Horror Writer Thomas Ligotti on Company Managers Who Get Promoted Through Destroying the Company

I’ve been watching videos by the Outlaw Bookseller recently. He’s a retired bookshop manager, now living in Bath, who talks about literature and book collecting, and particularly Science Fiction and Horror. In one of his videos he discusses Horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s novel, My Work Is Not Yet Done. This differs from much horror literature in not being set in Gothic castles and catacombs, but instead in the corporate work place. One of the characters is a manager, who comes along with flip charts and checklists purporting to improve productivity and employee performance. As the story goes on, the characters realise that all his management strategies are rubbish. They don’t actually work, and instead make the situation work. At which point, the manager gets promoted to another position.

Ligotti’s been going for decades now. He was published in a variety of British small press horror, SF and fantasy magazines in the ’80s and ’90s and is very much respected as one of the great writers of the genre. I’m not a big fan of ‘Orror. I’ve read Dracula, some of Brian Lumley’s grim tales, H.P. Lovecraft and a few others, but it’s not a genre that really appeals to me. But that description of the manager seems very well observed. Way back in the ’80s and ’90s Private Eye used to cover various big businessmen, who were recruited to head blue chip companies like ICI with very generous salaries. These men then proceeded to wreck these companies so that their share prices plummeted, at which point they were released. Again, with obscenely generous severance packages. The same people would then go on to be recruited by another, previously successful company or organisation and then proceed to do the same again. And I’ve met people who’ve experienced this in real life. I was talking about it to a taxi driver, who told me that it happened to a company he had worked for. The company recruited a manager at an expensive pay package, who then proceeded to run it into the ground, before being given the heave-ho with another massively generous pay package. Who then went off to do it to some other company.

No wonder British industry’s in a state. It’s full of the incompetent and greedy running companies into the ground, while being massively rewarded for their greed and incompetence. And I dare say that if anyone says anything about their grossly inflated pay, they’ll get the usual nonsense about market rates and having to pay large amounts to recruit talent.

Even when the people recruited are massively untalented and a real destructive force with their incompetence. But no doubt they went to the right schools and know the right people, so they carry on in their mission to wreck western business in order to get themselves bigger and more lucrative promotions.

Nazi Stormtrooper Publishes Book on Satanism, with Ideas Drawn from Horror Novels

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting things on here for over a week or so now. I’ve been doing other things, that have kept me busy. Thanks, however, to everyone who’s persevered with the blog in that time and kept reading, just in case. Your interest and support is appreciated.

I found this interesting little article by Matthew Collins over on the Hope Not Hate site. It seems Ryan Fleming, a member of the National Front has published a book, the Codex Aristarchus, on Satanism. Fleming is a member of the Nazi Satanist group, The Order of the Nine Angles. He also knows a thing or two about evil. In the book, he quotes extensively Ian Brady, the notorious Moors Murderer, and the book puffs itself as ‘coming from the blood-stained moors of England.’ He was also sent down by the beak for two years for forcing a vulnerable young man to perform a sex act on him.

So, this is a guy, who can be reasonably described as vile and sick.

See the article at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/nazi-sex-offender-releases-book-4836

What struck me is that the book promises to teach its readers how they can turn themselves into an astral vampire, so they can feed off the human herd. Interestingly, the term he uses for ‘astral vampire’ is ‘wamphyri’. This should be familiar to aficionados of the British horror writer, Brian Lumley. It comes from Lumley’s own vampire novels, the ‘Necroscope’ and ‘Blood Brother’s series.

Lumley’s vampire novels are a strange mixture of the supernatural and straightforward science fiction body horror. The vampires – wamphyri – are humans infected with a pernicious symbiont, a tape worm-like creature that warps their minds and bodies. Those infected not only feed on blood, but they also develop the ability to warp and mould their bodies into any shape, rather like the demonic members of the upper classes in the Brian Yuzhna 1980s horror flick, Society. Or the mutating Doctor Praetorius in Yuzhna’s From Beyond. Back in their home dimension, the vampires’ lairs, their eyries, are made out of the mutated body parts of their victims, which they sculpt into the required shapes using their arcane skills in creating monsters. This element of the novels ultimately derives from the various mad scientists, and their experiments in manufacturing monsters from the ghastly fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Which is entirely natural, given that Lumley started out writing horror and fantasy fiction within Lovecraft’s own Cthulhu mythos.

As for astral, or psychic vampires, I think this comes either from Aleister Crowley, or from Anton LaVey, the late head of the Church of Satan. The connection between Lumley’s vampires and Satanism is that in his book, Shaitan is the first vampire. It is, however, only hinted that the character is the fallen angel of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Lumley’s Shaitan has no real memory of who or what he was before he fell and turned up on the vampire creatures’ extra-dimensional homeworld, and his powers, although supernatural, are derived entirely from his infection with one of the creatures.

Lumley’s books are, however, straightforward works of Science Fantasy/ Horror fiction. They’re not remotely Satanic, except in the sense that they are set in worlds where supernatural evil is real. If anything, they’re more strongly influenced by Spiritualism – the Necroscope of the title, Harry Keogh, can talk to the dead rather like Spiritualist mediums. The last book in the series also shows a slight Christian influence, in that Keogh finally wins the battle against the vampires after they crucify him. But that’s it. There’s no great mystical teachings there, and the whole thing is purely for entertainment. Christopher Lee in an interview on Pebble Mill once described the Hammer Horror movies he was in as morality plays. Dracula rose from the grave to prey on the living, but after causing carnage and mayhem, good eventually won. Usually in the form of Peter Cushing with a stake in one hand and a hammer in the other. Lumley’s book are the same.

So, if you’re looking for a good book on vampires, I recommend Lumley. I read them about twenty years ago. They’re fun pieces of body horror, good wins in the end, and they don’t pretend to teach you any great mystical secrets of the universe. Although multidimensional mathematics is discussed with the disembodied souls of leading German mathematicians in the first book, Necroscope.

Or you could go to the all-time classic itself, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As for wanting to be a vampire, you’re far better off watching the classic Hammer films and listening to Goth tracks like Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Undead, Undead). Those won’t teach you any great mystical secrets either, but then, neither will Ryan Fleming, or A.A. Morain as he styles himself as the book’s author. But unlike Fleming, Lumley, Stoker and Bauhaus don’t pretend to.