Mephistopheles and Walpurgis Night

Click HERE to read Manly P. Hall's January 26, 1927 THE ALL-SEEING EYE article about the symbolism of Walpurgis Night and Mephistopheles.

 HAPPY WALPURGIS NIGHT!

ALMOST CANON

Earlier today, I appeared for the first time on Nick Willard's ALMOST CANON podcast! The main topic under discussion is my nonfiction book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP.

Here's Nick Willard's synopsis of the episode:

This week we talk with author Robert Guffey and cover as much ground as we can in 3 hours! We start with Operation Mindfuck and end with Chameleo, covering just about everything you can think of in between.

I became aware of Robert Guffey’s work several years ago, 2016-2017, after he published a book called Chameleo: A Strange But True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security. This is a story that I believe doesn’t get the attention it deserves and is the reason I wanted to have Robert on in the first place. This story has its roots in ancient magic but focuses on not only alphabet agencies and high tech invisibility suits but other experimental technologies that are more akin to Men in Black or the Glimmer Man.

And while we do touch on Chameleo towards the end of our talk, we start off by discussing another masterpiece penned by Robert, a book called Operation Mindfuck which is Robert Guffey’s clinical dissection of QAnon.

LISTEN HERE!!!

SPIES & SAUCERS & BROWNIES!

Like anybody else, when my mother-in-law brings over some belated birthday brownies she baked herself, my first instinct is to use them to promote a book I wrote ten years ago. If you listened to my recent interview on Seriah Azkath's WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?, you heard me discuss my 2014 novella collection, SPIES AND SAUCERS. If your interest was piqued at all, there are still copies of the hardcover edition available on Amazon. Click HERE to order your copy of SPIES AND SAUCERS... TODAY!!!

PRAISE FOR SPIES AND SAUCERS:

 

"Robert Guffey’s book Spies and Saucers presents three novellas about UFOs, Men in Black, strange creatures and even stranger occurrences. These tales are set in the '50s, but they sound as fresh as any modern story of UFOs and strange creatures. Reading in bed or right before bed is not recommended for the faint of heart."

 

--Tessa B. Dick, author of Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright and My Life on the Edge of Reality

 

"Robert Guffey’s Spies and Saucers is an unforgettable experience. In this book, the three tales are distinct and yet also have clear thematic relationships to one another, all evoking an insightful view of the wonders and the fears of America in the '50s. They also draw upon a rich array of pop culture, ranging from B-horror movies like The Devil Bat (1940) with Bela Lugosi to Irish folklore and the golden age of science fiction novels.

 

"These allusions enriched both occasions I’ve read Spies and Saucers (thankfully I have a hardback, as I’ll be returning to it again in the near future). At the same time, I don’t believe knowledge of the various films and books to which Guffey refers is necessary, no more so than it is for reading and loving Thomas Pynchon.

 

"Spies and Saucers is thoughtful--at times dark, at times darkly humorous--but always enjoyable.

 

"Along with Cormac McCarthy, Guffey is my favorite modern fiction writer. Spies and Saucers provides ample proof as to why I feel that way.”

 

--Gary D. Rhodes, author of The Perils of Moviegoing in America

 

 

"Guffey's extraordinary fictional narrative is an extension of his interest in conspiracy theories and the wild suppositions and events these curious belief systems declare as truth [...]. Spies and Saucers resonates as a reconstruction of that mid-century media and those exceptional, nearly mystical experiences when flying saucers hovered above us and communists, hidden in doorways, watched us with subversive intent. Guffey's novel seems spontaneously generated from the troposphere of fear hanging above us at the beginning of a new, byte-infused century, a literary tulpa expressing the nexus of propaganda, false narratives, and outright lies we experience every day."

 

--The Mailer Review

My Final Rallying Cry to Vote for DEAD MONKEY RUM in the 22nd Annual Rondo Awards!!!

ANYONE can vote in the Rondo Awards! My latest novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, has been nominated for "Best Classic Monster Fiction." YOU CAN VOTE FOR DEAD MONKEY RUM IN 3 EASY STEPS....

1. Copy-and-paste the ballot below into an e-mail.
 
2. Choose DEAD MONKEY RUM in the BEST CLASSIC MONSTER FICTION category.
 
3. Then email to David Colton (taraco@aol.com) by midnight on April 16th, 2024.

Don’t forget to include your name in the e-mail!

 
--START COPYING--   

 

BEST CLASSIC MONSTER FICTION:

 
— DEAD MONKEY RUM, by Robert Guffey (Planet Bizarro, softcover, 192 pages, $12.99). Cryptozoic beasts race adventurers in Los Angeles.

--END COPYING--

 

MAHALO, my friends!!!

Another Chance to Hear WHERE DID THE ROAD GO? (Part 2)

In case you missed my recent appearances on Seriah Azkath's radio show WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?, then feel free to head on over to YouTube and check out Part Two of this three-hour interview. Topics include CHAMELEO, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES, SPIES & SAUCERS, psychic youth, drones, UFOs, They Live, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Whitley Strieber, Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, Aleister Crowley, John Dee, John Keel and the New Journalism, The Mothman Prophecies, The Eighth Tower, Wilhelm Reich, Contact With Space, Trevor James Constable, They Live in the Sky!, cloud busting machines, Jack Kirby, Kenn Thomas, William S. Burroughs, Charles Fort, Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, David Paulides, infrared light and cameras, advanced electronic military camouflage in Ukraine, high-tech camouflage and the Geneva Convention, Richard Schowengerdt’s recognition by the U.S. Navy, VICE News, and other matters of High Weirdness! (Note: This interview was recorded back on March 16th.)

Robert Guffey Part 2 - March 30, 2024

CRYPTOSCATOLOGY RETURNS TO FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE NEWS!

On today's episode of the FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE NEWS podcast, Chris Mathieu and I discuss esoteric cinema, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, UFOs, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, H.P. Lovecraft, SPIES & SAUCERS, my latest book, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES, and related High Strangeness!

LISTEN HERE!!!

Here's My Penultimate Reminder to Vote for DEAD MONKEY RUM in the 22nd Annual Rondo Awards!

Yes, it's true, ANYONE can vote in the Rondo Awards! My latest novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, has been nominated for "Best Classic Monster Fiction." YOU CAN VOTE FOR DEAD MONKEY RUM IN 3 EASY STEPS....

1. Copy-and-paste the ballot below into an e-mail.
 
2. Choose DEAD MONKEY RUM in the BEST CLASSIC MONSTER FICTION category.
 
3. Then email to David Colton (taraco@aol.com) by midnight on April 16th, 2024.

Don’t forget to include your name in the e-mail!

 
--START COPYING--   

 

BEST CLASSIC MONSTER FICTION:

 
— DEAD MONKEY RUM, by Robert Guffey (Planet Bizarro, softcover, 192 pages, $12.99). Cryptozoic beasts race adventurers in Los Angeles.

--END COPYING--

MAHALO, FRIENDS!!!

 

PRAISE FOR DEAD MONKEY RUM:

"A remarkable rush of entertainment and thrills."

--Alan Moore (V for Vendetta and Watchmen) 

 

"Robert Guffey's fantastic novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, will at least bring your brain out of a coma, if not get your imagination off the couch. This is a thinly masked tribute/adventure to the late Stanislaw Szukalski and his boundless imagination. This book is a mental gymnasium."

-- Robert Williams (Visual Addiction, Hysteria in Remission, and Through Prehensile Eyes)

 

"A fantastically rich and entertaining piece of work with an original sharp edge."

 -- Jim Woodring (writer/artist of Weathercraft, The Frank Book, and One Beautiful Spring Day)

 

"Stanislaw Szukalski would love DEAD MONKEY RUM. This novel is addictive like a heavy drug. Make space in your calendar to read it all."

-- Irek Dobrowolski (director of the Netflix documentary, Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski)

 

 "Yetis, Tiki Gods, Cryptozoology, and rum-filled adventure! Sign me up and tell me when the ship sails! I'm recommending this Robert Guffey novel to all my friends, family, and foes to take their minds completely off whatever they are thinking about. Wonderful."

-- Loren Coleman (Mysterious America, The Field Guide to Lake Monsters and Sea Serpents, The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Curious Encounters, and 40 other books - Director of the International Cryptozoology Museum)

 
"DEAD MONKEY RUM succeeds at being a pursuit thriller, with suspense and tension as the monkey and Stephanie evade their cryptid enemies, and comedy as the two exchange jabs at each other. It is cinematically fast. DEAD MONKEY RUM should be adapted to a [...] Ralph Bakshiesque animated film where both the zaniness of the narrative and the latent satire would really flourish."

-- Exotica Moderne

 

 UNBOXING DEAD MONKEY RUM:

 

 

CRYPTONECROLOGY: Ed Piskor, R.I.P. (1982-2024)

I included Ed Piskor's RED ROOM graphic novels on my annual Top Ten list two years in a row (see #2 of The Cryptoscatology Top Ten: The Best Comic Books of 2022! and #7 of The Cryptoscatology Top Ten: The Best Comic Books of 2023!). Here's what I wrote about RED ROOM in 2022 and 2023:

To the casual reader, Ed Piskor's RED ROOM might at first appear to be little more than an exercise in splatterpunk excess; for the more discerning reader, it turns out to be a clever, insightful, McLuhanesque satire about the effects of technology on the human condition and vice versa. Here’s the plot synopsis that appears at the beginning of each issue:

The DARK WEB provides means to use the internet ANONYMOUSLY, free from consequence. CRYPTOCURRENCY transactions lack a detectable paper trail, providing further obfuscation. These tools are being abused to create a NEFARIOUS subculture of MURDER for ENTERTAINMENT in real time via WEBCAM. WHO would participate in such a sick enterprise? WHO are the VICTIMS? WHO are the CUSTOMERS? WHO are the MURDERERS?

Throughout each issue, the reader is not only shown the extreme violence being streamed in the Red Room but also the ongoing thread of comments from the viewers paying to watch (and critique) the violence. From the way the comments are written, the reader begins to form a mental picture of the type of person who would shell out an excessive amount of money to witness something as bloody as this unfold before their eyes. The perverse chatroom comments, particularly the ones that appear in RED ROOM: TRIGGER WARNINGS #3, are eerily similar to what I’ve read in QAnon chatrooms while researching my latest book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP.

If you think comparing a story about a cult of snuff film enthusiasts to the followers of QAnon is way off the mark, consider the fact that soon after Joe Biden’s certification as president, QAnon followers began enthusiastically sharing doctored photographs and videos on social media that appeared to show scaffolding near the White House on which human beings were being hanged. The QAnon cultists couldn’t have been more elated. They thought this was proof that Trump was still President, had declared martial law, and was now following through on “the Plan” to execute Satanic Democrats—in public view. When it became obvious to even the most gullible QAnon follower that these photos and videos were fake, the sigh of disappointment was heard around the world. These Christian Patriots were inconsolably upset that they had not been watching genuine snuff films.

Though not explicitly about QAnon, the hypocrisy of MAGA Trumpism, and the radicalization of the evangelical right, RED ROOM nonetheless holds up a distorted mirror to its audience that successfully unveils the ugliest Jungian shadows of early twenty-first century America. If "splatterpunk satire" isn't already a recognized category of fiction, perhaps RED ROOM will put it on the literary map.

Of course, aficionados are well aware that humor has always been an important component to splatterpunk. From the top of the literary strata (e.g., the dark elegance of Clive Barker's BOOKS OF BLOOD or the Boschian onslaught of historical violence depicted in Edward Lee's THE TELEVISION), all the way down to the pulp madness of Rex Miller's SLOB or Guy N. Smith's CRABS ON THE RAMPAGE, one finds gallows humor interwoven with the very DNA of violent horror; however, Ed Piskor's RED ROOM series takes this marriage of humor and horror to new heights. RED ROOM: CRYPTO KILLAZ!, the third and final volume of the series, is the apex of splatterpunk as social satire. What might at first seem to be an exploitative horror story about "murder for fun and profit on the dark web" (the comic's official tagline) ends up being a multilayered examination of the marriage between dehumanization and technological evolution, fragmentation and capitalism, reality distortion and identity displacement. The bloody story spans generations, establishing unexpected connections throughout the decades, linking the dawn of cinema to the Jack the Ripper murders, Charles Foster Kane to snuff films, Quentin Tarantino to Quantico, crypto coins to human sacrifice. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan (who was somewhat of a satirist himself) wrote in 1970, "When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.” If McLuhan were writing UNDERSTANDING MEDIA in the twenty-first century, he would no doubt devote a whole chapter to Ed Piskor and RED ROOM.

Here's an excerpt from Christian Holub's 4-2-24 ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY article entitle "Ed Piskor, Comic Artist and YouTube Host, Dies at 41":

Ed Piskor, the writer and artist behind ambitious comic books like Hip Hop Family Tree and X-Men: Grand Design, died Monday at 41.

A death notice posted by the Savolskis-Wasik-Glenn Funeral Home of Munhall, Pa., remembered Piskor as a "gifted artist and cartoonist" and said he "passed away unexpectedly." Piskor's sister, Justine Cleaves, also addressed his death on Facebook, writing, "It is with the most broken heart that I share my big brother, Ed, has passed away today. Please just keep our family in your prayers as this is the hardest thing we've ever had to go through."

A cause of death was not disclosed. On Monday morning, Piskor posted a lengthy note to his Facebook page, in which he addressed and denied allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct from multiple women. "I'm helpless against a mob of this magnitude. Please share my side of things. Sayonara," he wrote, linking out to a five-page document that ended with "1982-2024."

Piskor broke through in comics with his 2012-2016 project Hip Hop Family Tree, which documented the early years of hip-hop culture and portrayed iconic figures like DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Public Enemy.

In 2017, Piskor took a similar all-encompassing ensemble approach to Marvel superhero mythology with X-Men: Grand Design, an attempt to synthesize the complicated history of mutants in a cohesive narrative. In an interview with EW at the time, Piskor explained how he tried to blend multiple different comic art styles in his work. "I'm a fan of all comics," he said. "I like manga, I like French European albums, I like a lot of newspaper comic strips. The storytelling method I use is a pastiche of all that stuff."

Since then, Piskor wrote and drew a horror comic series called Red Room, which occasionally inspired controversy. He also launched a YouTube channel called Cartoonist Kayfabe, in which he and fellow cartoonist Jim Rugg would interview other comic artists and share their thoughts on the art form.

To read the entire obituary, click HERE.

Friends and fans have been posting various tributes since the news of Piskor's death was announced. Here are just a few from Danny Bedrosian, David Choe, Chuck D, Gary Groth, Mahdi Khene, Rob Liefeld, Jim Mahfood, Tom Scioli, and Carol Tyler.

Following Piskor's final wishes, Jim Rugg (his CARTOONIST KAYFABE co-host) has begun posting the banked episodes. You can see the latest one directly below....

CARTOONIST KAYFABE:
EC Comics vs US Air Force! Are UFOs Real? Was the Comics Code Payback?

Another Chance to Hear WHERE DID THE ROAD GO? (Part 1)

In case you missed my recent appearances on Seriah Azkath's radio show WHERE DID THE ROAD GO?, Part One of this new three-hour interview is now available directly below....

Robert Guffey Part 1 - March 23, 2024:

Not only do Seriah and I discuss my latest book, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES (as well as a panoply of CHAMELEO-related topics), but we also delve into lucid dreaming, Flannel Men, Freemasonry, UFOs, Glimmer Men, eyeless stone dogs, psychic warfare, and more!!!

THE COMPLETE FEAR OF KATHY ACKER

I just finished reading Jack Skelley's FEAR OF KATHY ACKER, a darkly comedic stream-of-consciousness rant that's half dirty realism and half Joycean monologue. This unique experimental novel would make a fantastic one-man show. Highly recommended! 

 

"Deft, deadpan, dreadful, deliberate, delirious. Perfect adult bedtime reading."
—Jane Rankin-Reid, White Hot Magazine

"Fear of Kathy Acker is one of the great lost masterpieces of ’80s experimental fiction. That it’s no longer an inaccessible legend is huge."
—Dennis Cooper

"Jack Skelley pours it on like sometimes blam blam blam like the riff in 'Death Valley '69' but mostly with a surfer’s rhythm like the cool throb of his guitar, his writing the poetics of pink love and punk pool splash action, the sound I adore."
—Thurston Moore

"Despite the dislike of seeing my own name, you’re really a good writer—never what’s expected."
—Kathy Acker