Jim Keith’s Black Helicopters Over America

I’d been planning to read Jim Keith’s Black Helicopters books for a while. The black helicopters conspiracy is a little dull in some ways, but it seems integral enough to conspiracy lore that I had to take a closer look. The general idea is that right wing militia types thought that unmarked black helicopters were swarming around America trying to suppress American patriots. These helicopters were piloted by emissaries of the New World Order, nameless/faceless individuals working for some shady, secretive division of the government focused on overthrowing the government.

Oh, by the way, I’ve cracked the code
I’ve figured out these shadow organizations
And the Illuminati know
That they’re finally primed for world domination

And soon you’ve got black helicopters comin’ cross the border
Puppet masters for the New World Order
Be aware: There’s always someone that’s watching you.

– “Weird Al” Yankovic

The first book gives a timeline of black helicopter sightings. The confusing thing here is that for the first 20 or so years of these sightings, they were linked, almost exclusively, with cattle mutilations. It was only after 1993 that the helicopters became linked with the idea of political oppression. This switch seems confusing at first, but it’s easily explained away. The globalists spent 20 years having their henchmen cut up some cows to throw people off their trail. It seems kind of mad when you think about it first, but look at the wacky shit they pumped into the Kennedy assassination narrative. That the American government would push ridiculous disinformation to cover their tracks is the least unlikely part of this conspiracy theory.

Much of the rest of the books is extremely boring and unconvincing. Both discuss FEMA camps (a discredited idea about giant underground prisons covered extensively in Bill Cooper’s book). There’s also a bizarre section in the second book on the “quadrant sign code”. This is a theory that claims that the stickers placed on the back of traffic signs across America were actually placed in such a manner that they provided directions to different mystery locations to mystery employees of secret groups within the government. The person writing about this theory had not cracked the code, and hence had no actual evidence of his claims, but this didn’t stop him from waffling on for 17 pages. Overall, the second book is considerably worse. The first book isn’t hugely entertaining, but the ideas it was discussing were novel enough for me to enjoy it for a few hours. Also, the first volume covers roughly 25 years of sightings over its 150 pages. The second book covers 3 years of new information over the course of 220 pages, so it’s a bit more drawn out and dull.

I’m sure many people who read these books in the 1990s probably rolled their eyes at many of the claims herein. I probably would have too. It’s very easy to be dismissive of conspiracy theories, and there’s always people out there who are crazier than you. I’ve seen writing from Jim Keith, the author of this book, dismissing the claims of Bill Cooper and David Icke. I’m clearly skeptical of some of the claims made by Keith, but I have the benefit of hindsight and the internet. Looking back at what these guys were afraid of now is bizarre. Some of their fears were misguided, but many of them fell far short of how bad things would actually get. Keith is afraid of microchipping and government control over the lives of private citizens. Now the majority of people in America are glued to a cellphone that includes a camera, a microphone and GPS tracking. We routinely and willingly tell these phones things we wouldn’t tell another human being. Mega-corporations like google and meta know more about us than our closest friends and family members. Social media is a more efficient control of mind control than 90s conspiracy theorists could have imagined. It’s not UN soldiers who are murdering American citizens, it’s their own law enforcement agencies, and it’s not the globalists who’ve taken over, but billionaire child-molesting, bloodthirsty creeps, insidious scumbags who went out of their way to convince people like Keith’s patriotic readers that they were right while simultaneously using their fears as a playbook on how to seize control. I sincerely wish Jim Keith had been right. The New World Order sounds a whole lot better than the mess we have today.

Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall

Life has been very busy recently. I’ve been finishing up my coursework and working on music stuff, and consequently, there’s been a few weeks that I haven’t updated this site Sorry. I’ve still been reading quite a lot, but much of what I’ve been reading doesn’t really fit in with this blog. I finished Scott Smith‘s A Simple Plan and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright during the week. Both were good books, and just as dark as anything I’ve reviewed here, but neither comes close to horror in the Nocturnal Revelries sense of the word. Here’s a novel I read a few weeks ago. While not as depressing as the 2 books I just mentioned, it at least contains a haunted house.

**PS Publishing 2024 (First published 2015)**

Wylding Hall is a good book, but it’s barely a horror novel. It’s about a folk rock band that goes to a remote mansion in the English countryside to write and record an album. Unfortunately, their singer runs away with a ghost.
There’s a couple of creepy moments, but overall, it’s not scary. It has a few elements of gothic fiction, but the narration is a little too upbeat for it to seem creepy for long. It’s like horror-lite or sugar free horror. At the same time, I really quite enjoyed reading it. I love those old those classic album documentaries, and this feels like reading one of them. This would be a good book to read on a plane or a bus. I thought it was good fun.

I have some more straightforward horror novels coming up soon, and I recently got my hands on some ridiculous conspiracy theory books, so stay tuned.

Martin Ingram’s An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch

When I start researching a new topic, I usually look for the book that has had the biggest effect on the public’s opinion of that topic rather than the book that contains the most accurate information. Books like Michelle Remembers, The Mothman Prophecies, Helter Skelter, Communion, and Behold A Pale Horse, are almost worthless as descriptions of reality, but if you’re interested in the Satanic Panic, cryptozoology, the Manson Family, alien abductions or conspiracy theories, you have to read these books. I do this with books about hauntings too. Neither Harry Price’s book on the Borley Rectory and Jay Anson’s book about Amityville are considered accurate or truthful, but in many ways, these are the definitive books on the topic. I have been coming across references to the Bell Witch for many years, but it was only a few months ago that I decided to take a closer look at the topic. A few minutes research pointed to Ingram’s Authenticated History of the Bell Witch. as the source of most of the lore surrounding the Bell Witch Case. I started reading it in January, but I’ve been so busy with work and school that it took me 3 months to get through it. This is a nightmare of a book.

**Rare Book Reprints – 1961 (Originally published 1894)**

So the Bell Witch is more of a ghost than a witch. It’s sometimes referred to as a goblin. The spirit showed up in the house of the Bell family in 1817, and terrorized (some of) them until the father died in 1821. It’d pull off their blankets and say mean things to them. It was quite nice to the mother of the house, reciting poetry and bringing her treats when she was sick. Some local people suspected it was the spirit of another local woman named Kate Batts. Kate was a bit of a weirdo, and people seemed happy to blame her for their misfortunes. She probably just had autism or something. The Bell family did not think it was her. Some of them thought it may have been the spirit of a Native American. One of the Bell family members supposedly kept a diary of these events, and it ended up in Ingram’s hands with the stipulation that he wouldn’t publish it until everyone in the family who had been directly affected by the spirit had died.

While this book is where most of the tales of the Bell Witch come from, it’s suspected that Ingram wrote some, most or all of the book. He did so in a horrible manner too. You would be far better off reading the wikipedia page than wasting your time on this awful, awful piece of writing. The author seems to think that readers will believe these ludicrous stories if he heaps enough praise on the characters involved.

Never, in all the land, was as devout a Christian as Master Chubbs found, and even today you’ll see a twinkle in the eyes of the older residents of Roberston County who still remember this jovial and most generous man whose handsome appearance and gentle hands gave relief and solace to all who beheld them. It was on his 22nd birthday that the young master had the pleasure of encountering the most perfect and exquisite lady Bell, but their most pleasant encounter was ruined when Old Kate appeared and shoved a pin up his supple and tender anus…

Honestly, every single character gets this kind of treatment. It’s truly excruciating.

Even worse is the books depiction of black people. This was written in Tennessee the 19th century. There are entire chapters written in… I don’t even know what you’d call it… slave-speak?

I find it very difficult to read stuff like this without saying it out loud, and as I read most of this book in a community center, I wasn’t able to do so. An author’s racism generally won’t stop me from reading their books, but in this case, it literally made the book difficult to read. It was so unnecessary too. It seems like the “Negro Stories” chapter was included for comic relief. While the witch mainly just teases white people, she actually turns a black person in a donkey.

Ingram’s book is the source material for much of the legend of the Bell Witch, but there has to be better written books on the topic. I think at this point, this book has become more regarded as an interesting early study and source of folklore than as an accurate account of anything. Personally, I have no further interest in this topic. Ingram has ruined it on me. It’s clearly all a load of bullshit.

Some Books by Brian Evenson

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on Brian Evenson for quite a while. I read Last Days about 3 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s more of a thriller than a horror novel, but it’s about a cult who like to amputate their own body parts. Cool! It’s quite messed up. Although I’ve definitely forgotten most of the plot, I have not forgotten how much I enjoyed reading it.

The next thing I read by Evenson was Altmann’s Tongue, his first collection of short stories. I read this shortly after finishing Last Rites. Part of its appeal was that I had heard the contents were so extreme that it led to the author having to leave his job at a Mormon university. In truth, I remember almost nothing about this collection. I can’t say I was overly impressed, and I didn’t read anything else by Evenson for a while.

In December I read Father of Lies. I had seen this one described as a more straight forward horror novel than Evenson’s other books. It is truly fucked. It’s about a paedophile priest who is either insane or possessed by the Devil. I read it in an evening, and it almost pains me to admit that I really enjoyed it. It’s a horrid book, real feel-bad fiction. It was so unpleasant that I picked up and read another book by Evenson a few days after finishing it.

The Warren is more of a science fiction novel than the ones mentioned above, but it’s gloomy existential science fiction rather than Star Wars or the likes. This was another book that took me less than a day to read and has encouraged me to venture outside the realms of straight horror recently. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in contemplating the limitations of identity and what it means to be a person.

So Brian Evenson has also written novels for movie and video game franchises under the pen name B.K. Evenson. I presume this is about separating his “literary” work from the more commercial stuff that he writes. I have no real interest in this books about video games, but after searching my local library’s database for audiobooks by Evenson, I found Feral.

Feral is a collaboration Evenson did with James DeMonaco, the author and director of The Purge movies. I haven’t seen any of those films, but I have a general idea of what they’re about. When you think about it, a story of violent survivalist action/adventure put through the filter of a literary author with a penchant for nastiness could turn out very well. I am happy to say that Feral pulls it off quite successfully.

A pandemic hits the world and turns all men into fast zombies that really hate women. After 3 years, only a few small armoured settlements of women are left. Allie is a scout in one of these settlements, and she spends her days looting abandoned stores for food and goods while dodging, incapacitating and sometimes kidnapping the feral male zombies. She rides around on a motorbike and carries guns and machetes and is basically a total badass. Things get worrying when she notices that there are far more males skulking around her territory than usual. To complicate matters further, one of these males doesn’t seem to be infected.

This is not the kind of horror I usually enjoy. The most similar thing I’ve read was probably Brian Keene’s The Complex, a novel that I wanted to like but struggled to enjoy. Feral was better though. I don’t know the story behind it, but given DeMonaco’s work in film, I assume this was originally an idea for a movie. I think it would work well as a movie, but I understand that the zombie film market was probably oversaturated in the years prior to 2017 when it came out. Also, I can see how the pandemic element to the book may have discouraged studios from considering the idea in the few years after it was released.

Feral is definitely more typical of the horror genre than Evenson’s other works, but it was fast paced and entertaining. I quite liked it. I don’t know if I’ll discuss them here, but I am quite certain I will read more of Evenson’s books in the future.

James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia

You may have noticed that most of the books I’ve reviewed this year have been relatively recent. This is because I am back studying part time and relying on audiobooks as I do the dishes to get through any reading at all. For the last week, I’ve been listening to James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. It’s a bit older than the other stuff I’ve read recently.

**Grand Central Publishing – 1998 (first published 1987)**

The Black Dahlia is an excellent book, and the subject matter is truly horrifying, but I’ve been on the fence as to whether I should post about it here or not. It contains horrendous acts of cruelty and depravity, so it kind of fits the bill, and it was previously reviewed on the toomuchhorrorfiction blog, so I reckon it’s fair game. While it’s not a horror novel, it is so dark that I imagine most people with an interest in horror will likely be interested. It’s also really good.

I didn’t know what to expect going in. I had seen people saying this book was great, but I didn’t know what kind of a book it was. It’s a novel. It involves a crime that really happened, but it’s not a novelisation or even speculative fiction. Most of the characters here are made up. The book is described as “neo-noir”. I’ve only read a few books of “noir” fiction, but Ellroy’s writing was far grittier than those. This was written in the late 80s, and it doesn’t hold back on any fronts. Everyone in this book is a piece of shit, but it’s this element that makes it believable. It’s also what makes the book very funny in parts.

After reading the book, I had to do a little research in the case. It’s truly horrible stuff. There’s a heavy metal band named after it. I remember I bought a ticket to see them once because Cephalic Carnage were opening for them. When I got to the show, I realised I had left my ticket at home, so I had to buy another. I left after a couple of the headliner’s songs. Not my thing. I wouldn’t cross the road to see Cephalic Carnage at this these stage either to be honest. I wish I could go back in time to save my money.

I reckon I’ll read more books by Ellroy in the future, but I doubt they’ll get reviewed here. This one was great though. Read it if you haven’t already.

Operation Mindfuck Goes Mainstream – John Higg’s KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds

When I was a boy, one of the great privileges of being the oldest child in the family was being allowed to stay up to watch the first half of the Late Late Show on a Friday night. At this point we only had 8 TV stations, and most households in Ireland tuned in to watch Gay Byrne’s long running chat show. I would have watched every Saturday for a few years, but I only have memories of 2 specific episodes. One was an interview with Rael (who was on the show a few times) and one was an interview with a pair of musicians who had burned a million pounds.The latter episode roughly coincided with my 9th birthday, and I remember being as disgusted as both my parents and the members of the live TV audience at the notion of burning that much money instead of donating it to charity. I had never heard of the band.

It was probably about 10 years later that I became interested in a band called Extreme Noise Terror. I’ve mentioned them before on this blog. I read somewhere that they had performed at the Brit awards with some electronic dance act and that the performance had involved somebody shooting a real gun into the crowd. I remember seeing a very blurry video of the performance (here’s a clearer version) and thinking it was really cool. I probably checked the dance act’s wikipedia or something and learned that they were the same guys that burned the million pounds. I don’t think I gave them much more thought, but as a dedicated grindcore fan at that point, I probably had a much easier time accepting the artistic statement of burning a million pounds.

In 2015, I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. I had already started this blog at that point, but that book pushed me past the point of no return. Robert Anton Wilson‘s Discordianism and ideas on chaos magic have had a very significant impact on how I view reality.

I don’t remember how I came to discover the fact that I was in the same boat as the KLF. Because they had deliberately deleted their catalogue to make their music inaccessible, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I first saw the video for Justified and Ancient. It blew my mind. This is a big budget music video featuring a hugely popular country star singing about a sect of Discordians from one of my favourite books of all time, a book that remains relatively unread despite its reputation in conspiracy theory circles. This truly bizarre piece of art had remained hidden for decades at the behest of its creators. In truth, it’s not the kind of music that I enjoy listening to, but I couldn’t help but love it. This is real weirdo stuff, but at one point it had been hugely popular. I was fascinated.

**Blackstone Publishing – 2024 (First version published 2012)**

A couple of weeks ago, I read John Higg’s The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds. It was really entertaining. It’s a strange book to read too because so much of it seems unbelievable. The KLF’s story is so strange that they almost seem like characters from Illuminatus! rather than just fans of the book.

So Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were essentially failed musicians who had been in a few different projects but had taken on non-creative roles in the music industry. Almost as a joke, they started a “hip-hop” project that consisted of them mashing up famous songs and releasing them as singles. They used their contacts in the music press to drum up a bunch of attention and controversy. The music was fairly crap, but they did media stunts and record burnings to keep the attention going. It worked, but it is unclear as to whether they were just extremely lucky or whether the media stunts they were performing were actually extremely potent and successful chaos magic rituals. After getting a number one single with this approach, they turned away from the mash-up genre and started making stadium house. In reality, they only wrote a few songs, but they reworked and remixed these until they became huge hits. They continued doing weird stuff as they released these songs including making a road movie with no plot and burning a giant wicker man in a ritual in front of a bunch of music journalists on a small Scottish island.

In 1992, they were awarded the best British group award at the Brit Awards. It was in response to their growing popularity that they invited Extreme Noise Terror to perform with them. They also left a dead sheep outside the venue. Within a few weeks of that awards ceremony, the band quit the music industry and deleted their music. The money burning happened a few months later.

Higgs’ book is great. It has plenty of detail on the story of the band, but it also gets into odd theories too. There’s a chapter on Alan Moore, who seems to have been friends with the band, and there is even mention of psychogeography in here. The book heavily leans into RAW’s reality tunnel ideas too. The KLF claimed they were members of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAM). (The JAMs were agents of chaos fighting against the Illuminati in Illuminatus!) Anyone who has read Illuminatus! will remember Operation Mindfuck, the Discordian effort to thoroughly mess with people’s heads at any cost. That Drummond and Cauty leaned into the promulgation of chaos is obvious, but Higgs discusses the interesting idea that they were driven to do so by external forces rather than internal ones.

After reading the book, I also watched the 2021 documentary, Who Killed the KLF? I’m used to reading about bizarre stuff, but seeing video footage of what I had just read about was quite weird. These things really happened. The way we consume media is so different now compared to the late 80s/early 90s that it’s really hard to imagine anything as weird as the KLF becoming hugely popular again. I know there are still plenty of brilliant oddballs out there being creative, but I feel like it’s a shame that they’ll never have to chance to share their weirdness with a mainstream audience. At the same time, it was very encouraging to see people really pushing the boundaries of popular entertainment. Markoff Chaney would be proud.

In honesty though, I still think that burning the million pounds was lame.

Kathleen Hale’s Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls

A few years ago I started posting about true crime books. For the last decade, the tagline of this website has read “Horror and Occult Book Reviews” and in keeping with the theme of the blog, I’ve only posted about crime books focusing on cases that involved the occult in some way. Most crimes are horrific in some regard, but horror fiction does not play into many crimes in the same way that occult beliefs frequently do. There is, however, one infamous criminal case in which horror fiction plays a central role, the 2014 Slenderman stabbing of Waukesha, Wisconsin. While the story of 2 children attempting to stab their friend to death as a sacrifice to a sinister internet boogeyman seems rather suitable for a website like this, I have avoided discussing it here for personal reasons.

At this point, I doubt many of the freaks who spend their time reading blogs like mine don’t know the story of Morgan Geyser and Annisa Weier. When they were 12 years old, they became convinced that a character they read about on the internet would let them come and live in his mansion if they murdered their best friend. This seems absolutely crazy, and that is because one of these girls was suffering from severe case of schizophrenia and the other kid was impressionable and messed up in her own ways. Together they formed a very toxic relationship that school counselors and parents failed to notice until it was too late. They stabbed their friend 19 times and left her to die in the forest while they headed towards the forest to find Slender Mansion.

The book I read, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, was good. It doesn’t focus on the sensational aspects of the story and rightfully directs its readers’ attention to the shortcomings of the education, rehabilitation and mental health systems in America.

While the victim of this affair is obviously the child who was stabbed, it’s hard to believe how badly the support systems in Morgan Geyser’s life failed her. This book was published 4 years ago, and Morgan was recently in the news again for trying to flee her group home. I don’t think anyone suspects she’s out to hurt anyone at this point, but she is clearly very insane. The entire story of this case is horribly depressing. If you’re interested though, this book is a good place to start.

So apart from the fact that I generally avoid reading about children getting hurt, I’ve specifically avoided covering Slenderman stuff in the past because of my personal connection to the story.

I was 16 years old when we got the internet in our house. My parents knew nothing about the web, and my friends were computer nerds. I very quickly learned how to delete my browser history and how to connect with other like minded weirdos. I used to post on a few different heavy metal forums, and on one of these I befriended a user called DevilMatt666. He was 14 years older than me, and I thought he was really cool. He had seen Pantera live and used to describe things that he liked as “mint”. I’m pretty sure he’s the person who first introduced me to the music of Glenn Danzig. We weren’t best friends or anything, but I would have interacted with this guy several times a week for at least 4 or 5 years. When the internet changed and forums started to die, Matt was one of the few posters I added on facebook.

I remember sitting in work one day in 2014, reading the news. I had seen mention of the Slenderman stabbing but hadn’t bothered reading about it properly. When I saw a headline mentioning this incident and the name Morgan Geyser, a bell went off in my head. I knew that name. My internet buddy Matt’s last name was Geyser, and I knew his kid’s name was Morgan because he posted about her all the time. I had seen a constant stream of pictures of this kid as she grew up. Honestly, one of the things I liked about Matt was the fact that he was a big, long haired heavy metal dude who was absolutely enamored with his little girl. Underneath the tattoos and sick goatee was a big softy. When I saw the photos in the news article, I knew it was her.

Matt disappeared from the internet for a while, and when he returned he was a broken man. In truth, the only things I remember about him from this point on were the endless posts about missing Morgan and not being able to stop crying. I saw comments and articles on the internet labelling him as a Satanist and a monster, but as far as I could see, he was a really lovely man. I got rid of facebook in 2020, and it was only after reading a recent article on Morgan’s escape that I read that he died 3 years ago. This was a real bummer, but even when he was alive I found it hard to imagine a happy ending to his story.

Knowing that he was dead and that calling attention to this case was no longer potentially going to upset him, I read this book about what happened. It was actually quite challenging to get through. Part of this is the fact that it’s an all round sad story, but my familiarity with some of the characters and the fact that I have my own kids now made it quite a struggle to get through. Keep an eye on your children.

Two Books about Hell – A Short Stay in Hell and The Divine Farce

I read two books about Hell recently that were both really, really good.

A Short Stay in Hell – Steven L. Peck

I picked this up on a whim a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a horror novel set in Hell, but despite some fairly brutal violence, the actual horror here is made up of a kind of philosophical dread instead of any Satanic sadism.

A Mormon dies and wakes up in Hell to find that his religion was false but that the real god is somewhat lenient in his wrath. The Mormon is doomed to stay in Hell, not for eternity, but only a limited time. The amount of time is determined on how long it takes him to find a specific book in a library.

This doesn’t sound so bad, right? Even the biggest libraries we’ve built wouldn’t take too long to comb over. The difficulty for the protagonist is that he’s not stuck in a university library. He’s stuck in the Library of Babel, the one described in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. This library is very big indeed. It contains every 410 page book that could possibly be composed out of the 95 characters most keyboards can print. When you start thinking about how many books that makes, it becomes quickly apparent the library contains a rather large number of books indeed.

The vastness of that number, which is arbitrarily small when you think about it, is where the horror lies. The notion of existing in any state for half as long as it might take to find the book makes eternal oblivion seem preferable. The living conditions in the library are not generally that bad. The inhabitants there have unlimited food, companions and warm beds. It’s the amount of time that they have to spend like this that messes with your head when you start to think about it. Personally, I think the idea of any form of eternal consciousness seems nightmarish.

This book is short, entertaining and subtly horrifying. I strongly recommend you all read it.

The Divine Farce – Michael S.A. Graziano

After finishing A Short Stay in Hell, goodreads recommended Michael S.A. Graziano’s The Divine Farce. Graziano is another academic. (He’s a neuroscientist, while Peck is an evolutionary biologist.) I had enjoyed Peck’s book so much that I was delighted at the prospect of reading something similar.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised. This is another one about Hell, although here, the characters don’t seem to remember anything about the life that lead them to Hell. The whole plot seemed a bit like an allegory for life. Things start off with the characters trapped together in what seems like an upright coffin. They remain here for untold ages before escaping into a vast cavern filled with other maladjusted freaks. They get separated, and the rest of the story follows one of them as he tries to make sense of his new existence.

This book is also very short, and I don’t feel any need to further discuss the plot. It was very entertaining, and I recommend that you track it down and read it.

Jesus was a Vampire and a Dragon – Nicholas De Vere’s The Dragon Legacy

It has been a long time since I gave up on a book. When I started this blog, I had more free time and hence more tolerance for absolute bullshit. The last time I started a book and actually found myself unable to finish it was back in 2016 when I attempted a book called You Are Becoming A Galactic Human. A few years ago, I read a book by Tracy Twyman and a friend recommended I read a book by her pal Nicholas De Vere. I knew it was more on the bloodline of Christ story, but aside from that I had no idea what it would be like.

Before starting, I looked this de Vere guy up. He died a few years ago, but there’s some fairly bizarre claims about him on the internet. He traced his ancestry back and found out that he was descended from royalty, and it seems like he managed to have a royal title legitimately conferred on himself, but I’m not sure of the details there. He also claimed that he was a descendant of Elves, Vampires and potentially Jesus Christ.

I don’t think many people have read this man’s work. Part of this is due to the obscure nature of his claims, and part of it is likely how difficult he made it to understand what he was actually claiming. I spent over a week’s worth of reading on this book and got through less than half of it. The first few chapters weren’t easy to follow, but I could get the basic gist of what they were saying. It became so agonizing after a few hundred pages that I had to give up. My brain wasn’t taking anything in, and I didn’t want to waste another 2-3 weeks staring a book that wasn’t making any sense at all.

I’m going to summarize what I understood of the first few chapters.

Chapter 1
Human beings are dumb idiots. The Dragons (people with dragon blood) are Elves and are a separate species who have been persecuted for the last 1000 years. They are magic and exist on a higher realm that normal humans can’t comprehend. They have better senses than normal people like some animals do. The Grail Code is only applicable between Dragons because everyone else is shit. Dragons ritualistically drink the blood of their kings to gain their knowledge. Literally. Jesus was actually Satanic because Satan was actually good.

Chapter 2
Vampires and witches are all elves. When I was reading the words ‘elf’ and ‘elves’ in the previous chapter, I found it difficult not to think of the elves of Tolkien. It turns out I was right to think this way because those are the kind of elves that the author is talking about.

Chapter 3
Dracula is based in fact. Stoker was actually in the Golden Dawn and based his novel on insider information. Real vampires only drank the menses of beautiful virgins. This would make it likely that Jesus was in fact a vampire.

Chapter 4
The Elves faced a worse holocaust than the Jews. Again, the elves are literally like the elves in Lord of the Rings. The author compares homo-sapiens to hobbits. The elves who kept their bloodline pure weren’t racist because asking them to have sex with a regular person would be like asking a black person to have sex with a monkey. It’s not racist for them to refuse that! (This logic is not mine!)

Chapter 5
Things are getting complicated now. The author seems to think he’s talking to a mate that already understands all of this stuff. He gets into his family history. The de Vere dragon family are far superior to current monarchs who aren’t elven at all. He makes some good points about how garbage collectors never get knighted but provide a much more important service than actors or football managers. I thought this was a very interesting thought.

Chapter 6
Agonizing swill cross referencing grail lore, Irish mythology, kabala and numerology. The main take aways here are the swastika and the Star of David are the same thing. Jews are Aryan. The salmon of knowledge is actually a euphemism for licking the pussy off a beautiful woman. It really seems like the author lives in his own world. He seems to forget that people will have a hard time with him using words that generally mean the precise opposite of how he uses them.

Chapter 7
I cannot read this book anymore. I like the ideas, but the writing is too frantic and confusing.

I am sure there are gems spread throughout the rest of the book, but I am not able to spend any more time reading it. I’m sure de Vere’s fans will say that I’m just a mudblood homo-sapien who wouldn’t be expected to understand intelligent literature like this, but I could trace my ancestry back to the Merovingian Dynasty if I tried hard enough, so I am likely an elf, vampire and a dragon too.

Hailey Piper’s A Game in Yellow

I have subscriptions to a few different public libraries. Most of the horror that they offer is quite new, and I generally avoid that kind of thing. In recent months, I’ve read a few very enjoyable works of modern horror, and so I’ve been a bit more open to stuff from the library. The other day, I was looking through Libby, and I saw the audiobook for a title named A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper. It seemed liked it would offer a new spin on Robert Chamber’s King in Yellow mythos, and the blurb of the book mentioned S&M, so I downloaded it.

Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this book at all.

It’s about a woman who isn’t finding sex with her partner satisfying. This leads to them trying more extreme forms of bondage. These attempts to spice up their sex life don’t work, and so the main character resorts to reading pages from The King in Yellow, a play that drives people insane. This works very briefly, but she overdoes it and falls victim to the King.

The plot is a pretty cool idea, but the main character was a boring, self centered, unpleasant piece of crap. Her negativity drained all tension out the book. I wasn’t able to bring myself to hate or pity her. She was just annoying, the kind of person I would avoid at all costs. I could not have cared less about what was going to happen to her. The other characters were more interesting, but their roles in the book really only served to give an insight into how much of an annoying loser the protagonist was.

There was one part where she overhears the women in her office chatting about how handsome a man is and this makes her look down on them. She’s supposed to be gay, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t be particularly interested in cute guys, but to look down on people for what they like is an asshole thing to do, especially when they’re just having a chat at work to get through the day. I’m not gay, but if I heard my gay or straight female coworkers talking about how cute a guy is, I’d be happy to join in on the chat or at least take a look to see what the fuss is about. Her response to her coworkers is, “Is he what gets you wet, or is he what you’re told to want?” This really reminded me of a lame dork I knew as a teenager who had “You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.” written on their backpack. Go back to Hot Topic, you sniveling, cringey dork.

She was also vindictive, careless about the safety of others, frequently late for work, completely humorless, frigid and sneaky. She was such a dose that I really wanted the book to be over soon after starting.