Review: "Occult Detective Quarterly"

Lovecraft and his crowd lived by submitting their writing to various pulp magazines that were willing to pay for their contributions. Sadly for them, this means of living dwindled away for most of them and left them hanging with literally nowhere to go, except to find day-jobs and get on with things. For HPL this was anathema and he died rather than take this step; for Robert E. Howard as well, after bending his material to fit the shapes of various magazines increasingly uninterested in printing his A-game stuff, he decided that a bullet was the only answer. Of all of them, perhaps Clark Ashton-Smith was the only realist among them who could stay the course and last at least some of the distance.

In recent years, the only way to get into print with a Mythos-based short story was to find an agent and pay for it to happen. The big publishing houses, have become ever-more impatient with writers of short fiction and demand only novel-length literary fiction, or factual material. Increasingly, the big houses only want 1) novels by authors with a proven track record, or 2) stuff that’s been done (and which has sold) before. It seems the likes of Penguin, or HarperCollins, are refining their tried-and-true material into increasingly rarefied stuff and, if you aren’t Salman Rushdie, you won’t get a foot in the door. Self-publishing has filled the gap here, allowing those passed over by the Big Guns to get something into print (or, at least, onto Kindle). There are pitfalls with this, however: if a big publisher picks up your stuff, they give it their all – packaging and promotion – and it can be an easy ride; for a self-publisher, all of this falls into their (often inexperienced) lap. Despite all the hype, blog-site promotion doesn’t really equate to book sales.

Fortunately, there’s a positive response. With things like Kickstarter and an increase in the availability of print production (including print-on-demand facilities), the pulp magazine has had something of a re-birth. If you look hard enough, you can find a growing bevy of underground magazines hoping to revive the heyday of the classic pulps. One of these which I’ve been pleased to make the acquaintance of is the “Occult Detective Quarterly”. The purview of this magazine is fairly specific: they publish material which examines the notion of criminal detectives who use, or encounter, supernatural phenomena in the course of their investigations. There is a solid basis for this specification: many great weird fiction authors have used this concept, from Edgar Allan Poe, to William Hope Hodgson, to Algernon Blackwood, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you factor in television material like “The X-Files” and “Supernatural”, and comics offerings like “John Constantine: Hellblazer”, you can see that there’s a wealth of territory to be covered.

The print run of this journal is very short – the fourth instalment is being compiled – but enough water has passed under the bridge to give a critical overview. My feeling is that this is a positive and well-helmed vehicle; there are some quibbles (inevitably) but I will address these at the end. For now let’s jump in to issue 1:

GAFFORD, Sam, & John Linwood GRANT (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #1 – Winter 2016/2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw Poland.

Quarto; perfect-bound paperback; unpaginated (100pp.), with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.

With efforts of this nature you’d be forgiven for thinking that there would be some misfires in a first issue, while the editorial and production staff find their feet; surprisingly, there is very little of that in evidence here. The compilers are sure of what it is that they’re trying to do and they hit the ground running. This instalment has a wealth of solid literary performances accompanied by some high-quality artwork, commissioned especially for the pieces that they’re illustrating. There are some entertaining articles and a Reviews section which speaks directly to the type of material which this exercise is focussed upon. All in all, especially with the Mythos material contained herein, this is definitely value for your hard-earned.

Things kick off (after the welcoming editorial Introduction which spells out the scope of the project) with a rather surprising collaborative effort from David T. Wilbanks and William Meikle which channels Raymond Chandler via Curious George, in that it features a gorilla named Gus who works as a private detective in Los Angeles. In the course of “Got My Mojo Working”, he manages to isolate an incursion into this reality by menacing Australian  Aboriginal Dreamtime entities by means of a series of bizarre paintings, which activity he thwarts with his finely-honed understanding of Louisiana-based folk magic. This is a mildly-entertaining piece of fluff, which ticks a whole bunch of boxes that seem to be touchstones of the assembled material, the Chandler-pastiche being prime among them.

Moving on, we come to “When Soft Voices Die”, by Amanda de Wees. Straightaway, we’re into the other trope that’s a constant of the fare on offer – the late-Victorian, Hope Hodgson knock-off. Even moreso than the Chandler pillaging, this is a high-wire act in that, if the details aren’t hit squarely on the head, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Outlining a psychic investigator-cum-stage actress’s dilemma in finding a place to stay after her house burns down, de Wees presents to us the character of Sybil Ingram Lammle (after the "Frankenstein" director), whose sensitivity to ghostly presences leads her to the resolution of a mystery long-ignored by the family with whom she finally finds a (haunted) billet. This is an amusing effort, somewhat undercut by its anachronisms of language and attitude, that wends its way to a rather obvious conclusion.

Next, comes “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You” by Adrian Cole. This is another Chandler-esque romp - this time with a snappier line in descriptive writing - that throws us into an urban-fantasy milieu wherein our characters hop from this world into the “Pulpworld” and back. The Pulpworld contains all of the Noir-ish things you’d expect with a name like that, along with dragons and magic. Our detective – Nick Stone – is a trench-coat-wearing, twin-Beretta-packing investigator who runs a shady deal across the divide between realities, becoming mired in a game of revenge, justice and retribution. It’s at this point that “Occult Detective Quarterly” really starts to deliver the goods.

“Orbis Tertius” by Josh Reynolds springboards off the works of Jorge Luis Borges and tries to reach above the simple one-note tune of ‘spooky detective romp’. We meet his Occult Detective - Charles St. Cyprian - with his dissolute female sidekick, “Ebe” Gallowglass, on a mission to defend the Empire against the incursions of the arcane. In the course of ridding a moderately-respectable Gentlemen’s Club from a hideous mind-altering entity unleashed from a mouldering tome, they are forced to confront the fact that the paradigm shift which the entity was impinging upon them might actually have been better than the reality in which they find themselves. This was a moderately successful turn, although the arch quality of the character’s names, along with their fashion-conscious posing with coats, hats and firearms, made them sound more like someone’s roleplaying favourites, rather than fleshed-out protagonists. There is an issue at play here too, in that Americans have an odd perception of what it means to be ‘Victorianly English’: I’d probably have enjoyed Mr. Reynold’s attempts at an Occult Detective from the other side of the Pond rather than this. And just what is “Ebe” short for actually?

Up next is T.E. Grau’s “Monochrome” and, hands down, the best piece of writing in this issue. An early note on the Editorial page states that this story is re-printed from Celaeno Press’s "The Court of the Yellow King", edited by Glynn Owen Barrass in 2014, and it’s easy to see why the Electric Pentacle people wanted to give it an airing here too. This is ground-shaking stuff. Set in L.A., our disaffected, drink-sodden investigator, now working as a free-lance journalist, follows a trail of disturbing events which dramatically shift the landscape around him as it begins to crystallise its hideous shape. This takes Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow” premise, beefs up the stakes and updates it perfectly for contemporary times. This is the uncaring dispassionate negligence of the Cosmos made real, behind a mask of the Rodney King assault and the ensuing L.A. Riots. If I have a quibble, it’s that the illustration commissioned for the piece lets too many cats out of the bag before the conclusion. This story alone is worth the price of admission, especially for Mythos fans.

“Baron of Bourbon Street” by Aaron Vlek follows the investigation of a New Orleans detective – Alfonse de Cartier – as he gets to the bottom of an outbreak of soulless corpses. This wouldn’t be too unusual a deal except that these corpses were soulless before they were killed and Alfonse’s patron, Baron Samedi himself, wants it stopped. Here we see the third tine of the Occult Detective pitchfork in full flight – the Vodoun element. From “Got My Mojo Working”, to the villain in “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You”, to this articulation, it’s clear that the go-to option for ‘States-side supernatural dicks is to wallow in the ways of creole folk religions. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily; it’s just that it’s going to get quite old, quite quickly. Anyway, the premise for this tale is a nice slant, but by the end I was wondering why we needed an Occult Detective at all, since the Baron was pushing along most of the action by himself.

Oscar Dowson’s “The Adventure of the Black Dog” examines the mess that dabbling in the paranormal can leave behind when a soldier, lately returned from the Boer War, takes up his friend’s offer to house-sit only to discover that a hideous Tulpa in the form of an eyeless black hound is haunting the place. In the course of the tale we meet the portentously-named Dr. Henry Jerusalem Crow who clears the supernatural slate and takes our un-named narrator onboard as his new assistant. We’re back in late-Victoriana mode here but with a writer who better knows his chops about the time period; sadly, his writing could’ve done with a bit of a polish as, apart from ending rather too abruptly, he constantly makes assertions about his characters only to undercut them a few paragraphs later – our narrator, for example goes from being comfortably well-off to financially ignorant in a handful of sentences, according to the changing needs of the story, which was unsettling. A good potential tale that just needed that little bit more work.

The final literary offering of this issue is the first instalment of a round-robin story incorporating the work of several of the editorial staff and their associates in an ongoing tale of occult detection, entitled “The Occult Legion”. To be honest, I passed over this as it felt a little like a pointless exercise. Of course, in an endeavour such as this, it follows that the writers who have a desire to pen these kinds of stories are also the ones who got together to create the vehicle to showcase their efforts, so it figures that there would be just such a forum for them to strut their stuff. That’s fine, but I just feel – personally – that this type of thing is like knocking off ‘artworks’ simply to fill in space on a wall. I’d rather read something that had its own point and expression in preference to watching an ‘in-crowd’ slapping each other on the back.

In terms of articles, there’s a witty essay on “How to Be a Fictional Victorian Ghost Hunter (in Five Easy Lessons)” by Tim Prasil, who runs us through the Victorian literature of the Occult Detective and gives us the low-down on the art of fin-de-siécle spook detection. After this there’s a look at “The Occult Fiction of Doctor Spektor” a character from the Gold Key Comics range of the 70s and an interview with his creator in “The Man Behind Doctor Spektor – An Interview with Don F. Glut” underlining the fact that the concept upon which the magazine has been predicated is wide-ranging and well-interpreted. Finally, the Reviews section covers more bases with overviews of two collections of short stories focussing upon the Occult Detectives created by Tim Prasil and Jessica Amanda Salmonson as well as a recently–released audiobook version of William Hope Hodgson’s Dr. Carnacki stories.

All in all, a solid start to this enterprise. Now on to Issue Two!

GAFFORD, Sam, John Linwood GRANT & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #2 – Spring 2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw Poland.

Quarto; perfect-bound paperback; unpaginated (104pp.), with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.

The second instalment kicks off as before and this time with an ongoing comic series featuring an Occult Detective who happens to be a dog. “Borkchito: Occult Doggo Detective” by Sam L. Edwards and Yves Tourigny had me grinning right from the word ‘go’ with all of its tangled grammar and pleasing doggie-ness. I’m a sucker for an ongoing comic… The first thing to notice this time around is that the number of ads between the covers has increased, which is good if you’re looking for alternative venues to publish your material, but which might annoy some punters. Still, it’s a good sign for the continued health and prosperity of the magazine overall.

First cab off the rank is a pastiche tale of Dr. Carnacki’s younger days, “The Arcana of the Alleys” by Brandon Barrows. This is a tight little story of an untold event in Carnacki’s past which is set up in a manner of which Hope Hodgson might well have approved and even incorporates a bit of fisticuffs which rings true from Hodgson’s real-world activities. It suffers, sadly, from being a New Age occult experience wholly outside of Carnacki’s purview and feels somewhat like it was originally another story idea, co-opted to a new purpose.

“The Black Tarot” by Mike Chinn takes a page from “The Shadow” and sets us up with a trio of two-fisted pulp era mystical crime-fighters trying to stop a letter-bomb hoodoo - a la M.R. James’ “Casting The Runes” - from targeting a bunch of US tycoons. Here again, we have a story that feels like everyone’s favourite RPG characters taking parts in an old classic, but it’s well-penned and amusing enough in its own way.

With “Conquer Comes Calling” by Edward M. Erdelac we’re back to American folk-magic wrapped up in Chandler pastiche with a dose of “Shaft” thrown in for good measure. John Conquer is a Harlem-based private eye with hoodoo in his arsenal taking down a hex-y villain who has the ability to turn into a cat. Not only does he show up the detectives investigating the case (including saving them from being shrunk down to doll-size) but he makes off with the girl at the end of the story. It’s a little bit of 70s period fun, but A Rage in Harlem it ain’t.

Tim Waggoner’s “The Grabber Man” is a well-written story that seems to be an entrée into a wider world of dark deviousness. Having encountered “The Shadow” as a child – a dark, parallel world of creepy mutagenic monsters - our narrator Ismael, now grown and working as a psychologist, examines his patients for signs of them falling under the evil influence of this outside force. In this short tale, which begs for some kind of follow-up, Ismael rescues a girl from a “psychovore”, a caterpillar-like creature which lurks undetected behind her ear and generates fear of manhandling strangers during her dreams and, later, waking life, off which it feeds. This story was highlighted by a blurb on the issue’s front cover, which made me turn to it first; sadly, it was full of spelling errors which seriously undercut its impact.

Tricia Owens’ “White Ghost in the City” is a diversion from the usual run of paranormal sleuths we’ve had thus far. Ashton Lesser is hunting through Kowloon for a clue leading to the discovery of a missing soldier on leave from the Vietnam Conflict. Unfortunately, Lesser is a hard-bitten bigot who’s well outside his comfort-zone. Engaging a Hong Kong whore to help gain an entrée into the world of soldier-kidnapping, he soon discovers that the handful of missing men of which he was vaguely aware numbers a whole lot more than that… just before he joins their ranks in a suitably nasty way. This is one of only a few examples in these collections which make a deliberate and positive effort to subvert the stereotype.

Now we have “Devil in the City of Lights” by Bruno Lombardi. There’s one thing that bothers me and that’s a story that plainly hasn’t done its research. This is a great story with entertaining characters about a nightmarish, sewer-dwelling creature attacking people in the French capital that completely overlooks the fact that the sewers in Paris are wide and run directly under the streets specifically in order to not wind up as the sort of hellish lavatorial mess that exists under the streets of London. If you decide to think of this tale as a story of two French policemen taking a stroll – for whatever reason - in ‘London Below’, then it works; if you know anything about the sewers of Paris, this is an error in judgement.

Kelly A. Harmon is a writer who pushes a series of novels concerning an Occult Investigator named Assumpta Margaret-Mary O’Connor who deals with demonic happenings in her mid-west American setting. “Light from Pure Digestion Bred” is a short piece that wraps up some left-over business from her earlier, longer material while providing a nice entrée to the characters in the ongoing series. Frankly, I’m not a fan of Laurel K. Hamilton’s work and Kelly A. Harmon obviously is; I’ll leave it at that.

“Death and the Dancing Bears” by Steve Liskow is a story that partakes of its indigenous American setting with gusto. This is a tale of lycanthropy and circuses in a reservation locale filled with inter-racial miscommunication and local sheriff intervention. Our sheriff is a racist bigot and his deputy is a Native American woman with a greater insight into what’s going on than her boss. There’s a lot to like in this story given its cultural cross-grain revelations. Annoyingly though, it reads a bit like a literary version of a decorated Franklin Mint china plate, with eagles and rainbows and semi-clad sexy squaws.

“The Occult Legion” round-robin narrative continues in this issue with “Terror on the Links” by Joshua Reynolds. Again, I let it lie, for the reasons listed elsewhere.

In terms of articles, Danyal Fryer provides us with a solid potted history of “John Constantine: Hellblazer” - talking us through his character and motivations and revealing why he fits the bill as an Occult Detective - followed by “The Man Who Is Carnacki: An Interview With Dan Starkey”, who voiced the character on the audio-book which was reviewed in the previous issue. Tim Prasil then provides us with a breakdown of what makes an occult medical 'man' in “Doctors of the Strange: the tradition of the Occult Physician”, covering everybody from Dr. Heselius, to Abraham van Helsing, to Dana Scully. The Reviews section covers a bunch of self-published and e-published potboiler series (some of which skim the margins of the erotica tag) released though a number of representative presses and is worthwhile perusing for those on the lookout for a new series to get their teeth into.

A very solid follow-up on the first issue; now onto the third instalment.

GAFFORD, Sam, John Linwood GRANT & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective Quarterly #3 – Fall 2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw Poland.

Quarto; perfect-bound paperback; 122pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.

Back again and third time’s the charm. For Lovecraft fans there’s a wonderful story about the Mi-go here, set just after Professor Wilmarth’s return from Vermont, and there’s a very nice overview of Robert E. Howard’s attempts at generating his own Occult Detective. Let’s hook in:

There’s a touch of “Predator” about S.L. Edwards’ “Magdalena” and I’m certain that several viewings of that film (and its sequels) were undertaken by the author as part of the research process. A village in South America is attacked by a demonic entity which is trying to wriggle out from under Satan’s boot-heel and stake a claim on its own personal version of Hell. Our Occult Detective, backed up by a cadre of CIA-activated death squad veterans, goes into the wilderness to sort things out. It’s pretty much a train-ride to a vaguely splatterpunk end at this point. The best feature was the opening section wherein the Devil comes to our Detective’s office to enlist his aid in ousting the usurper – it’s a magical beginning, let down in part by what comes next.

Aaron Smith pitches a nice tangential sequel to Dracula in “Blood Sings To Me”, the tale of the small child taken by Lucy Westenra at the start of Stoker’s novel, now grown to adulthood. Since her abduction by the “bloofer lady”, Katharine Mason is able to ‘read’ impressions of blood splatter left at the scenes of murders, thus allowing her to track down the perpetrators. This is a nice conceit and a very nice story, enlivened by the hint of a blossoming romance between the seriously-sanguine Miss Mason and her erstwhile partner, Inspector Walter Franklin.

A post-script story based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “Disconnected” by Brian M. Sammons sees a Pinkerton agent set on the trail of a trio of Mi-go nuisances, bent on enacting their fungal revenge upon Albert Wilmarth. In a William Burroughs-like fashion, the narrative has been cut into pieces and re-combined into a crazy-quilt story that cleverly segues between its own disjointed sections – the reason for this is the deliciously-evil surprise at the end.

I’m not a fan of Holmes pastiche. Either, it was written by Conan Doyle, or it wasn’t; if it wasn’t, then it’s almost invariably bad. The trap that most writers fall into is in thinking that Sherlock Holmes is a slight, two-dimensional caricature and is therefore easy to replicate on paper: this is a fallacy. If it were that easy, we’d all be doing it and there’d be no reason to print “A Study in Scarlet” ever again. It is with just such a mindset that William Meikle presents us with “The Ghost Shirt” a tale of Holmes and Watson tracking down paranormal goings-on at a London-based “Buffalo Bill Wild West Extravaganza”. Quite apart from the fact that fans of “Penny Dreadful” with be familiar with this trope, once again we have a writer with a surface knowledge of the time and characters trying to write convincingly when their efforts would be better-spent telling a story about the things that they actually know. This is a well-crafted story, but it’s bad Holmes-and-Watson and it’s bad Victoriana: “quarter to eight” people, not “7.45”!

Edward M. Erdelac gives us another dose of John Conquer, 70s hoodoo detective, with “Conquer Gets Crowned”. Here, we see a tension between a writer attempting to adhere to an established template but also instil some information on another subject that they’ve become interested in: Erdelac is juggling his “Shaft”-with-juju-bags premise with an extended insight into the street-art sub-culture of New York in the 70s. Frankly, I think he should have saved the graffiti bombers for a stand-alone tale. Trying to blend afros and red leather jump-suits with spray cans and street-art smarts is too much and detracts from both without adding anything to either.

“Homo Homini Lupus” by Sam Schrieber is another case where we’ve obviously been dumped into a world that’s larger than what a short story can comfortably hold. This is a slice from a larger reality where supernatural magic, and the policing of it through government-mandated authorities, is taken as a fait accompli. We have a sinister Wall Street mystic cabal with a Brett Easton Ellis fetish dealing illegally in the trade of souls, artificially inflating the share prices and attempting to crash the market. Going undercover into the ‘soul exchange’ is our Occult Detective – a werewolf – who confronts the villains, only to find a double-, and then triple-cross. It’s a nice story, but it flags its twists a little too freely.

Here, at last, is a writer who’s read more than a surface amount of the stuff that they’re writing about. In “Cowherd” we have a couple of club members hearing a spooky tale from a third member with a supernatural reputation, along the lines of a Carnacki story frame. The narrative re-counts the awakening (by a sloppy spiritualist) of an ancient Otherworldy power at an ancestral estate, at which point our Occult Detective, Simon Wake, is brought in to deal with it. The dialogue is well-rendered, the characters believable and barely an anachronistic note is rung throughout. The evil at work here is of the Fey kind and here too, Melanie Atherton Allen has done her homework. The only thing letting it down is the artwork, which doesn’t really do the story justice.

Alice Loweecey offers us a tale (“It Runs In The Family”) of an antiquarian who inherits an estate from his wealthy ex-wife, eight years after she has vanished and who has now been declared dead. Travelling to the mock-"Addams Family" building, the only ghosts that bother him are those of the past and the unresolved issues of his broken marriage. Then the psychic sister of his ex’s boy-toy shows up and reveals that All Is Not As It Seems. This was an amusing yarn, although the stakes were never very high, and I was never convinced that our narrator was an actual antiques dealer.

This next story – “Out Of The Sea” by Soumya Sundar Mukherjee - introduces us to Bipul Pandaji, a seller of sweetmeats in the town of Puri on the Bay of Bengal. Having almost been drowned within the waters of that sea, he survived to discover that he had gained the power to summon the spirits of those who had died in that same watery grave and incarnate them in giant bodies composed of water. When approached by two young men who ask him to revive the spirit of the man who killed the sister of one of them – the lover of the other – he at first refuses, only to discover that the man they wish to take pleasure in reviving and killing is the same one who murdered his own sweetheart and who later almost killed him. While set in a unique locale quite different from any seen so far in any of these collections, the story concerns itself mainly with the mechanics of the revenge scenario letting all the excitement of the local colour fall by the wayside. Interesting notion, however.

Bob Freeman’s “The Occult Legion: Birds of a Feather” follows on from here, part three of the ongoing, tag-team write-fest. I know that even Lovecraft undertook one of these exercises in his day; that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a good thing. In the short term, they provide a way for a nascent magazine to fill in empty pages but, after awhile, new contributions by writers should be given preference, and such gimmickry should not be allowed to become the raison d’etre of the publication. ‘Didn’t - as a mad Lovecraft fan - read his page-filling attempt; didn't read this.

In terms of articles, there’s a very interesting and well-researched column by Bobby Derie on Robert E. Howard’s attempt to create a Carnacki, or John Silence-type figure to fill a growing demand in the publishing market, which was stumped by his inexperience in the form, along with his own personal preferences. This is not a ground-shaking revelation into the ways of the Conan-creator, but is a well-considered and interesting examination of the author’s style and process, backed up with excerpts from his correspondence to others within the Lovecraft Circle.

This is followed up by an article which focuses on Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and their half-baked careers as “Dabblers in Ghost Hunting”. The article references instances where both authors set out to determine if a locale pointed out to them was actually haunted or not, and how comment and controversy followed these attempts afterwards. Dickens is held up as the “Scully” of the duo, in that he approached his haunting from a sceptic’s viewpoint, while Conan Doyle is our “Mulder”, desperately wanting to believe (if only in fairies). This is a thoughtful and well-balanced report by Tim Prasil and certainly provides valuable insight into these two giants of English literature.

The pleasing, and very grammatically-tangled, “Borkchito” returns and is a welcome continuation.

The Reviews section continues to impress by the sheer range and quantity of material covered, proving that detective fiction with a supernatural bent is as wide-ranging and multi-faceted as the editors would want us to believe. Here are e-books, paperbacks, novel series, graphic novels and audio-books enough to cover all tastes and input preferences.

*****

So much for the good stuff, every review has to have a down side. There are a few points that I would like to make about this journal that I found less than edifying. The first is the tone. In all of the various interviews and some of the reviews herein (and – thank heavens! – only in those segments), there is a breathless ‘fan boy’ attitude which is tedious and also embarrassing. As far as reviews go, it’s great to be excited about the topic but this fact should never allow the critic to drop their even-handed perspective and simply gibber “this is fantastic! This is fantastic!” over and over again. As an interviewer or critic, if you ever feel tempted to end an observation with an exclamation point, you should stop, leave your desk and come back ten minutes later, having carefully reconsidered your options. There are several instances of this not having happened here and it certainly comes off as less than professional.

Awhile back, I examined two separate publications from Miskatonic River Press and found them wanting. A major issue that I had with them was the fact that the ‘editors’ had done very little in regards to actually editing the material and, having established the outline of the project, had proceeded to throw the concept out the window. Here, our Electric Pentacle people know exactly what they’re about, so the vision and content are not really an issue; still, in the copy-editing and proof-reading department, there is room for improvement. Two instances stand out, and they do so because they fall at extremely unfortunate moments: in the first story of the first issue, a sentence has been dropped at the bottom of the initial page causing a loss of sense; and, in a story in issue two that the editors chose to highlight by listing it as a feature on the front cover, there are a multitude of spelling errors that have thus become awkwardly underscored for the reader. I had to re-read the sentence “I straightened up in my hair” several times before I realised that “chair” was the required term, not “hair”. The issues here are nowhere near as bad as those evinced by Miskatonic River Press and, as I say, are most likely teething issues: with any luck, they should smooth themselves over as time goes by. Unfortunately, in such a project as this, these are also the sorts of things that can kill repeat sales.

(On a related note, if you’re going to include a contents page, then - by default - you must number the pages of the publication; this didn’t happen until issue three. ‘Good to see that it was addressed.)

Copy-editing and lay-out is one thing, but line-editing is another. There are several instances here – mentioned above – where the presented works contain errors of sense, or internal logic, that an astute editor should have picked up on and addressed before going to print. It’s possible that with imminent deadlines and a lack of other - better - copy, the editors simply couldn’t get in contact with the writer in time to say “how about sprucing this up a little?” before the kick-off. Again, as things roll on, hopefully this will be less of a concern.

I completely understand that such endeavours as these are a labour of love and that they get slaved over outside of working hours, after the serious business of making a living and earning a crust have been accomplished. Nevertheless, a production as professional-looking as these books are, should be - at the very least - able to match the standard of a daily news-print publication that manages fewer errors per page-count each issue on a far more demanding basis. Every error – of sense, or typography - makes the punter question the price tag being asked for admission, no matter who’s at the helm and under what circumstances.

*****

Aleister Crowley, who (I was certainly surprised to note) did not make a cameo in any of the first three issues of this magazine, worked long and tirelessly on his own journal, “The Equinox”. The first issue contained a wealth of colourful material, some provided by well-known writers of the day. Shortly thereafter though, the number of contributors dropped sharply, as Crowley was recognised as the con-artist and snake-oil salesman he truly was. In the later issues, every item – article; fiction; poetry; review; letter to the editor – was written exclusively by himself, under a plethora of pseudonyms. Finally, exhausted and burnt-out by the demands of his rag, he let it be known that the final volume would be one “of silence”. I’d hate for this periodical to go the same way, and that is particularly why I’m so dismissive of the tag-team writing exercise by the editorial staff – does anyone else out there remember the travesty that was Thieves World? If a journal is to survive it must actively seek out contribution, not provide it in-house as space and time pressure demands. That way lies madness.

So, it’s with fingers-crossed and warm wishes for a bright future that I cheer on “Occult Detective Quarterly” and wish them the very best of luck in their future endeavours. Four Tentacled Horrors from me, overall, for the first three instalments.

Review: The Penguin Book of the Undead

BRUCE, Scott G. (ed.), The Penguin Book of the Undead – Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, Penguin Books/Penguin Random House LLC., New York NY, 2016.

Octavo; paperback; 295pp. Mild wear; front cover lightly creased. Very good to near fine.

I’ll qualify this review right from the get-go by saying that this isn’t a book for everybody. Sure, if you’ve come to this blog it’s because you’re vaguely interested in things that slither in the night; but this book is more than just a selection of ghost stories from across the planet. Rather, it’s an academic look at the notions of death and undeath across the ages - from the early days of the Ancient Greeks - and the official responses to such phenomena to be found in the works left behind by major religious, philosophical and other commentators. Yes, there are things that go bump in the night to be unearthed herein; but they stumble and lurch alongside the intellectual viewpoints of the likes of St. Augustine and Shakespeare.

As further qualification, I should point out that it's clearly stated that this selection focusses upon the Western, literary traditions surrounding the walking dead. It contains nothing from Asia, Africa or the Americas and certainly nothing from the Australasian perspective - books on any of those subjects would necessarily be immense and many of them would stretch the definition of "literary". I've read some reviews of this book on places such as Good Reads and there're a lot of people out there getting sniffy about what this work doesn't cover, rather than what it does, which, to my mind, is rather beside the point. If I'm running a car-yard selling red Toyotas, don't come to my house asking for a blue Ford, that's all I'm saying. And to those people who've complained about this book being "too church-y"? Just go away. Moving along...

In another instance of serendipity, a friend gave me this book which had been mistakenly included in a shipment of books delivered to the bookstore where he works. Given the time, cost and effort involved in correcting the error - sending the book back and so on - it was decided to just write the thing off; my friend took it, decided that it didn’t really melt his margarine, and forwarded it on to me. I had been trying to find a reference to Odysseus raising the shade of Tiresias the Seer for another piece I’d been working on and – voila! – here it was, included in this selection. I plundered the material I’d been looking for to aid in that other project and then stayed on to absorb the other morsels within. They were many, varied and delectable.

Taking this long view of the notion of ghosts, revenants, vampires and zombies, the editor provides the reader with a fascinating insight into how the earliest ideas concerning the undead became established and then built slowly on top of each other, adding accreted layers of theological, philosophical and artistic thinking atop the concepts established by the Greeks and Romans. For example, the early thinking of the church, as outlined here by St. Augustine, fairly unequivocally dismissed the idea of ghosts as false reportage, wilful misdirection, or the uncanny actions of the Divine; later, when the medieval church was more interested in garnering wealth on earth by selling indulgences and intercessory masses, the idea that souls in the new-minted theological construct of Purgatory could contact their living relatives to seek assistance, gave ghosts a shiny new acceptability.

The Greeks and Romans saw ghosts as simply a means to obtain information though necromancy. Troublesome spirits were usually roused by one of two things – either, they had been unburied, their bodies left to rot somewhere without requisite prayers sung over them, or there was some unfinished business that prevented them from resting peacefully. In the case of Odysseus, he needed to summon the seer Tiresias in order to find out if he had been cursed by the gods in some fashion and to see how he could avoid it (he was, and he couldn’t). While talking to him, he encounters other shades of Erebus, including Achilles (who tells Odysseus that his recent thoughts of suicide are a bad idea because Hell sucks) and his mother who had died of grief in his absence; he also sees a fellow shipmate who, while the crew languished with Circe the witch, fell off a roof on which he was sleeping and broke his neck: since none of the other crew members had seen this happen, they sailed off without him, leaving him unburied, assuming that he’d just run off. Odysseus promises to return and give the chap a decent send-off.

This is all fairly mild stuff compared to the section in the Roman writer Lucan’s Pharsalia in which he depicts a meeting between Sextus the son of Pompey and a witch named Erictho, who dwells amongst the graves and tortures the dead to do her bidding. He pays her to raise a talkative shade who can reveal if either Pompey, or Caesar, will prevail in the war that the two of them are waging:

“…She wanders among slain bodies cast off and denied their burial. Straightaway fled wolves, hungry birds of prey pulled out their talons and fled, while the Thessalian [Erictho] selects her prophet; probing entrails chilly with death, she finds the fibres of strong, unwounded lungs and seeks the voice in a body discharged from life. Many fates of slain men already hanging there – which one would she want to call back up to life? ... At last she picks a body with its throat cut, takes and drags it by a hook stuck in its fatal noose, a wretched corpse over rocks and crags, then lays it high up under a mountain’s cave, which gloomy Erictho damned with her sacrifice.”

Sextus receives a response he probably could have done well without and the dead soldier, having already been apportioned his fate and now standing cheated of it by the witch Erictho, is left to crawl onto a pyre which she lights for him, since Death will not take a human being twice.

By the time we get to Pope Gregory the Great (c.540-604) the Church’s vested interests are showing. Ghosts now appear to the living to urge them to intervene in their afterlives by buying masses and prayers to ease their pains in Hell. The great monasteries of Europe, such as that at Cluny, became huge engines of prayer, staffed with large numbers of monks who prayed daily at all times for the rest of souls in torment. In return, the orders were given tracts of land, farmsteads, city properties, gold and other tokens of wealth to ensure that those who had passed over would be spared the horrors of Purgatory. Editor Scott Bruce serves up an entertaining selection of colourful tales, designed to argue in favour of this wholesale spiritual racket, many of which retail a story in which a monk apparently dies, then returns to life with information concerning the horrific conditions of the Afterlife. That these church-spawned tales do not square with St. Augustine’s belief that ghosts cannot be real is plainly shown: the opinions of a saint are liable to fall on economically-deaf ears where there is a stack of money to be made by preying on the insecurities of the masses.

(This shows the modern-day Church’s outrage about such things as Spiritualism in a particularly poor light; pots ought to be very careful about calling the hygiene of the kettle into question…)

After this we are treated to various schismal treatments of spooks, incorporating the Scandinavian ideas of ghosts as unresting nuisances that wouldn’t simply lie down and be dead, for God’s sake, but continued to linger about the places where they had lived, eventually bringing them to ruin due to their predilections for fright-causing and wanton destruction. These ideas passed into Protestant theology, treating spirits as goblins, or imps (literally, offshoots of the Devil), imitating those who had died, and flying in the face of the Catholic ‘prayers-for-gold’ mine. By the Renaissance and into the 1600s, ghosts had become hardly more than the province of dramatists, character tropes to be launched on stage for the education and edification of paying audiences. Thus, the book ends with an overview of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and examines the way in which the Bard of Avon marries together both the Catholic and Protestant notions of what a ghost should be to brilliant effect.

There are fan-boys out there who will leap onto this book by virtue of its outré cover and its spooky title; however, they will probably derive little from perusing it. It’s not Dracula; it’s not World War Z; it’s certainly not Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What it is, is a valuable and deftly-compiled collection of real, actual literary sources, discussing manifestations of the undead across fifteen centuries of theological and philosophical discussion, revealing how we got from Odysseus talking to Tiresias on the banks of the Ocean in the land of Cimmeria, to Rick Grimes waking up from a coma in Atlanta GA, during an outbreak of the walking dead. For that reason alone I’m giving it the full five Tentacled Horrors.

The Sharknado Experience…

Ferrante, Anthony C., “Sharknado”, The Asylum Productions/Universal/Sony Pictures, 2013.

Ferrante, Anthony C., “Sharknado 2: The Second One”, The Asylum Productions/Universal/Sony Pictures, 2014.

Ferrante, Anthony C., “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!”, The Asylum Productions/Universal/Sony Pictures, 2015.

Ferrante, Anthony C., “Sharknado: The Fourth Awakens”, The Asylum Productions/Universal/Sony Pictures, 2016.

To kick off, I’d like to apologise for going dark during the Winter Olympics. It’s not that I’m a fan, but every time an event like this happens, visits to this blog go through the roof, beginning in Russia (and, weirdly, Italy this time) and then, as the Russkie deluge tapers off, they get overtaken by the Yanks until – after the event finishes – business returns to normal. Despite appearances, a lot of work goes into this site, and frankly, I’d rather be reaching out to fellow travellers as opposed to a bunch of mindless, Internet-trawling web-spiders looking for a bunch of pre-programmed buzzwords. It might look good as far as my stats are concerned but it makes me wonder who I’m addressing out there in the wilderness, apart from people looking for sex in Republican China, students wanting to pirate my essay on Oliver Onions, or those planning a trip to Binger, Oklahoma. Yes, those three entries generate the most hits here people…

While all of this non-human attention was coming down, I decided to put my feet up and give myself a break. During this self-imposed sabbatical, I discovered this four-pack of meteorologically-affected marine horror and I thought it would be a good way to get back into things afterwards, as well as continuing my review of all things ‘cinematically shark-y’. Let me say right up front: I am not the target market for this material and, consequently, I may have judged it a little harshly. That being said, even the worst cinematic releases have something to offer the students of horror narrative, so let’s unpack!

To begin, it has to be pointed out that these films have been made incredibly cheaply. This is not a bad thing – restrictions to budget often force creative types to work around limitations and make something special. Sadly, Mr. Ferrante and Co. have not been so inspired and have resorted to a toolbox of standard gimmickry which has only served to let them and their project down. Foremost amongst these techniques is the clunky use of stock footage, a thing that was a hallmark of many films made in the 30s and later. This, for those unaware of how it works, is the judicious insertion of royalty-free film material in order to pad-out the film’s leaner moments, or to introduce fantastic elements which would be too expensive to A) go on location to film, or B) fake with special effects. It worked in the first “King Kong” film; it works less well here in the first “Sharknado” movie. Let me be clear: I don’t consider the use of stock footage to be a bad thing, not at all; if you’re going to do it though, don’t use the same piece of footage over and over again. After awhile, you’re going to have to give that lemon shark with its two remora buddies an acting credit…

Another technique well-and-truly overused in these movies is the close-up with off-screen sound effect, coupled with a camera jiggle and blood/water/evidence of high winds tossed in from out of frame. Usually, this signals that a shark has leapt out of nowhere and killed someone next to the actor in close-up, or that a piece of the environment nearby has blown up/fallen over. It’s also used to imply that Ian Ziering knows how to ride a surfboard (apparently, his first name is pronounced, rather pretentiously, “EYE-an”; for this reason, I will henceforth spell his name “I-in” in order to mock him mercilessly). This trick also has its limits: used too often, the audience begins to wonder if there’s actually anything at all to see here as most of the action takes place wherever the camera isn’t pointed. By movie four, when they pull this stunt merely to get Cheryl Tiegs through doorways, or into storm cellars, the audience members are rolling their eyes and masticating their popcorn with a sense of outrage.

I’ve said before, during these shark-film examinations, that I’m sure that there must some kind of ‘stock CGI programming’ out there which can be purchased on the cheap and used in various filmic capacities; sharks being simply wriggly torpedoes with a chomp-y end, they would surely be easy to create and mass-produce. Well, these movies are full of these virtual suckers, thrown in whenever the story requires a quick addition of teeth. These creations are often simply overlain upon actors performing some kind of ridiculous mime, with the solipsism of camera angles and water/smoke/fog/blood there to cover any lack of seamlessness. No-one making movies is spared the questionable results of such manipulation – remember the scene in “Deep Blue Sea” where Samuel L. Jackson gets taken out? – but the technique escalates to egregious levels here.

In short, the effects in these films are less than “special”, and arguably, this is what lends them some charm and is what has created a huge fan-base for the franchise. However, there are films out there which have done so much more with so much less (remember the HPLHS’s “Call of Cthulhu”?), and it makes you wonder if the guys making these movies just had a “she’ll be right” attitude to the whole film-making process. Let’s now turn to the scripting.

These flicks are all homage (or a pastiche) of 80s action hero movies, which – again – given the recent nostalgia-trip being pushed for that decade, probably explains these films’ popularity. This type of run down memory lane isn’t necessarily a bad thing and no movie production house – from Marvel Studios to this cheese-y company – is entirely able to fight clear of it. The unifying lynch-pin to the exercise would seem to be David Hasselhoff: he’s in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” and he shows up here as well in “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” as our hero Fin’s father. He’s also in the online Youtube short feature “Kung Fury!” which is arguably better than either of these two vehicles in terms of what it sets out to achieve. However, his inclusion in the “Sharknado” franchise signals a sudden bankruptcy of ideas and its inevitable demise (the moment when it - *ahem* - “jumps the shark”, if you will).

Of course, penning a paean to the 80s action genre means necessarily that the writers partake of a slew of Stallonenegger tropes that are often funny, but occasionally wince-worthy. Fin is able to fly a jet aeroplane in the later films because his son took flying lessons, a slim rationale of the kind that proliferated throughout video-nasty fare of the decade of excess. He also has an extensive working knowledge of space-flight by virtue of the fact that his absentee dad (Hasselhoff) has a career flying space shuttles. This stuff will break your brain if you wrestle too long with it. As well as this kind of slipshod writing, the movies necessarily run the Hollywood Morality play-book, which leads to a slew of inevitable demises and dismissals. Slap the girl on her butt? You die. Leer down the front of her dress? You die. Make bitchy comments about how your BFF from your school days hasn’t aged as well as she might? You die. Claim that your unrequited love of the hero is the cause of your unfulfilled life but let him know that the door to those possibilities is still open? You…well you get the picture!

In the first two movies, there is a witty sense of appropriation from various sources, paying homage to fan favourite vehicles of the genre. “Sharknado 2: The Second One” begins with a faithful replaying of William Shatner’s memorable turn as a jittery aeroplane passenger from “The Twilight Zone” intercut with elements of “Snakes on a Plane”, before riffing off “Die Hard” for the rest of its run time. After this, the writers had obviously done their dash, and couldn’t quite rise to this level of creativity once more. The remainder of the series is simply a run of clunky cameos held together with some tenuous plot.

I’ve had friends whooping for joy after just reading the cast list from these films – Tara Reid, Bo Derek, Vivica A. Fox, Kari Wuhrer, Frankie Muniz, Cheryl Tiegs, Gary Busey – but really? If these 80s (and later) actors were your favourites, seeing them here is only going to disappoint. Most of them are struggling to act without the benefit of their Zimmer frames and, in the case of Cheryl Tiegs (as stated above), her obvious frailty is more confronting than entertaining. If you like your memories intact, you’d probably best avoid this whole series.

As an aside to all this, there are cameos throughout which involve celebrities I’ve never even heard of (what the hell is a Carrot Top?), and the sly, knowing presentation of their moments onscreen are increasingly irritating and alienating. By movie four, it seems as though the creators have become obsessively focussed upon shoe-horning every cut-rate celebrity they can think of into the film: from Wil Wheaton to Lou Ferrigno, the screen is so overpopulated that you’d be forgiven for forgetting who the lead actors are.

Speaking of which: I-in Ziering (of “Beverly Hills 90210” fame) is an inspired choice for the lead role of Fin Shepherd, ex-surfing star and now a magnet for flying sharks; but even he seems a little put out by the number of unemployed celebrities who show up to hog his limelight. With each movie, more secret, or resurrected, members of his over-extended family appear out of the woodwork and it’s clear by the end that even he’s trying his best to keep track of who’s who. Add to which, whatever chemistry there is supposed to between him and his on-screen, divorced-now-pregnant-and-soon-to-be-re-married cyborg-wife Tara Reid, is completely absent: as far as I can tell, these two were only acting in order to take a breather from the on-going “my trailer is bigger than yours” bitchiness. By movie four they’re both essentially ‘phoning it in.

By the time the pre-title sequence for “Sharknado: The Fourth Awakens” starts to run (with all the attendant references to the “Star Wars” franchise you’d expect), the writers and producers have completely dropped the ball. Initially in the series, the threat was a sharknado – that is a whirling column of air which is filled with sharks; before the end of this, the last instalment, we’ll see “bouldernadoes”, “oilnadoes”, “firenadoes”, “lightningnadoes” and radioactive sharknadoes (yes, they had some quippy name for these also, but I had tuned out completely by this stage). In all cases, the answer to the threat was to make a large explosion that would snuff out the meteorological aspects of the phenomenon leaving only (only!) a rain of sharks (or boulders, or oil, or fire, or lightning, or radioactive fish) to be dealt with. The sharks learn to fly, exist out of water, get studded with rocky armour-plates, learn to navigate outer space and glow green with lethal radiation, but none of these modifications are ever remotely explained. Along with the physical limitations of fluid dynamics, the writers are not about to let a little real-world biology get in the way of their story.

In the final analysis, this is a film to watch with your brain in neutral, preferably with a few drinking buddies over for a mindless evening of dumb entertainment. You should probably eschew (unlike me!) watching them all in one big whack, and instead dip judiciously. Start off with the first film; creep your way into the second offering, but then leave it that – as the bean counters are wont to say, there are ever-diminishing returns to be gained from your continued investment in the exploits of I-in and Co.

I’ve rated each film individually above but overall, I’m giving one-and-a-half Sharktacled Horrors to the whole franchise.

Postscript: I've just been watching the third season of "Scorpion" (a guilty pleasure) and discovered an episode entitled "Sharknerdo". It's the usual socially-inept science-geekery that we've come to expect, but if you want to see every shark-movie trope I've been examining over the last little while, it's all in this one episode, from bobbing heads, to buoy escapes, to cheap CGI shark moments. Looks like I'm not the only one doing the research!

Review: "Sleepy Hollow" - Season 3

Wiseman, Len (Dir.) et.al., “Sleepy Hollow – Season 3”, Twentieth Century Fox, 2016.

The slow demise of this TV show has eventuated – after Season 4, there will be no more shenanigans in the ‘Hollow (of a cockily-proposed seven, sure-fire seasons) and, in the final analysis, these guys have no-one to blame except themselves.

The first season of “Sleepy Hollow” had chutzpah and a budget and very little else. With just these elements onboard, they forecast a silly, but entertainingly scary ride to come. By Season 2, they dropped all pretence of being witty or funny, and the entertainment factor went into a sudden nose-dive. Here, in Season 3, the budget has been slashed, the writing apparently outsourced to the junior staff and the will to live (or, at least, to act) strangled within all the performers contracted. What you’re seeing here, folks, is a death rattle. The shark, as they say, has well-and-truly jumped.

It’s really a shame, too. Initially, this series had a lot going for it – a handsome cast, a hefty budget and some interesting notions. However, they traded all of their advantages for a lazy complacence that has destroyed their credibility and alienated their audience. I’ve mentioned before how the writers assume that their viewers are au fait with other supernatural TV shows and don’t bother to explain or ground their own material as a result: “it’s like a wendigo, right? Y’know, like in X-Files? So yeah, like that.” Add to this that they short-cut required knowledge in any situation by putting the umbrella notion of an Oxford education circa 1770 over it, and suspension of disbelief goes right out the window. As a series of examples here are some instances:

The first steps towards deciphering Sumerian Cuneiform were made by Georg Friedrich Gotefend in 1802, published in 1815, but were generally ignored by the academic world. It wasn’t until 1857 that the language was considered definitively understood. Ichabod Crane readily translates a stone tablet written in this script which he rescues from a crypt beneath his (somehow, unoccupied, un-redeveloped, and un-demolished) ancestral home in – Scotland? (What: were they trying to channel “Outlander”?)

The earliest known reference to gunpowder dates to the work of Wei Boyang in 142 AD during the Eastern Han Dynasty of China. Jenny confidently attributes the discovery of gunpowder to scientists in the Tang Dynasty (618 AD – 907 AD) at one point. I would at least have expected Ichabod – as a Brit - to object to this notion on the basis that Francis Bacon is also often credited with the discovery.

Jesuit missionaries were active in China from the late 1500s. They published Christian theological materials in Chinese between 1593 and 1607. Louis XIV appointed a Chinese immigrant – Arcadio Huang - to catalogue France’s collection of Chinese texts and artefacts and, with Etienne Fourmont, he produced a Chinese grammar in 1742. The first European Sinology institute was established at Naples in 1732. Most other learning centres in Europe did not embark on any real study of China until after 1860, being more interested in the study of Assyria and Egypt (due to Biblical connexions) and, in the case of England, India. And yet Crane, who arguably wasn’t even in Europe during these events, can read Chinese. The Romanisation of the Chinese language – the Wade-Giles System – was published in 1892. So again, how can Crane read this stuff?

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was written in the 5^th Century BC and translated first into French in 1772, and again in 1782, by Jean Joseph Marie Amiot a Jesuit priest. A partial translation into English was published by Everard Ferguson Calthrop in 1905 as The Book of War; this was completed by Lionel Giles in 1910. And yet, Crane quotes Sun Tzu at length over games of chess with Abbie, a book which wasn’t even in common parlance in Europe during his lifetime, let alone the United States.

Starting as a paper in 1922 entitled “Old British Trackways”, Alfred Watkins published The Old Straight Track in 1925, outlining his theory about the concept of ley-lines, which he invented. This, however, doesn’t stop Crane spotting ley-lines all over the countryside.

The “Ynglinga Saga” is the first part of a legendary saga entitled Heimskringla, a history text originally written in Old Norse by the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson about 1225. It was first translated into English and published in 1844 by Samuel Laing. It outlines the history of the earliest Norse leaders, tentatively connecting them to the Norse gods. It’s not the grimoire that this show’s writers claim it is; it’s not a grimoire at all.

Spirit cabinets – or manifestation cabinets - were designed by fraudulent spirit mediums to fool séance members. The medium would invite an audience member to tie their hands and then draw the curtains over the medium inside the box. Despite being tied, musical instruments inside the box would play, “ghostly” hands would emerge from behind the curtain and so on. Of course it was all stage magic of a low order and yet our cast make use of one in actual, serious, magical endeavours. Perhaps this is an in-joke on the writers’ part, evidence that they know that what they’re shovelling is pure hokum? Naaah…

And finally, the giant-killer: Sleepy Hollow was founded in the Nineteenth Century as “North Tarrytown” a village in the orbit of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County, New York. Located between Mount Pleasant and Tarrytown proper, the village was re-named “Sleepy Hollow” in 1996. Rather than being the haunt of decapitated Hessians, it is better known as the birthplace of Mythbuster, Adam Savage.

I could go on. All of this information can be discerned by a quick stroll through Wikipedia via a Google search, but did anyone connected to this show even bother? Of course not. And here is where they made their fatal error: they can’t be bothered, but their audience can, and by relegating the intelligence of their viewers, they’ve killed their cash cow. Writers be warned: judge your audience at your own peril.

But the blame for the show’s demise cannot be laid entirely at Ichabod Crane’s door. As before, with Abbie’s career, the show’s writers use this as another egregious umbrella to cover a multitude of sins. First – it only takes nine months at Quantico to become a Federal Agent? Seriously? If this was the case, why aren’t all the ISIS sleeper cells putting their representatives through the routine in order to tool them up? Why doesn’t everyone in the US take the course as, I don’t know, some kind of military service? And afterwards, when you’ve graduated, you get to be posted wherever the Hell you want? I’m certain that this isn’t the case: schoolteachers don’t have this luxury; I’m pretty sure Government law-keepers follow suit.

As in previous seasons, Abbie’s blanket “career” allows her to do all kinds of investigate-y stuff, but there’s never any blow-back from when she’s derelict in her duty. She ignores cases, procedures – even her superiors – every time it interferes with her (lacklustre) ghost-busting activities. At one point she even quits, but the Bureau keeps her job open for her to come back to if she wants. Seriously? With all of the cadets coming through Quantico after their nine-month internship, you’d think job vacancies would be filled in a heartbeat. As before, the writers never let the exigencies of the real world interfere with their weekly monster hunt.

And speaking of which: in past seasons, there were some actually scary opponents to face. Now, with the budget being so obviously trimmed, the villains are all definitely B-grade, even recycled from previous seasons, and the wow-factor has diminished accordingly. This season’s main nemesis, Pandora – she of the Box - is obviously where the money went and even then the writers fail to capitalise on all of the funky set-dressing by giving her a focused rationale. By the mid-point of Season 3, she seems mostly bored and regretful of ever coming to the ‘Hollow. That’s okay though, because Abbie also loses the plot and appears to have much better (unspecified) things to do elsewhere.

In the first season, Crane exhibited bursts of outrage about the state of the country which he fought to create. These were, by and large, the best thing about the show. Season 2 toned them down almost into pastiche, and in Season 3, they’re entirely absent. Given that these moments were the best thing about the show, I’m gobsmacked that they got relegated. Rather than being a fish out of water, Crane is simply an oddity, and not a very good one at that. I’ve said before that you need to leave your degree in American History at the door before watching this show; by this stage, the savaging of American history is the least repellent thing about it. I’m prepared to believe that Ben Franklin’s glass armonica was a device for controlling resurrected corpses, or that Paul Revere built caskets to contain god-summoning widgets, or that Betsy Ross was an arse-kicking chop-socky wunderkind, but only if the show’s designers build a vaguely-credible rationale around these concepts. Instead we get this.

Did I mention that there’s a crossover episode to the “Bones” franchise? If there’s one truism in TV-land, it’s that you can’t prop up two dying televisual commodities by marrying them together.

It’s over, folks. After Season 4, there is no more – the money has spoken. There are only two words to sum up this wasted effort: Sloppy. Hollow.