The Dark Masters Trilogy (2018) by Stephen Volk, containing the following novellas:
Whitstable - 1971 (2013): The first of the three fictional novellas featuring real people stars Peter Cushing, days after losing his beloved wife to emphysema in 1971.
While sitting on the beach near his home in Whitstable, Cushing is approached by a boy who thinks Cushing IS Van Helsing, vampire fighter and nemesis of Dracula. And the boy believes he is being preyed on by a vampire -- his stepfather.
The truth is just as horrible. Cushing begins by trying to shirk responsibility, and then tries getting the authorities to help out. But in the end, the actor has to discover how to face Evil himself, as himself -- though the art of acting does come in handy.
It's a marvelous, sympathetic character study in which the metaphor of vampirism is explored sensitively through one of the real-world evils that it can be a metaphor for. Despite the grim and mournful subject matter, Volk injects appropriate humour throughout -- especially when it comes to people mixing Cushing up with his oft-time co-star Christopher Lee, or to only recognizing him from cameos on current comedy TV shows. Highly recommended.
Leytonstone - 1906 (2015): Alfred Hitchcock's anecdote about his father having him put in jail for a night as a young boy in order to teach him to be good is the spark for this meditation on childhood fears and the peculiar character of the world's greatest thriller and suspense director. As he notes in his afterword, Volk alters the real nature of Hitchcock's family to make him an only child, doted upon by his mother and worried about by his father, who decides on the police visit.
Needless to say, the police visit does not yield the expected results. Volk examines the roots of fear here in childhood trauma, while also having what seems to be a good time coming up with precursors for many of Hitchcock's most famous film scenes. His Boy Hitchcock isn't entirely sympathetic, but he is certainly sympathetically drawn when it comes to his motivations and fears. Highly recommended.
Netherwood - 1947 (2018): In the last year of his life, 'The World's Wickedest Man,' Aleister Crowley, summons England's most popular post-war horror novelist -- that would be Dennis Wheatley -- to a peculiar hotel in Netherstone. Why?
Because Crowley believes a recent apprentice has gained enough magical power to conquer the world -- and, more importantly to Crowley, who lost a daughter at a young age, to fully claim that power the apprentice will sacrifice his own infant daughter.
This really is a great work, straddling reality and the supernatural without ever conclusively establishing that Crowley's fears are "real." One of the things that links the two men is a concern with permanence -- as a philosopher and thinker for Crowley, as a novelist for Wheatley. The third-person narrative focuses on Wheatley's thoughts and reactions, leaving Crowley to be imagined throughout from the outside by Wheatley. This choice generates suspense (is Crowley really on the level or is he just 'aving a laugh?).
But this narrative POV also allows the reader to judge Wheatley as he's judging Crowley -- and equivocating in that judgment. This seems fitting because one's assessment of Crowley relies a lot on just how much one believes in what he supposedly did, and how much one believes HE believed in what he supposedly did. It all makes for a fascinating fictional trip through the lives of two people who are increasingly forgotten as the decades slip by. Highly recommended.
In all: A great book of 2018. Highly recommended.
The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) by Mark Frost: Mark Frost's canonical (as in, 'It's a part of the series lore') book is creepy, informative fun. It could almost stand on its own, though in that case it doesn't exactly have a conclusion.
In a nod to the documentary strain of horror fiction, The Secret History of Twin Peaks deploys journal entries, diary excerpts, newspaper articles, and first-person testimonials and reporting to supply David Lynch and Mark Frost's fictional town with a convincingly weird history as a place where the walls between the normal world and the world of demons and aliens have worn very, very thin.
The conceit here is that much of what we're reading was found in a lockbox at an undisclosed location. It's been assigned by FBI assistant director Gordon Cole (played by Lynch on the TV series) to a younger agent with the initials 'T.P.' to annotate. T.P.'s notes appear in the margins.
The contents of the lockbox (or 'dossier') were assembled by an initially unnamed character from Twin Peaks (the show and the town). That unnamed character (dubbed 'the Archivist' by T.P.) also comments on the various pieces assembled in the dossier while hinting and then confirming that much of the dossier was assembled by another character from Twin Peaks. Got all that?
Frost brings real historical figures (Lewis of Lewis and Clark; UFO investigators J. Allen Hynek and Kenneth Arnold; President Nixon; Jackie Gleason (!)...) and real events into the secret history of demon- and angel-haunted Twin Peaks, to enjoyably creepy and expansive effect. It seems as if Frost is much more into UFO' s than Lynch, making The Secret History of Twin Peaks a somewhat different experience than the show. And that's a good thing. Everything herein dovetails nicely with what we've seen on Twin Peaks without over-writing anything.
Frost supplies background for many of the characters of Twin Peaks, from the Mayor and his brother (remember them? Well, they're major players here!) to Major Briggs and Dr. Jacoby. The dossier ends when the Archivist apparently disappears in 1989, a few days after the events in the series end. We do discover the fate of a couple of characters from the show. However, a gap of about 27 years is indeed left between the end of dossier and Twin Peaks: The Return. Some of that gap is filled in by T.P.'s marginal notes, as she or he is writing just days before the events chronicled in Twin Peaks: The Return begin.
In all, this is an impressive addition to the world of documentary-style horror and fantasy fiction. If you've watched Twin Peaks: The Return, you'll probably guess the identities of our archivist and the young FBI agent reading his work in 2016. You may be surprised when the UFO stuff starts flying, or when American magazine editor Raymond Palmer's The Shaver Mysteries suddenly makes an appearance. L. Ron Hubbard shows up as well. And Aleister Crowley, and so on, and so forth. Highly recommended.
The Devil's Bride (a.k.a. The Devil Rides Out): adapted by Richard Matheson from the Dennis Wheatley novel The Devil Rides Out; directed by Terence Fisher; starring Christopher Lee (Duc de Richleau), Charles Gray (Mocata), Nike Arrighi (Tanith), Leon Greene (Rex), and Patrick Mower (Simon) (1968): Fun, tightly plotted period piece (it's set in England in the 1920's) pits Christopher Lee in a rare heroic turn against the forces of Satan himself as conjured up by Aleister Crowley-esque black magician Mocata.
The great Richard Matheson does solid work turning a novel by the often clunky Dennis Wheatley into a crisply executed occult thriller that clocks in at barely 100 minutes. Lee commands the screen as a reluctant, learning-on-the-fly white magician who must battle the powerful Mocata (a terrifically oily, ingratiating Charles Gray) for the souls of two people who have been pulled into Satanic worship.
The rites and spells sometimes sound so odd that you'd swear they were lifted from H.P. Lovecraft or William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder series and not from actual occult sources. This Hammer film has a fairly low budget, as Hammer films always did, but the cinematography, direction, and set design mostly make up for it. There are a couple of goofy moments involving visual effects, but a couple of things also work quite well.
The film is at its creepiest when it keeps its demons off-stage, but that's true of virtually all horror movies. Wait for the moment in which a crucifix operates pretty much like the Holy Hand-grenade of Antioch. Reportedly this was Christopher Lee's favourite of his many Hammer Horror Films, partially because he himself suggested they make it and partially, I assume, because he got to be a commanding good guy for once. Recommended.
The Dark by James Herbert (1980): Herbert gives us an apocalyptic struggle between Good and Evil, though this time expressed in pseudo-scientific rather than religious terms. A somewhat Satanic cult leader commits mass suicide with his followers in a London (England) suburb. A year later, what appears to be a sentient cloud of pure evil begins to sally forth from the site of the suicide, corrupting many of those it meets to act on their worst impulses. And it's pretty much up to three paranormal investigators and a medium to stop the rising tide, as conventional methods prove insufficient.
Herbert seems to have a good time destroying large portions of London, with a cloud-fueled soccer riot probably the best set-piece. Herbert's protagonists have an astonishing ability to survive physical punishment (the oldest and wisest paranormal investigator seems to get strangled every ten pages), which is good, because they must endure a lot of it.
This is an enjoyable horror novel in which evil operates more like a plague than the sort of thing one normally sees in horror novels. The protagonists are sympathetic if somewhat broadly drawn, and the stakes convincingly high. While this is horror, the depiction of the civil authorities pitching in to fight a supernatural menace also contains echoes of an awful lot of the British science-fiction-disaster tradition seen in the Quatermass series, Doctor Who, and the novels of John Wyndham. The sudden ending is quite loopy. Recommended.
Tomb Seven by Gene Snyder (1985): Labelled a horror novel by its publishers, Tomb Seven contains almost no horror. It's really a pseudo-scientific, ancient astronauts archaeology thriller about a dig in Mexico that unearths a seemingly impossible array of artifacts...and one weird 8-foot-tall skeleton. There's an awful lot of telepathic woo-woo stuff, much of it in need of less woo and more plausibility (cited for the millionth time in a piece of fiction about archaeology is the [in truth non-existent] Curse of King Tut's Tomb).
The protagonists -- a handsome Welsh archaeologist and a sexy Hispanic-American telepath -- have sex because that's how these things happen. And she is the most beautiful woman in the world, because that's also how these things happen. The telepath promises the reader that something terrible is coming. It never actually does. Sort of a wet firecracker. Not recommended.
Hell House by Richard Matheson (1970): Matheson's great ghost story pays homage to Shirley Jackson's earlier, great haunted-house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in many of its attributes. As in Jackson's novel, Hell House gives us a quartet of psychic investigators led by an academic and weighed down by personal issues who've been brought together to stay in an extremely haunted house for several days.
Matheson's novel focuses on the always fuzzy world of "psychic research" far more than Jackson's did. The psychosexual issues are much more overt. And unlike Hill House, where the haunting seemed to be a matter of a Bad Place rather than individual Bad Ghosts, Hell House appears to be the domain of the ghost of Emeric Belasco. Matheson loosely bases Belasco on Aleister Crowley, black magician and self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world." Belaso is much wickeder: his remote Maine mansion was the site of mass murder, suicide, and worse. But when the authorities finally broke into the mansion in the 1920's, Belasco was nowhere to be found among the dead.
Hell House is set in 1970. Two previous attempts to probe the mysteries of Hell House, the last in 1940, ended in the deaths or institutionalization of all those involved but one. And that one, a then-16-year-old boy judged to be one of the greatest psychics ever, is along for this expedition. Why? Because a dying millionaire is paying him and the others $100,000 each to try to figure out from the evidence of Hell House whether the human soul survives death.
As with his great, rational vampire novel I am Legend, Matheson herein sails the edge between the supernatural and the scientific. The physics professor who leads the expedition believes that ghosts are a product of human minds interacting with a charged psychic environment left behind by traumatic events in a specific location. There is no life after death except as an amorphous energy field subject to the fears and hopes of the living. The academic's wife isn't so sure. And the two psychics know that there's something more than that going on. But what?
Matheson doesn't write 'long.' Hell House is fairly brief and to-the-point, and its structure is as much mystery novel as horror novel. But the horrors are quite potent, and the characters sympathetically drawn even as they wrestle with their fears and their failings. Highly recommended.
Promethea Book 5, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia (2003-2005; collected 2006): Promethea, the 1600-year-old demi-goddess whose current host/personality is young college student Sophie Bangs, will end the world if Bangs allows her to manifest again. So Bangs hides from the government and from herself in New York under an assumed name.
But the paranoid, increasingly militaristic U.S. government has recruited science-hero Tom Strong to track Promethea down because Strong knew one of Promethea's previous avatars back in the 1950's. Strong reluctantly agrees, but he doesn't believe that Promethea really means to end the world.
But she does. She has to. That's her job.
And so the end comes to the Earth of Moore's America's Best Comics imprint, ushered in by the unstoppable Promethea despite the best efforts of Tom Strong and the rest of that world's heroes. From the realms of fiction and poetry and magic and gods descends judgment on everything. But what does the end of the world actually look like?
Well, it doesn't look like the end of the world in Moore's Watchmen. Promethea is a much different bringer of catastrophe than Ozymandias. And violence is not a solution or a means to a solution.
Moore's 32-issue exegesis on magic and the nature of reality comes to a stunning end here, beautifully imagined by both Moore and his artistic collaborators J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia. This may be one of the most visually beautiful comic books ever created, and one of the most visually complex. It's not for everybody -- this is a didactic essay about Moore's actual beliefs ever since he decided to become a practicing magician (!) in the 1990's.
Images and iterations of the Kabbalah, the Tarot Deck, various occultists and pretty much every religion under the sun get combined and recombined within Moore's apocalyptic vision -- with the caveat that 'apocalypse' derives from the Greek word for "revelation" or "lifting of the veil."
Never has Aleister Crowley made so many appearances in a comic-book series not named Aleister Crowley. Hurry down doomsday! Highly recommended.
