|
Post by severance on Oct 21, 2007 11:25:25 GMT
The bloody scanner won't scan at the momemt, so you'll have to go to the gallery for a cover shot that reminds me of Enya for some reason.
Black Honey starts off gruesomely enough with a white family, husband, wife and 18-month-old daughter, being forced from their Rhodesian home by black assailants. (This book was written in 1968 and mentions the Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union's campaign to gain independence from white rule at the time) In a particularly nasty ceremony the parents are crucified upside down, before having their throats cut and the blood collected. The child is beheaded and the blood is poured over the mummified corpse of M'fo - the most powerful witch doctor Africa has ever seen - who has been asleep for five hundred years since his battle with Kang, the God of Lightning. In a scene reminiscent of Dracula - Prince of Darkness the blood brings M'fo back to life, all six foot six of him, with a white streak in his hair. The collected blood is then drunk by the assembled disciples and the child's flesh is eaten.
From this scene we next turn to Cornwall where a bunch of hard-drinking London journalists, working for the rag The Sunday Echo are on a mission to expose what they think is a paedophile. Richard Trevithick, 55, lives in Gorse House, Bastow, with his 19-year-old blonde ward, Honey, and has done so since she was fourteen. Her fourteen year-old sister also is a visitor. The journalists uncover the fact that Trevithick was forced to move from London due to some undisclosed scandal several years earlier - so the investigation is underway as only Sunday rags, then and now, know how to do.
I was hoping this would be as good as the four Guardians novels I've read, unfortunately it only just reaches the lower heights of The Torturer. The adherents of the occult - M'fo, Honey and Trevithick - seem particularly ineffectual for most of the novel, and large tracts of it are taken up by hordes of journalists drinking excessively. I don't think I've ever read a novel where quite so much alcohol is consumed, every other scene seems to be set in a pub or hotel bar.
So overall, a bit of a disappointment, but it's Peter Saxon (this time by Stephen D. Frances) after all, so it's still worth getting.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Oct 6, 2011 18:42:32 GMT
four years on and finally i can oblige! Peter Saxon - Black Honey (Five Star, 1972) Blurb She was a teenager, beautiful, seductive ... and unimaginably evil. She cast a spell of black magic on men, and seduced them into the gruesome sect with which she had crossed her own blood.
This spine-chilling story begins in Africa with the throbbing drums of ceremonial witchcraft, a double human-sacrifice, and the resurrection of a past-master of evil ...
It ends where it continues . . . in England, where a monstrously-evil sect centred in an innocent-looking country-house perpetrates its twin-doctrines of ritual sex and death by torture.
This insidious creed is intended to engulf a nation - and only a few newspapermen are awake to its dangers ...things have been so deathly quiet on the pulp front of late, so was well made up to spot a copy of this going for £1 at Spitalfields Market this morning - the only paperback on the entire stall, too! as with all the best Saxons it starts at breakneck pace: before you're through the first page, a white family have been spirited away by black tribesmen following a lightening fast home invasion and, Saxon, assures us, their friends will never see them alive again. will be getting properly stuck in to this over the weekend.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Oct 7, 2011 17:44:12 GMT
Five chapters down. Sev has done such a neat job on summarising events to date that there's really very little i can add. Frances, or whoever is responsible * gets the ball rolling with a nice grisly execution by torture before an audience almost demented with "vile joy." Whereas GNS or any one of the Hamlyn Nasty guys would have devoted at least a chapter of gloating, intricate detail, Saxon only needs a few words to leave you in no doubt which part of Mr. Carter's anatomy just got toasted over the fire. Then it's the turn of the infant Elizabeth, whose blood successfully revives the mummified remains of M'Fo, the five centuries dead witch-doctor with a distinctive hair-style (see also McNeilly's 'The Specialist')
Cut to Bastow, Cornwall. Tim Dooley, a middle-aged former war correspondent and gun-runner, now a disreputable hack on The Sunday Echo, and photographer Barney Twiss, "the wiliest, toughest, most practised intruder on private grief in the business", are researching a Sin, Sex & Satanism-style exposé centring around the activities of Richard Trevithick and his glam housekeeper Linda 'Honey' Merrill. Originally they were a three piece, but Jimmy Soames, a callow,"mentally disturbed" provincial journalist has gone missing from his Wimpole Street nursing home (we're not sure how he wound up there, but he was following up on the witchcraft angle at the time). Can't help but like Dooley and Twiss because they come on like the sleazy version of Peter Haining & A. V. Sellwood in their 'non-fiction' classic Devil Worship In Britain! It's true that they get in their fair share of boozing (Len, the guv'nor of Bastow's The Kings Head is good for a lock-in) but that seems to have been mandatory for Fleet Street's slimiest (and New English Library authors & staff) of the day.
* Sev, i note you credit this to Stephen D. Frances in the post above and W. Howard Baker in the Peter Saxon Horror Bibliography. Shows you how much i know because my guess would have been Wilfred McNeilly and i'm no longer even sure why!
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Oct 9, 2011 19:22:05 GMT
"He hunched over the counter and contemplated the comfortable contours of Bessie, the barmaid, bending for a bottle of beer ..."
What i said about Johnny Soames above. It's a load of rubbish. He's still with us but Honey has designs on him, and it's looking like the bulk of the novel is devoted to the chain of events that lead to his breakdown.
Even to an experienced pro like Dooley there's now little question that Trevithick and his cronies are heavily involved in mumbo jumbo. As part of the investigation, he pays an eventful visit to Mrs. Vizard, a walnut faced, proper witch bent crooked with age, whose coven hails back to the Druids. On his way to her cottage, he's panicked by a glaring, black face seemingly hovering in the bushes. Mrs Vizard warns that he is in dreadful peril. It's hardly a confidence booster when she's murdered by supernatural means shortly afterward.
Back in The King's Arms, Soames is hitting the beer, ogling Bessie the barmaid and generally trying to fit in with the Fleet Street superstars. In walks Honey, "rounded and stacked in all the right places, her whole body seemed to say 'take me now'." Her body isn't bluffing. Soames is ensnared.
A breakthrough in the Trevithick story. Miss Janet Goodwin, typist, comes forward to denounce the Satanist to The Sunday Echo. Dooley, Twiss, Soames and Peter Pound, a big shot from the London office, confront their prey at his luxury dwelling. Honey's father, old man Merrill tags along for the opportunity to tell Trevithick he's a sex pervert who has not only turned Honey's head, he's now trying to corrupt his other daughter, fourteen year old Jennifer. The interview is terminated abruptly when Miss Goodwin launches herself at Trevithick and as good as claws his eyes out. Honey screams obscenities. Twiss gets plenty of juicy photo's. The The Sunday Echo runs the story on its front page under the screaming banner headline Shame!. The hacks are still congratulating themselves when a drunken Honey burst into The King's Head and breaks the news that Trevithick has thrown himself off a cliff. She threatens to kill loverboy Soames who she holds entirely responsible.
The reporters head back to Fleet Street and their local, The Hand In Hand. Echo editor Percy Langton is impressed enough with Soames to add him to the payroll and the youngster, badly shaken by the outcome of his breakthrough story, swears he'll never return home to Bastow. Dooley sets him up digs with Bridget McKay, a young reporter of his acquaintance, and the two hit it off. All is well until Honey waltzes into The Hand In Hand and effortlessly seduces Soames a second time, just as Bridget learns she's pregnant. A sneering Honey torments her rival to suicide.
Meanwhile, a delegation from Africa arrives in London, fronted by mystery man Kwame Obahi, who has come out of nowhere to unite an entire continent. Striking looking chap. Has a white streak in his hair. He doesn't have a single original thought in his head and yet his empty platitudes win him a standing ovation wherever he speaks. "He seems to hypnotise every audience he has. He's even done it to a bunch of back-bench Tories, and you know what they think about our black brothers", marvels one seasoned hack. Percy Langton goes as far as to compare him to "a sort of Billy Graham with boot polish."
sixty pages of high octane boozing to go ...
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Oct 10, 2011 18:15:23 GMT
Dooley masquerading as Stanley Watson, a lecherous travelling rep for a drug firm, angles himself an invite to the Satanist's swingers party/ Virgin Witch cast reunion off Park Lane. Hardly through the door and the assembled begin peeling off, the Fleet Street hack obliged to join them.
"Honey was the only one improved by being naked. The others, pot-bellying, sagging, loose-fleshed, were good arguments for tailors.
Dooley's sex-life had been active and varied. He had been to orgies before. But he did not care for this. Most of the people, he thought, were mentally sick.
Others came in; he recognised a junior minister and a perennial starlet with a phenomenal bust which should never have been seen unsupported.
The butler — immaculate and supercilious in tail coat — erected a small cinema screen and portable projector, and when the lights were out showed some amateurish blue films. From the exclamations and other sounds coming from the blackness around him, Dooley gathered that these had a fairly aphrodisiac effect on some of the company and even, he was surprised to note, on Honey, whom he could dimly-see reclining between a man and a woman."
By now, i'd say there's a fair chance our Globeswatch contingent are on the verge of doing thereselves an unfortunate, so all the more inexcusable that Saxon should end on a cripplingly lame:
"There is little point in describing the inevitable progress of the party.
Choked! Dooley gets Honey back to his place and slips her a cocktail of brandy, rohypnol and truth drugs. He wants to know her true intentions toward the cub reporter and, as suspected, they're still murderous.
Dooley breaks his news to Johnny Soames. The youngster is madly in lust with Honey but he also realises there's truth in what the veteran hack has to say. Honey has inveigled him into the black witch cult and some of the things he's been obliged to participate in - blasphemy, desecration of religious objects - strike him as revolting. He calls on her while she's having a bath and has it out with her. Honey rises imperiously from the soap suds and snarls that yes, its all true. She detests him and Kwame Obahi/ M'fo is going to slowly destroy him!
The attacks begin. M'Fo unleashes dead, jelly-like entities versus the Fleet Street boys. Soames goes gaga and Dooley leaves him in the care of a doctor pal with his own private sanatorium ....
one more session should do it.
|
|
|
Post by severance on Oct 11, 2011 10:22:04 GMT
Bloody hell Dem, your blow-by-blow account makes this sound a lot more entertaining than my faint recollections of it remember it being As far as accreditations go, these things seem to change where Saxon is concerned. Steve Holland says it's not a Frances, so I'll go with that. It reads more like a Baker to me than a McNeilly, Baker tended to be more hard-boiled I've found.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Oct 13, 2011 11:46:38 GMT
All finished now, and i've no hesitation in recommending that, should you find Black Honey hanging around a second hand bookshop, car boot sale, etc., pick her up and take her home for keeps. A deceptively slow first few chapters but don't be put off - by the end WHB (?) has hit us with the works: Witchcraft & black sorcery, Satanists "doing unprintable things to themselves", body-snatching, a pitchfork murder, child sacrifice, an upside down crucifixion or three, a maggot-infested walking corpse, minor bad sex orgies, etc., and all washed down with gallons and gallons of hard spirits. For once, the Satanists are portrayed as intelligent and genuinely dangerous as opposed to big girl's blouses giving it 'menacing' stares and precious little else, and, incredibly for a Saxon horror, even the ending rules. It would all make for an excellent Brit horror flick. That earlier mention of Haining & Sellwood's hysterical Devil Worship In Britain is maybe less wide of the mark than the bulk of my attempts at citing comparable material. Passages like the following could easily have come from the earlier pulp masterpiece (still my all time favourite witchcraft & black magic non-fiction title) ""there would be a paragraph in the local paper, perhaps even in the nationals. But it wouldn't be very unusual news.
For there was barely a month went past in Christian Britain without reports of a churchyard being sacrilegiously being broken into, desecrated and despoiled by followers of the Devil."pulp culture moments to watch for include references to The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Edgar Allan Poe (specifically The Premature Burial) very recommended!
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jun 7, 2023 10:45:00 GMT
Peter Saxon - Black Honey (Mayflower, 1968, 157 pages)
|
|