THE DEVIL TIMES TWO

Millionaire playboy and explorer turned fanatical anti-Satanist Phillip St. George is back, and this time it’s not quite as personal. In the first book, St. George was seeking revenge for the horrific murder of his beautiful wife, a task that he was spectacularly successful at. This time around he’s after a New York coven led by a foxy witch lady, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive. St. George doesn’t BELIEVE in Satanism, of course, he just knows the danger its adherents pose. His sworn duty is to kill them all, and then set fire to where they live.

The most ridiculous scene in this ridiculous book is when he is captured, drugged and laid out, naked, ready for sacrifice. As the witch looks him up and down, she is so impressed by his physical beauty and, not to mince words, the enormous size of his penis, that she decides to make him her lover instead. It’s the break that our big cocked hero needs, and the coven are on borrowed time from there on in.

It seems that this second book in The Satan Sleuth series was also the last. It’s a shame, as although they’re not great literature, they are great fun, and they are perfect for train journeys that last about two hours.      

STERILE VIRTUE

New Crete is a society far in the future that knows no hunger and no dissatisfaction, where war has become a game played on village greens, where the poets and magicians of a strange occult religion keep all classes of the population happy with their lot. As time traveller Edward Venn-Thomas finds out, however, this utopia has one major flaw: it's really, really fucking boring, so he decides to teach them to live again by reintroducing evil into their lives. 

Can we make that joke about it being based on a true story again? Why not, no-one appears to be looking.  

THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE KILLRAVEN

 

Unmann-Wittering used to read Killraven as a kid. He liked it, but never really understood the story, or the characters, or the dialogue, or what any of it meant. 

Nearly forty years later, confident that the intervening years had brought increased wisdom, perception and greater understanding, U-W had another try, with exactly the same results: total and utter incomprehension. 

Which is brilliant.

FLASH FORWARD

‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ is a favourite film of ours, and one of the scenes that is permanently glued to the inside of our skulls is when Thomas Jerome Newton (the cadaverous but quite brilliant David Bowie) is travelling through the American mid-west in the back of a limousine and looks out of the window to see that, somehow, the car has been spotted by a group of settlers from a hundred years previously. 

There is no explanation for this unsettling, green tinged time warp, and it passes almost instantaneously - as it reaches a certain point the limo disappears in a ball of blue light, then the gawping settlers do the same - presumably leaving an empty landscape. 

The interesting thing is not that Newton can see the settlers (he’s an alien, he has special powers), but that they can see him – and they, understandably, are pretty freaked out. So who is haunting who? Is this how ghosts happen: momentary temporal shifts from the past or future that leave indelible marks on the landscape? 

The idea of a ‘backwards haunting’ is an interesting one, i.e. the spectres are from the future rather than the past. In Nigel Kneale’s 1963 teleplay ‘The Road’, inhabitants of an 18th century village are disturbed by paranormal noises and visions they can’t understand, but we can recognise as psychic reverberations from the aftermath of a nuclear war that won't happen for another two hundred years. You’ll have to take our word for it on that one, though, as the BBC wiped it after transmission.

SKY PLUS

‘Sky’ is such an unsettling, weird, pagan sci fi ghost train ride of a programme that it’s sometimes hard to believe that it ever existed or, incredibly, that it was created for kids. 

Happily, primary historical source ‘Look-In’ recorded the details for posterity, along with the frankly incredible reminder that there used to be 14 regional ITV channels. The past is a foreign country, we watch telly differently there.

Nice to see that The Rollers are providing us with their 'History Of Pop'. Next week, Alvin Stardust begins a new six part series called 'The Rise & Fall of The Byzantine Empire'.

GOING GREEN

If, like us, you like the idea of a super intelligent top secret agent / super hero called Colin, then this is the book for you. 

Colin looks a little like a young Oliver Reed on the cover, which is good, but his famous brain appears to be turning green, which is very bad. Seriously, if any part of your body is turning green, get it looked at. 

Perhaps Colin is turning into one of the 'mental vegetables' referenced on the back cover.