry out, since the innocent do not feel pain – and he lasts until stroke number 32. There is a surprising twist at the end, which is solemnly satisfying, although grim. There’s lots to like here, not least the format which helps ground the story in its context. I’m not sure about it as story of occult detection – the investigative element is somewhat tenuous – but it’s very cool.

With Matthew Willis’s “The Way of All Flesh” we hit the first (or is it the second?) of three vampire narratives which Dave Brzeski promised us in the Editorial. A decision was made to take three stories of vampire activity and put them all in the one issue for reasons of comparison and contrast; I can see a justification for this, but I think there are more reasons not to, the main one being that these things tend to blur and can transform what was a showcase of various styles covering the range of the subject matter into an unintentional single emphasis. If, after reading this issue, you asked a friend what was their favourite story and they said, “the one with the vampire”, focus is suddenly lost. And, as I’ve just indicated, “Komolafe” reads - to me, anyway – like a vampire story too, so bloodsuckers it seems are in the eye of the beholder.

As to Willis’s story, from the opening scene I felt we were onto something good. The visceral sensations of unearthing a suspect corpse are powerfully conveyed here, as is the fear of the protagonist for her life in the face of the resentment and paranoia of her fellow townspeople. Milosova’s lover, Lazar, has died and, since then, four other members of the village have succumbed with similar symptoms. Upon exhuming Lazar’s corpse, it is revealed that his body has seemingly escaped corruption and the verdict of ‘vampire’ is swiftly reached. Milosova, as his lover, is branded a witch and a sentence on both of them is left to be decided by a travelling exorcist expected to arrive in the next few days. That priest, Solarić, is curiously modern in his way of thinking and unfolds a means whereby Lazar can be put to rest and Milosova’s life can be spared; however, the young woman, intrigued by the strange priest and his dark secret, throws a spanner in the works… Willis knows his corpsification and every detail of Lazar’s decay rings true from the appearance of adipocere, the sloughing of his skin and the lengthening of his nails. The establishment of Solarić as a prime occult investigator with Milosova playing Watson to his Holmes, is set up nicely and potentially leads the way to more grim cases in the future.

“Blindsider” by Cliff Biggers tells the story of Horace Cole, a back-woods school teacher in the US, who is called upon, during his summer holidays, to intervene on behalf of Virgil Campbell, a young man who, in trying to secure the sole affections of his amour, ends up saddled with an invisible parasite that lingers intangibly just outside of his field of vision. The narrative follows the conversation which the two men conduct, getting to the root of the mystery and its resolution, which involves poorly transcribed magical texts and insufficient shamanic training on the part of the fortune teller who summoned the parasite. In the end, Campbell is deprived of his unwanted attachment, but at great cost to his sanity. This was a pleasing diversion with some quietly humorous moments, although a little didactic for my tastes.

I.A. Watson’s “Vinnie de Soth and the Phantom Skeptic”, on the other hand, takes the same concept and puts a cute twist on the whole scenario. Here again we have an occult practitioner deep in conversation with an uninitiated mortal, except in this case, the mortal is dead, having re-emerged as a ghost, and, what is more, one who was once a hardened, published “skeptic” as far as all things supernatural are concerned. (The ‘k’ in ‘skeptic’ is to clearly underscore the ghost’s American roots.) Zephraim Holtz, hours before the first public session of his UK book launch, dies after handling a new-minted copy of his latest opus, and Vinnie de Soth – “jobbing occultist” – appears – illegally - in his flat to get to the bottom of the mystery. Refusing to believe that he has become a spectre, Holtz argues passionately for a rational explanation for the events that unfold, which de Soth bats away hilariously in a long series of verbal ripostes. By the end of the tale, Holtz’s murder is uncovered, the murderer exposed, and the mystical tables neatly turned. It’s an occult detection tour-de-force and even the footnotes didn’t break the mood.

Kelly M. Hudson’s “The Empanatrix of Room 223” takes us firmly into the territory of Raymond Chandler pastiche. Our gumshoe detective, August Marks, has been hired by The Devil to find the mother of the Antichrist and, to keep him on track, has saddled him with a demon named Roger, who is decidedly useful when it comes to taking out anybody who tries to get in the way of Marks’s investigations. Despite his Satanic mission however, Marks is prone to following up various sideline diversions of his own, and the discovery of the whereabouts of a missing movie starlet named Heather Tallent captures his attention, much to Roger’s chagrin. He finds her holed-up in a luxury hotel with the treacherous head of a mystical conglomerate called Pac Con, where she is conducting a two-year period of service crucial to her becoming a ‘epamanatrix’ which includes a vow of silence. (I thought momentarily about Googling that word, but a small, shrill voice in the back of my head screamed “NO!” I’d suggest you follow suit.) There’s a lot of witty dialogue here, some over-the-top violence and more than a soupcon of salaciousness. Not really my cup of tea, but well executed.

Next, is Bryce Beattie’s “The Unsummoning of Urb Tc’Leth”. The story is told not from the point of view of the occult investigator, but from the perspective of the investigator’s muscle and would-be lover. Our occult expert is abducted from a dilapidated house while trying to rescue a friend caught up in the sub rosa machinations of a nihilistic coven blessed with a punk aesthetic. Most of this tale is a blow-by-blow car chase through the mean streets of an industrial city with our protagonist performing dangerous stunts on his motorcycle, but eventually we get to the heart of the matter. Urb Tc’Leth is the name of the horror which the cultists summon forth and, once our bruiser finally realizes that it feeds on fear, he precipitates its downfall since he is not the least bit afraid of it. Once the demon is destroyed, the cultists (those left alive) disband and our heroes retire for bacon pancakes and a subtle re-imagining of their future relationship.

(As a side note, and since I just sat through both chapters of “IT” recently, I’m a bit conflicted about these ‘I don’t fear you, so you can’t hurt me’ resolutions. Demonstrably, the creature is physically present, armed and capable of inflicting harm; why is it that they always just dissolve like so much blancmange in the face of a person yelling ‘you don’t scare me!’? Weird. Unsatisfying.)

Alexis Ames’s “In Perpetuity” is next and is, I presume, the second (third?) vampire story on offer, except that, while it contains vampires, isn’t really about them. The setting, refreshingly, is a space station orbiting high above the Martian moon of Phobos. Occult detection in outer space is a decidedly unusual spin on the genre and this reality is populated, not only with bog-standard human beings, but also with vampires and werewolves, whose negative aspects have been, apparently, overcome by the advances of technology, allowing peaceful co-existence. Responding to an emergency summons, occult detective Basil Sinclair arrives on the space station to discover that someone has breached the interdimensional veil and allowed a demon across from the Other Side. Using his occult abilities and aided by a six-hundred-year-old space cadet vampire named Lieutenant Dominic Moore, Detective Sinclair tracks down the lurking demon, exposes its plan and facilitates its self-immolation. And he picks up a boyfriend en route! A solid tale and an innovative inclusion in the category of supernatural investigation.

S.L. Edwards’ “The Way Things Were” tells of the travails of two occult investigators on the trail of a magic lamp containing an evil djinni - an ifrit. The backstory to these events reads like a mystical post-World War Two version of Operation Paperclip, wherein magical practitioners from the Third Reich were repatriated to the US as a means of controlling their excesses and containing their power – not unlike the real world repatriation of Nazi weapons manufacturers. Our magical P.I.s – one of them a rescue from Nazi Germany himself – follow the aftermath of the murder of a pernicious repatriated mystic and discover that two of his indentured servants (read: slaves) were likely culpable and capable of both the felony and of the lamp theft. Things wind down to a massive confrontation with the lamp-spirit leading to a shonky contractual obligation, skewed in the ifrit’s favour. This was an enjoyable glimpse into a larger magical reality which absolutely begs for a follow-up of some kind. On a side note, Edwards is also the writer (with artist Yves Tourigny) of the “Borkchito” webcomics which graced early instalments of this magazine.

“Angelus” by John Paul Fitch addresses the elephant that lurks in the room every time an exercise like ODQ emerges: if the demons are so bad, what are the Other Guys like? In this story, our mystical detective Anna is awakened by her warding tattoos, moments before an angel appears in her bedroom but with not enough time to warn her girlfriend Rachel, who gets largely fried by the visitation. So begins a quest to discover why angels are appearing at random throughout the world, causing people everywhere to think that the Last Trumpet has been blown and that the Apocalypse is nigh. Taking her cynical ghost pal, Turk, along for the ride, she calls upon her homeless friend and Enochian wizard Tom Foolery, “the Singing Vagrant”, and they start to unwind the knot of this puzzle. The trail leads Anna unerringly to the failing ministry of her ex-lover’s father and the discovery of a sinister scheme to use the power of angels for personal gain. This is a powerful tale with likable characters, seemingly dragged forth from a larger body of work which, on the basis of this excerpt, deserves further investigation.

Our final vampire story is definitely (I think) “The Last Performance of Victoria Mirabelli” by Ian Hunter. Here, our protagonist investigator is a vampire named Roam who is looking for an alternative box to take his daily rest within. He learns from his undead pal that there is a magician’s box used by a old stage actress named Victoria Mirabelli, who killed herself inside it to cheat the cancer that was killing her and to cause her soul to reside within it for all eternity. Roam tracks the box down, discovers it in the possession of a dead magical accoutrements collector’s daughter, and determines that the wicked Ms. Mirabelli has been trapping other souls in it with her in order to ease her eternal confinement. He enters the box and begins a harried tussle for ownership… I was a bit conflicted with this story: the two vampires we meet at the start were intriguing and shared a nice dynamic; but then Roam lit out on his own and it became a desperate fight for… a box? The stakes seemed a little low-key to say the least, although there was a sting in the tail that wasn’t at all bad.

The Occult Legion has its last hurrah in this issue and draws a veil over things with its final instalment – “He is the Gate” by James A. Moore and Charles Rutledge. This time it’s Yog Sothoth tearing up Killbride Castle, but the two authors’ literary avatars quickly send him packing.

The articles are a wide mix of things. One of them – an appreciation of Hong Kong-based author Nury Vittachi’s “The Feng Shui Detective” and its sequels – was written by me so I won’t comment on it. The others include an interview with Jonathan Raab, author of a series of gonzo novels centred around Sheriff Cecil Kotto – described as a cross between Alex Jones and Hunter S. Thompson – and involving his interactions with the more lunatic fringes of the Conspirasphere. These stories appear to have been built up by various authors contributing to the core concept and adding elements from their own particular “sandboxes”. With titles like “The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre” and “The Lesser Swamp Gods of Little Dixie” how can we not check this out? Finally, in the irregular Cold Cases column, Michael Kellar reviews an old collection of Occult Detective fiction compiled by the indefatigable Peter Haining, dating from 1986 and cynically released to coincide with the launch of the first “Ghostbusters” movie. Haining collectors – and now I know that there’re more of you out there than just me – take note!

The Reviews section is jam-packed with goodies to keep an eye out for and there were certainly more than a couple of titles that resonated strongly with me. Maybe I can do a little more damage to my credit card…

*****

This issue feels as though Occult Detective Magazine has matured somewhat. It feels more of a whole, in and of itself, in terms of tone and that’s not all down simply to the plethora of vampires. Most issues, I’ve usually found that there are one or two tales that really demonstrate powerful wordsmithing, and which rise above the general run of journeyman writers. In this issue, far and away the best piece is “The Way of All Flesh”, even despite the fact that it falls away a bit at the end, followed by “Komolafe”, “Vinnie de Soth”, “The Way Things Were” and “Angelus” (that’s not a ranking in order by the way – it’s just as they appear in the book). That’s a large chunk of pretty solid writing right there and the best on offer so far from this magazine. It certainly bodes well for future issues.

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Fiction:

“The Rending Veil” – Melanie Atherton Allen

“Komolafe” – Tade Thompson

“The Way of All Flesh” – Matthew Willis

“Blindsider” – Cliff Biggers

“Vinnie de Soth and the Phantom Skeptic” – I.A. Watson

“The Empanatrix of Room 223” – Kelly M. Hudson

“The Unsummoning of Urb Tc’Leth” – Bryce Beattie

“In Perpetuity” – Alexis Ames

“The Way Things Were” – S.L. Edwards

“Angelus” – John Paul Fitch

“The Last Performance of Victoria Mirabelli” – Ian Hunter

“Occult Legion: He is the Gate” – James A. Moore & Charles Rutledge

Articles:

“Kotto’s Creepies: An Interview with Jonathan Raab” - S.L. Edwards

“Nury Vittachi’s The Feng Shui Detective and the Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics” – Craig Stanton

“Cold Cases: Supernatural Sleuths – Stories of Occult Investigators, edited by Peter Haining” – Michael Kellar

Reviews:

Terror is Our Business: Dana Roberts’ Casebook of Horrors – Joe & Kasey Lansdale

The Hollows: A Midnight Gunn Novel – C.L. Monaghan

Jonathan Dark, or the Evidence of Ghosts – A.K. Benedict

Wychwood & Wychwood: Hallowdene – George Mann

-Reviews by Dave Brzeski

Craven Street – E.J. Stevens

-Review by Julia Morgan