2025 October 27 • Monday

The Night Digger was an effectively creepy 1971 psycho killer movie with an excellent Bernard Herrmann score that makes me wonder if Herrmann saw Once Upon a Time in the West. There are a few recorded comments of his opinions about other soundtrack composers. He berated Elmer Bernstein for relying heavily on "the vamp" in his The Man with the Golden Arm soundtrack, for instance. (Bernstein took it in stride, noting that Herrmann was the greatest deployer of ostinato the genre had ever known.) And Herrmann loved Vic Mizzy's use of finger snaps in his theme song for The Addams Family. (Imagine sitting around watching The Addams Family with Bernard Herrmann!)

So here's The Night Digger, which uses harmonica as one of two front-line instruments (the other being the viola d'amore), an unusual choice since it's not a western or Americana or any other kind of movie for which a harmonica would be a natural fit. Had Herrmann seen Once Upon a Time in the West and got harmonica on the brain? We'll never know. But The Night Digger is the 880th Soundtrack of the Week.

The use of the harmonica, its plangent voice counter-balanced by the lush and dreamy viola d'amore, makes this a unique Herrmann score.

It's also classic Herrmann, perhaps not offering much that's new, though the crazy soaring and dive-bombing strings in "Mary's Death and the Road Builder" don't trigger a memory of another Herrmann cue.

Besides the harmonica it seems to be an all-string affair, a la Psycho, with particularly nice use of the harp. And the viola d'amore will remind listeners of Herrmann's music for On Dangerous Ground, another psycho-killer story.

With a stripped down and monochromatic ensemble, Herrmann nonetheless creates and impressive range of effects, blasting the audience with violent intensity, shifting chords and keys for surges of emotion.

His gift for lyricism and heartbreakingly tender melodicism is at a high point here but let's face it: his career is mostly high points.

2025 October 24 • Friday

Nicholas Condé's The Religion was made into a movie called The Believers. It was directed by John Schlesinger and starred Martin Sheen.

It's probably an okay movie if you haven't read the book. But if you have read the book, you're likely to be disappointed by how the story has been reshaped into a more conventional and less compelling drama/thriller with some supernatural stuff thrown in.

Which is a shame, because J. Peter Robinson contributed great music and Robert Müller's photography is consistently nice to look at. The acting is great from everyone and New York City locations are used effectively.

The basic story is the same. Recently widowed father with his young son get involved in an underground sort of voodoo thing that involves rich and powerful people. Young children are being murdered for this cult and the main character's son has been marked for sacrifice.

But the movie doesn't develop the same kind of paranoid dread that suffuses the book. There are attempts to put signifiers in the backgrounds of scenes: posters for old magicians, unicorn statuettes, evangelists on TV, etc., but they don't really do much.

In the book, the motives of the child murderers were actually good. They were making sacrifices to the gods to prevent some kind of event that would kill millions. The last time they tried to do this and weren't able to complete the ritual, it allowed World War Two and the holocaust to happen.

In the movie it's just rich and powerful people who've found a shortcut to more wealth and power for themselves. This is boring and over familiar and also makes them less interesting as characters.

The book has a devastating final twist at the end but the movie has painted itself into a corner where it ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Still, there are a couple of moments of real horror, especially one involving spiders that will not be for the squeamish.

2025 October 22 • Wednesday

Nick Sharman's The Surrogate is a story of supernatural evil wreaking havoc on the living from beyond the grave. The front cover blurb has Steven King declaring that it scared him and it was "a winner" but I suspect that he was overstating the case simply to aid a fellow Signet-published author.

It starts out promising enough, as Sharman begins with the traumatic childhood that, many years later, will cause our main character, Frank, to resolve that his dying father will never have any connection with Frank's won son, now a young child.

At first it seems like the grandfather simply wants to leave his estate to his grandson, a move Frank is determined to block. But once Frank's father dies, weird things start to happen.

At first it's pretty standard creepy stuff, like the dead man appearing in photographs that were taken after he died, the odd bit of telekinetic activity, and a genuine psychic who senses the evil stuff going on. (That's a device that I usually like and I liked it here, too.)

But Sharman doesn't seem to have a clear idea of where this is going or even what's actually happening. The evil spirit of Frank's father conveniently has "whatever" superpowers, so there's no reason for one thing to happen or another not to happen.

The cover, for instance, features a creepy Raggedy Ann-type doll, which, sure enough, ends up being a surprisingly efficient instrument of (attempted) murder. But how? And if the ghost can do that, why doesn't it do a bunch of other things that would be presumably be a lot easier.

There's also a forced attempt to manufacture a feeling of paranoia that seems to be all in Frank's head and then is very unconvincingly shown to be an accurate take on things. This also feels arbitrary, as well as confusing and unconvincing.

The story builds to a very downbeat ending that's disappointing not so much because of what happens but because the conclusion doesn't feel coherent or earned.

But 'tis the season for horror and this was appropriate if not fulfilling.

The first line is “The boy stood at the top of the wide stairs, listening intently to the buzz of argument below”.
2025 October 20 • Monday

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is one of the clearest examples of how important music can be in a film. The next time you watch it, consider what you'd be looking at and experiencing without the score. Many of the current crop of filmmakers have shown themselves to be quite adept at using music (and strong visual sense) to create tension and suspense.

The 879th Soundtrack of the Week is from one such movie: You're Next with music by Jasper Justice Lee, Kyle McKinnon, Mads Heldtberg and Adam Wingard.

Death Waltz Recording Company put it out on red and white swirl vinyl!

One of many pleasures in the movie is the use of the Dwight Twilley Band song "Looking for the Magic". After a very short and ominous "Opening Stinger" by Adam Wingard, the record gets right into the song, which is heard in the movie several times.

Drones, backwards tones, an insistent tapping and intriguing electronic textures and percussion create Jasper Lee & Kyle McKinnon's "An Ill Wind", a great cue that also sounds different from what you usually get in horror scores.

"Shadow Thoughts", also by Lee/McKinnon, is more recognizably electronic, but airy and delicate while also sounding scary. At times the didgeridoo is suggested, or perhaps even used, for the star of the movie, Australian Sharni Vinson.

Then Lee/McKinnon come up with an arco string pulse for "Shadow Thoughts", which uses pizzicato strings and other sounds that are harder to identify, eventually opening up with echoey percussion and some wailing instruments, building with keyboard at the end.

Wind sounds and bursts of soft mechanical pounding start out Lee and McKinnon's "Arrows Through Glass", interrupted by an insistent high pitched tone, and then concluding with a more intense pounding

Then there's another Lee/McKinnon piece, "Death Awaits All", which uses a heartbeat motif and some reverby piano, percussion and electronic noises. Strings come creepily in to bring it to a finish.

Now it's Mads Heldtberg's turn with "Cutthroat Run", a low rumbling drone with bass pulses that might make your subwoofer shake the floor.

"Wailing" is another Lee/McKinnon piece and sounds similar to some of the crescendo and release moments from earlier cues.

For "Commando Mode" Adam Wingard has some analog synth sounds throbbing around, nothing fancy, very simple and effective.

Mads Heldtberg comes back for "Drake Prog", a noirish and slinky piece with a cool bass riff. Synth is the main instrument here and it sounds like Goblin's grandchild.

Just for fun, the A Side ends with "Erin Text Tone", which is credited to Liam Cooke. It's an old mobile phone alert sound, that's for sure. I guess there were three seconds left on the side!

Side B opens with Lee & McKinnon's "Terror", which starts with fast bowing strings on one note with echoey cymbal hits subtly supported by other instruments. Like the movie itself, the score is a triumph of creativity and hard work over a low budget.

"Shadow Thoughts II", also by Lee & McKinnon, has clarinets playing lines that weave around each other while more didgeridoo-like sounds and other long tones provide a background for them.

Mads Heldtberg's "Knife Through Glass" is a creepy, echoey, ambient track, very sparse and simple but beautifully done.

Lee & McKinnon contribute the next two tracks, "Enter the Tiger" and "Bad Animals", the former a pizzicatto-percussion tocsin aggravated by some startling intrusions by other sounds and the latter an echoey, ambient mood that's like a cousin of "Knife Through Glass" with a cluster out thrown in at the end.

Then we get "Nails" by Heldtberg, another one with continuously bowed strings on one note providing a platform for some swelling, ominous low tones from other instruments.

"Lurking", by Lee & McKinnon, continues that general mood but throws in some throbbing, electronic bass notes.

Heldtberg comes back after that with "Dead Mom", which begins with a hunting horn and continues with a pulsing synth beat and other electronic tones for a compelling, creepy and also almost catchy cue.

Director Adam Wingard contributes "Lamb Mask Death", which is genuinely catch, kind of like a Goblin Zombi outtake.

Kyle McKinnon on his own contributes "Run Motherfucker", another kind of groovy electronic piece, but this one very minnimalist and stripped down, basically a single riff.

Then Adam Wingard does "Fox Mask Death", which starts with various ambient and percussive electronic textures and alternates and blends it with a keening high-pitched tone, which I think is actually Lee & McKinnnon's "Kitchen Fight".

More groovy synth music kicks off an unused alternate track, Wingard with Lee and McKinnon creating "Renegade", which has some ethereal synth notes floating over a driving and urgent bass and drums track.

The record closes with another ringtone, "Felix Ringtone", which is actually kind of a funky, hard dance groove.

2025 October 17 • Friday

I picked up this copy of Eric Sauter's Predators at a great used bookstore on Coney Island Ave, where there were hundreds of cheap paperbacks for sale.

It's not a werewolf novel, though I bought it hoping it was.

The story is a bit too long with too many characters and some serious pacing problems but it's good enough.

Dane was living in the Canadian wilderness with a bunch of wolves. Despite being human, he had become one of the pack and considered them his family.

Then a hunter named Van Owen brings four NYC professionals in a helicopter and they slaughter all the wolves, except for the alpha, an enormous black wolf.

And so Dane goes to NYC with the wolf to kill all of them, or, more precisely, to let the wolf kill them.

On the way he picks up a young woman named Jenny who's fleeing her mother's sadistic rapist boyfriend.

Also on the way we spend too much time with a cop named Yates and an animal control officer named Yates.

Van Owen is an insanely violent psychopath who enjoys kinky sex, gruesome murder and both of them at the same time. He's a great sleazy paperback villain with nothing about him that suggests a real person. But the idea is to build up to a big clash between Van Owen and… well, either Dane or the wolf or Jenny or Yates or Atwood or any combination.

Which is part of the problem. Always having to check in with all of these people works against the novel's having a sharp focus.

The set up is great, with Dane finding the wolves and then beginning his vendetta afer they get butchered.

And then there are a couple of good Central Park wolf murder scenes, after which things kind of get bogged down in to many extraneous details and bits of business.

The big showdown at the end is surprisingly unsatisfying and by the time I got to it I was kind of impatient for the book to be over.

But it's got enough going for it that it's worth reading. And there's even a reference to a voodoo goat sacrifice in Central Park, which I sort of hoped was a reference to Nicholas Condé's The Religion.

The first line is "The first time Dane saw the black wolf, it saved his life".

2025 October 15 • Wednesday

While Robert McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour was a devil-may-care romp through a werewolf fighting Nazis in WW2 story, combining men’s adventure and James Bondish sex and action conventions with enjoyably silly intrigue, bouncing back and forth between the 1940s timeline and our werewolf hero’s origins, Jeffrey Sackett’s Mark of the Werewolf takes aim at a similar target and misses completely.

Janos Kaldy is a werewolf who crosses paths with a neo-Nazi militant group in modern-day North Dakota. These members of the White Homeland Party, known as whips, are working seriously and with considerable diligence and effectiveness to start and win a race war and fulfill the aims of the Third Reich.

Werewolf lore here is different. Kaldy cannot be hurt or killed. Silver has no special power. He doesn’t eat or drink and neither does his body produce any waste products. He’s been alive for thousands of years, doesn’t remember much of his past, doesn’t even know what his original name was and only wants to die.

The only bit of werewolf legend that’s relevant here is wolfsbane. The flower weakens him and can be used to control him. Without it, he’s Superman and will break any chains, smash down any wall, etc. With the flowering plant, he’s Superman with Kryptonite, though he’s still invulnerable.

So, full moon, Kaldy kills a bunch of whips, they decide they need a werewolf because if they could get an army of Nazi werewolves together, that’d help their plans. They capture Kaldy pretty easily and then the reader spends hundreds of pages listening to really uninteresting and unconvincing characters talk and talk and talk.

There’s a character who’s a priest and a medical doctor, with the last name Neville, presumably for Neville Chamberlain, since he appeases and collaborates at every opportunity.

For exposition purposes Neville is also good enough at hypnosis to put Kaldy in trances and take him back in time, recovering buried memories and discovering that Kaldy had known Nostradamus and Merlin and been at the French Revolution and so on.

Interestingly, this novel was published about a year after the comic book Swamp Thing had taken its title character on a similar journey. Back then comics we’re hardly mainstream news but this one was. In one issue Swamp Thing was going to meet Jesus Christ but the president of DC Comics pulled the plug on it, causing writer Rick Veitch to quit in protest, thus creating a censorship controversy.

Does the werewolf Kaldy meet Jesus Christ? Yes, he does, more or less. I’m not sure if that’s a spoiler because by the time I got that far in the book I was finding it to be incredibly dull and tedious. I don’t recommend it.

There’s one decent twist and the epilogue gestures toward a cool idea for a werewolf book that, as far as I know, nobody has tried to write yet.

The first line is “The cold wind whipped through the naked trees, and the old woman pulled her heavy woolen shawl tight around her throat”.
2025 October 13 • Monday

The 878th Soundtrack of the Week is The Runestone's score by David Newman.

"Prologue/Main Title and Discovery" begins with long tones and echoey percussion hits before strings and horns introduce the main theme, a swaying 3/4 piece that apparently was inspired by "Teddy Bear's Picnic".

The next piece, "The Runestone Travels", is a Goldsmithesque suspense-in-motion composition that could easily fit into a Marvel movie today.

More echo percussion starts "The Voices Appear/What Do You Want?", which gets a lot out of long synth tones and blending electric and acoustic instruments for a tense atmosphere.

Some syncopated triad patterns give "Supernatural Romance" an urgent pulse that's occasionally interrupted by sustained notes.

A bass drone, monomaniacal hitting of one note, echoed percussion, string pads and some ethereal synth sounds start out "The Keys/No Turning Back", which ends with a relentless action/horror section that has swooping strings and a pounding march-like figure.

The triad play from "Supernatural Romance" gets a different voice from the strings for "Second Killing" before bringing back the march-like feel of "No Turning Back" and some James Horner-like brass writing.

"Martin Grabs Maria/Martin Is Crazy" is a feature for the synth in its melodic, rhythmic and textural capacities, as well as its ability to blend with other instruments. There are several different moods here, none comforting but all interesting and well done.

The triad motif returns in a different synth voice and slowed down for "No Atheists in Foxholes", which has a soothing celestial quality to it.

The beginning of "Marla Escapes Fenrir" would have fit in nicely among some of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible cues but segues into more of a horror/dread/awe area quickly.

The lovely main melody with its minor thirds and achingly beautiful feel comes back for "Heavy Petting" and then it's a mixture of bittersweet synth textures and driving, agitated action music for "Bingo/To the Mine".

Heavy synth pads and grooves, echoey percussion and lots of space open up "Slaughters at an Exhibition/Sigvaldson to the Rescue", which has some intense musical explosions while creating feelings of intrigue and pulse-pounding forward movement and, ultimately, terror.

"Jakomin/Fenrir vs. Officer Newman" starts with an uptempo run through the triad motif, making it sound like John Carpenter's Halloween theme's next-door neighbor. There's some very effective piano work in here too.

A different groove and a different, mysterious feel open "Battle/Round One", which also brings out the brass instruments for some fanfare-like figures.

"Fenrir Is Held Back" has some of the giant orchestral intensity of oft-used cues from the original Star Trek series while "Sigvaldson Offers Assistance/Persuasive Eyes" slows things down for a few minutes of more contemplative though still compelling music.

Some beautiful piano and woodwinds playing are the feature of "That's Enough" after which the full ensemble brings the energy level way up for several cues that use Newman's action and horror themes so far: "Jacob Gets the Axe/Sigvaldson & Fenrir Reunited"/"Jacob Brings the Axe/Final Battle" and "They Kill Fenrir/Final Scene".

Then it's time for the "End Credits", a mostly subdued piece that plays with variations on the main themes, and then "The Party", a groovy synth track that starts with a Miami Vice feel but becomes a more lighthearted dance track at the end.

2025 October 10 • Friday

Lisa Tuttle’s Familiar Spirit starts with a bang, throwing the reader right into a demonic possession story in which there is no doubt about the evil supernatural stuff going on.

Then it almost immediately shifts to a haunted house narrative as the protagonist, Sarah, newly single and confused and vulnerable, moves into the out-of-the-way old house that was the setting for the first chapter’s burst of bloody horror.

Almost immediately Sarah is under attack from the demonic force but is strong enough to resist. Refreshingly, not only does Sarah immediately accept what’s happening, but so do her two best friends. There’s no dithering or arguing or trying to convince Sarah that her experience didn’t occur.

This novel doesn’t waste any time at all, actually, just zipping forward and presenting a seemingly insoluble problem. Sarah could just leave and never go back to the house again but it’s a sure thing that someone less able to fight back will end up there and be the demon’s victim. And Sarah will feel responsible for that.

So fight the demon and destroy it. Great, but how? Sarah and one of her friends take a deep dive into the occult and demonology and anything else that might be relevant and, now armed with knowledge of spells and symbols, return to the house ready for action.

But they’ve jumped to some conclusions on the way and those conclusions, while perfectly reasonable, turn out not to be correct. There are several surprises awaiting the reader, as well as a fair amount of sex and violence, including one particularly memorable scene with a jade figurine.

This was a great book. I remember liking Tuttle’s short-story collection, A Nest of Nightmares, and that same twisted and horrific sensibility is let out to play in this very successful longer form work.

The first line is “After a long while Valerie rose from her slumped, broken position like a puppet whose dangling strings have at last been gathered and pulled".
2025 October 08 • Wednesday

Here's a really good urban paranoia horror novel, definitely similar to Rosemary's Baby, which is tagged on the front cover of this paperback edition, but uses voodoo rather than satanism as its plot engine: Nicholas Condé's The Religion.

Cal is a recently widowed single father who has just moved to New York City with his six-year-old son, Chris. In Central Park one day they come across the remnants of some kind of ritual that involved animal sacrifice.

Chris finds an interesting shell at the site and brings it home. Then he starts being able to communicate with the spirit of his dead mother and also has some other mysterious things going on.

There are a few crucial coincidences in this story and one of the two most coincidenty coincidences gets Cal involved in studying voodoo and how this religion is still being practiced in a modern urban setting.

He soon discovers that there's been a series of child murders in the city, and these, too, are ritual sacrifices that can be traced to some voodoo traditions.

Cal is an anthropologist and thus well placed to learn about a different culture's beliefs and practices, as well as to keep a rational objectivity.

Up to a point.

One of Condé's neat tricks is to present both Cal and the reader with examples of real voodoo magic actually working, whether it's casting spells or communicating with the dead, and then usually also gesturing in another direction to a plausible non-supernatural explanation.

It's a tightrope walk for Cal, who eventually falls off and becomes a believer—or at least half of him does.

It turns out that the human sacrifices are being performed by, more or less, the good guys, who are trying to win the favor of their seven gods in order to present the destruction of the entire world by nuclear armageddon.

The seventh and final sacrifice is, of course, Cal's son, Chris, a fact foreshadowed by Chris's sudden interest in the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

To save his son, Cal has to fight voodoo with voodoo. But if he succeeds, does he doom humanity?

This tension is sustained and developed and the novel is a well paced read, though it did ocassionally try my patience with some of Cal's wheel-spinning.

But it's certainly a really good horror thriller and has quite an ending.

The first line is "'Look, Daddy,' Chris Jamison said as he ran up holding out his open palm".

2025 October 06 • Monday

Released by Real Gone Music in special "hellfire" vinyl, the 877th Soundtrack of the Week is Alden Shuman's music for The Devil in Miss Jones.

Pianist Frank Owens starts with a lovely solo piece in 3/4 called "In the Beginning". It's only 43 seconds long but very sweet and pretty with a tinge of melancholy.

Then organ, vibes, horns and piano create a lush, mysterious, swaying and also pretty atmosphere for "Hellcat".

"I'm Comin' Home (Theme from 'The Devil in Miss Jones')", builds on what the first two cues established but adds strings and, eventually, singer Linda November to handle lyics, of which several are "I'm comin' home", sometimes leaving out "home".

Since this is actually a porn movie, there should be some kind of slinky electro-grooves. In "The Teacher" we finally get some wah-wah guitar and electric bass guitar playing with some gently groovy rhythms but it's still very sweet and serious and melodic. This is not a trash soundtrack and presumably it's not a trash movie.

The A side climaxes with "Ladies in Love", which is a romantic piece for strings and piano, as well as what sounds like French horn, low key melodrama, easy to imagine paired with bright, colorful images.

The B side starts with piano again, this time accompanied by strings and bells, playing the theme again but this time as "Love Lesson". Some kind of horn joins the bells on the melody and then we settle into the waltz groove and it's really nice.

Another 3/4 tune follows but "Beauty and the Beast" has a more shadowy, omnious feel to it. Reed instruments take the melody this time.

More plaintive solo piano brings us "Walk with the Devil", sounding a bit like if Liberace played the theme from The Conversation. It's beautiful, though, and not overdone.

Next the secondary 3/4 theme gets a bucolic and pleasant arrangement for "Trio in the Round" with strings being the main voice and there's an especially nice violin solo at the end.

Then "Miss Jones Comes Home" and we have some suspenseful long tones for strings and organ before the piano comes in with a slow and deliberate reiteration of the main theme.

And then we're "At the End", a 46-second reprise of the main theme.

2025 October 03 • Friday

A different take on UAP encounters can be found in Whitley Strieber's Communion: A True Story.

Strieber was already an established novelist with two books, The Hunger and Wolfen, adapted into well-known movies.

Communion is his autobiographical account of alien encounters and abductions, involving himself as well as his family and friends—sometimes just as witnesses, sometimes more directly involved.

It's an interesting and compelling account although, as seems always to be the case, there isn't anything verifiable or documented to help the unbiased reader decide what to make of his story.

Mental illness and substance abuse don't seem to be relevant here. Strieber himself is admirably open-minded about his experiences, willing to consider that everything could be happening inside his head.

Since what he experienced is so vivid and has at least some elements observable to others, he makes the excellent point that even if all of it is inisde his head, it should be a very important area of study.

When he starts to hypothesize about what the creatures he encountered might be, things start to fall apart a bit. Since there isn't any concrete evidence or information at all, they might be anything. He makes an argument, for example, for creatures who share a hive mind.

Sure, that seems possible. As does literally everything else. Nothing in particular points to a hive-mind intelligence.

It's a well-written and affecting book, though, and worth reading. It was made into a movie starring Christopher Walken and Lindsay Crouse, which is also worth a look, even though Strieber himself was disappointed by it.

The first line is "This is one man's attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown".

2025 October 01 • Wednesday

Happy anniversary, darling!

The May 2, 2025, Times Literary Supplement has a long review of two books, Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age and Abi Millar's The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age.

Is it really a secular age? I would find that to be a relief, if true. Maybe it depends on how you define "secular" and other such words that tend to pop up around it.

And both of these books seem to me to be starting with a false or at least wholly unsubstantiated premise and then galloping off in several wrong directions with it. But of course that's normal.

The Dreher book, however, appears to have some especially abnormal things going on in it.

I never heard of Dreher before, partly because these days information tends to come to us already pre-sorted to comfort the recipient and confirm our biases, so we'll be inclined to keep consuming more of it.

One of the reasons the TLS is compelling and perhaps even essential is that it is admirably wide-ranging and apparently hopes to appeal to those who are just generally curious.

Dreher is an influential conservative and Orthodox Christian and friend of J. D. Vance, all things that make it extremely unlikely that he would ever be friends with me.

His book appears to have the usual moaning about not enough people being Christian or those who are not being Christian enough and so on.

The interesting part of the review is this:

Technology, [Dreher] contends, is one of the main fronts in the campaign [by diabolical forces to frustrate humans' attempts to do whatever it is Dreher's Christianity thinks we're supposed to do]. The Tower of Babel warns of the risks of using technology (in that case, the building technology of Mesopotamia) to achieve human parity with God. The modern equivalent is Silicon Valley transhumanism – a project that, says Dreher, sometimes appeals explicitly to gods and other higher intelligences. A “California venture capitalist friend” told Dreher that “everyone he knows in Silicon Valley holds regular rituals to summon ‘the aliens’ to give them technological wisdom”. Dreher quotes a Google whistleblower, Blake Lemoine, who was fired for going public with his belief that LaMDA, Google’s AI programme, had achieved consciousness, and who said the programme had been ritually committed to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. This wasn’t a big secret, said Lemoine: “it’s just that journalists never ask about it”. AI itself, according to Dreher, is “a kind of high-tech Ouija board”, and we genuflect before what we have summoned. “We laugh at the primitive Semitic tribe dancing around [the golden calf], but many of us would have little trouble doing the equivalent around AI entities.” Whether or not you can agree with Dreher, the equation of ultimate efficiency with ultimate moral good (a blindly accepted axiom of technocratic postmodernity) is troubling.

Rather apologetically, he seeks to convince us that UFOs are the vehicles of resident malign intelligences that have always shared our planet, but are becoming more aggressive and brazen, using AI as their tool for preparing the world for a false religion. “It’s not hard to imagine that readers who have followed me up to now will conclude that this is where the story I tell of modern mysticism shipwrecks itself on the shoals of crackpottery”, he concedes. “I get it. I would have thought the same thing not long ago.” But Dreher’s conviction is unshakeable, and his treatment of UFOs long, detailed and earnest. “[The] most intelligent and highly placed people who investigated the [UFO] phenomenon do not believe that they are aliens from other planets”, he writes. “Rather, most appear to think that they are discarnate higher intelligences from other dimensions of reality.”

The devil, according to Dreher, doesn’t only infiltrate programmes, ideas and institutions. He is personal. His friend Emma was possessed. She was possessed, he suggests, because her dead grandfather back in Europe “had been a high-level occultist who brought a curse onto the family”. An exorcist was called (apparently there are quite a few in the Catholic church), but the demons made Emma fall asleep as she was saying the prayers that would have expelled them.

Dreher went to visit Emma and her husband in their high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Her husband, Nathan, told Dreher that, unbeknown to Emma, he was hiding in his pocket a relic of the True Cross. We’re not told where he got the relic, but, says Dreher, “the demonically possessed react negatively to such things: awareness of blessed objects hidden from view is one basic test of possession.” Dreher and Emma were talking on the balcony. When Nathan sat down at their table, Emma’s face transformed. “She looked at her husband and snarled, in a deep voice, ‘F—k you, bitch! Get that thing away from me!’ Then her head dropped down.” When Emma’s head rose again, Dreher continues, she gave him a pitiful look. “I’m sorry”, she said. “That wasn’t me.”

As Nathan walked Dreher back to his hotel, Dreher asked how the experience of Emma’s possession had changed him. “Now when I walk down the street”, replied Nathan, “I know that there is a spiritual battle going on all around me … It’s everywhere.”

The anecdotal story of possession will most likely confirm the appropriate biases. Last year Tucker Carlson claimed to have been attacked in bed at night by a demon who left visible claw marks. Also in bed with him at the time were four (4) dogs but that's just a coincidence.

More interesting is the reports of the silliness going on in Silicon Valley. I had no idea the tech bros were so goofy. AI as Ouija board is a persuasive analogy, though. I've been referring to Google as The Oracle for years.

And then there are the UFOs. I've been interested in this subject for a little while and while Dreher's take doesn't, on the basis of this review, have much of anything going for it, it does tie in to something Luis Elizondo, who worked in the Department of Defense and was officially involved with US UFO (or UAP) programs, says in his book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this book and Elizondo is a phlegmatic, unexcitable guide, a career soldier with no discernible traces of wackiness. He seems to hold conventional views on just about anything and his politics appear to be centerish but right-leaning enough to be against Edward Snowden's actions.

He shares his experiences with unexplained and paranormal phenomena, not just UFOs but also extra- or super-sensory abilities such as remote viewing—which he claims he learned how to do and could write a whole book about it. Which I wish he would.

He doesn't seem to have come to the table with any sort of bias in favor of UFOs or anything else but to have been educated and persuaded by his own observations.

As such, his should be a persuasive voice for most readers. Of course, nothing he says is verifiable and much of it isn't even backed up by anything. When he reports seeing glowing orbs in his own backyard, you have to wonder why nobody there grabbed a photo with their cell phone.

But Elizondo does name names when it comes to a cabal of Christians who have infiltrated the government and its agencies and see everything through the same kind of filter as Dreher and perhaps Carlson do.

At one point Elizondo is approached by Devon Woods, "who had assumed a senior role" at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Woods says, about UAPs/UFOs, "'you know we already know what these things are, right?'"

Elizondo isn't sure what he's talking about and is further confused when Woods continues, "'Have you read your Bible lately, Lue? … It's demonic,' he said to me. "'There is no reason we should be looking into this. We already know what they are and where they come from. They are deceivers. Demons.'"

This is actually the most alarming part of the book. This is a real person with a real name, one of several such people in our own government's agencies, manipulating other people and information behind the scenes according to religious beliefs that most people would find to be at least unconvincing if not totally bizarre.

And this part of the story, which should be verifiable as well as believable, seems to get overlooked, despite its very real significance. The New York Times review of Immimenet, for example, doesn't mention it.

Interesting times, I guess.

The first line is "In late 2008, I began a new job at the Pentagon after several tours with other US intelligence agencies".