Here are 77 books that The Devil Is a Gentleman fans have personally recommended if you like
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It was not hard to grow up Goth in an old farmhouse in Norfolk, one of the most haunted counties in England. Age 11, when the Eighties began, I genuinely believed that ghosts, witches, and a demon dog called Old Shuck stalked this land. John Peel's radio show kept the night terrors at bay and replaced them with the music that became my passion. By 19, I was writing for Sounds and would meet and work with many of the bands and artists who saw me through that dread decade. Forty years on, this is my love letter to a most maligned and misunderstood genre – and why it still matters.
While the Ripper was abroad in Yorkshire, New York was stalked by its own phantom killer, Son of Sam, while its rapidly diminishing police force were otherwise engaged giving out leaflets entitled Welcome To Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors.
Abe Beame was Mayor over a burned-out necropolis of demolished buildings, crumbling infrastructure and tripling crime rates, a city President Gerald Ford told to "drop dead". This was the stage on which Lydia Lunch began her assault on the senses and sensibilities of her nation, at the tender age of 16.
Her account of not only surviving but grabbing every last moment of fun to be had in Fear City is rivalled only by mentor Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn as the ultimate in New York stories.
“Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst . . . [and] gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song."—Barbara Kruger, Artforum
Lydia Lunch relays in graphic detail the true psychic repercussions of sexual misadventure. From New York to London to New Orleans, Paradoxia is an uncensored, novelized account of one woman’s assault on men.
Lydia Lunch was the primary instigator of the No Wave Movement and the focal point of the Cinema of Transgression. A musician, writer, and photographer, she exposes the dark underbelly of passion confronting the…
I was born in 1954, the same year as rock and roll. I am a product of the era that spawned me. I was that kid at school who would rather read his music mags than his school books. Over a rich and varied career, I have turned those passions into my profession. I have been a singer in a band, a music journalist, a broadcaster with the BBC national radio network, and have had several music related books published by major publishers. I have also been an academic specialist in my field and have managed to turn all those lifelong interests into a Ph.D. and an M.Phil.
I like books that take me via the scenic route. If I’m reading a history of folk music, I don’t just want dry old discographies and lists of bands and their lineups. I want a living, breathing account of where this all came from and what the modern era has inherited.
I want to know about the collectors and archivists and famous composers like Vaughan Williams and Holst who went from town to town and village to village getting information from people of my Grandad’s age about the songs that were passed down to them through the generations. I want a sense of how this stuff is in the very soil and landscape we inhabit.
A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits - books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century.
Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day.
'A thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview for a long time.' GUARDIAN
'A perfectly timed, perfectly pitched alternative history of English folk music . . . wide-ranging, insightful, authoritative, thoroughly entertaining.' NEW STATESMAN
It was not hard to grow up Goth in an old farmhouse in Norfolk, one of the most haunted counties in England. Age 11, when the Eighties began, I genuinely believed that ghosts, witches, and a demon dog called Old Shuck stalked this land. John Peel's radio show kept the night terrors at bay and replaced them with the music that became my passion. By 19, I was writing for Sounds and would meet and work with many of the bands and artists who saw me through that dread decade. Forty years on, this is my love letter to a most maligned and misunderstood genre – and why it still matters.
No other book captures the darkness at the dawn of the Thatcher decade with such verisimilitude as David Peace's conjuring of its premier bogeyman, the Yorkshire Ripper, in the third of his Red Riding Quartet.
Perhaps that's because the author used his Goth record collection to transport him back to the places where these crimes were committed, at the time of his West Yorkshire youth. Songs like Siouxsie and the Banshees' 'Night Shift' and The Sisters of Mercy's 'Fix' summon back that fearful terrain, where 'cow' was a term of endearment for a woman and the use of hammers to the head a familiar sign of domestic abuse.
Detectives are revealed to be as deadly as their quarry, priests give benediction with nine-inch-nails and stone angels turn their heads away.
Nineteen Eighty Three's three intertwining storylines see the Quartet's central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head as BJ, the rent boy from Nineteen Seventy Four, the lawyer Big John Piggott - who's as near as you get to a hero in Peace's world - and Maurice Jobson, the senior cop whose career of corruption and brutality has set all this in motion, find themselves on a collision course that can only end in a terrible vengeance.
Nineteen Eighty Three is an epic tale which concluded an extraordinary body of work confirming Peace as the…
It was not hard to grow up Goth in an old farmhouse in Norfolk, one of the most haunted counties in England. Age 11, when the Eighties began, I genuinely believed that ghosts, witches, and a demon dog called Old Shuck stalked this land. John Peel's radio show kept the night terrors at bay and replaced them with the music that became my passion. By 19, I was writing for Sounds and would meet and work with many of the bands and artists who saw me through that dread decade. Forty years on, this is my love letter to a most maligned and misunderstood genre – and why it still matters.
The Manchester evoked by Joy Division and Barry Adamson's first band, Magazine, also entered the Eighties a ravaged post-industrial city, strafed first by the Luftwaffe and then its own planners, who erected Brutalist estates over its Victorian past.
The son of a white Mancunian mother and black Jamaican father, Adamson grew up in some of the worst of the city's social housing in the Hulme of the Sixties. Another Selby aficionado, Barry recounts the story his challenging childhood with a picaresque, magical realist flair.
Music offers both salvation and damnation – as he progresses through Magazine and into Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, so too do all his most self-sabotaging addictions, until death brings a reckoning and a salvation in the first fruit of his solo career, the LP Moss Side Story.
In Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars, the enigmatic Barry Adamson shines a probing light into his own heart of darkness.
Born in the black and white world of post-industrial Manchester, Adamson saw music as a chance to turn his world technicolour. Propelled into punk via Magazine, he was the founding bass player in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, before stumbling too far down a dark, drug-induced path.
Unflinchingly candid, Adamson steers the reader through a mix of harrowing, tragic, funny and often life-affirming straights. Throughout it all, music - be it bass lines, melodies or film…
I used to love Dennis Wheatley’s Satanic pulp fiction when I was about twelve—like a gateway drug—and graduated on to read my first Crowley biography a year or two later. I was gripped. As the years went by I developed what might seem like more serious interests in reading about psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and surrealism, but it’s really the same area. I used to think it was funny that the Dewey library system puts Freud and the occult next to each other, but now I see it makes perfect sense. It’s all about the mind, and inner experience, and Crowley remains one of its towering figures.
An atmospheric biography—a book you can curl up with—by British occultist King (not to be confused with the more ‘literary establishment’ Francis King, a respected gay novelist; our man sometimes called himself Francis X King to distinguish between them). King was a quietly eccentric character who had been traumatized by his experiences in the Korean War, and at one stage sold ice cream on Bournemouth beach. Steeped in the Golden Dawn tradition, his other books include works on alchemy, Western esotericism, tantra, and more, and he was a friend of Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke, who also wrote on those subjects. I’ve always had a soft spot for their charmingly old-school, gentlemanly style of bygone British occult scholarship.
I've had many professions over the years: theatrical stage technician, stage manager, scenic artist, teacher, writer, driver, husband, and father. I've always had a love for horror and fantasy stretching from the classic Gothic to the incredible worlds of Tolkien, Pratchett, and many more. I never set out to write, but I love the escapism and freedom that both reading and writing allows. I was a military child and having followed my father across Europe, I settled in the beautiful cathedral city of Lincoln, UK, which itself has its horror, hauntings, and history. Fantasy writing seemed to be the next stage of my development, combining macabre with the fascinating task of creating a fantastical world.
I love compilation books, as this style of book works fantastically well for horror. In a short period of time, you can be transported from London to the Black Forest, from deepest Africa to the frozen climes of the Arctic. This book does not disappoint in this respect, taking the reader on a discovery of differing locations and also styles of horror writing. As you read this book of David’s, he takes you through a deeply reflective journey of horror writing genres, from Lovecraft to Poe and beyond. With great artwork to boot. Utterly fantastic!
"I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this work to fans of Lovecraft, MR James, Algernon Blackwood et al as Tallerman can take his place amongst those, and other, master craftsmen of the dark tale." - Peter Sutton (Bristol Book Blog)
Written by David Tallerman and Illustrated by Duncan Kay, The Sign in the Moonlight Includes the original novelette, The War of the Rats, and 13 other haunting tales.
A doomed mountaineering expedition attempts the slopes of Kanchenjunga, following in the footsteps of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. A young soldier witnesses omens of another, vaster conflict in the ravaged trenches of the…
I read widely and in many genres, so coming up with a thematic list was a difficult task. However, in working on my forthcoming novel Dead Ends, in which a quiet neighborhood descends into paranoia and insanity driven by fear, politics, and technology, I sought out novels that engaged with conspiratorial thinking and violence. I admire writers who don’t hold back and fully engage with their characters and material, particularly if it means going to dark, imaginative and strange places in their work. Please keep an eye out for Dead Ends, coming from Flame Tree Press in 2023.
From bat-shit to actual shit, Dread in the Beast is one of the darkest dives into the bowels of humanity — literally. A work of horror centered around filth and foulness, Jacob’s brilliant work weaves a violent landscape with odes to Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, and pagan gods and goddesses. This isn’t a conspiracy novel, it's just a full-on dive into dark depths and that is one of the reasons it resonates so deeply: Jacob doesn’t hold back, not a bit. To experience an author so fully engage and let herself go into the darkness is as brilliant to behold as it is uncomfortable.
DREAD IN THE BEAST used to be a novella about the goddess of waste and the king of wasters. Now it is a novel, stuffed full of the gruesome and horrible. Taken from the mythologies and histories of humankind, it follows the trail of the Mother Spririt of the worst that the world is capable of producing. From the catacombs of ancient Rome where a blasphemous sect twisted the message of the early Christians--to modern America with its obsession with violence, deities and saints and the reincarnations of beasts battle over sublime and profane, where the very reasons for existence…
I have pursued escapism in all its forms for most of my life. From studying the otherworlds of ancient civilisations, especially in my native Britain, including Arthurian tales and those of the Welsh Mabinogion to the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia. I am lucky enough to live in the Snowdonia Mountains with a wealth of legends and myth-making landscapes on my doorstep. This led to a practical interest in The Western Mystery Tradition and from there an academic curiosity toward occult societies and their founders. I believe there is a distinct link between our spiritual morality and physical mortality that is worth exploring through experience.
Few people can claim the title The Wickedest Man in the World bestowed upon one of the most vilified and revered characters of the nineteenth century, Alistair Crowley.
Writer, mountain climber, occultist, and dare I say visionary, Crowley has rubbed shoulders with both literary giants and personalities of the early nineteen hundreds. A member of several secret societies and founder of his own Temple of Thelema and surrounded by some of the strangest characters one could hope to meet in a single lifetime.
This biography recounts passages from his own diaries and manuscripts bequeathed to the author after his death and anecdotes both funny and disturbing about a man who lived a most extraordinary life. Eventually dying in poverty at a rooming house in Brighton.
I used to love Dennis Wheatley’s Satanic pulp fiction when I was about twelve—like a gateway drug—and graduated on to read my first Crowley biography a year or two later. I was gripped. As the years went by I developed what might seem like more serious interests in reading about psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and surrealism, but it’s really the same area. I used to think it was funny that the Dewey library system puts Freud and the occult next to each other, but now I see it makes perfect sense. It’s all about the mind, and inner experience, and Crowley remains one of its towering figures.
The most serious and culturally informed of the modern biographies, but still enthusiastic and enjoyable. Sutin is particularly good on Crowley’s religious and political aspects, and it reads unmistakably like a book by what a friend of mine would call “a real grown-up,” which isn’t always the case with books on occult subjects. Sutin makes a strong case for Crowley’s importance and larger significance, and the book’s wider perspective can be gauged by the spread of his solid, quality books on other subjects, including Buddhism and Philip K Dick.
Do What Thou Wilt: An exploration into the life and works of a modern mystic, occultist, poet, mountaineer, and bisexual adventurer known to his contemporaries as "The Great Beast"
Aleister Crowley was a groundbreaking poet and an iconoclastic visionary whose literary and cultural legacy extends far beyond the limits of his notoriety as a practitioner of the occult arts.
Born in 1875 to devout Christian parents, young Aleister's devotion scarcely outlived his father, who died when the boy was twelve. He reached maturity in the boarding schools and brothels of Victorian England, trained to become a world-class mountain climber, and…
I used to love Dennis Wheatley’s Satanic pulp fiction when I was about twelve—like a gateway drug—and graduated on to read my first Crowley biography a year or two later. I was gripped. As the years went by I developed what might seem like more serious interests in reading about psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and surrealism, but it’s really the same area. I used to think it was funny that the Dewey library system puts Freud and the occult next to each other, but now I see it makes perfect sense. It’s all about the mind, and inner experience, and Crowley remains one of its towering figures.
A relaxed and urbane book by a man who could really write: Booth’s other work includes poetry and the acclaimed novel Hiroshima Joe, along with non-fiction on cannabis and opium, both very relevant to Crowley. It seems to speed up towards the end and has no source notes, which I thought might be because Booth was already racing against the cancer that killed him. Now I think it was just pressure of other work—he was prolific. I was at the launch when alcoholic Crowley disciple Gerald Suster, also a Crowley biographer and also now dead, staggered to his feet and began a rambling question with the Crowley greeting “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” to which Booth cordially replied “93!” The crowd had no idea what they were talking about.
Crowley advocated the practice of magick and encouraged his followers to create their own life styles and develop a keen self knowledge. He wrote many books on his subject and is still revered as the master of the dark arts with books and websites and followers all over the world. Martin Booth has used his skills as a biographer to encapsulate the man and his extraordinary life-style in a chilling tale of magic and intrigue.
