Raising Hell: An Encyclopedia of Devil Worship and Satanic Crime

by Michael Newton

A guide to the satanic crime discusses the crimes of Stanley Dean Baker, a Satanist and cannibal; Juana Catrilaf, who killed her own grandmother and drank her blood; Charles Manson; and others. Original.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Conspiracy Theories

406 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

From Wikipedia:
"Michael Newton (born 1951) is an American author best known for his work on Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan series. Newton first began work on the Executioner series by co-writing "The Executioner's War Book" with Don Pendleton in 1977. Since then he has been a steady writer for the series with almost 90 entries to his credit, which triples the amount written by creator Don Pendleton. His skills and knowledge of the series have allowed him to be picked by the publishers to write the milestone novels such as #100, #200, and #300.

Writing under the pseudonym Lyle Brandt, Michael Newton has also become a popular writer of Western novels. He has written a number of successful non-fiction titles as well, including a book on genre writing (How to Write Action Adventure Novels). His book Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida won the Florida Historical Society's 2002 Rembert Patrick Award for Best Book in Florida History. Newton's "Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology" won the American Library Association's award for Outstanding Reference Work in 2006."

Pen names: Lyle Brandt, Don Pendleton, Jack Buchanan

Bibiliography available here.

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book could have been subtitled "A Roadmap To The Satanic Panic Era." Newton takes the reader through information on all kinds of cults and cultlike groups, sometimes involving spectacularly awful crimes. Many of the stories, like the murder of Arlis Perry, are very well-known but many others collected here have long since fallen into obscurity. One oddity in this book is the lack of cross-referencing; instead of just adding, say, "SEE ALSO MANSON FAMILY" at the end of an entry, Newton will repeat the whole story of the Mansons for you wherever it connects up to a character or crime. He doesn't just cut and paste, either -- this book came out before WordPerfect was in use. He'll rewrite the whole story for you from a slightly different perspective. This makes the entries repetitive as anything, but they also give the impression of a tremendous national, or international, network of weirdos working together for evil purposes. This was a nostalgic read about the biggest wave of hysteria the American public has experienced (so far) in my lifetime. Recommended.

[Nerine Dorman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gets one star for the amount of stories Newton has collected. It gets another star for having grammatically correct English. As a definitive guide to the occult, the author fails miserably, instead trying to cobble together a disparate collection of lurid tales designed to convince conservative people that any person who dabbles in the occult is almost certainly also headed directly down a path involving drug dealing, murder, paedophilia and sexual deviance. I must congratulate him on giving me some ideas to explore in fiction, however, and for showing me just how sad people are.

[?0?0?0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is handy as a sort-of wikipidia in a pocket-sized volume for a quick refresher on various cults around the world and crimes committed by its members, but the glaring and unforgivable error here is there's no bibliography although most of this material can be verified by cross-referencing with other books on this topic and online and so forth.