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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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Are you tired of hearing how AI can revolutionize how you work, play, shop, eat, sleep, drink, etc.? Are you sick to death of hearing about how you can leverage social media to earn crypto to buy NFTs? Do you miss the days when you could just walk around the corner without worrying about a self-driving car running you over while influencers record it with their drones to get likes on Tik-Tok?

Well, Paul Kingsnorth is and does. And he’s written a book about it. Not merely about our current state of affairs, but about how we got here, where we are going, and why we are in this handbasket.

He starts off slowly, explaining how “The Machine”, as he calls it, was built. By “The Machine”, he doesn’t just mean computer technology—though that certainly seems to be the endgame—but all of the quantitative, precise, “rational”, scientific, and “left-brained” modes of interacting with the world. An example from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is instructive: the Germans chopped down all their messy, organic trees and replaced them with nice, evenly-spaced ones. It was orderly, symmetrical—and disastrous for the ecosystem.

The same thing, more or less, has been happening to everything for the last 400 years in Kingsnorth’s view. It’s become harder to ignore lately, but as he explains, artists, poets, writers and other such people have been complaining about the phenomenon for centuries. To take one notable example, consider the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, who mused at the end of World War II, “Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter–leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines.”

Of course, World War II was hardly “the first War of the Machines.” World War I featured tanks, airplanes, machine guns, etc. I’m not sure when “the first” War of the Machines was. Maybe when they introduced the siege engine?

But this just goes to prove Kingsnorth’s point: that this is an ancient problem that has been evolving over the course of world history. The petty political squabbles of this or any other day pale in comparison to this steady, monotonic trend toward a fully-mechanized planet.

Where will it all end? In gray goo? In Kingsnorth’s view, even that might be more merciful than what’s in store for us.

Because, as he takes some pains to elaborate, the danger of technology may be something more than just mass unemployment and the gradual loss of our ability to do anything other than stare at screens. Kingsnorth, a Christian, sees something darker, more metaphysical and spiritual at work here:

“Silicon Valley mavens, from Mark Zuckerberg with his metaverse to Ray Kurzweil with his singularity, regularly talk… about where the technium—The Machine—is taking us. Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods. They never consider where this story has been heard before… that ‘AI’, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying ‘Antichrist’.

Humor me. Imagine for a moment that some force is active in the world which is beyond us. Perhaps we have created it. Perhaps it is independent of us. Perhaps it created itself and uses us for its ends… Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and now is seizing its moment.”

This sounds pretty dramatic. On the other hand, there are weird things in the history of technology. As Kingsnorth observes, an apple with a bite out of it has rather major significance in Western theology, and not as a good thing. And then you find out the original price of the Apple I…

Still, this could all easily be dismissed as the human tendency to look for patterns where none exist. (For example, when I typed “exist” just there, it was the 666th word of the post. Does this mean anything? Probably not.)

What is clear, whether you believe in dark supernatural forces at work or not, is that technology is having a significant effect on our ability to relate to one another as human beings. I don’t know if talking to an AI chatbot really is summoning demons, but there’s no doubt that they are capable of producing immensely destructive results.

In example after example, Kingsnorth hammers home the devastating effect that technology is having on people, ruining bodies and minds, destroying relationships, uprooting communities, and in general, “turning man against his brother / till man exists no more.”

All right, I admit that’s leading the witness a bit. Kingsnorth doesn’t necessarily expect us to believe that The Machine is the antichrist, although reading between the lines and listening to some of his interviews, it’s pretty clear to me that in his heart of hearts, that’s exactly what he believes. Which might explain some other things about the way the book ends up.

Because after documenting, in great detail and at some length, all the ways in which The Machine is ruining everything that is good and beautiful, we come to the part where we reasonably might expect him to offer us some kind of solution to this problem.

And what he offers is, essentially, nothing. Oh, he says some fine-sounding words about “setting limits” and “drawing lines.” For example, he himself has resolved to never use an AI chatbot, before almost immediately conceding that it’s possible he might have already unknowingly used one when calling a customer service number. He says he’ll never have a smartphone, but agrees that this makes life in the modern world exceedingly difficult.

Yeah, I’m sure that limiting ourselves to only 4 hours of screen time per day will stop the autonomous weapons systems right in their tracks. “Mr. Dent, have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?”

Kingsnorth is clearly a very intelligent man, and he must know his proposed solutions are woefully inadequate. And frankly, I think that he really believes that trying to fight it is a lost cause. As a Christian, he presumably believes that this has all been foretold, and that his victory will be attained not in this world but in the next, by holding true to his faith through the suffering that is to come.

Which is all well and good, I guess. Although if so, why even bother to write the book? And charge $13.99 plus tax for it on Kindle? This seems like it’s starting the resistance to techno-capitalism off on the wrong foot.

I’m not really accusing Kingnorth of hypocrisy. He is guilty, and he freely admits it. But then, so am I. I’m here writing in sympathy with his anti-machine manifesto on a blog on the internet. If The Machine really is some kind of malevolent xeno-intelligence, this is the part where we cut to it sitting in its lair, cackling maniacally at the pathetic ineptitude of its foes.

All this is a long way of saying that I agree with the general substance of Kingsnorth’s case. And I also agree with his observation that many, many other people throughout history have made the same observation. And all of them have proven largely correct at each step.

And it has never once mattered.  The Machine remains the undefeated champion. It should be clear enough by now that simply writing “The Machine is bad”, however eloquently, is simply not an effective form of resistance. Neither are any of the other obvious forms which have been tried over the centuries, from the Luddites to the Green Party.

If anyone wants to do anything about this, it seems to me it will have to be something that has never been tried before.  They will have to approach the problem in an entirely new way, because all other methods have failed.

Either that or take the Kingsnorth route, and try to live the best life they can while praying for deliverance in The Final Conflict with The Enemy. Well, who can say? The early Christians took over the greatest empire the world had seen to that point with a strategy of pacifism and martyrdom.

But that didn’t stop the advance of The Machine, either.

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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! 

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Book cover for 'The Sorcery of White Rats' by Adam Bertocci, featuring a silhouette of a girl against a vibrant, magical background with decorative elements.

How many books have you read involving prophecies about magical young people destined to save the world? I know, I know; it sounds like the tiredest trope in the world. Seemed like every work of YA fiction in the early 2000s had a premise like that.

Yet Mr. Bertocci, whom long-time readers will know from his slice-of-millennial-life short stories, takes this well-worn premise and makes it his own. I admit, when I read the synopsis of his debut novel, I was concerned he might have abandoned his own unique voice in favor of something clichéd but marketable.

I needn’t have worried. After only a few pages, it was clear that this would be no ordinary magical adventure. Bertocci has not forgotten the things that make his short stories powerful, but has instead fleshed out his typical themes into fuller form.

The story follows two young women, Bristol and Monroe, who are in the awkward mid-twenty years and still trying to figure life out. That is hard enough, but when Monroe awakens one day speaking in a strange voice and relating a terrifying vision of the end of the world, well, it really harshes their mellow, as people used to say.

Bristol takes Monroe to see her former friend, Xochitl, a neuroscientist who answers with scientific rationalism which is probably correct and deeply unsatisfying. Still not knowing whether to expect the end of the world or not, they are unsure what to do with themselves. Actually, they already were. But, you know, now it’s more so.

Bertocci has a way of writing that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read. His conversations don’t read like scripts; but evolve organically, hopping from topic to topic, and making unexpected callbacks to earlier subjects. Like real people talking, in other words.

Interwoven throughout the action of the story are interviews with the three leads, commenting on what they did in the moment and how it all culminates in the surreal rooftop finale. 

And what exactly was the rooftop finale? Well, I’ll give you a hint: shades of Majora’s Mask. Earlier this year, I reviewed a book about a man plotting to destroy the sun to escape the dreariness of his life. The Sorcery of White Rats is an inversion of that, in more ways than one. Just as the ancients regarded the sun and moon as somehow opposite, so Awful, Ohio by Jeff Neal and this novel are similarly opposed. And yet, like the yin and yang, each contains a drop of the other, and their apparent opposition is in fact a system in perfect, harmonious cosmic balance.

More than that, I cannot say. Let’s just say that Bertocci does a great job of making it all feel real. I’ll leave it to you to discover how  far his commitment to the bit goes.

Now if you’re like me, you’re probably asking: “is this a book I can read during the Halloween season?” After all, October 31st is right around the corner, and one naturally hesitates to read, watch, or do anything that distracts from the Halloween spirit for even a single minute of this most excellent season. (At least I do. Everyone else does that too, right?)

Well, I’m glad to say that the author of that great Halloween short story Samantha, 25, on October 31 did not disappoint.  It is not a Halloween story per se, but it is certainly weird and magical enough to fit the mood of the season. So, hesitate no longer! Get thee to your preferred purveyor of fine literature and nab thyself a copy of The Sorcery of White Rats.

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“If you loved The Wizard of Oz,” the back of the DVD case informs me, “you’ll love accompanying Dorothy on this second thrilling adventure.”

Well, I don’t love The Wizard of Oz. I saw it on TV as a kid, and it left me cold. Sure, the transition from sepia to color must have been amazing in the ’30s, and the “it was all a dream–or was it?” ending hadn’t become a trope yet, but like Citizen Kane, it’s one of those movies that’s remarkable for its time, but is actually not that impressive.

Luckily, however, the box for Return to Oz is straight-up lying. If you loved The Wizard of Oz, this thing will probably strike you as a bizarre perversion; a downright nightmare. But if you’re like me… well, you can at least approach it with an open mind.

And of course, Wizard of Oz is based on a series of books, and the translation from page to screen altered the story a good deal. Return to Oz aimed to be more faithful to the source material, while still incorporating a few elements from the first film.

We start off with Dorothy back in Kansas, telling her aunt and uncle about her adventures in Oz. They of course don’t believe a word of it, and are concerned by her obsession with her imaginary friends. So they do what any concerned guardians would do: take her to get electroshock therapy from a smooth-talking doctor and his sinister nurse assistant at a Gothic asylum in the middle of nowhere.

And so Dorothy finds herself alone in a room–little more than a cell, really–at night, during a thunderstorm, waiting for the doctors to begin the treatment. While she waits, a mysterious blonde girl appears, ghost-like, and gives her a jack-o’-lantern to keep her company, before vanishing again as suddenly as she came.

The first 20 minutes of this film are pretty much a horror movie, culminating in the scene were she’s wheeled on a gurney to the electro-therapy room, hearing muffled screams of other patients as she goes. But just before the treatment can begin, lightning flashes, the power goes out, and the blonde girl reappears and releases Dorothy. They both flee into the stormy night, pursued by the furious nurse, finally plunging into a raging river to escape. Dorothy’s new friend disappears beneath the water, and Dorothy clings to a floating box for safety before finally falling asleep.

She awakens again in the land of Oz, accompanied now by her pet chicken Billina, who, like all animals in Oz, can talk. But Oz is much changed from when she last visited–the yellow brick road is in ruins, the Emerald City looks like Thomas Cole’s Desolation, its inhabitants turned to stone, and its streets patrolled by monstrous creatures known as “Wheelers,” which cackle insanely and threaten Dorothy and Billina. With the help of a clockwork automaton named Tik-Tok, Dorothy escapes the Wheelers and gets them to take her to the ruling power in the Emerald City, Princess Mombi.

Mombi lives in an ornate tower of gold and mirrors. She is a very beautiful woman. Actually, she is dozens of beautiful women, because she is a witch who keeps a collection of heads in glass cases, swapping them out as her whim dictates, like a fashion plate would switch her hats.

The scene where Mombi leads Dorothy through the winding hall of disembodied heads, all awake and staring back at her, might be even more disturbing than the earlier asylum scenes. It’s hard to say.

I’ve only described about half the film so far, but I don’t want to give everything away. While this is still a family-friendly picture, the ending, like all the best horror, is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. See if you can figure out what I mean!

But I hope what I’ve described above is enough to convince you that this is not your typical Disney movie. It has dark fantasy elements that feel distinctly unlike the lighthearted fare we normally get from the Mickey Mouse studio.

At the same time, it is also not simply a lazy conversion of a children’s story into a schlocky slasher film. Nowadays, if you hear they’ve made a “darker” sequel to a beloved story, you probably shudder–and you are right to do so! Cinema today has none of the craft displayed in Return to Oz, which is why it’s worthwhile to take a little time to discuss who made it.

Walter Murch is perhaps one of the greatest film editors of all time. (The only competitor I can think of would be Anne V. Coates.) He worked on such films as THX 1138, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient. Return to Oz was his one and only directorial effort, and that’s a pity, because he clearly had a talent for filmmaking. In his short book, In The Blink of an Eye, he makes many noteworthy observations on the cinematic art, such as that seeing things in a discontinuous order, as opposed to one continuous “shot”, is a relatively new phenomenon for humans, who were used to seeing things strictly in order until the advent of film technology in the early 20th century.

And yet, our minds took to this new experience rather easily, Murch observes, probably because it is similar to the process of dreaming, which is the one other state apart from watching a film in which we see disconnected images presented one after another. Murch specifically likens the experience of viewing a film in the theater to that of dreaming, suggesting we must first enter the proper state in order to experience films properly.

Also interesting is Murch’s article, “A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be”, included as a sort of appendix to In The Blink of an Eye. Written in 1999, it contains some very curious ideas:

So let’s suppose a technical apotheosis some time in the middle of the 21st century, when it somehow becomes possible for one person to make an entire feature film, with virtual actors. Would this be a good thing?

…Let’s go even further, and force the issue to its ultimate conclusion by supposing the diabolical invention of a black box that could directly convert a single person’s thoughts into a viewable cinematic reality. You would attach a series of electrodes to various points on your skull and simply think the film into existence.

Does this remind you of anything? Anything at all?

But, Murch optimistically predicts, cinema will never die off as an art form, because it is fundamentally a communal, collaborative experience:

The midcentury pessimism about the future of cinema, which foresaw a future ruled by television, overlooked the perennial human urge — at least as old as language itself — to leave the home and assemble in the fire-lit dark with like-minded strangers to listen to stories.

The cinematic experience is a recreation of this ancient practice of theatrical renewal and bonding in modern terms, except that the flames of the Stone Age campfire have been replaced by the shifting images that are telling the story itself. Flames that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but that kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder, fuse the permanency of literature with the spontaneity of theater.

But I would like to emphasize the leaving of familiar surroundings. The theatrical-cinematic experience is really born the moment someone says, “Let’s go out.” Implicit in this phrase is a dissatisfaction with one’s familiar surroundings and the corresponding need to open oneself up in an uncontrolled way to something “other.” 

In his essays, we start to get an idea of why Murch’s Return to Oz works so well: it feels fundamentally like a dream. (Indeed, one possible interpretation is that the Oz parts are Dorothy’s dream.) And because Murch recognized that film is itself a kind of dreaming, he was able to wed his subject matter to his medium quite beautifully.

If you loved The Wizard of Oz, you may not like this darker, more eerie and ambiguous sequel. But if you enjoy an escape into the realm of dark fantasy, hearkening back to the days when fairy tales were anything but saccharine, you will find much to enjoy in Murch’s take on L. Frank Baum’s world.

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Longtime readers might remember that a few years ago I did a retrospective series on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and various adaptations of it. Had I known about this book at that time, I would have included it, because it’s another fine riff on the classic tale.

Our protagonist is Josie Penninger, a young woman cursed with the ability to see spirits. She lives in present-day Sleepy Hollow and makes a living working in her mother’s coffee shop and communicating with ghosts in her spare time.

But one day, a stranger comes to town, taking an interest in the prize of her mother’s collection of Sleepy Hollow paraphernalia: a copy of A History of New England Witchcraft said to have belonged to Ichabod Crane himself. The controversy over whether or not Ichabod Crane existed does nothing to diminish the value of the book.

From there, things get wild. Josie finds herself caught up in an inter-dimensional war in the spirit realm, involving the ghostly guardians of the town, a wise-cracking ghost hunter, and of course, the headless Hessian himself.

The plot is rather complicated, as it involves time-travel and all the mind-bending complexities that go along with such a story. But the dialogue is fast-paced and fun, and the action is like something out of an ’80s movie. The creative decision that ghosts can be shot makes for some easy-to-follow battles.

Nothing better summarizes this book than this simple fact: there is a scene where the Headless Horseman wields an M134 minigun. If this doesn’t tell you what kind of story this is, I don’t know what will. And, most delightfully, this scene is illustrated, so we get the full visual of an 18th century mercenary decked out in ammo belts.

That’s what this book is: classic folklore wedded to the sensibility of a Schwarzenegger movie. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, check it out.

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Book cover of 'Betrayal of Trust' by Geoffrey M. Cooper, featuring a woman in a lab coat with long hair, holding a bloodied syringe, set in a medical environment.

What’s better than a Brad and Karen thriller from Geoffrey Cooper? A Brad and Karen and Martin Dawson thriller! If you read earlier books in the series, you know him as the soldier-turned-medical-researcher who is a good friend of Brad, and who has helped the duo out in the past. I always enjoy his scenes, and so I was delighted when he teamed up with them again, assuming he would once again heroically help them all work as a team to catch the killer, as he’s done before.

Well, the way it all works out in this book is a little different. But I can’t say how. Sorry, you’ll just have to read it. What I can say is that the book is about a mysterious killer who keeps striking important medical researchers. Brad and Karen’s theories regarding her motives are forced to evolve with each crime, until eventually the pattern emerges in an unsettling way.

But what I think I liked best of all about this book is what the title refers to. The betrayal in question could be multiple things, including one possibility that isn’t even connected directly to the killer. I like ambiguity and mystery, leaving things up to interpretation. For one thing, it’s what helps keep critics like me in business. 🙂

Jokes aside, this is another good book from Geoffrey Cooper. I have only one slight, nit-picky complaint. As always in Brad and Karen books, part of the fun is the good food the protagonists enjoy as they try to crack the case. But I felt like in this one, it was always a lobster dinner.

Now, lobster is no doubt a northeast staple, so I can’t claim its not authentic. But I want variety! One lobster dinner is okay, but can’t we have some other delicacies, too?

I kid, I kid. This isn’t really a complaint, or if it is, it’s only the kind of complaint a long-time fan of a series can make. Like the Star Wars fans who wish there was a movie all about Porkins or somebody; it’s the kind of complaint that comes from a place of love, and I always love reading a Brad and Karen adventure.