They Had the Appearance of a Man (1)

Christian County, Kentucky, August 1955, 5pm.

The day had gone well: in the morning Jeremiah’s relatives had met him at the train station, and after some shopping, they had escaped the sweltering afternoon heat by ducking in to see a picture at the Alhambra theatre. Maisie had bought the tickets. They were five that day: Jeremiah, his cousin Billy-Glen, his wife Isabel and their little boy Bucky, and old Maisie.

Jeremiah noticed that Maisie hadn’t thought much of the picture.

‘Flying saucers and creatures from outer space-Jesus certainly never mentioned anything about them,’ he had heard her say to Bucky afterwards. ‘Folk from California dream up such things, but they’re a long way from Kentucky. All that sea air must make them soft-headed.’ Bucky had seemed to enjoy the picture, nonetheless.

Now the fields and scattered woodlands of Christian County were spread out before them as they trundled towards home in Billy-Glen’s battered Ford pick-up. The light was fading and the trees on the horizon were just starting to glow with a gold sheen.

Jeremiah was from one of the larger cities in New Jersey; at thirty-two, he was a little younger than his cousin, and had been removed from their branch of the family for many years. His natural home was one where chasms and canyons only existed between skyscrapers, where birds struggled to sing above the sounds of traffic at dawn. The silence here impressed him. His heart lifted, even as the heat smothered him like a closed fist. He tried to alleviate the stuffiness of the truck by opening the window, but the scorching breath that passed for wind in late-summer Kentucky quickly caused him to close it again.

‘Damn, Maisie. This is the life,’ he said, shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘Folk in Christian County don’t know what they have goin’ for themselves. When you were queuing for tickets this afternoon, I stood around in front of the post office. Just waitin’. And good God, every one of the customers who came in during that time knew the stewardess by name. And she knew them too, like as not.’

Maisie smiled. ‘Ain’t nobody in Christian County who doesn’t know everybody else, Jeremiah. And everybody else’s business, too- ‘specially in the case of Irene from the post office.’ She laughed, and then her face tightened. ‘And I’ll thank you not to use the Lord’s name in vain, dear.’

Jeremiah’s spirits fell slightly; he was certainly on a different plane to his rustic relatives. He made a mental note to watch his words more carefully in future. Before he had time to ponder this matter any further, Billy-Glen halted the truck with a jolt.

‘Cattle-gate!’ he yelled. ‘Whose turn is it?’

Seeing an opportunity to prove that he was no soft city-boy, Jeremiah jumped out of the truck before any of the others had an occasion to volunteer. He approached the gate; it was no more than a bunch of logs tied together with barbed wire, but he could see no obvious way to untangle the mess. Fumbling with the latch, he yelled as a blunt blade of wire sank into his skin.

Isabel leapt from the cab and brushed Jeremiah aside. She lifted one of the smaller logs, tracing it around a vertical stump to release the gate.

‘Isabel! Who is that with you?’ An elderly farmer, his face browned and leathery, approached from the field beyond the gate.

‘Nice to see you, Thomas,’ said Isabel. ‘This here’s my relative, Jeremiah.’

The big farmer practically crushed every bone in Jeremiah’s hand with his shake, but his smile was warm and genuine. “Pleased to welcome you to Christian County, friend,’ he said. Then, addressing Maisie in the truck’s cabin, he hollered ‘Hey May! Any news?’

Maisie’s head appeared from the window. ‘Well, Tom, next week’s the county fair. Are your strawberries gonna beat mine this year?’

‘It’s never happened yet.’

‘Then there ain’t no news around here. I’ll see you and your clan this week at church?’

‘As always, Maisie.’

‘Then all’s right with the world. Come on you two, get in the truck. It’s another ways ‘till we get to the farm. So long, Tom.’

As he climbed back inside, it struck Jeremiah that Maisie probably did meet Tom’s clan every week at church. He had a vision of them: two children, clean and polite and wholesome. He’d be willing to bet that Maisie’s strawberries beat Tom’s every year at the county fair, too.

Maisie seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘This family’s been my responsibility for nearly forty years, Jeremiah,’ she said. ‘I see to it that the little ones- little Bucky here, that is- get to grow up in a world where people know what’s right and what’s wrong. I don’t see why we need any change, when we’ve already got God and the Ten Commandments to live by. So, as far as I’m concerned, no news is good news.’

The truck rumbled on. Cornfields, bleached brown and gold by the merciless sun, gave way to a thick forest of oak where each tree seemed to grasp for its neighbour across the road. The road itself soon became little more than a dirt-track. Jeremiah was trying to work out how long it had been since they had passed another vehicle (certainly an hour at least) when the farmhouse came into view.

***

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

The things that scared us as children tend to stick with us all our lives; just ask the good people at Kindertrauma. Many adults retain a fascination for things such as the Daleks and Pennywise the clown, to name two common examples.

But there are other, more subtle terrors. I read The Kraken Wakes when I was about 12 (in a lovely 1950’s penguin edition, too), and didn’t think it was too scary. Aliens, end of the world- I’d heard it all many times before. In this case, the unseen creatures cause mankind trouble on a scale that is simply geographic- they melt the ice-caps and flood the world.

But shortly after reading it I fell into a strong flu, during which I experienced intense, Kraken Wakes- influenced fever dreams. To anyone who’s never had a fever dream, it’s something like having dreams when you’re awake, and also something like an unpredictable bad-trip. My dreams revolved around floods and earthquakes, and they were horribly real. So, even though I thought the book was none too scary, it obviously resonated with me subconsciously on some level. Ever since, I’ve associated that terrible time with Wyndham’s book, perhaps affording it a gravitas far above its actual content.

Returning to the book many years later, how does it hold up?

Let’s have a little background on Wyndham first. He’s kind of like a very 1950’s version of H. G. Wells: an Englishman, he wrote some great high-concept science-fiction, and he wasn’t shy about the kind of destruction he wreaked on the world in his stories. Like Wells, Wyndham’s novels feel like big-budget summer blockbusters. His most famous novel, Day of the Triffids, is a classic that’s right up there with anything Wells wrote.

Even though Wells was writing fifty years earlier, during the prudish Victorian era, today it’s Wyndham who comes across as more of a stereotypical stiff-upper-lipped Englishman. Wells was originally working class, and had lots of politically radical ideas (he was a thumping great socialist, and was in favour of a world government). Wynhdam, on the other hand, never lets us forget his middle-class origins in his books, and is frequently criticized for this.

The most common dismissal of Wyndham is that his plots are ‘cozy catastrophes’. As far as I can see, this accusation results largely from two (broadly similar) books- Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. In both books, terrible circumstances cause London (read: society) to break down, and though death, destruction and horror are all around (and Wyndham is not stingy with these themes), a decidedly middle-class hero will survive the catastrophe without much physical or emotional trauma. He will pick up a pretty girl somewhere along the way, and they will eventually make a new life for themselves in some quiet part of the country- a sort of simple-life pastoral paradise.

While this is broadly accurate for both books, and while they may be read as a kind of simplistic middle-class wish-fulfillment fantasy, this view really ignores many of the novels’ unsavoury elements.

In Triffids, suicide and depression surround the hero. He genuinely needs to find the strength within himself to survive this nightmare world. He learns constantly that in this new world, the morals and scruples of the old one are the first casualty. Is it right to smash a shop window to steal food? He does it. Is it right to help a blind person to commit suicide? He does it. Is it right to live in a society where everyone gets to impregnate your girlfriend for the continuation of the human race? Now wait just a minute…

Triffids was published in 1951, and was a huge hit. Wyndham decided that he was onto a good thing, so as early as 1953 he released the broadly similar Kraken Wakes.

Kraken begins as the narrator and his wife are among the first humans to notice the falling of unexplained ‘fireballs’ into the sea. It’s treated as a kind of anomalous phenomenon, similar to the then-current flying saucer craze. Later, characters theorize that it’s in fact the beginning of an invasion by some intelligence from a high-pressure world (Neptune and Jupiter are posited, but we never find out for sure). Over the course of several months and years, it becomes clear that something has taken up residence in the deeps of the world’s oceans. First deep-sea scientific expeditions, and then commercial ships become targeted by these intelligences. Worldwide sea travel ceases (in a move eerily similar to the Europe-wide lack of air travel that’s happening now as a result of that Iceland volcano business). And after that, things really get strange…

When Kraken works, it’s really creepy. I think that part of the reason I’ve always been fascinated by it is that we never find out a damn thing about those underwater critters. They might not even be aliens, they might just be Earth intelligences that have lain dormant until the 1950s. All we do know about them is that they like to screw with us. Some of the violence of the sea-disasters in the first half of the book is quite astonishing- hundreds and hundreds of people perish horribly (and off-screen, too). The horror is rarely in the protagonists’ faces the way it is in Triffids- it’s more of a paranoia thing: the thought that mankind has lost his method of long-term travel is oddly creepy.

And when the creatures do begin to show up on our beaches, they do so in a manner that answers no questions about their nature.

There are problems with the book, mostly linked to the ‘humour’. There’s loads of running jokes about how the narrator’s wife wears the trousers in the marriage, and they feel even more out of place than the bizarre joke about Josella’s book in Triffids. There’s also a joke about people confusing the narrator’s company, the fictional EBC, with the real-life BBC. In case you’re wondering, EBC stands for ‘English Broadcasting Company’.

There are tonnes of 1950s artifacts in the book- aside from the obligatory Red Scare scenes, both Britain and the US seem to lob nuclear bombs about quite cheerfully in an attempt to wipe out the undersea menace. And of course, it wouldn’t be Wyndham without his trademark 1950s British-ness; it’s almost impossible to read his prose without hearing someone with the received pronunciation speak it- and you know that’s worth something.

Pro.

Centurion

The howl rang out twice again that night, so that even the most battle-hardened legionaries began to fear what lay beyond the confines of the camp, where the forest grew thick and gnarled and brooding.

***

Dawn found Tacitus standing red-eyed before his tent. He pulled his wolfskin tunic closer about his body; the weak morning rays did little to dispel the chill.

'Did you sleep, domine?' The use of the title for addressing a superior indicated formality, but there was no disguising the warmth of the voice. Tacitus turned to see the squat form of Jerius, the lieutenant. His metal armour winked in the sun as he walked from his tent.

'In this place? No. Not for these three nights past. My eyes grow sunken and my mind is clouded. It is as if this excursion is but some kind of dream- I feel as though at any moment I will wake to find that I am in Nimes, or Carthage, or even in my villa in distant Rome… Anywhere but in this strange place.'

Jerius' eyes widened. His mouth struggled to express an appropriate sentiment.

'You are surprised at my frankness, Jerius?'

'Domine- yes, domine. That is, I mean-'

'There is no need, old friend.' Tacitus smiled. 'You and I have been through too much together for that. If I cannot confide in you, then I have no friend within several thousand miles of here, save those insolent tacticians in Brittania who sent me here, surely plotting my demise. If that be the case, I might add, then Jupiter help me.'

Jerius visibly relaxed. 'Sir, if I may also be frank, I had noticed that this place has been affecting you. I mean, how could it not? The isolation; the cold; and now these terrifying sounds during the hours of darkness…' A moment of silence, as the portly lieutenant debated the merits of revealing more. 'To me… it is as if we have wandered into the realm of myth- as if this island of Hibernia were in truth one of the fabled isles- Hy-Brasil, or the Ultima Thule spoken of by the Greek, Pytheas.'

Tacitus idled the grass with his foot. The standard soldier's sandal was certainly not adequate this far in the temperate north, he thought. 'The Greek is known to have lied about his travels, Jerius. Do not be tempted to compare his flights of fancy with… our situation here.' It was the standard dismissal of Greek achievements that Tacitus had been taught since childhood, but on this particular morning his voice lacked conviction. Perhaps this wind-swept isle was getting to him.

Looking back at the ranks of tents that comprised his century's castra, or temporary camp, Tacitus' mind drifted back to the larger camp in Brittania where his fate had been sealed. That camp had been large and well provisioned, with over one hundred centuries of legionaries being drilled every day in anticipation of the campaign to come…

***

It had been warm inside the tent. The smell of tanned hide mingled with the aroma of sweat as three men perspired, secretly deciding the fate of this remote outpost of the empire.

'We simply cannot tolerate any further excursions by the Celts into our affairs here. Trade with the local tribes will go to Hades if we cannot guarantee the safe passage of goods through our territories. An armed mission to Hibernia is the only answer.' That was Lupus, his small piggy eyes glinting in the darkness of the tent.

'Of course, we cannot spare more than a single century for this outing. But eighty men should be enough to make our presence felt on that forsaken island. After all, what are those savages next to our highly-trained soldiers?' Thus spoke Maximus, his bony fingers twitching incessantly as he did so.

Lupus appeared so uncomfortable in the stifling heat that Tacitus wondered how he ever had tolerated the weather in their native Italy. 'It occurs to me,' he spoke, his face shiny with sweat, 'that we have but one man present who could do justice to such a task- the hero of Carthage, Gregorius Tacitus.'

Tacitus' blood ran cold. His fame since his North African heroics had caused him trouble on occasion in the past, but this mission to Hibernia struck him as some kind of plot. 'With all due respect, domines,' he began, 'a single century seems a trifle meager for the task at hand. The Celts-'

'The Celts are savages, and will be planned against as such,' said Maximus irritably. Tacitus growled beneath his breath- Maximus had not been present at the ambushes in north Alba, where the Hibernian Celts had wiped out entire garrisons. He remembered all too well the stark, terrifying figures emerging from the night as though they were part of it, tall and hairy maniacs who butchered trained soldiers as expertly as would a gladiator in the coliseum. But the moment had passed- Maximus and Lupus were already planning his next brush with the Hibernian hordes, and any further protesting would be interpreted as insubordination.

***

'It will be glorious, don't you think?' Tacitus' reminiscing was broken by the sudden appearance of Julius Agricola. 'When we have tamed this place as we have done with Brittania, the entire Northern Isles will stand as a testament to the power of Rome.' Agricola, a centurion himself, was as dark and intense as Tacitus was open and fair. His intrusion threw Jerius into a brief confusion; the short lieutenent became embarrassed and left, returning to his tent mumbling an excuse about starting breakfast.

'Imagine it, Tacitus,' continued Agricola, 'forests cleared, straight roads running the length of the island, and planned towns- all in territory which previously only nature had claimed as her own.' His tanned face flashed a smile in which there was no joy.

But by now the sun was high in the sky, and it was becoming more difficult to hide the particulars of their true situation. The castra, settled uneasily between the sea and the forest, was but a fly on the lion's lip of this impenetrable, unknown land. Besides the vague records of the Greek travelers from centuries ago, no civilized men had ever come this far northwest, and Tacitus was becoming painfully aware of their isolation. Now, looking at the green hell that lay before him, he felt as though the forest would swallow him up.

Jupiter, he thought, no empire will again try to tame this heathen land.

Our Lady's Hospital.

I went up the Lee Road a friend for to see,
They call it the mad house in Cork by the Lee.
But when I got up there the truth I do tell
They had the poor bugger locked up in a cell.
Johnny Jump Up, Cork folk song.

Christ, and people sometimes ask why I'm fascinated by Victorian shit- growing up in a town where this Gothic monstrosity glowers down upon all and sundry from atop its gloomy hill! If ever there was a place that was haunted, it's Our Lady's Hospital on the Lee Road. It's a (partly abandoned) real-life Victorian asylum complete with sinister towers, belfries and circling ravens. Even on a bright cheerful morning, this place oozes a delicious malevolence. It's positively eldritch, as Lovecraft would say (ever notice how the word eldritch is only ever used when talking about Lovecraft?). Our Lady's is famously the longest building in Ireland, at nearly a mile in length. Cork people often refer to the entire structure as St. Anne's, and they also tend not to diffrentiate between the grey section, Our Lady's (which is today partly renovated as apartments) and the red section, St. Kevin's, which is out-and-out abandoned.

The grey part of the building (the long part) was built in 1852 as Eglinton Lunatic Asylum, a Gothic-style building. It is situated atop the steep hill that runs alongside the Lee Road. From the asylum, there is a great view of the south side of the city. It continued to operate as an asylum under several different names before closing following almost a century of damning reports regarding the care of its patients. Today, about two thirds of it have been renovated as Atkins Hall.


You can see here where the disused wing begins...







This is St. Kevin's, the completely abandoned building. This is as close as I got on this occasion...

Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean

Who did you want to be when you were ten years old?

It isn’t a trivial question- you can tell much about someone based on who they admire. (For example, if it’s Jeremy Clarkson, then we’ve learned that this conversation is over). But there are different levels of ‘heroes’. I mean, in a very superficial way, most people wouldn’t mind being a rich heir(ess), and most guys have though at times that being Hugh Hefner would be pretty decent. But these fantasies satisfy merely the most shallow of our needs- they do not answer our burning needs to prove our worth or live meaningful lives- and what people find ‘meaningful’ will of course vary.

Some of my heroes include writers like Arthur Conan Doyle- those who created characters and ideas that have become a part of the public consciousness. But while I would be thrilled to be as talented as them, it isn’t their lives particularly that I would wish to emulate…

That lofty rank would be filled by characters like Percy Fawcett, Harry Price, Richard Burton, Tom Crean and David Livingstone- regardless of personal fame or success, they lived extraordinary lives, each endeavoring in his own way to push back the boundaries of knowledge. Whether they explored the forgotten corners of the world’s jungles or the borders of belief, they reminded us ordinary plebs that the world was a place that was still full of adventure; a place where fantastic things can still happen. Lost civilizations, haunted houses, cannibal tribes and giant anacondas- these are the things that make life worth living (or at least worth reading about).

My recent reading of the book Eastern Approaches has immediately catapulted its authur, Fitzroy Maclean, into this exclusive club. Good God, the man’s credentials are absolutely impeccable; it’s almost obscene that he hadn’t come to my attention previously. If even ten percent of what Maclean wrote about is true, the man was the greatest legend who ever blagged his way through a Soviet checkpoint- a real-life Flashman who seemed always to blunder onto the scene whenever epoch-making historical events were getting underway.

Eastern Approaches begins by chronicling Maclean’s exploits in the years immediately preceding World War 2. A member of the early 20th Century British aristocracy, he was already moving in notable circles (Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh were good friends of his) when his diplomatic career begun in Paris. Maclean immediately works his way into my good books by decrying his enviable lifestyle there as ‘boring’. Easy work, good pay, lots of high society champagne parties and warm summer nights on the Champs Elysee do become so tiresome, after all. So, to the amazement and delight of his supervisors, Maclean opts to be reposted to Moscow- something no British diplomat has ever willingly done. No real reason is given for this, except that he fancies a bit of adventure, and wants to find out a bit about the mysterious land of Uncle Joe.

After some time in Moscow, he decides to travel through the forbidden territories of Central Asia, which few Europeans had ever seen (especially since the birth of the USSR). Just for a bit of a laugh. Samarkand and Buhkara sound like exotic, difficult-to-get-to places, and this more than than justifies to him the dangerous journey he intends to take. I agree. This he achieves with an astonishing mix of bravado and luck. The NKVD (precursors to the KGB) follow him everywhere, but because he’s such a legend, their agents often become friendly with him (usually over a bottle of vodka, too). Maclean moves through the various ‘stans, avoiding the usual Soviet red tape by simply not informing the NKVD where his next destination is going to be, and by spoofing to border guards when necessary. This entire section of the book reads very like a real life version of Flashman at the Charge.

Maclean provides an absolutely fascinating document of Soviet life during the 1930’s. Though he deplores the Soviet system, he is never jingoistic or partronising. In fact, he pretty much never has to say a bad word about the Soviets, as the facts of the case speak for themselves- everywhere he goes, movement is restricted for both locals and foreigners, NKVD are an oppressive presence, peasants are relocated en masse and treated like prisoners, and shops are empty as food shortages are standard. He enjoys the company of pretty much every nationality he meets, having good things to say about Afghans, Tajiks, Uzbecs and other unfortunate citizens of the great Soviet experiment. And for an upper-class Brit, Maclean appears to have been remarkably laid-back, especially considering the time. Not a page goes by that he isn’t cheerfully slumming it over a bottle of vodka with a couple of Kyrg peasants in the back of a truck or train.

One other thing needs to be mentioned- Maclean occasionally notes the presence of attractive ladies he meets along the way. After noting them in the text however, they shortly fade form the narrative, seemingly without function. Is there something here that needs to be read between the lines? Something that the author couldn’t make overtly clear when the book was published? At these times I tend to turn to the only picture of Maclean included, at the front of the book-



-and then I just know he tapped that.

My absolute sole criticism of this portion of the book is that it contains one chapter so gripping and terrifying, it stops the narrative dead in its tracks- a detailed description of Stalin’s show trials. After much light-hearted bouncing about Central Asia, this chapter comes as a bit of a shocker. Maclean finally lets a more serious tone creep into his writing, which is fair enough given that he's dealing with one of the most blood-chilling aspects of Stalin's reign. Given a ringside seat, as it were, Maclean reports the trials lucidly and without colour. Former high-ranking Party officials are hauled bleary-eyed into the court to testisfy to absurd (and often impossible) crimes. According to this testiomony of the damned, the Soviet Party was riddled, almost from before its conception, with traitors and conspiracies. Any citizen who was ever known to have dealings with foreigners was a spy; every food shortage was deliberately caused by malicious inside jobs, not government mismanagement. Maclean's narrative deepens considerably here as he leaves high-spirited hijinks to one side and instead delivers a fascinating physocological deconstruction of the Soviet regime. He tries to explain how living in a state of constant terror and misinformation has made it possible that, in some horrible doublethink manner, the audience (and even the accused) actually do believe the absurd deceit they are constructing. Positively chilling.

After this exercise in real-life horror, the madcap central Asian backpacking that Maclean indulges in over the next few chapters seem a trifle thin.

Strangely, the other 2/3rds of the book didn't strike me as being quite as interesting. Perhaps if they had been published separately, they might have had more impact. Anyway, when World War 2 begins, Maclean turns down his position as a local politician, and sign up for the army. Despite his privileged background, he willingly joins as a private and gets sent to North Africa to fight against Rommel's troops. Cue lots of strangely repetitive missions sneaking into desert cities and bluffing past German and Italian troops.

After this, in a truly Flashman-esque move, Churchill himself asks Maclean to parachute into Bosnia to meet the mysterious Tito. Tito is the leader of the Partisans, a guerilla movement who are fighting the Nazi occupation. Trouble is, nobody outside Yugoslavia knows who Tito really is. When Maclean finally meets him, he is impressed by Tito's leadership skills and independent streak. Maclean hides out in the Yugoslav hills for several months, fighting with the Partisans and trying to talk Tito out of his Communist ideals. Again, Maclean does not come across as a condescending, jingoistic Brit- he really does respect Tito, and his fear of Communism is based on experience, not xenophobia.

Even if his WW2 adventures were less interesting to me than his Central Asian odyssey, Fitzroy Maclean is never less than entertaining, and he has solidified his position as one of the great characters of the 20th century.

To The Devil A Daughter- The Church, Moral Panics and Fighting Fantasy

So, it’s 2010, and the Church here in Ireland is in trouble once again following another peek by the government into the more unsavoury aspects of their track record. It’s another bout of (probably necessary) naming and shaming that has the whole country on a bit of a downer, this time because the recent revelations make it quite clear that knowledge of the crimes and corruption extended to the highest levels of the establishment, and can no longer be viewed as the actions of a few bad eggs.

As I’ve noted before (when writing about the TV show Father Ted), allegations of improper conduct by Irish priests on a mass scale first came out in the 1990’s. Prior to this, the Irish public, somewhat conditioned by the decades of virtual Church rule, were slow to criticize or speak out against them. But once the first scandal erupted, hundreds more followed, as if some infernal floodgate of misery and suffering had been opened. Suddenly, people who had been abused, often many years ago, were everywhere. If you followed the story based on media coverage alone, it seemed as though there must hardly have been a one decent priest in the whole country.

Does this pattern sound familiar?

Firstly, I’d like to state that I’m not particularly inclined towards or against the Church. In this day and age, they are quickly becoming a somewhat irrelevant and powerless institution as far as many forward-thinking Irish people are concerned. So while I’m glad they no longer run the show, neither do I believe that they're all necessarily bad people.

I’m not particularly concerned in this article with whether or not the majority of Church scandals are based on real happenings (at the moment it certainly seems as though they are, unfortunately). What I am concerned with is how the pattern of Church scandals matches several other events that have occurred in the past.

‘Moral panic’ is the term given to those occasions in which the public and the media create a lot of hype over some new ‘threat’ to society. Typically, a fear will arise and very quickly spread, concerning some danger that was not present (or not known) previously. Large numbers of people will report having come into contact with this new threat. Sometimes the threat is real, but there are a surprising number of cases in which the moral panic was revealed to be ‘much ado about nothing’.

Some examples-

When I was a child in the early 90’s, there was a brief concern about child abductors who traveled in a white van. Children were warned not to talk to anyone who drove a white van- I remember being unable to understand why anyone would use this highly distinctive m. o. if everyone knew about it! Far from being local-specific, this panic has also occurred in the US and Australia over several decades, making it also a kind of urban legend. No white-van child abductors were ever linked to any real cases, so either this story is a kind of Chinese whispers corruption of a true story, or else child abductors internationally like to behave very suspiciously when they're on the job.

Day care abuse- these cases involved the 'ritualised abuse' of children on a massive scale in Australia, New Zealand and the US in the early 1980's. Again, there was a single well-publicised case, followed by many more. 'Coercive' questioning techniques were frequently used to get appropriate testimony from children, which rapidly began to include some pretty extravagant claims. If these stories were true, then day-care centers across the world were involved in incredibly well-organised paedophelia, child prostitution, cannibalism, animal sacrifice, abduction and blood-drinking on a massive scale, which they frequently carried out in enormous secret underground chambers (that never materialised upon inspection), and all without being noticed until roughly 1982. Hmm.

Out of all cases, many concluded without convictions, while some accused persons spent years in jail before having their convictions overturned. While some real cases of paedophelia were uncovered, the hysteria that accompanied these cases elevated them to an almost mythical, all-powerful network of Satanists.

Satanic abuse- oh boy. It gets even more unbelievable here, as allegations of Satanic covens exploded across Canada and America in the wake of the book Michelle Remembers, published in 1980. Turns out that Michelle remembered quite a bit. The boundary between reality and fantasy became completely destroyed in some of these cases when psychiatrists begun use 'recovered memories' as a tool for uncovering past atrocities by these groups. And what stories the children spewed- I really couldn't do it justice here. Suffice it to say that it will enlarge your view of the possible; the possible lengths the human mind will go to in order to construct a false reality. I have no beef with hypnotherapy- practitioners today understand that what comes out of a patients mouth while they are 'under' are as likely to be a product of their fear or longing as a true memory- but in those days, it seems to have been used pretty irresponsibly.

It has been noted before that the victims in these cases are almost unanimously white, middle-class women. It's almost as if the most well-off section of American society decided that it needed a reason to feel sorry for itself and get attention. And listening to these womens' stories, it really is all about attention. They are always the centre of attention. Entire cults dedicated masses of time and energy organising complex and lengthy rituals just for them.

One web site cannily puts it-

But why have only the stars of the rituals come forward to tell their stories? Where are all the minions? Where is the third torch-bearer from the right? The handmaiden, the second banana, the also-ran? No one's come forward to say, "Yeah, it was my job to bring the snacks," or "I set up the sound system."

Is this really any different from the narcissistic roots of many other strange phenomena, such as alien abductions and contactee cases? It seems to be a fact that people who are profoundly ordinary, who may have known no real trauma in their lives, often manufacture their own dramas in which they are the stars (or the victims) in order to fill some subconscious void. And once some new 'treat' meme is released by word of mouth or the media, it can shape the form that these fantasies take.

The Halifax Slasher- probably the strangest, and most telling example of all. In Halifax, England in 1938, women began reporting attacks by a mallet-wielding man. Within one week of the first report, ten men and women claimed to have been attacked, many of them providing quite specific details about the assailant. But when one early victim admitted that he had inflicted his wounds himself and made up the story, others soon admitted that they had, independently, done the same thing. What does this strange tale tell us about the unconscious wish of the public to be 'involved' in a big story, whether pleasant or unpleasant?

It must be stated that in most of these cases, the ‘victims’ appeared to have themselves been convinced of the reality of the threat. They frequently exhibited fear, stress and other symptoms of psychological trauma. Moral panics are not frequently thought to be a simple case of fraud or hoaxing- on some subconscious level, the threat is real to the ‘victims’. So while I’m not saying that this is the case with the Catholic Church scandals, I certainly do find the parallels striking. Victims of clerical abuse, however, have never had dodgy 'memory regression' techniques used on them in order to bolster their claims, neither do their stories have that kind of 'me, me, me' touch about them.

So strong was the belief during the 1980’s of the existence of a vast satanic conspiracy that it left a noticeable mark on the popular culture of the time. Movies that ripped off the late 70’s Satanist-themed classics Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen flourished. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the 80’s remake of Dragnet certainly helped convince me at a young age that dodgy underground cults were an accepted reality. When Hollywood recently decided to re-create an ‘authentic’ early-80’s horror film with The House of the Devil, they chose for their subject a coven of Satanists who require a young girl to sacrifice. But my personal favourite cultural artifact of 80's Satanism panic was something else...

Someone very clever once said that the meeting of two minds is like the meeting of two chemical elements; if there is any reaction at all, both are changed forever. When the 80’s phenomena of Fighting Fantasy books and Satanic worship hysteria collided, the result was something that is still considered staggeringly inappropriate for children: House of Hell. Have a look-



I don’t know if anyone outside the Bible belt would consider this book inappropriate now; I certainly believe that a fascination for the macabre is a healthy interest in a young child. All the same, I don’t believe that this is the kind of book that would get greenlit now. At the time, even the name was considered beyond the pale- hence the publication of the book as House of Hades in America; obviously one mythical afterlife location was considered offensive while another was not. Though some of the artwork was admittadly strong stuff-



Most of the FF gamebooks take place in a Tolkien-esque fantasy world. House of Hell is the only one that takes place in the 'real world', ie, planet Earth circa the 1980's. The plot is a classic 'haunted house' set-up- the player's car breaks down in a remote area, and they enter a big ol' spooky house looking for a telephone. Instead, they find a host of horrors that trap them within the house. Most of the enemies in the game are classic stereotypical boogeymen- zombies, ghosts, vampirs, etc. But the main plot involves a group of Satanists (the word itself is not used, but c'mon, just look at the illustrations!). They dress in white robes with goat heads, and gather in covens to sacrifice young girls on altars. At the end, the heads of the manor turn into huge, cloven-footed demons, and the book distinctly mentions a smell of sulphur as he does so. The unspoken message is that this stuff is not just an invention of the author of a fantasy book, but in fact, by the consistency of such details, is based on aspects of the real world. ’s amazing to think that this version of ‘Satanism’ was taken so seriously at the time- was nobody aware that all of this stuff can basically be traced back to Dennis Wheatley in the 1930’s?

As a gamebook, House of Hell is notoriously difficult. The house itself is maze-like and the creature battles are cruelly difficult. I was slightly intimidated by it when playing as a youngster- even with the aid of self-drawn maps, I always felt as if the house was huge and unknowable, so cleverly was it designed. So punishing were it's traps and creatures that exploration was seldom rewarded. I still recall the feeling of being helplessly lost, opening doors blindly and waiting for some cruel executioner or hooded cultist to deal me the final blow.. Fans have been known to be unable to complete it after literally years of trying- and that’s scary enough even without the Satanism.

(Here's a link to an article by the great Mike Dash about an outbreak of Satanic Panic in Wales)

The Wolfman

Pity the poor lycanthrope. With no distinguished source material to draw upon, and no big-name author to place before the title, it seems the wolfman is barely holding onto his position among the monstrous big-hitters. Dracula and Frankenstein must shun him at parties. Hollywood has had to base their recent wolfman effort on the 1941 original, and though the charmingly low-tech practical-effects wolfman is present and correct, it isn't the 1940's feel that causes the viewer to howl.


Instead, it feels as though the filmmakers have taken a cheesy 70's Hammer script- a relic of a simpler time when certain tropes were not quite as hackneyed as they are today- and filmed it in 2009, with a decent budget and played absolutely straight. It's the only explanation for the way the film plays every single Victorian horror cliche without irony and without any attempt to present them in any new way.

Decaying Gothic mansion? Check. Fair enough. Fog-shrouded moors? Check. That's allright, too. But in the same movie as mystic gypsies, torch-wielding superstitious villagers and cruel Victorian asylum 'scientists'?

Damn, I'm making this sound like the greatest movie ever. Any film containing such a cornucopia of treats should be a winner. But believe me- whatever you have in your head right now is almost certainly a thousand times more entertaining than the Wolfman actually is. There's something about how these elements are presented- I feel they would only work if the audience had absolutely never seen a horror movie (or a Saturday morning cartoon, which is where most of these elements now belong) before. Maybe if this movie had been made in 1941, or in 1971, it would have been a masterpiece, its strong visual style setting trends for decades to come. But The Wolfman instead trots out time-worn plotlines and expects us to be affected by them.

Ditto for the dialogue- maybe I'm just close-minded, but I feel as though the day has passed when you can put such downright corny words into a script and still play it straight. When Anthony Hopkins first appears (wearing a hideous tiger-skin jacket that in no way telegraphs the later 'revelation' of his bestial nature) to greet his recently returned son, I literally begged him not to quote 'the Prodigal son returns'. Just as he said it. The film is full of moments where you think 'ah, now if this were a cheesy movie made before 1979, they would say X here'- and The Wolfman never disappoints. As soon as Emily Blunt is shown researching werewolf lore in a dusty library, we know that we're gonna be confronted with this:

































Yeah, so there hasn't been a werewolf movie made yet that doesn't feature this woodcut: So far, I've noted it in The Wolfman, The Howling, and the X-Files episode 'Shapes'. But usually the pain is eased somewhat by having it introduced by Dick Miller (everything is better with Dick Miller).

The key to where it all goes really wrong lies in the asylum scene. Del Toro, who knows by now what he has become, is being studied by a demented 'doctor'. He's one of those Victorian sadist scientists who thinks that the best way to cure dementia is to cut out the patients' brain, or dunk them in freezing water. This particular trope has been used in From Hell and other movies to great effect, but here, the scientist is a ridiculous cartoon character who understates the horror we should be feeling. He straps Del Toro into a chair before an audience of doctors and students, in order to prove that no transformation will take place when the moon turns full. Of course, Del Toro knows all too well what will happen, and his desperate pleading is taken as being no more than proof of his dementia. It ought to have been a tense, physchological scene with the scientists waiting to be proven right, and Del Toro (and the audience) waiting for the carnage they know is about to occur. Instead, everything happens in a rushed manner reminiscint of a music video. Del Toro is strapped in, he warns the scientists, the moon appears immediately, he wolfs out within seconds. The resulting violence (and it is a great scene) feels light and pointless because of the botched foreplay.

The Wolfman does look great- dark and brooding- but ultimately, this is another slick trick to distract the audience from the fact that there is no substance. The edits are cut so tight that the film seems afraid to linger on anything for more than a moment, as if aware of how hollow the plot is. And apart from some howlers (the dodgy-looking were-Gollum should never have got past the script stage), the use of CG is mostly used to augment the wolfman as he leaps about, while he is portrayed for the most part using practical effects. And if I haven't mentioned any characterisation yet, well, that's because there isn't any.