A Psychical Invasion by Algernon Blackwood

A Psychical Invasion
by Algernon Blackwood
1908

The first of the John Silence psychic/occult investigator stories.  A humorist takes hashish to explore the boundaries of laughter and ends up inviting an evil spirit.  Enter John Silence, psychic investigator.  He spends the night in the humorists house with a cat and dog.  Dogs are afraid of ghosts/psychic emanations, but cats like them.  The dog gets scared, the cat runs around, and at some point Silence hallucinates multiple cats.  He then later discovers that an executed criminal had lived there.  The End.

It's a testament to Blackwood's writing that the piece is so engaging and atmospheric, given that he literally is just watching his pets the entire story.  The whole enterprise had a very 60s psychedelic vibe, with the drugs and vibrations and such.

I just wish something actually happened.  Ghost stories are pretty tame to begin with, and when you swap out the implications of being trapped in a horrid afterlife with psychic vibrations, there's not a lot of scary stuff left.

Read for free on gutenberg.org

Print collection from Amazon

Satan's Seed - Chill 1 - Jory Sherman

Satan's Seed
Chill 1
by Jory Sherman
Pinnacle, 1978

I actually enjoyed a Chill novel!  If only for the reason that he actually does stuff in this one.  Goes to places, talks to people, has a seance, and does two exorcisms.

Chill is called to a ranch in California to investigate cattle mutilations that have graduated into child killings.  He brings assistant and "special lady" Laura Littlefawn, who is full blown psychic in this first installment - she seems notably depowered in later books.

We are introduced to a series of characters and are told via seance that one is the murderer.  I was expecting some Agatha Christie style stuff here, and I'd spoil it for you if I could figure out what the hell was going on.  It probably wasn't that complicated - just dumb enough that I didn't bother following it.

Chill performs a couple exorcisms, but instead of freeing their victims from possession, the rites cause their bodies to explode.  Which I'm not complaining about.

To remind you, Chill is an insufferable vegetarian, the kind that explains it to waitresses in patronizing detail.  He also brings up that he doesn't drink or smoke as often as he can.  Except for wine and beer.  And he does eat meat, just not meat from your kitchen.

The 2000 print on demand reprint was horribly packaged.  I'm actually glad I got the paperback, as it serves of an example of how horrible books look when certain conventions aren't followed.  Little things like a missing title page and having the page numbers on the top make a difference.  The blurb was barely readable, and included a review quote from "Buzzy" referencing a website that is now a malware site.  The quote reads like something you'd buy off fiverr from someone in Eastern Europe.

Available for Kindle, a titch pricier than it should be.

Read a sample.

Devil, Devil by Michael Avallone (Satan Sleuth 3)

Devil, Devil
by Michael Avallone
Satan Sleuth 3
1975 Warner Paperback

Philip St. George is the Satan Sleuth, another in a seemingly long line of useless occult detectives who end up doing more harm than good, though to be fair, given Avallone's idiosyncrasies, this may have been on purpose.

St. George is a pretty self-conscious Doc Savage homage, down to his bronze skin and hidden explosive buttons, and a magnificent schlong as Lester Dent only wished he could have described.  A wealthy adventurer, he dedicated himself to exposing fake occultist and satanic cults after his wife and child were murdered in the first book.

Here he faces a satanic cult of wealthy socialites, coerced by Sister Sorrow and kept in place through a series of human sacrifices.  And by face I mean get captured by and run away from.

House of Scorpions - Chill 6 - by Jory Sherman

House of Scorpions

Chill 6

by Jory Sherman

1980 Pinnacle Books

At this point I'm convinced that Sherman hates his protagonist Dr. Russell V Chillders and wants us to hate him too.  I mentioned in my review of Doctor Orient that there was a subgenre of occult investigators that rarely leave the house.  We've got that going on here in spades, with Chill being too lazy to pick up his own damn phone most of the time.

We start with Laura Littlefawn, Chill's half-Indian psychic assistant and not-quite love interest.  It's implied that they hook up now and again, but she doesn't let him know where she lives or what she does for her regular job, which is running a chain of Indian crafts like that episode of South Park.  I think they're supposed to have one of those undefined casual things those California people have.

Littlefawn has nightmares about scorpions and gets some scorpion charm sent to her, so she goes to Chill for help, who helps her by doing absolutely nothing for almost the entire book.  I think he mentions something about the astrological sign Scorpio, which is the sum total of occult investigating he does this time out.

We then meet our villain, a rather pathetic failed cult leader Dan Crooked Creek.  He seeks to lead his people back to the traditional ways of the Navajo and hates Littlefawn for being modern and western, the only native American to do so in 1980, evidently.  His cult now consists of one trashy teenage girl, Rowena, and he lives in a cave near her ranch house.

Doctor Orient

Doctor Orient
Doctor Orient 1
by Frank Lauria
Bantam Books 1974

Occult detectives have been around since the 1850s, and have continued into the modern era with the likes of Kolchak the Night Stalker and the X-Files.  Doctor Orient is in the subcategory that a lot of early Doctor Strange comics are in - the occult detective that doesn't leave the house.

Occult has a posse, mostly students developing psychic abilities.  There's Claude Levi, dentist and hypnotist; Argyle Simpson, actor and adventurer; Hap Prentice, baseball player and mindreader; the open minded Catholic Bishop Redson, and sassy secretary Sordi.

They're up against Susej, a pseudo-Satanic cult leader and former priest who serves the Clear One.  Susej increases his power through human sacrifice and the devotion of talk show viewers that witness his miraculous healing powers.

Most of the action takes place in some incorporeal form.  Dreams, visions, the astral plane, or some other metaphoric space.  Simpson has the decency to leave the house and get captured, the most anyone does in the whole book.  The rest is all fasting, meditation, and watching TV.  Lots of TV.

Everything is tossed into the mix here.  Psychic powers, astral travel, I Ching, exorcism, voodoo, reincarnation, even poltergeists.  It all has a very 70s charm to it all, I just wish they'd leave the house more.