My Top Ten Best Quotes

Here are my top ten favourite sayings. Enjoy!


• A fool and his money are soon elected

• Honesty is the best policy but insanity is the best defence.

• I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my father, not screaming and terrified like his passengers.

• If I want your opinion, I'll read it in your entrails.

• My computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

• Whoever said violence never solves anything clearly didn’t enjoy it as much as I do.

• My loyalty can never be brought, but it can always be rented.

• I'd like to see things from your point of view, but I couldn’t fit my head that far up your ass.

• What’s the difference between bullshit & horsecrap? Bullshit is when the person talking horsecrap knows they’re talking horsecrap.

• What’s the difference between capitalism & communism? In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism it’s the other way around.

Mysteries of the vampire skeletons

I guess a lot of people on here probably already know what a revenant is.

But did you know that the word “revenant” is also the proper, scientific name that archaeologists use for any kind of vampire, zombie or ghoul that comes back from the dead to haunt the living?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why in the name of the sweet chocolate Christ do archaeologists even have a name for such scientifically impossible creatures? Well the answer turns out to be uniquely fascinating.

In our safe and enlightened times, these various species of the horrifying undead are taken by the establishment to be the figments of the ugly underbelly of the human imagination. Yet in ages past, such things were considered to be very real, and to constitute a serious danger to the populations that cringed in the unlit darkness of their draughty homes at night.

In fact, so real were these ghastly creatures taken to be, that fearsome measures were occasionally invoked to prevent a corpse from rising out of the earth to make its ghastly way in the world for a second, unnatural time.

Large boulders might be smashed down onto the cadaver during burial, nails could be driven through its heart and vital organs to pin it into place, or its cold limbs could be broken and twisted to cripple its reanimated gait and give its warm victims a fighting chance of escape.

Heart warming tales

Or, if you couldn’t afford the muscle and expertise to crush and bind the mortal remains of your nearest and dearest, you could always plump for the cheaper option of ramming a large triangular rock between their silent jaws, presumably to prevent them from biting you and spreading their foul contagion to the living, should they be unable to resist the urge to climb out of the ground and go hunting for Christian souls to nibble on.

If that isn’t gruesome enough for you, to put a stop to the unauthorised nocturnal excursions of known nightwalkers, their hibernating remains would be exhumed in daylight and eviscerated, so that a choice smattering of their internal organs, typically including the heart, could be torn out and cremated, usually at a crossroads nearby.

And, as Jennifer Aniston used to say, here comes the science:

Well preserved graves containing clear evidence of these well-intentioned mutilations are now commonly being turned up in archaeological sites dating back nearly a thousand years, though some are far more chillingly modern, and to support those more recent finds, fascinating and well-written documentation has also been unearthed.

For example, in the 18^th Century, a group of military surgeons – the most highly trained, scientific and sceptical minds of their day – were sent to Eastern Europe to debunk a local plague of vampires. Their detailed field notes relate how the exhumed corpses of several of these suspected bloodsuckers were brought before them after several months underground.

To their shock and disbelief, the bodies were undecayed, plump and healthy, with clear evidence of fresh blood around their mouths. They had no choice but to declare the infestation genuine and order the ritual desecration and destruction of the unholy remains.

Well that’s just swell

Of course, a modern mortician will tell you that a human cadaver, buried in late autumn, will look relatively hale and hearty, should you feel moved to dig it up for a quick look before the warm weather of the following spring brings it to ripen.

You see, a corpse in a cold grave rots from within. Something those battlefield experts had probably never seen, being more used to putting people in the ground rather than pulling them out of it. This internal putrefaction creates a lot of gas in the body cavities and under the skin, giving it that plump and just-fed, happy look. That same internal pressure will force the stewing stomach contents to leak from the mouth, looking for all the world like a beard of fresh blood and presto! You have all the evidence of vampirism that an untrained eye could wish for.

But just in case you think that the rise of western medical expertise marks the final resting place of these medieval misconceptions, I should warn you that this necromaniacal perplexity didn’t end a couple of hundred years ago. There was a celebrated case in the 1990’s in Romania, where some woman was convinced that one of her deceased male relatives was swanning around the village in his death shroud after dark. 

Understandably alarmed, some of the local menfolk took it upon themselves to dig up the restless corpse and have a look for themselves.

Sure enough, when they got the casket open, he looked pretty good for someone who’d bought the farm a few months ago, and there was clear evidence of blood around his mouth. When they cut him open to get his heart out so that they could give it a decent, Christian roasting at the nearest crossroads, he let out a couple of loud grunts at which point one of the team felt moved to leap out of the grave and return home at full pelt  - no doubt to retrieve fresh underwear.

In the cold light of day, it’s easy to speculate about stomach gases being forced through vocal cords by the pressure of the knife against the gastric wall, but I’m going to cut the grave robber some slack and say that had I been up to my dick in a grave with a rotting corpse apparently verbally objecting to being split in half, I’d probably have shat my pants too.

At any rate, according to people fortunate enough to live in modern day rural Romania, this sort of thing happens all the time. I can’t think why I’ve never seen this in a Go Romania! package holiday brochure…

Sometimes, dead is bitter

Another intriguing aspect of revenant archaeology, is that there’s often an upsurge in this kind of unusual burial whenever Christianity replaces an indigenous religion. The scientific speculation is that the bloody persecution that necessarily accompanies the forcible conversion of amoral souls to the one true faith causes a lot of bad dreams, and an irrational dread of a lot of angry dead people.

I can see some truth in this, but to this patchwork of guesses and amateur psychological piffle, I would add the following observations:

Firstly, there’s the issue of the Christian burial. When traditional methods of dealing with the bodies of the dead such as cremation or charnel housing are replaced by the seemingly unnatural and unholy practice of sticking ones ancestors into a deep hole in the wet ground, it is quite understandable that some people are going to worry that their relatives haven’t been dealt with properly and aren’t going to stay dead very long.

And secondly – and this is my favourite – the books of the Bible are full of stories about people coming back from the dead; after all, Lazarus has become synonymous with the return from the grave. There’s a rich smattering of revenant references throughout the New Testament, for example: “the dead in Christ shall rise” (1 Thessalonians 4:16) and let’s not forget JC himself, the most famous revenant in history, who’s startling reluctance to stay buried was the party piece that sparked a two thousand year celebration.

Such delicious irony to think that today’s cultural plague of zombies and vampires is nothing less than a shadowy reflection of the Christian faith, implanted in reluctant pagan minds over the course of a thousand dark years of oppression, now flowering in an age when the iron grip of the church has finally slackened.

I like to think of them as the vengeful corpses of vanished ways of life, wriggling up out of the soil of history to wander and groan through the streets of a religious citadel in decline. 

But if you want to see the brilliant TV show that inspired this blog, go here: http://www.channel5.com/shows/revealed/episodes/mysteries-of-the-vampire-skeletons-revealed

Advice for Horror Writers

Here is a question posed by someone who wanted advice for a friend trying to write a horror story. My reply given below attracted a lot of interest from the gothic community. See what you think:

Question from S.H : "My writer friend sent me a short story of hers for review. However, it had striking similarities with a Lovecraft story called The Music of Eric Zann and I have no clue as to how to help fix this or keep her from scrapping the story.

"It isn't perfect, English is not her first language and it was written about two years ago when her English was much worse. I still think there is hope for her story, I just don't how this can be fixed."


Answer: Hi, S.H. I see two issues here, neither of which is a problem.

Firstly, let me say that there is nothing wrong with a story that has striking similarities to another. As long as it’s written with passion and skill, no one should care.

Watch John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven and then follow it up with Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The first film is a direct copy of the second, adapted from the feudal rigor of old Japan to the violent wilderness of the early American West.

Both are phenomenal works of cinema that have stood the test of time. Are they two stories or one? It doesn’t matter. If you can rewrite Beowulf, so filled with adventure and power that it seizes a modern audience by the throat like the poisoned bite of an earth drake, then you are a great writer who deserves to be read and enjoyed.

Dan Millman’s wonderful book Way of the Peaceful Warrior is clearly very heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda’s first work: The Teachings of Don Juan. My feeling is that Millman could have entitled his bestseller: I Wish I’d Had A Teacher Like Don Juan And If I Had This Is What It Would Have Been Like .

As a man who has read so much Castaneda that when I close my eyes, I can sense the beating of his heart, I loved Millman’s attempt on that same summit by an only slightly different route. My familiarity with the master helped me to fall in love with his shadow.

Pablo Picasso once said that bad artists copy, good artists steal. Originality is a fine thing, but it is not the hallmark of creativity and a work should never be judged on that alone.

This brings me to the second point, and that is the quality of the writing.

I am assuming that your friend loves to write. If this is true, then she must be addicted to reading her own work, and thus be a slave to the urge to reread and rewrite, to beat and to burnish her own words until they shine with the fevers that consume her heart.

This is the hunger that makes us what we are: the need to breathe so much life into the words on the page that they become alive, dancing in the minds of our readers, suspending eternal moments in their brains in which the secrets of our souls are whispered and screamed for the rest of their lives.

Her English is improved, she has the fleshy bones of a story already crafted by her own imagination. How can she resist the yearning to take hold of it and carve the possibilities of her hopes and dreams into it? She has an opportunity in front of her that should set her thoughts ablaze with inspiration.

This story is not a broken thing to be fixed. It is an unfinished thing to be made whole, an embryonic stream of thoughts to be fed, nurtured and thickened until its heart beats and its lungs crave the fresh, cold air of the big, wide world.

Tell her to rewrite it. Not this way, or that way, but one page at a time, and the devil take any passing resemblance to anything written by another.

Let it grow and change like a human mind evolving with the pressures of life and time, until it is the biggest, the best and boldest it can be. Until she feels from cranium to womb that she has nothing left to give to it. That it is a lover spent of all further joy and surprises, and just a fond memory to be enjoyed while she skips enriched to pastures new.

And it will be then that she looks back on that nascent tale, written in less than perfect English, and wishes with all her might that she had one more just like it: another perfect spark to fire the deepest joy a literary being can feel.

Hope that helps. Sometimes I miss the point because I am insane. I apologise if I have done this here.

Peter

A Curse on the Whole World

What is it with vampires these days? I don’t know about you, but from my point of view, things have been getting a little bit silly since Buffy & Angel kicked their dead butts back into the mainstream.

On the one hand, we have what I call the “Blade” disease, where the sons and daughters of Dracula have all turned into ninja mafiosi who won’t venture outside unless they’re fully dressed for fetish night at a Dutch nightclub. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Underworld and Van Helsing and I will always treasure those memories of Kate Beckinsale’s jumping spinning cyclone kick in a leather catsuit, but I think that any more of this flagellatory, bestial necrophilia would just be flogging a dead horse.

At the other extreme, I recently saw the teen movie Twilight for the first time, and was amused to witness the hitherto hideous curse of the undead metamorphosed into some kind of positive lifestyle choice. Far from sticking to his traditional role as the immortal nemesis of an increasingly culturally irrelevant Christian church, in this film, one trendy bloodsucker had triumphed over the twin handicaps of an insatiable thirst for human blood and a fearsomely erect haircut to become the ultimate high school jock.

Return of the King

Yet, gently engaging though the Twilight saga is, it has no power to frighten or truly interest me. It has diverged radically from what viscerally fascinates me about the curse of the vampire. To worm our way back down into the truly rotten, poisonous core of that enduring myth, I say we need retrace our steps no further than Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. A beautiful book and an equally appealing TV miniseries, the vampires within it establish a nest in the eponymous town and set about infecting as many hapless victims as they can, each human meal reanimating from the grave to become another nefarious vector for the supernatural plague.

Brother eats sister, pupil murders teacher, mother feeds upon squealing child.

King’s vampires are not the slightly embarrassed, superior companions of humanity: they are the potential agents of its complete destruction. Ultimate  predators that left unchecked, would exponentially eradicate the warm mammals upon which they feed in an escalating orgy of senseless greed.

In my darkest dreams, this is what vampirism represents: a ferocious disease transmitted by a ghastly species of cannibalistic, total rape in which the body and perhaps even the very soul itself is stolen, corrupted and twisted into a voracious simulacrum of the human host. And what of the prey, those of us who are condemned run like rabbits beneath the talons of the immortal raptor scourge? We are entranced: in sexual thrall to the beasts that lust after the pain of our flesh; in awe of their strength and preternatural beauty, enchanted by the promise of eternal life dangled above the trembling weakness of our fragile, fleeting forms.

I need vampires to be ruthless, starving, mutated beings that can mimic those we love the most whilst harbouring a feverish desire to feast upon our trusting blood. They should be an appalling threat that appeals profoundly to the deep and complex webs of fear and dependence that interweave within our closest emotional bonds. What mother wouldn’t open her window to the prodigal daughter she thought was lost forever? What infant son can resist the arms of the mother risen from a grave that he barely understands? What lover could deny the bite of a lost soul mate that promises perpetual union in an endless night of superhuman passion?

Yet though we might be enticed to jump into the grinning jaws of the assassin masquerading as our dearest love, to do so would be to take a leap into the terrible unknown. When we surrender to the teeth of the killer, do we become more than we are? Or do we die, only to be replaced by a ghost that haunts the echoing chambers and empty veins of a puppet corpse, while what remains of our conscious mind boils in the endless exile of unbearable damnation and pain?

Does anything of the host survive?

Sleeping with the Enemy

Like perplexingly many people, I frequently endure horrifying dreams of a post apocalyptic struggle to stay one step ahead of just such ravening, malignant hordes. These are archetypal nightmares, wrought into the structures of our brains by some synchronistic twist of psychochemical destiny. I love and hate these compelling visions of unbearable horror in equal measure. They revolt and fascinate the deepest, wettest recesses of my cerebellum.

In one recent variant that repeated on several nights, the world’s oceans had been replaced by a planet-wide pool of infectious, intelligent saliva that sought out its victims by sweeping into their cities and homes. Once stung by its corrosive fluids, the human body slowly began to decay, and its mind was gradually and agonisingly digested into the collective unconscious of the carnivorous sea. Yet while its crumbling flesh remained intact enough to shamble in pursuit of the living, it served its watery god as a hunter of men, its putrefying limbs and darkening senses directed to seek out fresh and uncontaminated bodies towards which to beckon the caustic, sentient waves.

“He’s in here” they whispered through rotted throats and peeling grins as they peered through cracks in the door behind which I cowered in the grip of paralysing dread.

Each distinct stripe within this tortured spectrum of my fabulous rainbow of nightmares is coloured by the same wave of unbearable emotion. The terror and exhaustion of an existence which has no meaning other than escape from a threat of almost inexpressible evil: comfortable and familiar people altered into hideous and infectious things.

Over the years, these dreams have recurred often enough to force me to recognise that the beasts that dwell in their depths are seemingly interchangeable. On some nights they are vampires, on others, zombies of one grotesque genus or another. The words may change but the song remains the same. This ogre swapping penchant of my subconscious eventually guided me to understand that the life-cycles of these two famous monsters are remarkably similar: the reanimated bodies of our friends, family and neighbours, hungrily chasing us down to bring us into their unholy fold by eating us alive.

Once this, in hindsight, glaringly obvious parallel had dawned in my waking brain, I began to notice the pattern elsewhere too. The most evidently isomorphic legend is that of the lycanthrope. The werewolf is clearly a vampire with a fur coat and bigger teeth.

Eat me up, Scotty

But the pattern certainly doesn’t stop there. It turns out that our culture is brimming with mutated forms of the transformative plague, and to find some of its most interesting incarnations we must ascend from the hot blood and soil of the horror genre into the cold, inhuman voids of the science fiction tale.

The myth is replicated in its most chilling cultivar in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where it is the tendrils of an alien plant rather than the fangs of a beast that rob the helpless human of his or her most intimate essence, and release an evil double to steal the unsuspecting shapes of its family and friends in turn.

This same ghastly theme is ruthlessly assimilated by the Borg in the Star Trek Universe. Whole planets are infested with an artificial, technological virus that subsumes the infected into a super-consciousness without pity, and lonely holdouts are often confronted by technologically disfigured partners and relatives whose inhuman mission is to convince them that their “resistance is futile”.

Whatever else occurs in the Star Trek universe, for me, the spectre of the Borg looms, often silent but always large against the cold blackness of space: an ever growing, oceanic consciousness of heartless evil that stands poised to one day swallow the last lonely and terrified island of humanoid emotional warmth like a giant, sightless skull bursting a grape between the dry, crushing headstones of its relentless teeth.

All of these vile monsters understand our weaknesses to perfection because they used to be us, and yet they are no longer constrained by the human feelings that might temper the seething hunger that simmers in their immortal veins. This is what makes them evil beyond our imaginations.

Dwelling on these most terrible things is a horror some of us can barely resist: a cliff edge over which we must peek. And in the swirling terror of that abyss roils the hundred million years of madness that lurks like some cold blooded beast beneath the soft veneer of our civilised skins. Freedom, power, and immortality await us. All we need to do is endure a painful death and cease to be everything that we might be proud to call ourselves…

The Next Generation

When I wrote the Shadow of Death, I needed to explore this deep, inner dread of superhuman, parasitic mimicry in a different way.

What if the very forces that create the heavens and the earth could take an interest in us, seek us and hunt us through the people we trust and love? What if a being so old and so cunning that to us it would seem to be none other than the Devil Himself could wage war against us through the stolen flesh of our closest friends? I wanted the reader to experience the malevolent, dark and hungry intelligence of a creature that could spin the fabric of the world itself into evil men and women within a plan to manipulate a single human life to its own savage, unknowable ends.

I wanted to show how when a human being tries to fight back against such a toxic force, he becomes entangled in the claws of the beast, poisoned by the venom that drips from their cunning blades and begins to change until one day he cannot recognise himself as any different from the monsters that he hates with all of his ferocious and now inhuman power.

He himself is now the dealer in black secrets, the taker of life and the servant of death. In this way, man, ascended from the animal kingdom to become a civilised being, evolves anew to become a predator again, in a terrible realm where the safety and boredom of the everyday world is like a distant, fondly remembered dream.

In this expanded vision of creation, he is able to see both sides of the coin: he is the hunter and the hunted, the killer and the quarry, the corpse and the phage that bloats it from within. As the old, sheltered existence he longs for crumbles beneath his feet, he is forced to remake his own melting flesh and shattering bones with desperate hands into a shape whose sole purpose is to survive by violent murder.

By ripping away the living essence of other warm beings, he slowly learns what it means to become the ending of his own world. He comes to understand the very meaning and preciousness of life.

And it is a gift he would give anything to forget.

This is the purpose of that book: to take the agony of my foulest dreams and use it to force open a doorway into the more vast and terrifying, unconscious land that lies all around us, just beyond the sight of our human eyes. I wanted to animate the cadaver that rots beneath the boards upon which we tread throughout our waking lives, and hint at the ghastly truth that haunts so many of our sleepless nights: that we live in a tiny island of illumination in an ocean of perpetual night.

And the darkness is coming for us, one by one.

Sweet dreams,

Peter

The Shadow of Death

 The Shadow of Death is now available on Amazon in paperback or kindle edition.

Here is what readers are saying about this incredible book:

• very classy, very unique...
• some very raunchy parts… which literally take sex to new dimensions!
• this book is written by a true master of dark thoughts...
• harry potter on acid and viagra...
• simply brilliant...
• disturbingly believable...
• the raunchy sex scenes and strength of passion contained within this book gripped me and left me gasping for more...
• it is difficult to describe how exciting, imaginative and spine-tingling this story is I was unable to put it down...
• this is so good it hurts...
• fast and gripping...
• a gothic masterpiece...
• vast and disturbing...
• romantic, very touching and funny...
• downright sexy...
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• the writing is really lovely...
• pray god he writes another...
• I loved this book!
• totally original...
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• off-beat humour made me laugh out loud even in the book's darkest moments...
• a beautifully written book...
• very disturbing and very dark and highly original...
• the stuff of terrible nightmares...
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• the godlike creatures are unbelievably strange...
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• imagine reading the bible when you're on the worst acid trip you can imagine...
• a story doesn't get much bigger and blacker...
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• highly recommended...
• dark, chilling and thoroughly gripping... 
• I got hooked with the first few lines, and Death is a woman? That's new and interesting...