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