Black Static

No, come back those of you who read the title of this post and are now quick marching toward the exit. It's not about the Patron Saint of Pit Closures and her paramour.

It's about Dennis Wheatley. You know, the horror writer.

Back in the 60s, when the rest of the country was getting into The Beatles, I was getting into horror fiction (actually, I was getting into The Beatles as well, but this is not that sort of a blog).

There were several strands to my 'horror education'. The old Universal movies - Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the wealth of sequels - shown every Friday night, which my parents allowed me to stay up late and watch, because there was no school on a Saturday. H. P. Lovecraft's stories, one volume of which so freaked me out that I sleep walked with it into my parents' bedroom and left the book by the side of their bed, and another that I was reading all alone in the house one afternoon, and somebody outside was hammering in a stake or something, so that for a moment I really thought Great Cthulhu was coming to get me. (In parenthesis, some background information. We lived in a very large and old house, a couple of generations of the family under the same roof. One time I found a ouija board in one of the attic rooms, which my father took away from me with strict admonitions never to play with those things, and the family who owned the house after us did some renovation and discovered a sealed room which we'd had no idea was there with nothing inside of it except a framed photograph of Winston Churchill on the wall. Spooky.) TV series like The Munsters and The Addams' Family, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (and I religiously collected the bubble gum cards), and of course the gloriously gory Pan Books of Horror, which I paid other kids to steal for me from the local Woollies, as I was too much of a wooz to pinch stuff myself (I do hope the Statute of Limitations has expired on that one). Sundry volumes of 'true' ghost stories, one of which I was reading alone in a barn on a summer afternoon while working harvest for a local farmer and nearly wet myself when the farmer's daughter crept up on me from behind.

And then there was Dennis Wheatley.

Books like The Satanist, To the Devil, a Daughter and The Devil Rides Out were just the sort of thing the young Pete was looking for. Each one prefaced by a portentous warning about the perils of witchcraft and black magic, they had about them a sense of authenticity that was missing from my other reading material of the period (the other guys were just making things up, but Wheatley was a man who knew his garlic cloves). And there was the added attraction that most of them had healthy dollops of sex, which was something else my teenage self was developing an absorbing interest in and regarding which there wasn't an awful lot of information out there at the time. This was pre-sex education in schools and internet porn, and the nearest most of my generation came to a naked woman was a copy of Health & Efficiency passed round back of the cricket pavilion or lurid but rather nebulous fantasies about Emma Peel, so a racy scene or two in a Wheatley novel was very welcome to enquiring but prurient minds, though my adult self looks back and woefully shakes his head at the idea of sex education from such an eccentric source. The wonder is that most of us Wheatley babies didn't grow up with some very peculiar fetishes. Oh, wait a minute...

Of course, the Dennis Wheatley experience had more to offer than just the author's novels. Skipping forward into the 1970s, there was non-fiction book The Devil and All His Works, which I remember as being published in weekly instalments by Marshall Cavendish or someone similar, and then assembled in a free binder from the publisher, though I can't find any evidence online that this actually happened. Perhaps a decade later, I tried to get rid of the book and discovered that Oxfam charity shops won't accept just anything. And then there was the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, with publishers Sphere using Wheatley's name to get a whole raft of rare and classic titles out in paperback, including work by F. Marion Crawford, Aleister Crowley and Sax Rohmer among others.

But by now my interest in horror was temporarily on the wane. Science fiction and - *shudder* - literature had won my heart, and the Pans and the Wheatleys and anything else with a maggot infested severed head in a tin bucket or similar on the cover fell by the wayside. I wanted ray guns and robots, and women who were impressed by a guy who could (and still can) quote the opening passage from Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers and knew the titles of all the books Henry Miller read while living in Paris in the 30s. Ah, the pretensions of a twentysomething wannabe intellectual.

So skip forward a few more years, a whole decade this time, and in the summer of 1983 on a whim I decided to reacquaint myself with a lot of the writers I'd read in my teen years, and so picked up a copy of The Irish Witch by Dennis Wheatley, only to learn that Tom Wolfe was right and you never can go home again. By this stage in my life I was writing reviews (if only for my own eyes) of every book I read. Reading them now I can see that I described the book as 'a bitter disappointment' and that I had 'seldom encountered such limp and ineffective prose, almost too tedious to endure at times' while 'instead of letting events speak for themselves Wheatley clutters it all up with unnecessary historical and social dissertations, proof of the author's erudition if not of his literary craft'. My biggest criticism was reserved for the characters, especially hero Roger Brook - 'his marriage of convenience, his condescension to the lower classes, his concepts of honour, the respect in which others hold him, all leaves me cold'. I described him as a 'turd' and dismissed the book as 'horror for those who think farting at the vicarage tea party will put your immortal soul in jeopardy'. I had a mean pen back in those days.

And my suspicion is that these traits were always present in Wheatley's fiction, only my younger self didn't recognise them, or perhaps didn't care, which suggests that I should probably dismiss any thought of returning to his other books, The Devil Rides Out, The Satanist etc, in case precious memories get trampled on, but at the same time I'm almost certain that one day, time allowing, I will return to those books, even if I know the odds are the experience will not be a pleasant one. It's an itch you just have to scratch. I'm Pete Horror Guy once again, and to paraphrase Joe R. Lansdale, I will not flinch or look away.

Dennis Wheatley (1897 - 1977) - he sold a lot of books, more than fifty million according to some, made a lot of people happy and generally was a positive influence in the genre, but with his nationalist outlook and upper class air he was also very much a product of his time, and that time has gone.

And so too has the time for me to read and  review The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Dedalus hardback, 699pp, £25) by Phil Baker, which was released last October and must now slip gracefully off my radar, even if its subject never has and probably never will.