Satan’s Mistress
By Brian McNaughton
1978 Carlyle
Paperback, 252 pages
McNaughton’s follow-up to Satan’s
Love Child isn’t as sex-filled as its predecessor, but it’s a truly
inspired piece of lunacy in and of itself. Nobody in the book has a shred of
decency and wonderfully awful things happen to everyone.
The Laughlins are a fucked-up
family. Mom’s an insane hippy, dad is a commercial artist and young Patrick is
confused as hell. They live in Mom’s inherited old Mill that has a suspect
history. Patrick is an awkward nerd but has typical teenage thoughts and
desires, and dreams of a red-haired mistress. In the waking world, he has a
crush on a cheerleader. When the folks have an “adult” party, everyone gathers
at the Mill and, quite literally, all hell starts to break loose. You see, Mom
has found a hidden passageway in the basement that leads to her ancestor’s
library which is filled with evil writings. It turns out that the Cthulhu
Mythos that Lovecraft wrote about was not fiction!
That’s about the gist of it and
believe me, that premise allows all kinds of wacky things to happen. Patrick
gets taken over by evil spirits, Dad buggers his gay boss, and everyone gets
wrapped up in the madness. There is incest, infant-eating, possession, and
brutality, but it’s all served up with a healthy sense of humor and clever storytelling.
At one point, the family lawyer, a Lovecraft fan, figures out the connection
when he finds the real Necronomicon in the library and says he has to call
Colin Wilson, L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Briney, all real-life writers
who have dabbled in the Mythos (the last one, a collaborator with McNaughton!)
to see what they know about it.
In a word, this book is fun. Sit
back and enjoy the silly weirdness. By the way, it was Carlyle Books that made
this and three other books “the Satan Series” back in the day. Overall, they
don’t really share a common thread, though the third book, Satan’s Seductress,
does continue this storyline. This title has been restored as Downward to
Darkness with McNaughton’s original, preferred text and title, by Wildside
Press and it is readily available online. But feel free to stick with this, the pulpier version, for a wild ride.