Most people I know love a good ghost story, and I think that extends to people I don’t know, as well. The ghost story seems to be universal. Whether or not you believe in spirits of the dead, a good ghost story told in the right setting can make you jumpy, give you gooseflesh and make the darkness a menacing thing even if it’s in a familiar room. I know people who don’t like other kinds of horror fiction or movies who enjoy a good ghost story. I’m not sure precisely what it is about them that is so effective for so many, but ghost stories seem to chill us in ways that no other horror subgenre can.
The first horror movie I ever saw was a ghost story. William Castle’s 13 Ghosts showed me that being scared could be fun. I couldn’t have been older than five when my cousin, who was a couple of years older than I and lived next door, rushed over to get me. “You gotta see this thing on TV!” he said, barely able to contain himself. “It’s got ghosts and a haunted house and a hidden treasure and — just c’mon!” He practically dragged me to his house. I sat down in front of his TV, watched for a while, and my little skull nearly exploded all over my aunt’s furniture. There was a guy on TV wearing special glasses that allowed him to see ghosts — What a great idea! Where can I get some? — and he was in his basement watching ghostly, floating skeletons burst into flame! And later, his son puts on the glasses and watches a headless man try to tame a lion — a ghost lion! I mean, how cool is that?
Some of the most terrifying horror fiction and movies have been ghost stories. Among my favorites are Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, which became Robert Wise’s brilliant less-is-more 1963 film The Haunting (I like to pretend that the 1999 movie never happened), Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House and the 1973 film adaptation, John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House, Stephen King’s novel The Shining, and the 1982 hit Poltergeist. These books and movies are only a few examples, but they are capable of making me actually feel physically cold, the kind of cold that requires a blanket. They're all haunted house tales, the most common and popular kind of ghost story, although ghosts can pop up anywhere in fiction and film.
For years, I’d been wanting to use in my writing an experience I had in the early 1990s, but I hadn’t figured out how. Sometime in 2005, it occurred to me that in more than 20 years of writing horror novels, I’d never written a ghost story, and I decided to remedy that by drawing on that experience. The result was The Loveliest Dead.
I was hired to write a book called In A Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting. A version of that later became a re-enacted docudrama on the Discovery Channel called A Haunting in Connecticut, and still later, a 2009 movie called The Haunting in Connecticut. It was the story of a family, Al and Carmen Snedeker and their children, who moved into a former funeral home allegedly infested with demons with a fondness for anal rape. How did they know the house was infested with demons? They asked the experts — “demonologist” Ed Warren and his “clairvoyant” wife Lorraine. I took the job because I was familiar with the Warrens. As a boy, I used to read of their adventures in the National Enquirer and found them spooky and entertaining, and they were involved with The Amityville Horror. I thought it would be fun to meet them and work on their book.
In their role as paranormal experts, the Warrens relied heavily on their Catholic faith and the teachings of Christianity to back up all of their conclusions and claims and were rather pious about it. But off the job, they were quite different. He was loud and foul-mouthed and became enraged if any of his claims were questioned, no matter how delicately, and she was gossipy, catty and took any disbelief in their work as a personal attack and responded accordingly. When I had trouble getting the stories of the individual family members to mesh, I asked Ed for advice. He said, “They’re crazy. All the people who come to us are crazy. Just use what you can and make the rest up. You write scary books, right? That’s why we hired you. Just make it up and make it scary.” They claimed to have video tape of some of the supernatural incidents that happened in the former funeral home in Connecticut and told me about it at length, repeatedly promising to provide me with a copy. But I never saw the tape because they claimed they couldn’t find it. They’d been doing this for more than 30 years, they allegedly had video evidence of actual supernatural activity — and they misplaced it. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Ed and Lorraine gave me a tour of the "occult museum” attached to their house, but they wouldn’t do it until after dark because ... well, it’s scarier after dark. The museum is at the end of a long, dark, narrow passageway, a room filled with alleged artifacts from cases they’d worked on, things like possessed dolls and objects supposedly used in Satanic rituals. Ed was my tour guide and his spiel was as accomplished as that of any veteran carny. The whole thing was designed to frighten, just like a good ghost story told around a campfire. Ed and Lorraine and I were in the same business — scaring people. The difference was that I happily admitted that my stories were fictional while they did everything they could to convince people theirs were accurate accounts of things that had actually happened when they knew perfectly well they were not. In short, they were rank frauds and they exploited troubled families in the course of their work.
In the case of In A Dark Place, Ed and Lorraine Warren exploited the Snedekers, a family dealing with some serious problems like drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse — but they were a family who wanted to be exploited. They welcomed it! Everyone involved was eager to make a book deal, and then, with luck, a movie deal. While I was with them in Connecticut, Carmen Snedeker — who was running an illegal interstate lottery operation that she was afraid I would reveal in the book — repeatedly asked me how much I thought they could make from a movie deal. The Snedekers needed help, but not the kind the Warrens were offering. After the experience, I talked with another horror writer who’d been hired to write a book for the Warrens and his experience mirrored mine. So did his conclusions.
If you’d like to know more about my experience with the Warrens, you can read this interview at Damned Connecticut and listen to this MP3 of my interview on the Monster Talk podcast for the whole story. In A Dark Place has been out of print for a long time, but for the last two years, it has appeared on the BookFinder.com list of the most requested out-of-print books. Used copies of the hardcover and paperback editions sell for anywhere from one to three hundred dollars. If you find a copy for less than that, grab it!
When I began writing The Loveliest Dead, I didn’t know much about how the story would turn out, but I knew it would include a married pair of aging paranormal “experts.”
After the sudden death of one of their two sons, the Kellars move into the big old house Jenna inherited from her father. There’s a rusty, vine-covered swing set in the back yard. Who are the mysterious children who play on it at night? Their son Miles claims that when he’s in bed in the dark, a man rises up out of his bedroom floor and threatens him. And what’s down in the basement? At first, Jenna is convinced they are being visited by the spirit of their dead son, but it begins to look like something else occupies the house with them. Out of desperation, they call on Arthur and Mavis Bingham, professional paranormal investigators whose work in the field is chronicled in tabloid newspapers and popular books. But Lily Rourke, a woman living in another town with a psychic talent she does not especially enjoy having, is experiencing premonitions about the Kellars, and she tries her best to get to them and help them. The truth behind what’s going on in the Kellar house is not only horrifying, but it puts the Kellars in grave danger — especially their children.
Here are some excerpts from a few reviews of The Loveliest Dead:
"Ray Garton's The Loveliest Dead eases the reader into what is easily the most mature, heartfelt, and unflinchingly disturbing novel of his career. The unspeakable horror that lies at the center of Dead's mosaic-like mystery is the darkest nightmare of every parent, only in Garton's hands, the revelation of this nightmare is only the beginning. A powerful, terrifying, unforgettable achievement. Ray Garton is back, and he will shake your soul's foundation with this one."--Bram Stoker Award-winning Author Gary A. Braunbeck
"There's a lot of The Shining in the opening chapters, yet where King's novel reached for high operatic horror, Garton keeps his terror up close and personal. You never feel like you're in one of those grand Addam's family-style haunted houses. This is the kind of house you probably live in, and that makes the terror all that more real. There's a lot of The Amityville Horror, with ghost-busters, psychics, and mediums crawling out of the woodwork to investigate these goings on. There's even a bit of Shirley Jackson thrown in, and yet with all this mixing and matching of style, the work is unmistakably individual. The Loveliest Dead has the feel of something you'd read in the newspapers, maybe a tabloid, but definitely a plausible sounding tabloid. So take a walk with Ray Garton through one of the creepiest haunted houses you're ever going to visit. He treats his readers with respect; he treats his characters with respect; in short, Ray Garton is a writer to respect." -- Steve Vernon, Horror World
"Garton shows a sure hand in stringing readers along, delivering scenes to elicit goosebumps at just the right moments. ... I’m a sucker for haunted house stories, and Garton’s — mixing The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door — is a good one. It hooks from the start." — Bookgasm
"Garton proves his masterful writing skills yet again with an exquisitely put together story that squeezes the heebie jeebies out of you!" — Mystery Galore
The Loveliest Dead is now available for Kindle, Nook, in paperback, and as an audiobook. If you enjoy the book, I hope you'll post a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your blog or website. To learn about my other work and keep up with new releases, visit my website at RayGartonOnline.
Movies have always been a passion of mine. I think the movie that hooked me as a little boy was The Wizard of Oz. I never missed it when it aired on TV once a year. On weekends, I watched all
the movies that aired on cable — from the horror movies on =Creature Features every Saturday night to the old movies that ran all day Sunday. But I was not allowed to go to a theater to see movies. We were Seventh-day Adventists, a denomination that prohibited going to movie theaters. We were told that if we went entered the local multiplex, our guardian angels would not accompany us, and if we should die while in there, we would be doomed. This stemmed from something written by the cult’s prophet and founder, Ellen G. White, who condemned theaters in her voluminous, mostly plagiarized writings. But she did that back in the 1800s, well before movie theaters existed. So the Adventists extrapolated.
Movies became a kind of forbidden fruit. Mark Twain wrote, “There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.” As usual, he was right. Not being able to see them on the big screen like other people made me crave them. I became a sponge, soaking up movie lore and trivia.
In 1977, my freshman year in high school, I worked up the courage to risk eternal life and enter one of those dens of wickedness — a movie theater. I had the help of a friend named Bob, who was not an Adventist, but whose mother had sent him to the Adventist school I attended, anyway. I told my parents I was going over to Bob’s house after school and would eat there. Instead, Bob’s mother dropped us off at the mall, which had a theater. Three movies were playing there: Star Wars, The Gauntlet and The Goodbye Girl. I was the only remaining human being in the free world who had not yet seen Star Wars at least once — even my Adventist friends had thrown caution to the wind to see the biggest movie in the galaxy. Of course, they didn’t have to deal with my parents. But Neil Simon was one of my writing heroes, so I chose to see The Goodbye Girl.
As we were standing in line at the box office, Bob pointed to one of the benches along the mall’s promenade and jokingly said, “Look, it’s our guardian angels! They’re sitting down to have a smoke!” Icewater suddenly flowed through my veins, my mouth became bone dry and my palms started to sweat. I actually began to tremble with fear because I was about to enter ... a movie theater.
You have to understand that I had always been taught that a movie theater was no place for a good and decent person. The church didn’t seem to mind if we Adventists watched movies at home on TV, but entering that building was a sin — as if the building itself were somehow wicked. By the time I made it to that box office line in 1977, I had come to believe that the inside of a movie theater was a cross between an opium den and a low-end whorehouse. I expected people to be having sex in there, shooting up heroin in the back rows.
Then there was the fact — very real to me at the time — that my guardian angel would stay outside. Not for a smoke, of course, because that was even more sinful than going to a movie! But I would be alone in there. Even accompanied by Bob, even surrounded by the other moviegoers — I would be spiritually, cosmically alone. What if I died in there? What if I choked on some popcorn? What if the place burned down? What if I had a cerebral hemorrhage? What if I tripped and fell on someone's heroin needle? What if god just decided to stop my heart out of annoyance at my rebellion? My soul would be lost — all for a Neil Simon comedy. I nearly soiled myself with panic.
It took him a while, but Bob managed to calm me down and we bought our tickets. Inside the theater, I was shocked to find that alcohol was not being sold at the snack bar. Not even beer! No smoking was allowed in the auditorium, there were no visible signs of drug use and people weren't humping like rabbits, either! Oh, sure, the floor was sticky, but not from anything biological. The movie was wonderful and remains my favorite Neil Simon film, but I left the theater with a much bigger impression than the one left by The Goodbye Girl: movie theaters were not only not dens of iniquity, they were wholesome places! The theater was a hell of a lot more wholesome than my own home, where I learned that my parents had found out I’d gone to a movie. My mother shrieked, “You’re lucky Christ didn’t come while you were in that theater!”
I had tasted the forbidden fruit, and it had not disappointed. After that, my love for movies only grew more passionate and I saw two or three a week. I read books and watched documentaries about movies and the people who made them. I wrote stories in my spare time throughout my childhood and my writing was as influenced by the movies I saw as by the books I read.
It was only a matter of time before I wrote something that was immersed in the movies. It finally happened in 1999 with Sex and Violence in Hollywood. At that time, I had been thinking a lot about how violent movies had become within my lifetime. I’m not one of those people who thinks violence in movies or books or video games makes people violent — given the kind of books I write, that would make me an insufferable hypocrite. I don’t have a problem with violence in entertainment myself, but I’ve noticed that as it has become more explicit over the years, things that we once found shocking seemed increasingly tame, even naive.
In 1960, the shower scene in Psycho was horrifying, but 20 years later, it seemed rather innocent compared to all the throat-slashing and head-severing in Friday the 13th. And it wasn’t just movies; violence had become more pervasive throughout our culture. And it wasn’t just fake violence! A look at the news on any given day revealed that violence was very much a part of our daily lives.
With each new level of violence presented to us, we’ve become a little more desensitized to it. I was ruminating on this when I sat down to write Sex and Violence in Hollywood. It didn’t have a title yet, though, and I really had no idea what it was going to be about. All I knew was that I wanted to write something that involved the movies and our growing numbness to violent images.
I began with a sex scene. Adam Julian, a young man in his early twenties was having sex with a woman in her forties. I didn’t even know their relationship to each other at first. By the end of that scene I did, though — the woman was the wife of Adam’s father, whom he hated. After that, I was off and running. After all, I had to find out why Adam hated his father! The book flowed faster and more smoothly than anything I had ever written. At times, it felt as if I were merely taking dictation. It was, in fact, the most enjoyable writing experience of my life.
It’s kind of a thriller and kind of a comedy set against the backdrop of Hollywood, with enough touches of horror to keep it from getting too bright and sunny. Adam and his best friend Carter Brandis are hardcore horror movie fans and their love of the genre permeates the book. It deals only peripherally with our desensitization to violence. It’s much more concerned with sex, violence and Hollywood, and features a big, high-profile, celebrity trial. There are even some cameos by real-life celebrities.
My agent showed more enthusiasm for Sex and Violence in Hollywood than anything I’d ever written. He was ebullient. I was concerned that perhaps the ending was a little too extreme, but he convinced me to leave it alone. He shopped it around to all the New York publishers, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They loved it! But ... they didn’t know what to do with it. I had written almost nothing but horror in the previous 16 years and this was not horror ... although it had elements of horror. It couldn’t accurately be called a thriller ... although it had elements of a thriller. It wasn’t a legal thriller ... although the last third of the book covers a big celebrity trial. It was funny ... but it wasn’t really a comedy. It was sexy ... but it wasn’t really erotic fiction. When it came to categorizing Sex and Violence in Hollywood, the book was an orphan child. Despite the fact that they all loved the book, the New York publishers turned it down with regret.
In 2001, it was finally published by Subterranean Press as a limited edition hardcover. Unfortunately, my regular readers didn’t know what quite to make of it, either, and showed little interest. That was a depressing turn of events because I thought then, and still think today, that it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Over the years, though, the book pulled in some new readers, one of whom called it a blend of Quentin Tarantino and Jackie Collins — which I took as a big compliment! It has received some great reviews. One of the most enthusiastic was from Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Weston Ochse. You can read his review here. And here are some excerpts from others:
"Nasty, raucous, at times hilarious, Garton’s latest delivers what the title promises, in spades. But the core of the book is a sensational murder trial clearly inspired by the O. J. Simpson case. The cast features an abrasive female judge who swoons over the film stars who flit in and out of the courtroom, tongue-tied prosecuting attorneys, a nerdy defendant who reserves his right to silence, and Rona Horowitz, a pint-sized, high-octane defense lawyer. Even Johnny Cochran, among a host of real-life celebrities, makes a brief appearance. The defendant may be guilty as hell, but part of the fun is watching dynamo Rona cook up one outrageous legal trick after another to try to extricate her client. Meanwhile, the story’s hero, young buck Adam Julian, is sleeping with his hated schlock-film producer father’s new wife, as well as her underage but wildly sexed, drugged and dangerous daughter. [Julian’s sweetheart] Alyssa is the unlikely chip the author will eventually cash in to supply enough gore for two or three more trips to the courtroom. ... This over-the-top excursion into the underside of Tinseltown provides more thrills than a high-speed car chase on an L. A. freeway."
— Publishers Weekly
“Trust Ray Garton. This talented author of many of the more distinctively strange horror novels of the past decade and a half could — probably — write the sort of break-out commercial novel that would make his name a household word right up there somewhere in the alphabet just before the King, Koontz K-section in the book stores. … Check out his substantial new novel, Sex and Violence in Hollywood. It’s a fascinating work with all the commercial elements: greed, Hollywood, murder, Hollywood, lust and graphic sex, Hollywood, psychopathia. Oh, and Hollywood. Garton’s novel is muscular, paced something like a car with a brick duct-taped to the throttle, and edgy with a sharp and nasty little tongue lodged firmly in cheek. ... The deliberately broad and superficially bland title manages to reel in vivid portraits of a generation more lost than usual, an accurately jaundiced view of how thin the dividing line seems to be between fantasy and reality. ... As a bonus, the reader gets a sardonically entertaining legal thriller slipped between the ribs of what might be termed a dark associational suspense work. ... The author cranks his epic to a balls-to-the-wall ending that could trigger late-night reader debates for quite a while.”
— Edward Bryant, Locus magazine
"Worth every penny of its price. You are in for one mean, hard, vicious ride; it’s about as searing a satire as you’re likely to encounter. I defy anyone to survive the last 50 pages unshaken."
— Gary Braunbeck, Bram Stoker Award-winning novelist
"Visceral, provocative, and graphic, Sex And Violence In Hollywood would make a perfect vehicle for the next Quentin Tarantino film. Equal parts crime novel, Hollywood expose and legal thriller — Garton alternately channels Jim Thompson, Joe Esztherhas, Dominick Dunne and John Grisham — it’s a genuine pleasure to read, a trashy thrill ride with unexpected depth. Gleefully milking the dramatic potential of Adam’s dysfunctional family, various Hollywood lowlifes and America’s legal system for all they’re worth, Garton also slips in some sly commentary on modern culture, the media, and the judicial system, celebrating and condemning their excesses. Purists might ask, 'Is it horror?' Well, not in the supernatural sense, but certainly in the utter emptiness of the main characters’ lives. Rest assured, however — there are some genuinely horrific moments, not the least of which is the shocking denouement."
— Henry Wagner, Hellnotes
“Sex and Violence in Hollywood is not only Ray Garton’s best novel, but it may be one of the best novels published, in this or any other year.”
— Weston Ochse, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel Scarecrow Gods
"Sex and Violence in Hollywood is a realistic, non-supernatural melodrama of greed, murder, and twisted family relations that offers exactly what the plainspoken title promises. ... It’s a kinetic, plot-driven novel filled with cliffhangers, betrayals, unexpected developments, and moments of stark, disturbing violence. It’s also, at times, a very funny book, filled with cogent observations of an insular, narcissistic society. Sex and Violence in Hollywood possesses wit, energy, and a relentless momentum that carries the narrative steadily forward. At its best, Garton’s latest has the raw, in-your-face power of a Quentin Tarrantino film. It comes highly recommended to anyone looking for a nasty, colorful, high-adrenalin good time."
-- Bill Sheehan, Locus magazine
Sex and Violence in Hollywood is available for Kindle at Amazon and for Nook at Barnes and Noble. If you've read and enjoyed Sex and Violence in Hollywood, I hope you'll post a review at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or on your blog or website. To keep up with new releases, please visit my website at RayGartonOnline.
In the 1980s, a bizarre phenomenon began in the United States that captured my attention and held it for more than a decade. The information you’re about to read is the result of research and hindsight. When it was actually happening, the truth about all of this got little or no attention, and although I followed the news stories, I did not yet have all the information. Even when I wrote Shackled, I wasn’t aware of the whole story. While it was going on, cameras and microphones were focused on the shocking details and the accusations and claims that sounded like something from a horror movie.
Like everyone else, I first became aware of it in 1983 when it was reported that Judy Johnson, mother of a student at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, claimed that her child had been sodomized by her estranged husband and one of the McMartin teachers, Ray Buckey. An investigation began. But Johnson repeatedly contacted the District Attorney’s office with accusations that were increasingly macabre. She claimed that people at the preschool were having sex with animals, that preschool administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey had “drilled a child under the arms,” and that “Ray flew in the air.” Here is an excerpt from a summary of an interview with Johnson, reported by the Deputy District Attorney:
“Billy describes having communion in a church. A prayer similar in sound to the Lord's prayer was recited. A goat climbed up higher, higher, higher. Then a bad man threw it down the stairs. It woke up later. ... Ray picked his rt. pointer finger. It bled. Ray put it in the goat's anus. Nobody had clothes on under the robes. Billy had a robe on too. They put a Band Aid on his finger. ... Lots of threats were made against Billy and his family. It is unclear whether it was a doll or real baby (Billy says real baby) but the head was chopped off and the brains were burned. Billy said Peggy [McMartin] killed the baby. Peggy had scissors in the church and she cut Billy's hair. Billy had to drink the babies [sic] blood. Ray wanted Billy's spit. He put it on the altar. The baby was big like Billy. It screamed. When Billy's bottom was bleeding Ray put a tampax in his bottom to stop the bleeding, then he took it out. The red circled people in this ad [referring to a newspaper ad for a local health club] are all familiar to Billy. The 3 women are witches."
Johnson had been diagnosed with and hospitalized for acute paranoid schizophrenia, but that information was withheld during the trial. When it was finally revealed, the prosecution maintained that Johnson’s mental illness was brought on by the stress of the trial, although it was later revealed that she had admitted to prosecutors that she’d been mentally ill before the whole sensational case began. In 1986, she died in her home from complications of chronic alcoholism. But by then, the snowball of accusations, rumors and media frenzy had become gigantic and unstoppable. The initial accusations were made in 1983, the preliminary hearings began in 1984 and the trial lasted until 1990 and cost a total of 15 million dollars. It was the longest and most expensive trial in American history.
Accusations made by the children were every bit as bizarre as those made by Judy Johnson. Satanic rituals were described during which children were sexually abused in tunnels, secret rooms and at airports and car washes. Children claimed to have been taken away in hot air balloons and airplanes, to have seen witches fly through the air, and one child identified movie actor Chuck Norris as one of the Satanic child abusers. But investigations turned up no physical evidence of anything described by the children.
One of the initial prosecutors, Glenn Stevens, claimed that his fellow prosecutors had withheld vital evidence from the defense and he left the case. During the trial, Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder met with the children and parents involved and Stevens claimed that Smith and Pazdar influenced the testimony of the children. Who were Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazdar? I’ll come back to them in a moment.
Videotapes of the children being interviewed by people from Children’s Institute International, a child abuse clinic in Los Angeles, revealed that the method of questioning was highly suspect. The questions were extremely suggestive and coercive and led children to make false accusations. Some believe the method of questioning led to false memory syndrome. The trial ended in acquittals and dismissals, but even so, the lives of those in the McMartin family were destroyed.
The McMartin case was not the only one, it was just the most prominent. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, accusations of Satanic ritual abuse — some at preschools and daycare centers, as in the McMartin case — swept across the country like a wildfire. Nearly all of them involved the same lurid and horrifying details of Satanic rituals, necrophilia, cannibalism, human sacrifice, children being urinated and defecated on and other mind-blowing atrocities that came up in the McMartin case. Also present were the same leading, coercive questioning techniques used on the children in that case. With no substantial physical or corroborating evidence, arrests were made, trials were held and people were convicted.
Volunteer activist groups like Believe the Children were formed to educate people about the widespread problem of Satanic ritual abuse. Organizations of therapists published material to inform other therapists and law enforcement of the symptoms of what became known as SRA. Out of this came the revelation that a worldwide conspiracy of multigenerational Satanists who were extremely well-connected and powerful was kidnapping children and abusing them in horrible ways and using them as sacrifices in their rituals, which allegedly increased their supernatural power. Stories arose of Satanists who were actually summoning Satan. This worldwide conspiracy also included Satanic messages and supernatural powers involved in popular rock music and role playing games. It seemed that Satan’s agents were lurking around every corner, waiting to pounce on America’s children.
But none of this appeared spontaneously. All of it sprang from just a few sources. The first two were a couple of men who became very popular in Christian circles during the 1970s.
Mike Warnke was a Christian evangelist and comedian who claimed that, before converting to Christianity, he was a Satanist who climbed the religion’s ranks to the position of high priest. He told tales of Satanic rituals and explained how Satanists kidnapped and raped children and young people, using them in rituals that brought them, the Satanists, supernatural power. He talked about women who were used as breeders to provide babies for the Satanists to sacrifice in their rituals. His book The Satan Seller was published in 1973 and became a huge Christian bestseller. As a result, Warnke became a popular speaker who was in demand all over the country, and his Christian comedy records sold in big numbers. For two decades, Warnke was a Christian star who was respected as an “expert” in Satanism. In 1985, he was even featured on the May 16, 1985 episode of the ABC news magazine 20/20 called “The Devil Worshipers.”
Another popular speaker in Christian circles during the 1970s was a man named John Todd. Like Warnke, he was an in-demand speaker who claimed to have been a high priest in what he called the “Satanic Illuminati.” He claimed to have been John F. Kennedy’s “personal warlock” and told stories of being present for the ritualistic dedication of master recordings of popular rock albums to Satan himself, who often made an appearance at these ceremonies. He spoke of a vast Satanic conspiracy to take control of the United States and the world. He claimed that Ayn Rand was the mistress of one of the Satanic Illuminati’s highest ranking members, Philip Rothschild, who ordered her to write a novel that outlined their plan to take over the world. The result was Atlas Shrugged.
These two men helped lay the foundation for what was to come. The actual structure was built by a woman named Michelle Smith and her therapist, and later husband, Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. In 1980, their book Michelle Remembers was published and became a bestseller.
Michelle Remembers tells the story of how Smith’s mother, part of a multigenerational Satanic cult in the city of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, forced Smith to participate in rituals beginning when she was five years old. It claims Smith was kept in a cage, sexually molested and tortured, rubbed with the blood and body parts of sacrificed babies and adults whose murders she had been forced to witness. The last of these rituals allegedly lasted 81 days and included the actual summoning of Satan himself. Smith claims that Jesus Christ, the virgin Mary and Michael the archangel intervened during that ritual and not only healed all of the physical scars she bore from years of abuse but removed all of her memories of those horrible events until the time was right for them to be revealed again. (As Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady would say, “How conveeeeeenient!”) According to Pazder, that time came when he began treating her for depression and recovered these “repressed memories” while Smith was under hypnosis. Pazder claimed that Smith had been a victim of the Church of Satan, a worldwide cult that predated Christianity.
In spite of the book’s many irrational claims — not the least of which was that the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, predated Christianity (which is a little like saying bumper stickers predated the invention of the automobile) — Michelle Remembers was published as nonfiction.
When reports of Satanic ritual abuse began to surface all over the United States in the next few years after the publication of the book, Pazder was consulted by law enforcement as a Satanic “expert.” He, too, became a popular public speaker and TV guest. In 1984, he was called in to consult with law enforcement on the McMartin Preschool case. That’s when prosecutor Glenn Stevens, who left the case because of the egregious way it was being handled by his fellow prosecutors, claimed that Pazder and Smith were given access to the children and influenced their testimony. So it’s no surprise that their testimony frequently mirrored the ugly details in Michelle Remembers.
In fact, the testimony of the accusers in all of the Satanic ritual abuse cases that followed were repetitions of the details in that book, and the idea that a global conspiracy of Satanists was not only reinforced but it started a panic. Michelle Remembers was routinely used as a guidebook by law enforcement in profiling cases of Satanic ritual abuse.
Most of the details of Smith’s story are identical to details given by Mike Warnke in his book about his experience with Satanism, and Pazder’s claim that there existed a worldwide conspiracy of ultra-powerful Satanists who were kidnapping, torturing and sacrificing people, especially babies and children, and that breeders were having babies specifically to be used in Satanic sacrifices, mirrored John Todd’s tales of the Satanic Illuminati.
That might be a significant fact in their favor if all of these people — Warnke, Todd, Smith and Pazder — were later revealed to be greedy liars and utter frauds.
The Great Satanic Panic of the Late 20th Century was greatly aided by a media eager to showcase the sensational stories that included plenty of sex, violence and jaw-dropping horror. And no one jumped on the Satanic express faster and in a bigger way than synthetic journalist and slavering media whore Geraldo Rivera — or, as I like to call him, Horrendo Revolta. He did a number of TV shows on the subject that only poured gasoline on the fire. In 1988, his 90-minute primetime Halloween special, Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, borrowed it’s name from Satan’s Underground, the book by Lauren Stratford (also published as nonfiction), who claimed to be a survivor of Satanic ritual abuse and whose book launched her career as a public speaker and “expert” on the subject. The book was a Christian bestseller and she appeared on Geraldo’s special.
You can watch Geraldo’s special on YouTube in nine parts. I strongly recommend that you give it a look because you can see the number of completely unsubstantiated claims that are made — wild claims about cannibalism and infant sacrifice — and the out-of-context soundbites Geraldo runs as if they are hard news. The show accepts at the outset the existence of a vast Satanic network. When Geraldo starts talking about “breeders” who provide Satanic cults with babies to sacrifice in their rituals, what does he use to support the idea? A clip from the 1968 horror film Rosemary’s Baby — which never claimed to be nonfiction.
The most articulate guest on the show is Michael Aquino, founder of the Temple of Set, and one of the primary boogie men in the country according to Christian conspiracy theorists. He makes some extremely valid points about the real philosophy behind his religion and other Satanic beliefs, which bears no resemblance to the claims made by Christians about Satanism. He also points out that others on the show claim to have been involved in Satanic cults that routinely engaged in human sacrifice, but not one of them has ever identified a single guilty party for law enforcement or provided the names of anyone else involved in those cults. At one point, he says, “Who are they? Name them. Identify them and arrest them.” Aquino’s calm, rational responses are virtually ignored by Geraldo in favor of the feverish, outlandish claims of his other guests.
When Aquino calls for names and arrests, the response by the alleged “survivors” is that no one will believe them. One woman claims that no bodies are found because the Satanists “consume them.” Really? Bones, too? “Satanists ate my evidence!”
Former FBI agent Ted Gunderson claims that nothing can be done by law enforcement. Since retiring from the FBI, Gunderson has worked as a private investigator and claims that the worldwide conspiracy of Satan worshipers has been responsible for a host of high-profile crimes and incidents, including the Oklahoma City bombing and the accidental skiing death of Sonny Bono. He also claims the United Nations is poisoning the population with chemtrails as part of the Satanic Illuminati's effort to decrease the population. The only evidence we have here, of course, is the evidence that Ted Gunderson is a fucking loon.
Geraldo strung together a list of unrelated crimes committed by deranged people who possessed Satanic paraphernalia or claimed to be Satanists and concluded that an enormous network of Satanists were killing people all over the country. He paraded in front of the camera people who appeared to be drug-addled or mentally ill or both — some of whom were so dysfunctional that they could hardly speak — and pointed to their inarticulate claims as hard evidence of this network. It was a low point in television, a field where low points are common — but this was lower than usual because of the disgusting claims being made without any evidence and the damage those claims did to so many over the years.
A big culprit in all of this was the unreliable and damaging “repressed therapy movement,” a form of therapy that attempted to extract repressed memories from people, sometimes under hypnosis. As many as one in five people who have memories “recovered” using this kind of therapy have memories of Satanic ritual abuse, including the elaborate details outlined above. But hypnosis is not always necessary. Sometimes all you need is ... Geraldo Rivera.
Rivera’s shows on the Satanic Panic were not just bad TV, they did real damage. Paul Ingram lived in Olympia, Washington with his two daughters who one day watched one of Rivera’s Satanic ritual abuse shows. They ended up accusing their father not only of abusing them, but of leading a Satanic cult and overseeing the sacrifice of 25 babies. Using sleep deprivation and hypnotic interview techniques, interrogators from Ingram’s church, the Church of the Living Water, convinced him that he suffered from multiple personality disorder and had repressed the memories of the abuse and his Satanic activity. With no evidence, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In 1995, Geraldo apologized for publicizing what he came to realize was a complete fraud that had damaged so many lives and he recanted on CNBC, adding that he thought the “repressed memory therapy movement is also a bunch of crap.” But after all the manipulative disinformation he had aired over the years, his brief apology on a little-watched cable channel was hardly sufficient.
In the 1990s, most of the biggest names in the Satanic ritual abuse business — and it was a business, and still is! — were soundly exposed as liars and frauds. People like Mike Warnke and John Todd and Lauren Stratford and the Satanic conspiracy team of Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder — and much of that exposing was done by the Christian magazine Cornerstones. And yet, despite being exposed as frauds, these people — with the exception of Todd, who died in 2007 in the Behavioral Disorder Treatment Unit run by the South Carolina Department of Mental Health after serving half of a 30-year prison sentence for rape and child molestation — are still at it! And there are still plenty of people who believe everything they say, people convinced that the Satanic conspiracy is growing and that countless people are still being harmed and killed by devil worshipers.
Why do the Satanic Panic stars keep going even after they’ve been debunked? Because there’s money to be made and attention to be drawn to them. One can make good money as a public speaker, and then there are books and videos and audio recordings to sell. After all, there are still plenty of people who believe them in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they're full of crap. These are people who place their religious beliefs above the reality in front of their faces, people who prefer a scary fantasy to an unpleasant, mundane reality. They need something to fear and blame. These people are all Christians, of course, because Satan is specifically a Christian deity, and a Satanic conspiracy makes more sense to them than the possibility that greedy fellow Christians might use their belief to bilk money out of them.
Christianity played a big role in the SRA scare. The accusers, therapists and activists involved were mostly fundamentalist Christians who identified as “Satanic” anything their religion condemned and anything that smacked of the “occult.” The word “occult” originally referred to something that was secret, hidden from view, concealed or beyond understanding. But it has come to mean primarily anything relating to the supernatural, and to Christians, it is synonymous with “evil,” even if the true meaning of a particular symbol — like the pentagram, for example — is actually benign. In order to take those stories seriously, one first must believe in an evil being called Satan who is actively involved in people’s lives. I’m not trying to belittle the people who believe that ... because I was one of them.
During the 1970s, I heard the recorded lectures of Mike Warnke and John Todd — and another Christian teller of Satanic tales, Bob Larson (who’s also been discredited by Cornerstone as a liar and fraud) — a lot. They were played for me and my fellow classmates in the Seventh-day Adventist school I attended. Warnke’s talks were always funny, but what he was talking about was not — he joked about Satanism and being privy to kidnappings and the ritualistic abuse and sacrifice of young people, which aren’t what you would normally call comedy gold if you’re claiming those things actually happened. For one entire week in 1977 at what was then Lawncrest Junior Academy (now Redding Adventist Academy in Redding, California), Mr. Currier’s math class was devoted solely to listening to a series of cassette recordings of John Todd outlining the whole Satanic Illuminati conspiracy.
(Incidentally, my math teacher Mr. Currier later got into trouble for molesting the young wheelchair-bound girls with muscular dystrophy he’d taken into his home as foster children. To the best of my knowledge, he was not a Satanist — he was a Christian school teacher. But Satan still got the blame because later, Mrs. Currier explained to me that the devil was responsible for the whole thing. See? Satan is very convenient because you can blame him for everything!)
You know what? Those guys — Warnke and Todd — scared the shit out of me. My parents could never understand why I enjoyed watching horror movies on TV so much. They just couldn’t get it through their heads that the vampires and werewolves and ghosts in the old movies I watched on Creature Features every Saturday night were a relief from the nightmarish horrors instilled in me at school and in church. I’ve been writing horror fiction for a living for the last 27 years in part because of the fear-mongering paranoia I was taught by guys like Warnke and Todd.
You have to understand that I was raised to believe that Satan was an active threat to me at all times. As far back as I could remember, I had always been taught that I had to pray to god for help and be good to get his approval, but Satan’s attention was always focused on me. He was constantly peering over my shoulder, breathing down my neck, tempting me, goading me, threatening me, deceiving me. Because of my interest in forbidden things like novels, comic books and horror movies, I was told he was working through me, that he was using me. I was taught that god would always win, but at the same time, I was taught to fear Satan. When I watched a horror movie like Rosemary’s Baby on TV as a kid, it was like watching a documentary! It merely confirmed everything I’d been taught.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1981, I was seriously questioning everything I’d been taught to believe. A lot of years would go by before I would finally be free of the fears and superstitions that came with those beliefs, but that was when the serious thinking began. When I started hearing the stories of Satanic ritual abuse, I nearly wet myself! This wasn’t Rosemary’s Baby or The Brotherhood of Satan on TV — this was the news! My first thought upon hearing those stories?
Holy shit, everything Mike Warnke and John Todd said was TRUE!
I had grown up believing in all kinds of conspiracy theories that are simply taken for granted among Seventh-day Adventists in particular, and many among Christians in general. They’re so common that no one thinks of them as “conspiracy theories,” but simply as the truth with which they live. Seventh-day Adventists believe that there are ongoing back-room meetings in the U.S. government in which the Catholic church is trying to get the “Sunday law” passed, which would make Adventists criminals for observing the Saturday sabbath rather than going to church on Sundays. There are plenty of Christians, besides Adventists, who believe the Catholic church is the beast of Revelation. Some Christians believe Jews are conspiring to rule the world and wipe out Christianity. Many believe that all of science has conspired to bury the truth of creation with the lie of evolution and, depending on who you talk to, that either Satan planted fossils to fool us or god planted them to test our faith. So a Satanic conspiracy to molest and sacrifice children wasn’t exactly a big leap.
When I wrote Shackled in the mid-‘90s, I still didn’t have all of this information. The Satanic Panic was just beginning to calm down. But I had some very serious doubts, because the information I had did not add up and carried the unmistakable scent of bullshit. But I did what every writer of speculative fiction does — I asked, “What if?” What if something like this were really going on?
Shackled is about tabloid reporter Bentley Noble, who works for the Global Inquisitor. While researching a story about a woman who talks to the late Liberace, Noble stumbles onto something so horrible, so unspeakable, that he’s not sure if even his own tabloid will report on it because it’s so unbelievable. Children are disappearing and what’s being done with them is almost too awful to accept. With the help of a true crime writer and Pastor Ethan Walker, whose own son Samuel has been taken, Noble goes into the dark underworld of human trafficking and discovers that there is no limit to the evil that men can do.
A lot of people have told me that Shackled is one of the scariest and most upsetting books they’ve ever read. That, of course, is music to my ears. But some mistakenly believe that the book is based on actual events, and that misconception stems from the fact that the Satanic Panic was widely reported on, but the truth behind it received very little if any coverage. The truth is seldom sensational enough for the media. Shackled is entirely a work of fiction inspired by what has turned out to be a contemporary legend, like Bigfoot and alien abductions (complete with anal probes). I did not write it, as some think, to make people aware of a real problem. I wrote it only to entertain ... and to terrify. I hope it does its job.
Shackled is available in paperback and for Kindle and Nook and as an audiobook from Audible. Please visit my website at RayGartonOnline.com
For too long, the werewolf has been the Rodney Dangerfield of the horror genre. He’s never gotten any respect. He’s never gotten the respect he deserves, at least, not in my opinion. And this is despite the fact that he’s been the star of some great horror movies.
In 1935, Henry Hull played The Werewolf of London and six years later, Lon Chaney, Jr. turned into The Wolf Man, probably the most iconic werewolf. The latter was Universal’s biggest moneymaker in 1941, but after that, Larry Talbot’s wolf man was relegated to making appearances in movies that focused on other monsters, like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Two years before he moved to the Ponderosa and became Bonanza’s Little Joe, Michael Landon’s hormones got the best of him in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, an enjoyable but low-rent drive-in werewolf movie from American International Pictures. For decades, Hammer Studios turned out dozens of horror films, including eight Frankenstein titles, seven Dracula movies ... but only one werewolf movie in 1961, The Curse of the Werewolf.
Aside from hackneyed, low-budget schlock, it was twenty years before another loving, quality effort was made to bring the werewolf to the screen. The Howling and An American Werewolf in London were both released in 1981, which remains the best year for werewolf movie fans in all of human history. 1994 saw the release of Mike Nichols’s top-drawer production Wolf and in 2010, The Wolfman was lovingly remade with effects by the great Rick Baker. Both got a tepid reception and failed to revive interest in monster movies.
While the werewolf hasn’t been ignored, compare his record to all the movies that have been made about ghosts, or vampires, or the lumbering, brain-hungry zombie, or even the one-note mummy.
The werewolf pops up in literature from time to time. Two from the 1980s come immediately to mind — Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf and Robert McCammon’s memorable werewolf-Nazi mashup The Wolf’s Hour. There have been some wonderful werewolf novels from W.D. Gagliani, William D. Carl, Jonathan Maberry and others, of course, but they have been sporadic. These days, werewolves seem to be most commonly found in urban fantasy or paranormal romance. The werewolf as monster — I mean, the scary kind — are much harder to find.
Over the decades, the vampire has had all the horror cachet. The vampire is horrifying because he’s a walking corpse and wants to suck your blood and turn you into a walking corpse. He’s sexy because he gets to keep his good looks and he can’t be killed, so he’s been around for a long time, has seen everything and has lots of experience. The vampire is erotic because what he (or she) does is deeply intimate and involves penetration and sucking. His allure is that he can relieve you of your mortality and allow you to “live” on and on as a supernatural being superior to all those around you. The vampire changes with the times. He began as the mustachioed, grey-haired man with hairy palms in Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel and has morphed over the centuries into sparkling, angst-ridden teenagers.
But the werewolf remains unappreciated, underused and taken for granted. When the editor at Leisure Books became convinced that werewolves were going to be the Next Big Thing and asked me to write a werewolf novel, I jumped at the chance.
It had been so much fun writing Live Girls back in the 1980s. Vampires had always been sexy — Stoker’s Dracula had kicked Victorian prudishness in the nuts — but the sex was never explicit. I set out to change that. I wanted to do the same thing with werewolves. Sex was not associated with werewolves at all, not even implicitly, and I couldn’t understand why. After all, the transformation from human into werewolf removes all inhibition and self-consciousness. The werewolf gives no thought to social conventions, taboos, the law, or whether or not either party uses protection. The werewolf is the id unleashed, a human’s animal nature stripped naked. And what do animals do? They eat and fuck. They fuck and eat. It occurred to me that a werewolf might do both at the same time.
Of course, werewolves aren’t as suave as vampires. They don’t charm and seduce. They’re animals. They take what they want. Sexually, that would be a kind of rape. I say a kind of rape because rape as we know it is not a sexual act, it’s a brutal act in which sex is used to dominate, demean and demoralize the victim. In the violent act of rape, sex is the weapon used, not the desired goal. A werewolf, being an animal following animalistic urges, would simply be fulfilling a need without any agenda, but also without any concern for the person involved. I want sex, you’re here, so I’m taking it from you — except it would not be an articulate thought, more like an urge. Sex would be the goal, but against the will of a human target, of course, it would be rape. Rape is not sexy. But it’s a horrifying threat and appropriately monstrous behavior for a monster, which is what a werewolf is. The connection between the werewolf and sex would have to be found elsewhere.
In 1941's The Wolf Man, writer Curt Siodmak concocted the werewolf mythology we know today. He invented it from whole cloth. Maria Ouspenskaya, playing the old gypsy woman Maleva, delivers the memorable line, “Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” This has long been thought to be an authentic Gypsy or Eastern European folk saying, and some sources even list it as such. But Siodmak made it up.
Siodmak came from Germany, where his life was disrupted by the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis. Suddenly, Siodmak — like so many others — was a hunted criminal simply because he was a Jew, just as Larry Talbot was suddenly a monster, marked by the pentagram. Siodmak invented the entire werewolf mythos — the connection to the moon, the pentagram, the idea that a werewolf could be killed with silver, all of it. He made lycanthropy a supernatural curse that was passed on through the werewolf’s bite. Anyone bitten by a werewolf would become a werewolf during the next full moon.
But what if instead of a supernatural curse, lycanthropy were a condition passed on through bodily fluids? What if it were, say, a virus? Better yet, what if it were a sexually transmitted disease that could be passed on by having sex with someone you didn’t know was a werewolf — a werewolf in its human form? And with that, I had my modern-day werewolf.
Ravenous is set in the quiet coastal northern California town of Big Rock. But it doesn’t stay quiet for long. I was pleased by the reviews the book received. Here are a few samples:
“For Garton, lycanthropy is an STD, spread mostly through rape, that runs rampant through a small town fraught with affairs and intrigues. His werewolf is a terrifying creature: not a remorseful, helpless cursed human but a homicidal beast driven by a dual urge to breed and feed. Hurley is a sheriff to root for, and Garton’s well-paced horror novel reworks the werewolf myth to great effect.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Ravenous does for werewolves what 'Salem's Lot and Garton's own Live Girls did for vampires.”
— F. Paul Wilson, creator of Repairman Jack
"Ray Garton has done it again. As a chilling masterpiece of dark fiction, Ravenous is right up there with Live Girls. Just as Stephen King's ‘Salem’s Lot triumphs because of the strength of its characters and the utter, engrossing reality of the town they live in, Ravenous will be remembered by readers long after its last sentence. Our beloved Grand Master of horror has never written a bad book, but Ravenous is right up there with the best novels anyone has written. In Garton's masterful prose, the werewolf finally becomes as real, as convincing and as archetypally compelling as the vampire long has been. Garton's brilliant reconceptualization of the ancient legend feels so right, so utterly terrifying, that it will become the benchmark against which all other novels of its kind are judged. I couldn't put it down. It haunts me. It will haunt you."
— Steven Spruill, author of Rulers of Darkness and Ice Men: A Novel of the Korean War
“Ray Garton's Ravenous reads like a joyful mash-up of Desperate Housewives and Predator, adding the hunt to the tally of our daily desires. Witty, warped, and steeped in blood, this novel of hungry horror tumbles toward a delicious finale that will only leave you wanting to read more and more of Garton's ferocious fiction.”
— Douglas E. Winter, author of Run
“Ravenous grabs you by the throat in Chapter 1 and never lets go. Ray Garton, master frightener, is at his best in this one. Read it alone at your peril.”
— Gary Brandner, author of The Howling
“Ravenous is Ray Garton's most disturbing, affecting, and ferocious novel since Crucifax — which is to say, he's going to cost you a lot of sleep with this one. There are images and sequences in this book that only a frontal lobotomy will make you forget.”
— Gary A. Braunbeck, Bram Stoker-award winning author of Mr. Hands and Coffin County
“Garton’s attention to detail in description is second to none, especially when describing the setting. His descriptions of the original werewolf colony alone are enough to make the readers feel they are there. ... The story takes hold of the readers from the first few pages and doesn’t spit them out until the last page. The characters are compelling and the monsters more than terrifying. After reading Ray Garton’s Ravenous, I guarantee you will never look at your neighbors in the same way again.” — Dread Central
“In Ravenous, lycanthropy is a virus that is transmitted sexually when an extant werewolf couples with an uninfected person. Garton plays with the suspense factor since a person does not have to know they’re infected to pass on the disease. That the infection makes the recipient randier than usual only means that it spreads more quickly in this small town. ... And around the halfway point, all bets are off. Garton plays for keeps. There are no favored characters. Everybody is a possible target for sex or supper, even if they were only introduced pages before. But in a Ray Garton novel, the walk-ons get a full characterization, too. Garton doesn’t shirk in his writing, which makes him one of the top horror writers working today.”
— Craig Clarke, Down in the Cellar
When I finished Ravenous, I knew I had more of it in me and went to work almost immediately on the sequel, Bestial. And I plan to return to these werewolves in the near future.
Ravenous is now available in paperback, as an ebook for Kindle and Nook, and as an audiobook. If you enjoy Ravenous, I hope you'll post a review on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
If you miss the old fashioned werewolf that isn't interested in being understood or having its feelings validated, and if you also enjoy a good scare — and if you have an interest in sex — I hope you'll give Ravenous a look. But be careful ... it's contagious.
What man hasn’t fantasized about finding a beautiful woman in his garage one rainy night — a woman he’s never seen before but with whom he feels an immediate emotional connection — who leads him into a deadly adventure that ends up turning his entire life upside down?
Well, okay ... maybe that’s just me.
I’ve always loved stories like that, though. Remember Hitchcock’s North by Northwest? Cary Grant plays Manhattan advertising executive Roger Thornhill who has lunch in a restaurant one day and happens to raise his hand at precisely the wrong moment. Unnoticed by him, some shady thugs are watching him, and because he raises his hand when he does, they mistake him for a government agent. They lead him out to a car and take him away. That begins a thrill ride that involves Roger being framed for murder and leads to a breathtaking climax on Mt. Rushmore — and lands Roger in bed with Eva Marie Saint.
There’s something extraordinarily appealing about that possibility. Let’s admit it, most of us have pretty ordinary lives that are fairly short on thrills and intrigue. The idea that our everyday routine could suddenly be disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious stranger who might lead us into an exciting, breathless adventure is a pretty seductive one, isn’t it?
Back in the mid-1980s, I visited a friend in Baltimore, Maryland. I had one day of sightseeing before I was hit by the worst flu bug I’d ever experienced. It knocked me to the floor and then kicked the crap out of me. I spent most of my time in Baltimore in bed. In addition to being sick, I was pretty miserable that my trip to Charm City had been ruined and embarrassed that my friend had to put up with a sick houseguest. But there was nothing I could do about it, so while I was stuck in bed, I did what I always do — I wrote. I had a notebook handy and, mostly to distract myself, I began a story with nothing particular in mind. In the opening, a man found a beautiful woman huddling in his garage on a rainy night. He didn’t know her, had never laid eyes on her before, but his first thought upon seeing her was, I’ve found you. I didn’t get very far, but it took my mind off of how sick I felt. Over the next few years, though, the idea returned now and then. I would look it over, consider it, then put it away again.
By the end of the 1980s, I’d written five books, a couple of novellas and several short stories, all in the horror genre. I was in the mood to write something outside of that genre. Horror gives you a certain amount of freedom. You deal with vampires, werewolves, demons and other supernatural creatures. Horror works best when it’s grounded in reality with real people who are in real situations. But because it deals with the supernatural, once you’ve established that familiar world, you are free to become untethered from reality. The framework may be rooted in reality, but within that framework, the dead walk and are thirsty for blood, people can turn into monstrous beasts and the denizens of hell roam the earth to make people miserable. Remove the supernatural element and suddenly things are very different.
The dead don’t walk. People don’t turn into anything. Hell is something the clergy uses to frighten money out of their congregations. In the real world, the supernatural isn’t an option. If you’ve grown accustomed to it, not having it to fall back on is a challenge. I wanted to be challenged. I returned to that idea that kept haunting me — the one about the guy who finds the beautiful stranger in his garage.
I did what I usually do — I wrote that initial scene and then followed it to see where it would lead me. I discovered, to my surprise, that I was writing a love story, although an unconventional one. When Gerard Brady discovers that woman hiding in his garage, there’s a reason he immediately thinks, I’ve found you. Of course, I didn’t know what it was when I started out, but I discovered it — just as I hope you will.
Trade Secrets was an exciting writing experience. No monsters, nothing supernatural. Everything took place in the confines of hard, cold reality. Of course, that’s not to say there are no monsters in the book. After all, reality holds plenty of monsters. They just aren’t supernatural. Somehow — for me, anyway — that makes them scarier. There are more than one in Trade Secrets, but I think the scariest is Edna Macomber. She’s my personal favorite of all my villains.
When I was in school, there was a woman named Mrs. Macomber who was a scary monster. She was the mother of a classmate. For reasons I never fully understood, she hated me on sight. She was angry all the time. She did not walk, she stalked. She stormed. She charged. In my memory, I always see her with her fists clenched at her sides. There was a rage constantly boiling inside her, and all too often it was directed at me. She was a “room mother” and spent a lot of time at the school, always involved in one capacity or another. Any achievement I had, anything I managed to accomplish at school that was known to everyone — winning a competition, or a class election, things like that — infuriated Mrs. Macomber because she had it in her head that somehow I had snatched it — whatever it might be — away from her son.
Her son was a nice guy but he was socially awkward and tried a little too hard to fit in and be funny. For that reason — and because nobody liked his mother — he was often picked on. He had some health problems that worsened as he got older, requiring a lot of treatment, including blood transfusions. Years later, he contracted AIDS from one of those transfusions and died. I’ve always regretted not getting to know him better because I’m sure he could have used a friend; with that woman for a mother — domineering, smothering, constantly present, and so very angry — it’s a wonder the kid wasn’t a complete wreck all the time. Anyway, Mrs. Macomber had it in for me and all my friends knew it. When she showed up on campus, one of them usually warned me with the chilling words, “Macomber’s coming.” Those words play a role in Trade Secrets.
Edna Macomber has a cruel job. She enjoys her work. What she does and who she does it for are among the book’s secrets, which you’ll have to read to learn. Even though Trade Secrets isn’t a horror novel, I succeeded in frightening myself when I created Edna Macomber.
Trade Secrets is available for Kindle at Amazon, for Nook at Barnes and Noble, in paperback and as an audiobook from Audible Audio.
If you enjoy Trade Secrets, I hope you'll post a review at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or on your blog or website. To stay updated on new releases, visit my website RayGartonOnline.
I live in far northern California near Mt. Shasta. In the shadow of the mountain is a quaint little town that looks like it belongs on a postcard. The colorful mythology surrounding Mt. Shasta has made the mountain a New Age mecca, which has benefited the town.
According to the folklore of local Native American tribes, Chief Skell descended long ago from the heavens to the mountain’s summit and his spirit resides there to this day. Mt. Shasta is also central to the creation myth of northern California tribes. According to legend, the Great Spirit cut a hole in the sky through which he pushed snow and ice to create the mountain, and then he used it as a kind of step ladder to descend to the earth.
In 1904, legend has it that a man named J.C. Brown, while prospecting for gold for the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of London, England, discovered a cave that sloped downward for 11 miles, leading him to a subterranean village filled with gold, ancient armor and shields, and the mummified remains of long-dead residents, some of whom stood up to ten feet tall. 30 years later, Brown told his story to John C. Root, who assembled an exploration team of 80 people. But on the day their expedition was to begin, Brown and Root disappeared and were never seen or heard from again. Some believe that those mummies were the remains of survivors of the lost continent of Lemuria and that the village allegedly found by Brown was part of their vast city under the mountain. Some even claim many Lemurians still live in that underground city. If you happen to see one of them, the Lemurians, it is said, will wipe your memory clean of the encounter — which leads one to wonder how anyone could possibly know that and be able to remember it.
The story of the Lemurians originated in a fantasy novel called A Dweller On Two Planets, written in the 1880s by 17-year-old Frederick Spencer Oliver. The novel gives an account of the Lemurians moving to Mt. Shasta after their continent sank into the ocean. According to the book, the Lemurians live under the mountain to this day. Frederick’s parents were astonished by this accomplishment; they believed their son to be a big slacker who was simply not very bright, so they figured there had to be some other explanation for his novel. They decided the book must have been channeled through Frederick by otherworldly forces. It was marketed as such and remains in print to this day. Now if someone tells you that refugees from the sunken continent of Lemuria built a city underneath Mt. Shasta and if that person presents this information as historical fact, as many do, you can smile and say it was all made up by an imaginative teenager.
While visiting Mt. Shasta in 1930, mining engineer Guy Ballard encountered a man who introduced himself as Comte de Saint-Germain, one of the so called “ascended masters” (which has always sounded to me like a degree in mountain climbing, as in, “Of course I’m qualified to climb that mountain, I have an ascended masters in mountain climbing!”) and ended up founding the religious movement known as the “I Am” Activity.
Some people think the mountain is a refueling spot for alien spacecraft, although I suspect the aliens have found other planets on which to gas up since prices have gone through the roof here. The spacecraft descend to the mountain under the cover of large saucer-shaped clouds that conceal them from onlookers. (For those who enjoy facts, these, of course, are lenticular clouds, which occur naturally at high altitudes.)
The rich mixture of beliefs about the mountain are reflected in the town of Mt. Shasta. At first glance, it looks like a pretty typical little mountain town. But on closer examination, you’ll find stores selling magical crystals and geodes, books on meditation and crystal power, ascended masters, how-to guides on being a shaman and other similar subjects, kitsch and chotchkies representing fairies, Hindu gods, space aliens, Jesus Christ, pagan deities and Native American folklore, and other evidence of the mystical phenomenon known as commercial exploitation.
In 1987, New Age guru Jose Arguelles came up with what would be the first worldwide synchronized meditation, which was correlated with an unusual astrological alignment signifying, to people who think astrological alignments signify things, a shift in the planet’s energy from one of war to peace. This global meditation was called the Harmonic Convergence, and the plan was to gather people at various “power centers” around the world. Arguelles believed that if 144,000 people were to meditate in each of these “power centers” at a scheduled time, this new age of peace and enlightenment would be launched. (In the years since 1987, we have discovered that simply wasn't the case.) One of those “power centers” was Mt. Shasta, less than an hour’s drive from me. Well, there was no way I was going to miss out on a day of people-watching like that. (Writer Mahesh Grossman does a short, funny one-man musical show on his experience at the Harmonic Convergence.)
Mt. Shasta was the most crowded I’ve ever seen it that day. People came from all over the world to ... to ... well, to do whatever the hell it was they planned to do — meditate, vibrate, massage each other’s chakras, whatever. A lot of these people were dressed like they’d just flown in from New Delhi. Other were dressed like they’d just flown in from 1970. The town’s main street was lined with vendors selling crystals, jewelry, mystical drums, all kinds of New Age literature about everything from meditation to past life regression to communicating with the inhabitants of other planets.
A guy who bore a strong resemblance to Tommy Chong was selling what looked like some kind of tribal drums. I didn’t know how they fit into the Harmonic Convergence milieu, so I asked. This was a mistake. Chong launched into an explanation of how one could draw energy from the universe down to the earth using his drums. He explained to me the healing power of drum circles. He demonstrated some of the drums. He did everything but write a ransom note, which would have been appropriate because I felt I was being held captive. He was such a nice guy that I didn’t want to cut him off abruptly and move on (back then, I was much more patient with nonsense than I am now), so I listened. But ultimately, I had to disappoint him by not buying any drums.
There were a lot of crystals for sale. One booth in particular, run by an attractive auburn-haired woman, had an especially beautiful selection of crystals and stones on display and I stopped to look them over. The woman greeted me and asked what I was looking for. I said I was just looking.
“What properties are you interested in?” she asked.
“Properties? I don’t understand.” Was she selling real estate, too?
“Well, different crystals and stones have different properties, different energies. Some heal, some bring abundance and prosperty, fidelity in love, clarity of mind and — “
A laugh slipped out before I could stop it. I shrugged and said, “I’m just interested in what they do best — look pretty. I really don't believe in that other stuff."
Her face changed. She reminded me of Donald Sutherland at the very end of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was afraid she was going to alert the others that there was someone walking among them who did not belong. So I quickly moved on.
There were a lot of demonstrations planned that day, and I was eager to see one in particular. In fact, it was the main reason I had driven to Mt. Shasta for the Harmonic Convergence. It was a “channel” — a woman who claimed that an ancient entity spoke through her to impart the wisdom of the ages.
Channeling had become quite popular at that time, mostly due to a woman named JZ Knight, who originally used the word “channeling” to describe the process by which a 35,000-year-old entity named Ramtha spoke through her. Guess where Ramtha is from. Go on, take a guess. Lemuria! It's a small universe, isn't it? That’s right, while all the other Lemurians were taking up residence under Mt. Shasta, Ramtha set up shop inside the head of a Tacoma, Washington housewife and mother named Judy Hampton in 1977. Judy became JZ Knight — and she also became very rich with the help of her imaginary friend. She was everywhere in the 1980s, popping up on The Merv Griffin Show, Oprah, Larry King Live and a host of other shows. She got a lot of attention from celebrities like Linda Evans, who was famous for her catfights with Joan Collins on the wildly popular primetime soap Dynasty, and Shirley MacLaine, who, in addition to being an Academy Award-winning screen legend, is known for her views on ”star beings” and UFOs and reincarnation.
Ramtha (speaking through Knight, of course) claims to have been a Lemurian warrior who battled the Atlanteans more than 35,000 years ago with an army made up of 2.5 million soldiers. That would make Ramtha’s army more than twice the size of the estimated population of the entire planet at the time. This lends some credence to the theory that JZ Knight is full of shit. But shit sells, and this puppetless ventriloquist act certainly worked for Knight. A lot of people have bought into Knight’s message that each of us is a god and capable of creating our own reality. Have you ever been to a dinner party where each person inhabits his or her own reality? Trust me, the conversation sucks. Whenever I find myself in a situation like that, I quickly create a reality in which no one else is able to create their own reality, and it clears things right up.
I had seen Knight on TV several times, doing her shtick. Ramtha sounded like James Mason trying to do an impression of Yul Brynner, and while doing Ramtha, Knight became very animated, often pacing the stage, squatting and swaying and gesticulating with her arms and hands. Now 65, Knight is still around. She's been tucked, pulled, peeled and Botoxed to within an inch of her life — today her lips are twice the size they were in 1985, suggesting that Knight has enlisted a team of cosmetic surgeons to help create her reality. She doesn't seem to move around as much as she used to anymore and Ramtha’s accent is much less pronounced. He sounds a lot more like Knight now, perhaps after a couple too many cocktails and not enough sleep.
After seeing Knight on TV so often, I couldn’t resist the chance to see a channel perform in person at the Harmonic Convergence. She appeared in a rickety old theater in the town of Weed (yes, that’s right — Weed!) just up the road from Mt. Shasta. I don’t remember her name, and I never heard of her again after that weekend. There’s a good reason for that: She was terrible. Her message was similar to Knight’s — “Fuck reality!” — but in spite of the fact that her husband was on stage with her the whole time, seemingly coaching her, this woman’s performance was amateurish and completely unconvincing. Like Ramtha, the entity she channeled claimed to be an ancient, benevolent entity who was generously passing on his ancient wisdom and experience to the people of the modern age.
As I watched her dubious performance, I entertained myself by wondering what would happen if she really were channeling some being ... that wasn’t telling the truth. Just because a 30-thousand-year-old entity says he has our best interests at heart and wants to impart all kinds of cosmic wisdom to us doesn’t necessarily mean that’s true, does it? I mean, call me crazy, but is it really a good idea to believe everything we're told by every 35,000-year-old entity that comes along? What if he were lying? What if he had a hidden agenda? Sure, crackpots like JZ Knight want only one thing — money. Well, two if you include fame, but I think money is the driving force behind convincing people that some invisible, long-dead guy is talking through you. But what if the crackpot weren't a crackpot and the being speaking through her had other plans? What if it was just using the attractive, charismatic channel as a way of getting attention and amassing followers? And what if his plans for those followers were ... unpleasant?
The seed of Dark Channel was planted that day. Nearly a decade later, I dusted off the idea. By then, the novelty of the New Age movement of the 1980s had worn off, but it had been thoroughly absorbed by our culture. That day spent converging harmonically in Mt. Shasta gave birth to Hester Thorne, the charismatic founder and leader of the Mt. Shasta-based Universal Enlightened Alliance and the channel for a millennia-old entity named Orrin. Some people say that Thorne is an accomplished fraud. But they are wrong. Others — people who are troubled, damaged and dealing with serious problems in their lives — find hope in Orrin’s message of peace and unity. The only problem is ... Orrin is lying.
My New Age horror novel Dark Channel is available in paperback, and for Kindle at Amazon, Nook at Barnes & Noble, and as an audiobook from Audible. To keep up with new releases, interviews, appearances, and other information, visit my website at RayGartonOnline
