“it is hard to imagine the planning of the mandrill, except by a malignant fiend”

EJ Sullivan
The Grotesque (from Form issue one, 1916. Edited by Austin Osman Spare & Frederick Carter)

As reported in Phil Baker’s Austin Osman Spare - The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist

Arthur Machen says it best:

He and his father seemed to pass down an avenue of jeers and contempt, and contempt from such animals as these! This putrid filth, moulded into human shape, made only to fawn on the rich and beslaver them, thinking no foulness too foul if it were done in honour of those in power and authority; and no refined cruelty of contempt too cruel if it were contempt of the poor and humble and oppressed; it was to this obscene and ghastly throng that he was something to be pointed at. And these men and women spoke of sacred things, and knelt before the awful altar of God, before the altar of tremendous fire, surrounded as they professed by Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven; and in their very church they had one aisle for the rich and another for the poor. And the species was not peculiar to Caermaen; the rich business men in London and the successful brother author were probably amusing themselves at the expense of the poor struggling creature they had injured and wounded; just as the “healthy” boy had burst into a great laugh when the miserable sick cat cried out in bitter agony, and trailed its limbs slowly, as it crept away to die. Lucian looked into his own life and his own will; he saw that in spite of his follies, and his want of success, he had not been consciously malignant, he had never deliberately aided in oppression, or looked on it with enjoyment and approval, and he felt that when he lay dead beneath the earth, eaten by swarming worms, he would be in a purer company than now, when he lived amongst human creatures.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I remember seeing this book laid out on a table of half-price bargains downstairs in the big Easons in Dublin when I was ten or eleven.  I was there with my dad.  I’d already read his tattered copy of Alan and Sally Landsburg’s In Search Of Myths and Monsters so this was right up my street. That was over twenty years ago. I can’t remember why I didn’t buy it, or at least try to pester him into buying it for me.

I’ve had that cover image lodged in my brain since that day and I don’t think a month has gone by that I haven’t thought of it and wondered what it was called.

I found the picture while reading about the sad news of John A. Keel’s death on Cryptomundo.  You’ve probably seen the film based on Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies. I had no idea he’d also written the book that has tormented me for twenty odd years.

But now I know. To ebay!

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

Before this the only Chomsky book I’d (attempted to) read was Fateful Triangle.  That was a bit bloated and dry but this one is excellent.

A close and worthwhile look at the smegma festering beneath the wizened patriotic foreskin of Imperial America.

Steve Aylett’s biography of pulp sci-fi author Jeff Lint. Ye fucking gods, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Three random lines . . .

Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories.

Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.

The cover of that issue showed an oriental magician beckoning some sort of horned kangaroo out a sewage outlet.

It is a masterpiece, worthy of the great man at it’s heart.

This is the cover to the UK edition.