Destroyer: A Black Magic Story

by Andrew Hickey

When Rudolph Hess flew to Britain, he was on a secret mission -- to give Nazi spies in Britain the secrets of an occult ritual that would win the war for the Germans.
With the fate of the world at stake, Alan Turing, Dennis Wheatley, and Ian Fleming have to find the occultists and stop them. But what is Aleister Crowley's involvement? And how can they decode the ritual in time?
"an intriguing adventure": Fortean Times

172 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 20, 2017

About the author

I had a biography here but it was very out of date. Currently my main work is my podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. The New Yorker compared that to the Bible, Oxford English Dictionary, and the works of Gibbon and Pepys, and said it "will eclipse every literary project in history". So that's nice.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Ian Fleming attempts to harness the talents of Alan Turing, Aleister Crowley, Tom Driberg and Dennis Wheatley to deal with the various possibilities and risks of an occult ritual brought over by Rudolph Hess on his flight from Nazi Germany. Possibilities and risks relating purely to the belief other factions may have in the rituaI, of course, because magic isn't real...is it? I suspect if I'd read this back when I was devouring Usborne guides to the supernatural, and similar wide-eyed grab bags of the rum and uncanny, it would have become one of my favourite books (though at that age, come to think of it, I might have found the number of queer characters a bug(ger) rather than a feature). Now, I'm aware that I'm missing a level, because it's a pastiche of Wheatley and his ilk, and I've not actually read any of the originals. But it's still plenty of fun, in a Boys' Own Bumper Book of Satan sort of way. Also, very good on the little privations of wartime life, the sort fiction often considers unworthy of mention but which can easily impact on everyday life far more than the big stuff - the scratchy socks and terrible tea. One or two little details seemed misplaced: the phrase 'sexualised violence' running through Fleming's wartime thoughts feels like it might be anachronistic; and surely the ringing church bells would have attracted more interest given 1941 is within the period when they were only to be rung as a warning of attack or invasion? But the amount of John Higgs-style primer on Ideaspace snuck in to the final chapters makes up for that.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2017/10...