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On the one hand, you might be tempted to say, this book is just a zany comedy. It certainly has its share of zaniness. It’s about a woman who travels to a small river village, populated by colorful characters. A wizard named Zuzzingbar, a group of gossipy ladies, and a species of aquatic creature known as a “leaping chomper”, which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be, are just some of the odd denizens of the place.

And then there’s Coren, a man cursed to never be allowed to set foot on dry land. So, he spends his days rowing up the aforementioned river. He has to, because if he doesn’t, he’ll go over the waterfall at the end of it.

Is this setting fertile ground for hilarity? It is! And there is plenty of that. Humorous hijinks abound. You might as well know that, despite the name on the cover, this is a Zachary Shatzer book. I’ve reviewed every one of his published books, and if you don’t know by now that I enjoy his work, well, you just haven’t been paying attention.

And yet… you might stop and wonder, why did he publish this under another name? Isn’t it just another one of his wizard stories?

Well, yes and no. It is another one of his wizard stories. But it is also something else.

You see in the description where it says it’s a “philosophical comedy”? Don’t ignore that first word. The book poses a philosophical and moral dilemma for the reader to puzzle over. And argue about ad nauseam. (Well, maybe that’s just me.) But it really is an interesting question of ethics that lies at the center of this seemingly light little comedy.

What is the interesting question, you ask? I’m not telling. That would be to spoil it! The whole story has been constructed specifically to invite the reader to think about this moral quandary. For me to just vomit forth my own interpretation would be leading the witness.

And how refreshing it is, I might add, to read a story that invites us to think, rather than lecturing us on what to believe. There is more than one way the story can be viewed, and that’s what makes it magical. Well, that and the wizards.

Is this Shatzer’s best book? I’m not sure—I really am fond of The Beach Wizard. But it’s in the top three, certainly, and it probably is the one that lends itself most readily to discussion and analysis. And it does it with the lightest of touches, without ever seeming heavy-handed or preachy. It’s just a story about some people and how they play the cards life deals them.

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Cover art of 'The Marching Morons' by C. M. Kornbluth, depicting a futuristic city with towering skyscrapers, crowded streets, and large advertisements highlighting themes like overpopulation and anti-intellectualism.

In his penultimate album, the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has a lyric, “You got me wishing, wishing our little love would last / You got me thinking like those people of the past.” And isn’t that the point of reading old books? To step into the shoes of people from a bygone age to see what exactly was on their minds?

Well, that’s what I think, and that’s why Little Red Reviewer’s Vintage Science-Fiction Month is such a valuable tradition. It gives us an excuse to go back to those sci-fi books of yesteryear, and see what, if anything, they can say to us in 2026. Well, what can “The Marching Morons” from 1951 tell us about the world of today?

Cover of a vintage science fiction book featuring a rocket and a cartoonish alien, with the text 'Red alert for the Interstellar Patrol The Vintage Science Fiction Month not-a-challenge'.

The book is set in the future, and begins with a humble potter excavating the ruins of the University of Chicago, where he finds a man called “Honest John Barlow”, who back in the 1980s had been placed in a state of suspended animation. With modern technology, he is quickly revived, and enters into his new reality, which, from books and films he has seen, he assumes will be high-tech, enlightened, and advanced.

However, Barlow quickly finds that all is not as he anticipated. Much of the world’s population lives in congested mega-cities, driving in cars that claim to go incredibly fast, but are actually modified with rigged speedometers that claim to go ten times faster than they do. The populace is awash in crude, vapid entertainment and hyper-sexualized electronic advertising. Current events, meanwhile, seem to be nothing but apathetic news personalities recounting one massive technological disaster after another and politicians speaking in ungrammatical and semi-literate soundbites.

Barlow, again falling back on his own reading of science fiction, assumes that the masses have been enslaved by a cadre of elites, and that the government handlers he has been assigned are the secret police of the tyrannical government that has let this occur. He demands to speak to their leadership.

Surprisingly, this request is granted, and they explain to him the the has got the situation all wrong: it is the billions of morons who have enslaved the relatively small handful of competent people still remaining. The latter are the people who keep the world (barely) functioning, supporting the ever-expanding hordes of imbeciles.

If this sounds as familiar to you as it did to me, it’s probably because it is almost exactly the plot of the 2006 comedy film Idiocracy. But here is where the two stories diverge, because while Idiocracy was a rather lighthearted comedy, “The Marching Morons” takes a much darker turn.

Barlow’s nickname is ironic, you see. He didn’t build a career in real estate back in his own time by being exceptionally ethical. And when the leadership of Earth explain their predicament to him, he responds by offering them a typically ruthless deal: he will help them with their moron problem, if they will name him Supreme World Dictator and give him money, power, and prestige. Not knowing what else to do, they agree to his demands, and Barlow then sets about implementing a massive propaganda campaign to sell the morons on the idea of vacations to Venus, and creating a program to dismantle the cities and use the material to build rockets which will take them to the supposed Venusian paradise.

Barlow, who is a bit of a racist in addition to his proclivity for shady real estate dealings, is a student of mid 20th-century Germany, and borrows heavily from that period in his plans for dealing with his captive population. Needless to say, his rockets do not actually go to Venus.

It’s not a long story. It appeared in Galaxy Magazine, where it took up a mere 30 pages, complete with very 1950s illustrations. (You can view it here.) Indeed, for a science-fiction story, it contained relatively little world-building. And yet, I did not feel that this was a serious problem; for it was as if the setting seemed already established in my mind. 

It’s always interesting, as I said, to know what “those people of the past” were thinking about. It’s even more interesting, once you know that, to speculate on what they would think about us, if they could know about our time. What would C.M. Kornbluth make of 2026, if he could see it? Well, I have an idea, but I’ll not put words in his mouth. Read the story, and decide for yourself. 

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I’m a big believer in tradition. Not for nothing have friends compared me to Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Especially on topics like Halloween and college football, I am something of a zealot on matters of tradition. And I have to be! A tradition is like a plant: it must be nurtured, tended, and cared for. Otherwise it dies.

Today’s book is an example of a dead tradition. The introduction informs us that “reading a ghost story on Christmas Eve was once as much a part of traditional Christmas celebrations as turkey, eggnog, and Santa Claus.” In Victorian times, the “Christmas ghost story” was a cliché, but now the only trace of it that still exists in the popular consciousness is in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and its many adaptations. (In the words of Bart Simpson, “TV writers have been milking that goat for years.”)

A cartoonist known as Seth aimed to revive this tradition, by republishing classic ghost stories, of which this is one, originally published in 1925. It’s about a young man who sees a ghostly woman in a bookstore, which was previously a residence. In a little-used annex, he finds a manuscript of poems she had written in life. Thinking perhaps it will put her spirit at rest, he decides to publish them himself.

Now, you might say, that sounds like a simple enough story. And it is—but the Victorians had another tradition, you see, and that tradition is also preserved in this volume. That tradition is: incredibly overwrought prose.

I’m no stranger to complex writing. I grew up on Gilbert, Hardy, and Lovecraft, you know. I’m not one of those people who thinks writing should be as concise as possible, as I’ve said more than once. But damn, this thing is something else. Everything is described in the minutest detail, and once you’ve got through reading it, you realize that you don’t know much more than when you started. It reminded me of Henry James, only more so.

It’s not actually a bad story in itself. It has kind of a twist, and it’s a twist that I think will appeal to writers in particular. I’ll give you a hint: how would you feel if someone published your drafts without permission? But the problem is that I had to plow through so much ornate verbiage to get to it that by the end I’m like, “is that it?”

That said, maybe it would work better read aloud to friends by firelight on a cold December evening, while drinking eggnog. Perhaps eggnog mixed with a goodly helping of rum. Then you and your friends could enjoy the story together, and engage in the delightful parlor game of debating why the room was green and what it symbolizes. And isn’t that the real point of reading?

Well, no, of course it’s not. That would be silly. Still, like the ghost of Maiden’s Peak haunting the summer festival, I enjoy keeping alive all the old legends that people have forgotten over the years. And I must thank Lydia Schoch for bringing this book to my attention. It took four years, but I finally got around to reading it! 🙂

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They call him the Bard for a reason. Shakespeare took the English language and used it like he owned it, constantly inventing memorable turns of phrase. He was so good at it that by now it actually works against him. You’ll be watching a Shakespeare play and somebody says something and you roll your eyes and go “oh, that old cliché… oh, wait,” suddenly remembering that it wasn’t a cliché back then.

We still have some creative users of the English language with us today, even as modern communication technology homogenizes speech patterns. Adam Bertocci is one of them, and his latest book shows off his skill at the playing of words.

It’s a simple enough story, about a teenaged girl named McKenna who is cast as Mercutio in her high school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Now, I have to confess my ignorance: I’d forgotten there even was such a character in R & J, if I ever knew it. It’s not my favorite Shakespeare—give me Macbeth or better yet, Coriolanus, any day.

But anyway, McKenna is assigned the rôle, as people used to call it, and it’s a tough challenge for her, because Mercutio, in case you also forgot, is a male. So she has to get in touch with her masculine side, and she figures that the best way to do that is hang out with her brother’s friends, including the boy she has a crush on.

What follows is a typically Bertoccian mix of wit and philosophy. Because of the age of the characters, it’s less about the angst of figuring out life as an adult, and more about the experience of growing up in the first place. As a result, it has more of a carefree, breezy quality to it, which is exactly as it should be.

I could go on, but I’ve been rallying people to read Bertocci’s books for years now, and I have a mind to keep on doing it. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and read it already!

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How many of you remember the movie Jackie from 2016? It was well-received at the time, but like everything in our age of ephemera, it didn’t make any lasting impression. As the national motto says, “don’t ask questions, just consoom product, then get excited for next product.”

Despite my best efforts (i.e. writing long-winded, rambling reviews) it didn’t even manage to garner Natalie Portman the second Oscar she deserved. It’s too bad, because if it had, it would have made the 2017 Best Picture announcement even more screwed up, since presumably Faye Dunaway would have announced Jackie as the winner when it wasn’t nominated.

On the other hand, more people probably remember Jackie than have read Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image. Which is also too bad, because, as I said in my review, it basically predicted our current society.

If you don’t want to read (or reread) my review, the executive summary of Boorstin’s book is that ours is increasingly a world of what he termed “pseudo-events”. Pseudo-events being artificial creations of publicists and propagandists to generate news items, or what we today call “content.”

Careful readers will notice I’ve referenced one pseudo-event already: the Oscars, which is a ceremony based around people giving themselves awards for pretending to do things and creating elaborate illusions. It is a pseudo-event based on pseudo-events. Naturally, it is one of the biggest news events of the year, every year. Somewhere, Boorstin’s ghost mutters, “Q.E.D.”

And Jackie is a film about the construction of pseudo-events, images, and narratives. As the widow says towards the end of the film, “I believe the characters we read on the page become more real than the men who stand beside us.” Indeed.

Of course, the central precipitating event of the film is anything but pseudo, as it involves the real death of a real man. But from there, after a whirlwind of emotional agony, Mrs. Kennedy sets to work crafting the funeral for her husband, planning it with the same care she put into her renovations of the White House; with an eye to how the public will perceive it.

The film is framed as a conversation with a strangely disrespectful journalist, who strikes a decidedly abrasive tone with Mrs. Kennedy that seems impossible to imagine happening in real life. My interpretation is that this is meant to represent her impressions of the Press as a whole, rather than any single real event. Again: images!

Over the course of the film, the journalist develops a grudging respect for how skillfully she crafted political theater to convey her message, never more so than when she says the whole thing can be summarized by the last lines of the musical Camelot.

To be frank with you, it was the use of Camelot in the soundtrack of Jackie that inspired me to do this post. Let us peel back the layers of this pseudo-event onion: here we have a film about how people used a play based on a legend to craft a fictional narrative that then shapes reality. When you listen to the voice of Richard Burton portraying King Arthur singing about Camelot (which would have been the actual performance Kennedy would have heard) set to footage of Natalie Portman playing Jackie Kennedy spinning the whole thing for a magazine interview—well, it really does start to blur the line between reality and fiction.

Speaking of the footage of Portman-as-Kennedy: the film includes scenes where archival film of the real Jackie Kennedy is intercut with scenes of Portman mimicking her. Many a film reviewer noted how it was impossible to tell which was which. (I can tell which is which—but then, I had a poster of Ms. Portman in my room when I was 12.) Still, there’s no denying that the imitation is expertly done, and that an actress in a movie reenacting the words and mannerisms of a woman who was already putting on a performance for the television cameras just adds another layer to this kaleidoscope of unreality.

Boorstin, writing in 1962, already had plenty of material for his thesis from the Kennedy administration, not least of which was the famous observation that Kennedy’s appearance in a televised debate helped sway voters to him.  Jackie is practically The Image: The Movie, since it’s not only the same theme but even the same time period. (By the way, how excellent of a title is The Image: The Movie? They should have made that the subtitle.)

A lot of the advance press, including interviews from Portman herself, emphasized the “Female Power” aspect of the film. (This was late 2016, remember.) Frankly, this is something I’ve never really gotten from this movie. Jackie isn’t empowered, she’s a slave to public opinion, just like everyone else in Washington. She’s good at dealing with it, perhaps, but ultimately, the nature of the image-based world requires her to sacrifice what should be an intimate, private act of mourning her murdered husband to appease the all-seeing eye of mass media.

At least, I’m certain Boorstin would see it that way. The state of the “Graphic Revolution” as it existed in the early 1960s, and that Boorstin exhaustively documented in his book, is captured vividly in the film, to the point where you can see why Boorstin felt like he needed to sound some alarms.

However, there is one part of the film where the widow relinquishes control of her carefully-managed appearance and bares her soul. These are the scenes where she speaks to a priest, and they are some of the most interesting in the entire picture, so they are worth exploring in detail.

The Priest, played by legendary actor John Hurt in one of his final performances, is even more unlike a priest than The Journalist is unlike a journalist. Mostly in the sense that his attitude towards God seems distinctly atypical, as when he says, by way of consoling the widow:

There comes a time in man’s search for meaning when one realises that there are no answers. And when you come to that horrible, unavoidable realization, you accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching… I have lived a blessed life. And yet every night, when I climb into bed, turn off the lights, and stare in to the dark, I wonder… Is this all there is?

I don’t think they’ll be printing that on sympathy cards anytime soon.

In these scenes, Mrs. Kennedy seems to be confessing to a terrible spiritual emptiness, which she has tried to fill by creating the image of an idyllic “Camelot.” But she has not succeeded, and dreams of surrendering, finally, to the void. The film ends with a strong implication that Jackie’s—and by extension, Jack’s—lasting legacy to the world is in the images they created. But for the people themselves, there is no true peace, no true meaning.

This is probably why the movie feels so disturbing and not completely satisfying. The bitter notes are all on a human level, while the notes of triumph and overcoming are all in the range of images and projections. The sacrificial fire casts beautiful shadows on the wall of the cave.

As a drama, it succeeds only intermittently. As a warning about pseudo-reality overtaking actual reality, it succeeds nearly as well as Boorstin’s magnum opus. Which is to say, (a) incredibly well and (b) not well enough. Because every trend Boorstin identified and every facet of political theater that Jackie exposes have grown exponentially since the 1960s. The only parts of Boorstin’s book that haven’t aged well are the ones where he says things like, “this cascade of pseudo-events reached a climax when…”

Buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This all leaves us with the question of whether it’s even possible to make a film, or any work of fiction, that warns about everything being fake. Since fiction is by definition fake, isn’t that just contributing to the problem?

I hope you aren’t expecting me to answer that, because the truth is, I don’t know. Or perhaps I suspect I do know, but I don’t like the answer I am coming up with. If it’s correct, it implies you should immediately log off and touch grass. In fact, you should never have come here to begin with when you got thinking about pseudo-events. If documenting the problem itself contributes to the problem… well, we have landed ourselves squarely back in one of those hyperstitional situations, as discussed last week.

The only vague shape of something resembling a solution that suggests itself to me are in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…”

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Ah, my friends; my loyal, loyal readers! We review a lot of strange books on this blog, don’t we? Old books, forgotten books, books possibly no one else has even read.

And yet I daresay this might be the strangest one we’ve ever done. Is it fiction? Is it philosophy? Is it from Heaven or is it from Hell? Well, maybe a bit of both. Let us, as my unwanted AI assistant is fond of saying, “dive in” and “discover” and “explore” this exceedingly bizarre volume together.

So first off, you might ask, “what is CCRU? Is it an acronym?” Well, yes and no. It might stand for “Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.” The “About the Author” listing on Amazon for this book states:

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was a name on a door in the Philosophy Department of Warwick University, UK, during the late 1990s. It was a rogue unit, blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi, and music journalism. Its frenzied interdisciplinary activity, including the Virtual Futures and Virotechnology conferences and the journal Abstract Culture, disturbed Warwick’s Philosophy Department, resulting in the termination of the unit.

On the other hand, one of the… well, let’s call them “stories” in the book itself alleges that CCRU is not an acronym at all, but the name of a Polynesian Demon of Apocalypse. But since this appears to be entirely made up by the authors of the text, there is no reason to assume this is the case.

Finally, the text on the back of the book states that “CCRU does not, has not, and will never exist.”

So, no one will acknowledge what the title of the book means or who wrote it. If this seems confusing and strange to you, just wait.

The contents of the book are organized into chapters, some of which read like prose poems in what can only be described as a techno-Lovecraftian mode. There are many references to worms, fish, ancient gods and the like, but in conjunction with turn-of-the-millennium computer jargon.

Perhaps most notable are the repeated references to lemurs. “Lemur” being a word both for the ring-tailed primates native to Madagascar as well as a derivation from the Latin word for ghost, lemurēs. In the context of the CCRU, the word seems to mean both at once, since lemurs are understood to be transcendent beings, pursuing some sort of unknown objective across vast gulfs of space and especially time. This is explained (using a very loose definition of the word “explained”) in the section “Lemurian Time War,” which describes how a man named William S. Burroughs wrote a book called Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar.

William S. Burroughs was real, and did write a book about lemurs in Madagascar, although it was called Ghost of Chance. The text described by the CCRU is supposedly sent backward from the future in order to allow it to be written.

Which brings me to the first of several notable concepts introduced in the CCRU’s corpus: the concept of hyperstition.

An amalgam of “hype” and “superstition”, a hyperstition is an idea which brings itself into being. A famous example of this is Roko’s Basilisk, a thought-experiment which suggests that if a super-intelligent AI exists in the future, it may punish those who tried to prevent its creation. Therefore, it is wise to do everything in one’s power to help create the super-intelligent AI.

You see the diabolical logic? By believing in this theory of a super-intelligent AI, we make it more likely that it will exist. Thus, with a lot of literary license, it can be seen as a type of time-travel; the AI reaching back from the future to instill beliefs that will lead to the creation of itself.

This is, in my opinion, interesting. Admittedly, it might be viewed as just a variant on Pascal’s Wager, but it’s an intriguing concept nonetheless.

It’s also a good illustration of CCRU’s cavalier approach to fiction vs. what we plebs call “reality.” As far as CCRU is concerned, there is no difference. If a fictional idea “exists”, what’s to say it’s less real than something that’s actually, you know, real?

Which is why, in addition to the references to the works of William S. Burroughs which are only loosely connected to the actual man by that name, we get references to writings by people like “Echidna Stillwell” and “Peter Vysparov”, who exchange letters on various cosmic horror abominations which they are assiduously researching. None of this stuff is “real” in the sense you or I understand the term, but it contributes to the overall CCRU philosophy.

What is the overall CCRU philosophy, you wonder?  Well, we’re getting there. It’s not really a thing that lends itself to easy summary, but rather emerges slowly, almost like an organic or chemical process, from the sulfurous stew of bizarre technogothery that foams and bubbles incoherently across the different chapters.

Basically, the picture that gradually emerges is not that different, in broad outlines, from the one painted by Paul Kingsnorth in the book I reviewed last week. Capitalism, far from being a mere system of economics, can be viewed as a kind of inhuman xeno-intelligence which operates according to its own logic, quite apart from anything the humans who make it run intend. Artificial Intelligence is simply the most evolved form of this fundamentally alien entity.

And like Kingsnorth, the CCRU views the thing in apocalyptic metaphysical terms. In this view, AI is not being developed by humans. Rather, it is a force coming from somewhere entirely separate from the everyday realm of human perception—a place sometimes ominously referred to, in the fine Lovecraftian tradition, as “The Outside.”

What is The Outside, and how do things get in from it? Well, Kingsnorth used the metaphor of the internet as a worldwide Ouija board, and this intuitively seems like an analogy of which the CCRU would approve. But they have an even more bizarre and esoteric method for consorting with the dark powers, called the Numogram.

The Numogram, which is the odd diagram you see on the cover, is CCRU’s qabbalistic calling card. It’s impossible to understand the philosophy of Lemurian Time-Sorcery without understanding the Numogram. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) it is also impossible to understand the Numogram. Quoting directly from Part 8, “Pandemonium”:

“The Numogram, or decimal labyrinth, is composed of ten zones (numbered 0-9) and their interconnections. These zones are grouped into five pairs (syzygies) by nine-sum twinning (zygonovism). The arithmetical difference of each syzygy defines a current (or connection to a tractor zone). Currents constitute the primary flows of the Numogram.”

This is the part of the story where I’m most inclined to wonder if the whole thing is just an Andy Kaufman routine for eccentric philosophers. You can never be sure that the entirety of CCRU’s output is not some elaborate academic practical joke which is not terribly funny.

Except of course for one stark fact: viz., that to the extent anything can be gleaned from the CCRU writings, it is a prediction that AI will relentlessly conquer the world. And indeed, this prediction appears to be coming true. After all, AI is ubiquitous in cyberspace. Just in the course of writing this blog post, I keep getting irritating pop-ups telling me how I could write it “better”. I thought these were merely repetitive and annoying, but perhaps the CCRU is correct, and they are in fact intrusions from dark spiritual forces that lurk in the heart of internet, buried deep in the undersea cables that connect the Earth like monstrous worms. “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”

Again and again, Kingsnorth and the CCRU align in ironic ways. Where Kingsnorth says “let ‘the West’ die”, CCRU writes cryptically, “America is nothing but the West, and that’s the Land of the Dead.” (“Going west” is archaic slang for dying, presumably because the sun “dies” in that direction at the end of every day.)

The one point on which CCRU differs significantly from Kingsnorth is that their view seems to be that the replacement of humanity by demonic machine intelligence is a good thing. Since I reviewed Kingsnorth’s book, it’s only right to consider the counter-point. We here at Ruined Chapel still follow the Fairness Doctrine, after all. And according to CCRU, humans are basically just an evolutionary mistake. There’s a whole section in here dedicated to explaining why bipeds are an aberration, and your really S-tier lifeforms should be quadrupeds, or better still, cephalopods.

I docked points from Kingsnorth’s book for failing to provide an adequate solution to what he persuasively described as a great spiritual void at the heart of modernity. Well, CCRU claims the void has already been filled—not by anything human, but by dread monsters that haunt the blackness between the stars. Where Kingsnorth would say we should try to remedy this, CCRU favors accelerationism: continuing the process of shredding all trappings of humanity in favor of becoming something else.

It all sounds a bit crazy. But, perhaps the craziest part is that it sounds a little less crazy now than it did at the turn of the millennium. Implausible, yes, but not wholly impossible…

Speaking of the turn of the millennium, Y2K has immense spiritual significance in the CCRU philosophy. Besides the infamous glitch being a kind of “digital hyperstition”, it also marks the dawn of a new era.

Of all the weird vignettes in this book, none stuck with me as much as “The Excruciation of Hummpa-Taddum”. “Hummpa-Taddum” being supposedly some union of mythic gods that gave birth to the Age of Pisces, and even more supposedly, thinly disguised by Lewis Carroll as “Humpty Dumpty”. (To be clear, I can find no evidence that anything called “Hummpa-Taddum” exists in any folklore outside of this volume. Again, the casual mixing of fact and fiction till the lines blur beyond all recognizability is a CCRU specialty.)

The AOE [Architectonic Order of the Eschaton. Don’t ask.–B.G.]  focuses upon a single problem—acknowledging no other: how to reproduce magical power across discontinuity. As Hummpa-Taddum gets smashed on New Year’s Eve, substitute powers await their chance and their destiny, sober, patient, totally ruthless…

The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master—that is all.

As longtime readers know, the aesthetic of “millennial weirdness” is a favorite hobby-horse of mine, and the CCRU Writings have it in spades.  And indeed, perhaps it is more than just an aesthetic found in the world of cyberpunk video games and Art Bell’s radio programs. It does feel, doesn’t it, as if something did change about a quarter-century ago. As if, to quote Lovecraft again, “the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods and forces which were unknown.”

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Kingsnorth is right: there is some malevolent metaphysical aspect to the rise of what he calls “The Machine.” If so, his plan of setting limits on screen time and not communing with the demonic presences “unless you really have to” is woefully inadequate. The CCRU actually provides a much more plausible roadmap to dealing with such forces, if they do indeed exist. The only issue, of course, is that their handbook provides instructions on how to summon the unholy powers.

As any good Lovecraft reader knows, the Necronomicon is a double-edged sword. You can use it to send the eldritch abominations back whence they came, if you know what you’re doing. And if we are truly in a spiritual war, we’ll need to have a grimoire or two in our toolkit.

But what exactly would this mean? Can we banish AI back into the Shadow Realm just by turning the Numogram upside-down? (It’s not like it would make any less sense.) Well, you could try it, I guess, but again, remember Kingsnorth’s warning about the internet-as-Ouija-board. More to the point, recall the words of the unnaturally long-lived 18th-century necromancer Joseph Curwen in Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:

I say to you againe, doe not call upp Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.

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The great comic actor Danny Kaye once said of his Gilbert & Sullivan parodies: “You know, I like Gilbert and Sullivan; I love singing it. I always wanted to make some records of some of them. Then I start in all good faith to sing it properly and then something goes haywire inside me; I go haywire–and the words go haywire.”

Something similar happened to me once: I wanted to write a classic 1940s noir-style detective story. Like Kaye, I started in good faith to do it, but it went haywire. That is to say, it turned into one of my typical action stories, with too many shootouts and too much technology. So I gave up on it.

What’s this got to do with C. Litka’s latest short story? Well, unlike me, when he tries to write a noir story, it doesn’t go haywire. On the contrary, he captures the vibe perfectly, despite the fact that as usual, the setting is not Earth, but his own cleverly constructed sci-fi world.

Nevertheless, he nails the essence of the noir tale. I could practically imagine the main characters as Bogie and Bacall, bantering back and forth as they tail their quarry through snowy streets on a dark evening.

Now, although I say the story is noir, it’s not jet noir. Part of the charm of Litka’s stories is the fact that, unlike so much modern fiction, they aren’t gratuitously violent or debauched. Well, hey, many of the classic noir films had to follow the Hays Code, too, and yet they turned out all right.

Enough of this! You want details, right? Well, sadly, I can’t give too many, because this is a short story, and to say much at all would give away the fun. It’s another Redinal Hu story, set a few months after the first one. Hu is once again drawn into an intrigue among the rival Great Houses. And as in the first story, what I enjoyed most about this is how he uses his wits, rather than violence, to effect a solution.

Admittedly, the same can’t quite be said of his dog, who gets involved in the action quite unexpectedly. Dogs are not known for handling matters with subtlety and discretion, which makes for an entertaining twist in what feels like an espionage caper.

All told, another highly enjoyable entry in Litka’s series-within-a-series that is the life of Redinal Hu.

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I saw that this book was voted as the #1 best Halloween book in a Goodreads list. So I decided to take a chance on it, even though I don’t like the only other Bradbury book I’ve ever read, Fahrenheit 451. (I never reviewed it, but my thoughts align with H.R.R. Gorman’s.)

Well, I’m happy to say The Halloween Tree is much better. It starts off with a group of costumed boys gathering to go trick-or-treating on Halloween night. But the leader of the group, a lad named Pipkin, is late. They go to find him, and discover the normally energetic and happy boy is looking unwell. Indeed, he is whisked away in the very claws of Death itself before their eyes.

But a strange figure named Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud appears from the land on which grows the titular tree, and offers the boys a chance to pursue Pipkin’s spirit, in hopes of saving him from an early demise. Mr. Moundshroud then leads them back into the darkest days of pre-history, explaining how early humans feared the death of the sun in the winter, and from there leads them on a tour of proto-Halloween rites throughout western history, from Egypt to Greece and Rome, into Europe and finally to the Americas. At each step they find, and then lose again, some manifestation of Pipkin’s spirit.

It’s a good overview of festivals of the dead throughout history, and Bradbury doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects, like sacrifices. The one thing I don’t quite understand is why he devotes a whole chapter to gargoyles and grotesques. These never struck me as particularly scary. Maybe it’s because my great aunt had a replica of one of the Notre Dame grotesques in her living room, so I always associated them with the decorative sensibilities of older ladies. But I guess it’s all part of the Halloween tradition.

The thing I liked best about the story, (well, apart from, you know, HALLOWEEN!!!) is that it teaches an important lesson about having to pay a price to get something you want. You want Pipkin back? Well, you’re going to have to give up something to get him. It’s a critical thing for kids to learn.

Now, while this may be blasphemous to many in the reading community, I don’t love Bradbury’s prose. He’s a good writer, but he seems self-indulgent, opting for elaborate, florid descriptions when something simple would serve just as well. (Maybe this also explains his love of the overly-ornamented style of architecture such as one finds in cathedrals.)

On the other hand, his character names are fantastic. Besides the aforementioned Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud and Pipkin, we’ve got Tom Skelton, who dresses as a skeleton, and another boy named Hackles Nibley. The image of a tree with jack-‘o-lanterns growing on it is also a memorable one.

Would I rate this as the #1 Halloween book? No. I’d probably give that honor to A Night in the Lonesome October. And if we include not only stories set at Halloween, but scary stories generally, the list gets longer.

But, it’s still a charming seasonal story, and as an overview of Halloween lore for children around the age of 10 or so, it’s an excellent starting point. So if you know any young people who are of an age to catch the All Hallows’ Fever, this book is just the thing for them. Whatever my issues with Bradbury, I’m happy to put them aside in recognition of his services to Halloween.

And with that, I am off to carve some pumpkins. Happy Halloween everybody!

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SPOILER WARNING: The title of this movie spoils the movie because at the end it turns out it’s about this school for girls that is run by Satan. 

But damn, do we take our sweet time about getting there. Martha Sayers is investigating the apparent suicide of her sister, who had been a student at the Salem Academy for Women. She enrolls as a student herself to try to find out what might have driven her sister to this tragic fate.

The Salem Academy for Women is a remote Gothic estate, quite pretty in the daytime but it gets creepy at night, especially when the power goes out in a thunderstorm. Naturally, this is also the time when Martha and her newly-made friend Roberta Lockhart decide is the best time to pursue their investigations, sometimes while clad in nightgowns, natch.

(Strangely, these scenes aren’t as sexed-up as you might expect. From the title and the fact that it was produced by Aaron Spelling, you might be thinking this would be “Jiggle TV”. But it’s not, although it was marketed that way.)

We meet two members of the faculty at Satan’s School for Girls Salem Academy: one is the popular, handsome art teacher, and the other is the weird, creepy psychology teacher. In a massive plot twist that only the most shrewd and careful of dogs could have anticipated, the handsome, popular guy turns out to be Satan. Or in league with Satan. Or something. All we really find out is he’s assembling some manner of coven at the school. It’s not clear what they do, other than murder would-be recruits who try to back out. Also, they wear white, even when you would think any decent devil-worshipping witch-cult would wear black. 

Anyway, it’s stupid and cheesy and a waste of time. Wikipedia claims it was one of the most memorable TV movies of the 1970s. Apparently, you could just broadcast anything in the 1970s and people would watch it. The Star Wars Holiday Special is evidence of this.

But after all, that was the 1970s and there were only three channels and the internet didn’t exist. I watched this in 2025. What’s my excuse?

Well, I’m just interested in all manner of supernatural horror stories. Even the bad ones have something to say. Especially if they have Kate Jackson in them.

Drink up, Kate. You’ll need it for this script.

In the end, this seems to have been part of the wave of what MAD Magazine called “Devil flicks” in the early ’70s, probably stemming from Rosemary’s Baby. But it’s not scary enough to be good horror, not funny enough to be camp, and is just generally baffling as to how anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place.

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It’s been a long time since I read an Agatha Christie book. I read a few Poirot stories as a teenager and liked them, though I found them distinctly inferior to Sherlock Holmes. But this is, as the title suggests, a Halloween story, and so of course I had to read it.

It starts out at an English country house, where Mrs. Rowena Drake is throwing a traditional children’s Halloween party, very much in line with those described in this handbook. Among the adult attendees is Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer and friend of the great Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.

All is going well until one of the young attendees is found drowned in the tub used for apple-bobbing. Making this even more suspicious is the fact that earlier in the evening, the young girl had proclaimed to everyone at the party that she had once witnessed a murder, though she refused to disclose details.

Ms. Oliver at once contacts her mustachioed friend, and he sets to work on interviewing the attendees at the party. As he does so, more mysterious intrigues begin to emerge about life in the seemingly quiet little village—he dredges up past murders that might fit the bill for what the poor child might have witnessed, as well as a complicated scheme of apparent forgery committed by a now-missing au pair girl. (Yeah, I had to look it up, too.)

The middle of the story dragged a bit, as it seemed like it was just Poirot going around talking to one person after another who laments that crime is worse nowadays because the justice system is always making excuses for criminals, looking for reasons to let them go only to have them kill again. “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, etc.” There really is nothing new under the sun. If there was one thing that surprised me about this book is how very modern it felt. I think of Agatha Christie as writing a more genteel sort of mystery, but parts of this were surprisingly direct. Strange that so dark a book could be dedicated to P.G. Wodehouse!

In the later stages, our elderly detective ties the threads together and works out who must be responsible for the crimes. Simultaneously, however, another murder is about to take place, under sinister, vaguely ritualistic circumstances, and it’s a frantic rush to stop the lethal hand in time.

Is it a great book? No, I don’t think so. Parts of it were a drag. On the other hand, other parts were quite interesting and, as I said, felt surprisingly relevant. They say the most enduring books are about human nature, which makes them timeless. That certainly would be the case here. If you want a good mystery to read at Halloween, about the darkness which lurks under the benign veneer of English country estates… well, read Hound of the Baskervilles. But if you want a second one to read after that, Hallowe’en Party is a good choice.

Now, I said above that the story is timeless, and so it could be adapted, like Shakespeare, into a different setting. And no doubt this is what the great Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh had in mind when he decided to adapt it to the setting of post-World War II Venice in his 2023 film, A Haunting in Venice, starring himself as Hercule Poirot and Tina Fey as Ariadne Oliver.

I like Kenneth Branagh. He’s a great actor (who can forget his St. Crispin’s Day speech?) and he directed one of the few Marvel superhero movies that I have both seen and enjoyed. I also like Tina Fey. (“How could I not? I’m entranced by those mud-colored eyes… that splay-footed walk… and that whole situation right there…”) Seriously, though, I like both leads and of course the whole thing is set at Halloween. What could go wrong?

Well… a lot.

First of all, it’s not really accurate to say A Haunting in Venice is “based on” or “adapted from” Hallowe’en Party. You can’t even really say that Hallowe’en Party “inspired” A Haunting in Venice, even though the cover of my edition of the book does say that. I think it might be correct to say that A Haunting in Venice was “suggested by an incident in” Hallowe’en Party. Even better might be to do as W.S. Gilbert did with his play The Princess, which he called a “a respectful operatic perversion” of a poem by Tennyson. “A cinematic perversion of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party” pretty much fits—no need, I think, for the “respectful.”

In the Branagh Version (not to be confused with The Browning Version) Poirot has retired to Venice, disillusioned with life, humanity, and God. Until one day Ariadne Oliver shows up and asks him to join her at a children’s Halloween Party being held at the palazzo of a wealthy diva whose daughter recently drowned by falling into the canal. But, to quote Richard and Linda Thompson, “did she jump or was she pushed“?

So, to cheer herself up, the grieving mother has decided to hold a party that features a shadow puppet show about the vengeful spirits of dead children as entertainment, followed by a séance to communicate with her dead daughter’s spirit. Make it make sense, I dare you.

Poirot quickly finds proof that the medium conducting the séance is a fraud. Even so, it does appear there is something ghostly and mysterious happening in the creepy palazzo. For example, the medium has Poirot put on her cloak and mask, after which he goes to bob for apples and has his head shoved under the water, but survives. The medium appears to be a slight, thin woman. How would her cloak even fit the portly Poirot? She may be a medium, but he’s definitely a large! Ba-dum tss. I’ll be here all week, folks.

But the medium won’t, because she gets mysteriously murdered while Poirot was being nearly drowned. This prompts Poirot to lock everyone in the palazzo, since they are all now suspects. Except not Ariadne, because she’s Poirot’s friend, so he enlists her help to solve the case. And they’ve got a tall task before them, because you see, it turns out that they are operating in a universe where nothing makes sense and normal rules of logic do not apply. It is the detective fiction equivalent of Calvinball.

In the end, Poirot figures out what really happened, which is more than I can say for myself. All I know is it’s a sordid tale of murder, revenge, betrayal, and ends up showing that you can never really trust anyone. Naturally, this helps Poirot rediscover his passion for work and apparently restores his faith in humanity???

And the stupidest part is, I sort of enjoyed it. The story may make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but the acting is good, and the aesthetics are absolutely top-notch. The vibe of being in a haunted palazzo during a storm on Halloween night is carried off beautifully, so much so that it takes a while before you notice how inane everything is. It’s like eating all your Halloween candy in one night: in the moment, it’s delicious, and it’s only afterward that you feel sick with the consequences. 

A Haunting in Venice is the epitome of style over substance. It looks amazing, and maybe if it were just a generic thriller, that would be enough to go on. But the whole appeal of detective fiction is the pleasure of seeing how all the pieces fit together in a logical chain. You can have a weird, supernatural story where tons of things are left unexplained. Some of my favorite stories are like that. Or you can have the denouement where the genius investigator explains how all the seemingly-unrelated events are actually part of a coherent whole. But ya can’t have both!