O MIGHTY RAY

Based on a true story. Maybe. We don't even know anymore.

A LIKELY STORY

206 pages, the upshot of which is: the Hebrew God Yahweh was an astronaut who happened upon our Earth and got into a pissing contest with the resident God, Elohim. Yahweh wasn't very popular, so he created his own separate race to worship him: the Jews. And that's why anti-semitism is such a big problem. And it's all in The Bible, if you know where to look, and Marc Dem knows where to look, because he's got a massive brain and is an incredibly sensitive and perceptive person who is ABSOLUTELY NOT against the people of Israel. 

We read this shit so you don't have to. Well, we skim it. We skim shit. There's the motto if we ever get a TOMTIT coat of arms. 

KINESICS

TOMTIT read a lot of self-help books and instructional leaflets, not because we haven't reached perfection but because it is important to know what your enemy has in his arsenal. Let's face it, it's not the books or even the writers that you have to look out for, but the readers: anyone who buys a book about 'projecting unspoken orders that must be obeyed' to use in earnest needs to be carefully watched: they're clearly some sort of dangerous psychopath, looking for a way to put you under their power. Avoid.

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.      

A TERRIBLE PLAGUE

There’s nothing Guy N. Smith loves more than a disaster; man-made or ecological, he’s really not bothered. Thirst begins with a tanker full of deadly weed killer crashing into a reservoir, sinking to the bottom and contaminating millions of gallons of water destined for the taps of Birmingham. The lucky Brummies get a form of rabies then, within a few hours, die desperately dehydrated and covered in popping boils and pustulent ulcers. The unlucky ones, more or less abandoned by the authorities, are left to fight for survival in Britain’s second city, a place torn apart by death and disease, looting, lawlessness, rape, murder and madness. Apart from the Cliff Richard film ‘Take Me High’, it’s the worst thing that has ever happened there. 

The beauty of anarchy in Guy N Smith’s fictional world is that it allows the author to pad out the story with endless vignettes about nasty people meeting nasty ends. In fact, almost three quarters of the book is dedicated to a non-stop orgy of random violence, and you sense that Smith is really enjoying himself, letting his imagination run riot along with his characters. The typical pattern is to introduce a character, then let us share his or her thoughts and feelings for a while and wonder where they fit in with the overall narrative. The character will then be pushed off a roof, set fire to, castrated or torn apart by a big dog or a big mob. We are then introduced to another character and the cycle begins again.

Halfway through this bloody insanity, Smith becomes suddenly fixated upon the restorative powers of shandy, with a few tins of the stuff taking on a talismanic quality. It’s a typical Smith detail: a fantastic mundanity. It’s a very British trait, and one of the reasons we always enjoy his work so much.   

There is a sequel to this book (‘Thirst II: The Plague’), but we’re going to have a nice rest before we tackle it. Now, where's that shandy?

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.  

ANY IDEA?

Answers on graph paper, please, to: SCIENCE, LONDON, ENGLAND. Science cannot return your answers, but there is a Nobel Prize for the best one. 

SEEING IS DECEIVING

There is no greater fun to be had in the world than reading a book whilst wearing 3D glasses, unless it's smoking crack in a library. 

This is R.L Gregory, Professor of Bionics in the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh. Yes, that does make us feel bad about our paltry academic record and now we want revenge.

WHY DON'T YOU?

Just one of the exciting projects to try during the upcoming school holidays. We've already harvested three kilograms between us, so what are you waiting for ?

ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

Horatio Nelson loses his eye, arm and life, respectively. He did his duty, as expected.

RAZOR TOOTHED FRENZY

ALLIGATORS (1987)

‘Alligators’ is great. It follows one of the classic Guy N. Smith formulas: wild animal runs riot, many people die horribly, screaming for their lives. As you might expect, the wild animals in this book are Alligators, specifically Caimans, including a female who has a memory of eating children before she was captured and fondly recalls the taste of human flesh.

The alligators are released from a local zoo by a gang of animal activists, two of which are immediately torn apart and eaten. Alligators are not known for their gratitude, although they clearly have a highly developed sense of irony. From here on in, it’s textbook Smith: guts fly, faces are shredded, severed heads roll, legs and arms are chomped down like twiglets. It’s a blood bath.

Our continuity is provided by a thoughtful vet and his new girlfriend, a former animal activist turned receptionist / sex toy. Their relationship is interesting, not least because he is permanently distracted by his job, leaving their trysts saying that a sick goat needs him, or basking in the afterglow of their lovemaking by thinking about delousing a donkey.

Every now and again, we are privileged to get inside the alligators heads, and it’s a revelation. As befitting a species that is around 37 million years old, Smith gives the alligator an archaic sounding, rather formal turn of thought, as in the wonderful scene where the female tells the male to sling his hook:

‘The mating season is gone. I have no 

further need of you. Be gone!’

I’d have liked to have heard Johnny Morris narrate that in one of his funny voices.

Smith saves most of his ire for animal activists, here presented as an ugly, dirty lunatic fringe led by a scarred and psychotic sadist called Maurice Jones. Jones once contaminated some cottage cheese with urine, so you know he means business. After much unpleasantness, including rape, murder and multiple threats of castration, Jones' beloved alligator stands on him, squishing his guts out in a long, spurty thread of ‘ow’-ness. It’s no less than he deserves, he's behaved like a right shithouse.  

Unusually, Smith resists the temptation to finish the book with a paragraph setting up a sequel, a crying shame as he has already established that the female is fertile and that there is a nuclear power station in the area. It’s not like Guy to pass up the opportunity for a book about radiation fuelled monster gators, so perhaps he thought the idea had run its course. Shame, as ‘Alligators’ is ace.

ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

A baby Oliver Cromwell is kidnapped by his Grandfather's pet monkey.

SHIT BEAST

We couldn't decide whether this unpleasant and hungry looking creature was a cat, a dog, a mutated rabbit, a 'mind spider' or a Taiwanese poster for 'Gremlins' before realising that it was just a rubbish painting and not worth the six and a half hours we'd just spent arguing about it.

FANATICS

We sometimes appear to be a bit hard on Guy N. Smith - but know that it comes from a good place: we love the man and his work, and derive endless enjoyment from it. We wouldn't join a fanatic's club, though, even though, according to our research, membership includes an annual meet with Mr. Smith - at his house. 

OLD AND MYSTERIOUS

Here’s a book by the late Alan Landsburg from the Alan Landsburg Wing of what we are now calling The Alan Landsburg Memorial Library. It’s a fascinating read, and the writing of it (as part of the ‘In Search Of…’ TV show) took him all over the world, which is nice. As Alan writes in the introduction -

The passage is worth posting in order to illustrate two of Alan’s greatest qualities: his enthusiasm, and his imagination.

THE TROUBLED NOW

 

This book was enormously entertaining, and took two hours to read, only marginally longer than it took to write. The story involves a super handsome, hyper intelligent millionaire explorer / playboy and his relentless search for the Mansonesque gang of hippy misfits who butchered his film star wife in the name of Satan, and it cracks along at quite a lick, especially as author Avallone keeps his foot on the accelerator by having lots of one sentence paragraphs.

Yes, he does.

Definitely.

There is no question of that.

No question at all. 

The Mansonesque gang are only playing at being Satanists, of course, and the relentless search of our hero (did you notice he's called Phillip St. George?) mainly involves him getting his lawyer to get him a long list of stuff like smoke grenades and a cigarette lighter with a gun in it and then idly hanging around the scene of the crime and waiting for the murderers to come back. When they do eventually return, St. George stuffs the miscreants full of psychotropic drugs and subjects them one by one to all manner of psychological torture while they cry and soil themselves. 

That'll learn 'em.  

Definitely.

There is no question of that.

No question at all.

FUTURE PAST

AVAILABLE NOW

ADVENTURES FROM HISTORY

King Harold gets an eyeful. 

TENUOUS TIE IN

Glowering Swiss hunk and 'handsome bastard' Oliver Tobias shot to fame in Harlech Television's 'Arthur Of The Britons', so much so that a publicity shot from the series was subsequently featured on the cover of the 1972 edition of K.K Downing's well received book on the Saxon and Norman monarchy. 

Not much is really known about the 'actual' King Arthur, of course, so Downing simply wrote a chapter summarising the first twelve episodes of the hit HTV show. No-one noticed, and it became part of the History curriculum in English and Welsh schools until 1998.  

A HARD DAY'S WRITE

In retrospect, writing a 215 page book about Psychical Research EVERY DAY seems like madness but, in 1954, that is what Donald J. West set out to do. He did extraordinarily well (this edition is from April 22nd, 1962) but, ultimately, the gargantuan task overwhelmed him and he gave up and went back to simply writing a book every other week.

A psychic trumpet, outlined by bands of luminous paint? Now we know what we want for Christmas.

Individual editions of the books are much sought after now, particularly the notorious last edition in the series (# 4,028) where, realising that nothing had actually changed in Psychical Research in the last twenty four hours, West simply wrote 'What's the point? What's the bloody point?' over and over and over again.