P. Saxon - Satan's Child

[Dr Terror]

www.trashfiction.co.uk/satans_child.html

If you have this one sitting in your to be read pile, I'd venture to say: move it to the top!

[severance]

Satan's Child - Peter Saxon - Mayflower 1967, Lancer 1968, Five Star 1972

In the village of Kimskerchan, Scotland, sometime in the mid 1700s (this is a guess as there are no actual dates, but I'm assuming its somewhere between the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the French Revolution of 1789) a young woman, Elspet Malcolm, is accused of witchcraft by her husband, hauled naked through the streets, and burnt at the stake by the male half of the village. All the females are in their houses, though that doesn't stop the instigators of the original rumours from getting a good view - "I aye thocht she had bigger diddies". Crucially to further events, her two young children Iain (13) and Morag (11)are made to watch, whereupon they decide to run away, and who can blame them. Unfortunately their father returns while they're still packing, and during an attempted rape of Morag, Iain leaves him for dead after attacking him with an axe. Iain and Morag then run off, and after leaving his sister in the care of a family in Glasgow, Iain enters the world of the occult, travelling all over the world always seeking to gain more knowledge and power, to enable him to exact his revenge on all those in the village he deems most responsible fof the murder of his mother.

There then follows a sequence of vignettes in which Iain first toys with his victims psychologically, before dispatching them physically, in various imaginative ways. To one avaricious farmer he appears as a huge black bull - unfortunately for the farmer, and the cows, his dreams of putting the bull to stud are dashed when he finds out the bull is just a little too big While the denouement of a couple is a little predictable, the sequence where Iain goes after the Reverend Donald Finlay is quite superb.

All in all, Satan's Child is another excellent Peter Saxon (this particular one being a Wilfred McNeilly, I think, it gets confusing...) that just cries out to have been filmed - think of a cross between Witchfinder General and Theatre of Blood and you won't be too far wrong.

[franklinmarsh]

Jul 15, 2008 19:01:57 GMT severance said:

- think of a cross between Witchfinder General and Theatre of Blood and you won't be too far wrong.

If that ain't a recommendation I don't know what is!

[Johnlprobert]

Abso-bloody-lutely.

I want my copy now!

[dem bones]

Not a patch on that superb Mayflower cover, but here's the Five Star cover from 1972.

Peter Saxon - Satan's Child (Five Star, 1973)

Blurb:
SEEDLING FROM HELL!

The folk of Kinskerchan were averse to Elspet Malcolm's tempting beauty. They gloated as her husband lashed her raw. Then they burned her at the stake - mindless, in their godly work, of the son who added his own screams to his mother's final agonies ...

lain Malcolm would leave that Scottish village, to sit at the feet of Himalayan masters and perhaps never to return. Yet something appeared in Kinskerchan - a thing of ghastly, ever-changing shapes - to exact a weird and terrible vengeance, one by one, on the murderers of Elspet Malcolm. It was a beautiful - and evil - woman. It was a raging bull. It was a marauding tiger. But to Pricker Gill, the last to await his fate, it was none of these ... it was the spawn of the devil straight from Hell!

Made a start on this last night, and there's no messing about. The early chapters, centered around Elspet's burning and the events leading up to it, make for the most brutal opening to any Saxon I've read since that nasty business with the white hot iron throne in Vampire's Moon. Already detest all but one of the villagers (Alex 'Auld Humpy' Cameron who slipped the condemned woman a horseball of opium) - Elspet's husband, the conniving witch-finder and the gaggle of vindictive womenfolk being perhaps the worst of a particularly repulsive bunch. "Perhaps that was the more evil thing that was done on that day, that the children were made to watch." McNeilly knows how to lay it on with a trowel! Breathe again, The Avengers, The Amityville Horror, Captain Scarlet & The Mysterons, Kim Newman and whatever other unputdownable stuff i've started recently, this is now my 100% book on the go.

[dem bones]

Have to agree with Charles and Sev here, Satan's Child is terrific, horrible, tightly plotted fun from start to finish. The vignette upon vignette approach is very much the method James Herbert would later adopt for his pulpiest novels and the scene where Angus MacIntyre's prize bull of the unfeasibly huge dick goes on the rampage versus the unlovely farmer and his wife even reads a bit like something out of The Fog. The admittedly contrived ending didn't come as any huge disappointment, mainly because the one I'd anticipated was far worse, and McNeilly manages to work in a completely unnecessary piece of unpleasantness in the church at the same time. I'm no idea how much macabre literature he read, but i'm guessing a fair bit as there are several references to "factual" cases, while the episode set in the French dungeon where the retired Pricker Gill is pressed into examining a suspected witch is a much-improved revamp of R. Anthony's The Witch-Baiter from Weird Tales/ Not At Night. Very recommended!