DENNIS
WHEATLEY - Understandably, after two world wars had shown us all too many real
life horrors, the genre of horror story fiction was in considerable decline.
Dennis Wheatley, the Stephen King of the 1950’s was probably single handedly
responsible for its revival, and for the renewal of interest in paganism and
witchcraft that his novels tell of. Wheatley’s literary output was prolific; he
wrote some excellent history material, many historic novels, and yet it was his
horror stories that made him famous. During the war, when he worked as a
propaganda writer for the War Office, he had allegedly discovered that some
witches had been making astrological predictions about the outcome of the war.
Astonished that the old craft might still be practised in the 20th century, he
wrote a string of pot-boiler novels about contemporary satanic covens and
rather than just have the stories being about believers in such wonders, he had
to go and bring devils, demons and monsters in as well. The results were all
too excellent for his bank balance; but his well-written yarns are sadly not so
popular today. Usually, they involve someone dabbling in the occult getting in
too deep, and finding magic far more powerful than they can handle, or that
their nice séance mentor is really Satan incarnate. The Ka of Gifford Hillary
involves a man practising out of the body experiences, who finds himself unable
to get back to his body, which (due to the absence of his soul) his family are
on the brink of burying. He has, effectively to race against time to find a way
back. Wheatley’s attitude was one of preaching the dangers of occultism. He was
overtly Christian. The tragic, laughable irony is that many people were
inspired by his books to dabble in spells, and start the very kind of covens
his novels denounced as so unholy. Wheatley put the new age squarely on the
map. Wheatley’s high reputation is now nearly forgotten. In the 1950’s and 60’s
his name was used to promote and endorse many other writers in the genre.
Wheatley edited and presented (with some very good introductory forwards) a
collection (The Dennis Wheatley Library) of the occult, which represented many
classic horror stories from before the decline; Stoker’s Dracula; Shelley’s
Frankenstein, among them. Sadly he also threw in dross like the unreadable
Moonchild by a certain Alastair Crowley, who might by now have been forgotten
instead of revered) and a collection of equally unreadable essays by Madame
Blavatski. Nowadays these are the idols of the movement we call the New Age.
Wheatley wrote a fascinating history of the Occult, The Devil And All His
Works, in which he denounces everything unchristian as Pagan and unholy,
including Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. He also expresses respect for the work
of a then relatively unknown Erich Von Daniken, who told us with a straight
face that God was an astronaut. It is sad to see that Wheatley believed so much
of what he wrote that he made others believe it for real too. His classic
novels, The Devil Rides Out, (Satanic cult tries to take over the World) To The
Devil A Daughter (A girl is raised and groomed for sacrifice) and They Used
Dark Forces (Nazis using the occult to help their war efforts) are true
classics of the genre. His historic stories, such as The Launching Of Roger
Brook (a Scarlet Pimpernel type tale of an English spy in Napoleonic France)
and its sequels are also well worth a look.
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