Banquet For the Damned (2004) by Adam Nevill

Banquet For the Damned (2004) by Adam Nevill: Hard-rocking Birmingham, England 20-somethings Dante and Tom move to St. Andrew's, Scotland, to make their second album. They're all that remains of their band Sister Morphine, the other members having given up because of poverty and personal issues. 

They're in St. Andrew's at the invitation of visionary academic Eliot Coldwell. Coldwell's Banquet For the Damned  was a controversial 1950's book about Coldwell's quest for meaning through drugs and arcane rituals. It's also Dante's favourite book.

Needless to say, perhaps, but hero worship is about to take a beating.

Banquet For the Damned is Adam Nevill's first published novel. It's a humdinger. Eliot Coldwell is not the Kerouac-meets-Huxley hero of his own Banquet For the Damned. Instead, he's an alcoholic wreck when Dante first meets him. An academic laughing-stock for decades, in St. Andrew's only because two of its top officials went to Oxford with Coldwell and wanted to do a favour to an old friend.

Or should that be 'old fiend'?

There are strange goings-on at St. Andrew's -- the town, the university, and the golf course. Students are disappearing. And they're disappearing just before they finish their senior theses! OK, that last bit is not a major plot point.

Dante soon finds that he's being stalked by Something Strange. It's all tied to Coldwell and his odd student inamorata Beth. Beth is intoxicatingly sexy to Dante but also, he soon realizes, odd and dangerous. Something really strange seems to follow her around.

Into this mix, Nevill also adds American anthropologist Hart Miller. Miller has been researching outbreaks of Night Terrors in various places around the globe -- Africa, South America, and Newfoundland among them. An outbreak seems to have started in St. Andrew's. Will the short, hirsute, alcoholic anthropologist end up fighting evil rather than documenting it? And will his catchphrase -- "Hey now!" -- suggest that Nevill binge-watched The Larry Sanders Show at some point before writing this novel?

The politics of academia ring pretty much true throughout Banquet For the Damned. So, too, Dante's infatuation with Coldwell and his popularized 'Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law' philosophy. Neville handles the supernatural ably in this first novel, presenting something scary and interesting. 

The climax does seem very consciously aimed at a visual-effects-heavy movie, but nonetheless it flows nicely. And the characters who find themselves in a last stand against Evil act pretty pragmatically when the moment comes. They may not be fully prepared, but they're at least prepared. Competence goes a long way in horror novels. Recommended.

The Crime-fighting Horse of Newfoundland and the Mummy That Sank the TITANIC

The World's Strangest Mysteries by Rupert Furneaux (1962): I bought this paperback on a lark, figuring it would be chock-full of loopiness. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that for books of this type, it's surprisingly even-handed. It's certainly no Cosmos, but neither is it like modern-day History Channel stupidity.

Obviously, much of the material explored here has become dated -- the book is more than 50 years old, after all. Nonetheless, sections on Kaspar Hauser, the Man in the Silk Mask, Anastasia, and other mysterious figures lay out and evaluate the various cases for who these people were or weren't.

We also get some stories of things that would turn out to be hoaxes after the book's publication (the infamous Brass Plate of California being one of them), or that were always hoaxes if one knew where to look for decent information (Welcome to Oak Island, suckers!). The book may be wrong in its conclusions about some of these things, but there is an argumentative process at work: Furneaux isn't completely gullible and accepting.

Well, OK, sections on the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti seem to have been thrown together, though Furneaux at least explains the overall reasoning for why they may exist (which is to say, cryptids were still showing up in 1961 with some regularity).

His section on the Shakespeare authorship (non)controversy is solid, though he appears ignorant of the simple fact that we know more about the life of Shakespeare than we do of virtually any other person of his socioeconomic class from the same time period: his was not a mysteriously under-chronicled life, and Furneaux repeats some misinformation about the Shakespeare statue in Stratford-Upon-Avon (and seems ignorant of the fact that the "second bed" was actually the best bed to will somebody -- as the guest bed, it hadn't been used).

Overall, fun stuff, with some interesting mysteries to follow up from other sources. Worth picking up if you see it lying around in a used bookstore for a fair price. It's also deceptively long, hailing as it does from a time when the paperback publishers tried to save money on paper by printing everything in tiny, tiny type. Recommended.

The Strange and Uncanny by John Macklin (1967): I'm pretty sure I read this unsourced compendium of weird, 'true' stories when I was about ten. And ten is pretty much the Golden Age for this sort of book. Now we can just download these strange sorts of tales directly from the Internet into our neocortexes. Truly this is a disturbing universe.

One can assess the probably verity of its contents by noting that it rehashes the completely fabricated story of Princess Amen-Ra and her mummy's role in the sinking of the Titanic, a story that still pops up a lot in stories about unexplained mysteries. Alan Moore even offered a version of it in the graphic novel From Hell.

However, more because of the ridiculous claims of the book than despite them, there's a lot of fun to be had. I can see how some of the stories creeped me out when I was a lad (including that of the malevolent Egyptian mummy). Others are actually reined in a bit too much for maximum enjoyment. If a story tells me that a demon killed someone, I'd like to discover that the guy was ripped apart by an invisible assailant. I don't want to learn that he was found with a single gunshot wound to the head. Pistol-packing demons would be cool in certain circumstances, but they lack a certain oomph in this situation.

Some of the 'true' stories here bear remarkable resemblances to fictional ghost stories I've encountered. And there's absolute no sourcing here -- no notes, no bibliography. Ah, well. You get to read about the telepathic, precognitive Newfoundland horse called Lady Wonder, who helped police in that province solve a couple of missing persons cases. Is this true? I'll have to look it up. Recommended.