A Thief in the Night- Funny Christian Propaganda

            A big fuss was made about the series Left Behind: the apocalyptic series about the End of Days wherein all the good Christians are swept up by the rapture (something they never mentioned to me in Catholic Sunday School), leaving all the rapists, murderers, arsonists, people who enjoy touching themselves in an impure manner (Guilty!), people who don’t like going to church (Guilty!), and  people who drink alcohol (Guilty!) to suffer under the rule of the Antichrist. Well did you know that this idea had been done before? Oh yes. In the 1970’s and early 80s a succession of films conjured up the Christian Armageddon right before our eyes. It was called A Thief in the Night series.

This guy's mustache is the real star

            A Thief in the Night (1972) was the brain child of Russel Daughton, who incidentally was an uncredited writer/director on the 1950’s version of The Blob. He plays a recurring role in all four films as a preacher who lead his flock astray by telling them that God loves them and all they had to do was lead a good life. Widely popular in the Christian underground film movement, the film was followed by A Distant Thunder (1978), Mark of the Beast (1981), and The Prodigal Planet (1983). Daughton was raising funds to finish the series, with The Battle of Armageddon, but passed away in August of 2013. In a sense this series goes beyond Left Behind because it marries Christian prophecy with a lot of crazy conspiracy theories.

            The action of the first film focuses on Patty, a young woman who thinks she’s a good Christian because she reads the Bible and sometimes goes to Church. Ha! She learns soon enough that being a good Christian (according to this film) requires you to constantly lecture other people about their sinful ways and spew Bible quotations from every orifice (“Hey, have you heard about this dead Jew that’ll solve all of your problems? His name is Jesus Christ- even though it really isn’t.”). In fact it’s a relief when the rapture actually comes because all of the smug (and they are oh-so smug) Christian types are gone, along with their sermonizing. No more Bible verses, let’s get to the blood!

            After the rapture a new world order, called UNITE (United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency), takes control. One of its first actions is to decree that everyone must wear an identification mark, the number 0110 repeated three times (0110 being binary code for 6). Patty refuses to take it, making her a target. She is then chased around and around and around the town, until she is knocked off of a bridge by a pair of her former friends who had taken the mark. The original films ends with everything being a dream, but a prophetic one for as Patty wakes up and goes into the kitchen, she learns that the rapture has indeed occurred. She gives a hearty scream and everything goes dead, except for the sound of me laughing.

  As the films progress things get a whole lot crazier. All of the world’s governments give up due to natural disasters and a limited nuclear exchange, and a man by the name of Brother Christopher takes over UNITE. Of course all true Christians know him to be the Antichrist, just like Obama, but everyone else loves the guy even though he speaks in a creepy metallic voice with a staccato cadence to it.

            No one is allowed to buy or sell unless they take the mark (0110). Eventually it is also discovered that the mark is the root code for the UPC symbol system. Patty, still refusing to place it on her hand, is forced to scrounge for food. Jesus shows up, says hi, then leaves.  Several nuclear explosions happen. A new religion is formed around Brother Christopher which everyone, but the faithful Christians, join (I guess the Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Rastafarians, and Hindus just give in). Patty is betrayed by friends, captured by UNITE, and eventually guillotined in the beginning of the third film.

            We are then handed over to a new protagonist, David, a plausible action hero who is out to get UNITE. The films take on a low rent Mad Max vibe here. There are dirt road chases, gun fights, people who aren’t Christians get large boils on their faces, hordes of mutants in robes roam the countryside attacking everyone (I shit you not!), a six year old is guillotined by the government, and one woman is eaten by a giant locust. All ending with a shootout and the heroes blowing up UNITE’s “main computer bunker” in New Mexico, which completely disorganizes them. Apparently this global government has only one server and no backups.

            All of this put together actually sounds pretty cool, but in-between each interesting part is  a lot of sermonizing and morality lessons which seem like they should’ve been scripted for a bad 1980’s sitcom, not an apocalyptic battlefield.

            Something I want to point out here is that I have noticed that the best religious type films/ morality plays don’t mention the Bible or Jesus at all. Whenever the Bible is discussed, the film comes to a screeching halt. Say what you want about The Passion of the Christ, it isn’t preachy and it keeps your interest.

            The entire series is riddled with laughably bad acting, stock footage that doesn’t match the movie’s film stock, and suffers from an extremely low budget. Granted this is a labor of love for the director and no doubt the people in it were all true believers working for low pay (if not for free), still the poor budget becomes very glaring as the series goes on and swings quickly from campy to tedious.This film series needs a fan edit.

                                  

The Witchlord and The Weaponmaster- Review





1st edition cover

  The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster is the notoriously difficult to find tenth book in The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series (known as the Wizard War series in the US).  The first edition of it was barely published at all, while the second is available as a print-on-demand novel through Amazon for around $40. I first came across it as a free PDF on the author’s, Hugh Cook, website but that was taken down after his death from brain cancer in 2008.

2nd edition cover

The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness is a series of interconnected books all of which occur at the same time (or roughly the same time) and the events of each impact the others. This leads to some very interesting storytelling as in some cases you saw the impact (it would come across as a rumor in a novel), before the event was described in another book. Each novel centers on a different protagonist and that person would often show up in another novel in a brief reference or as a minor character. So while every book technically stands alone, they all coalesce to make a greater whole- a literary collage.  He must have had one hell of a chart to keep track of it all, but it was one of the things that made this series stand out.

Cover of the 1st novel

        Originally the series was to be twenty books long, with two additional series planned The Chronicles of an Age of Wrath, and The Chronicles of an Age of Heroes- making for a total of 60 books. Unfortunately poor sales aborted that idea and Cook wrote The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster to wrap up the entire series- after which he put it completely behind him. I had contacted him in the mid-2000s offering to work with him on the series, releasing some more as ebooks – a very new idea then- but he was uninterested. Which is understandable, he had recently been diagnosed with cancer, but he also stated that he had moved past the series. Perhaps that was presumptuous of me, but I loved the world and the characters in it and I did not want it to end- especially not with this novel.

Cover of the 1st book-
American Edition

   I first encountered the series when it was published as Wizard War in the late 80s. I was immediately drawn in by the imagination, scope of the book, and the wonderful descriptions. What attracted me most though was the amorality which hung heavy in the setting. This was no typical fantasy fight against the forces of darkness. The protagonists were not shining examples of goodness and heroism. These were men, neither good nor evil (or should I say, both good and evil), struggling against each other, each with their own agenda. Reading it was a breath of fresh air.  As I continued with the series, I saw how one intimately slid into the other, like a great jigsaw puzzle. In fact there are many little things mentioned in the first and second books which are much larger deals in the tenth. Cook really did construct a beautiful literary architecture.

2nd book- Original cover

           The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster centers around the character of Guest Gulkan- The Weaponmaster, also known as The Emperor in Exile- and his father Onosh Gulkan – The Witchlord- as they rule their empire, lose it due to internal strife, then attempt to regain it. Guest Gulkan has appeared as a minor character in several other novels- The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (book 2), The Women and the Warlords (book 3), The Walrus and the Warwolf (book 4, though he isn't named) and The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (book 6)-  always with a sinister agenda which is finally revealed.  He begins the novel at the age of 14 (earlier than any other story in the series) and ends with his quest for power uniting many of the plot elements of the series. His eventual success is of a different order from that of the previous protagonists, giving him enough control over his world to change it entirely and shows us the end of the Age of Darkness- and probably therein lies the problem with this book.



2nd book- American cover

  I had several problems with this novel. The first being, despite its length (724 pages), it appears to be hastily written. There is a great deal of repetition of past events (some of them which happened only three or four pages earlier) and the titles of characters (some of which are quite long). Often the same information is repeated almost word for word on the same page. It seems very sloppy, almost like a first draft. An odd thing is that this repetition appears to have gotten worse between the first and second editions. I know when he re-edited the book he was suffering from brain cancer and had vision problems, but it still needed to be smoothed out. He obviously just wanted to get it over with. Perhaps it's understandable with his dreams of a huge series blowing up. 

3rd book- Original cover

        This is also probably the only book in the series which could not be read as a stand-alone book. A lot of the action that we get is either covered entirely in other novels or is skipped over in a few lines. Especially towards the end, the entire story mostly relates Guest zipping to and fro across the world, stopping some place for a few years (covered in a few pages), and then moving on. It wraps up the series, but is not a good story by itself. It feels more like a synopsis in many places.

3rd book- American cover

And because of this, the character of Guest is not very fleshed out. He’s just there. We are told of how he grows and changes, but we don’t feel it. Everything is hastily assembled. The opening of the book is the Collisnon Empire, also the setting for the third book. In the previous novel we get a real feel for this land. It is very distinct, filled with old customs and its own sense of history. All of this is missing here. It feels like just some generic country, not the interesting place described before. The flavor is missing from this novel and we are left with a bland concoction.

            Again I love this series and I’m happy I have this book. It’s simply that the last of the novels is also the least of them.
Buy it here

           

The Registry of Death

   The Registry of Death is a 56 page graphic novel by Australian artists Matt Coyle and Peter Lamb published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1995.  I first ran across it in Mid-Ohio Con in the late 90s during my routine excavations into the dollar bins - a particularly favorite activity of mine. If ever I thought that I had gotten a great bargain, it was when I snatched this up for 50 cents. it remains one of my favorite horror comics ever.


 It is a different book from your standard graphic novel, mostly consisting of single panel illustrations with captions at the bottom of the page. The pictures are bold, brutal, and mixed with traces of cold antiseptic cleanliness. They aren't explicit, but an anger and viciousness underlies each of the them. Everything is a little bit off in these illustrations (by design), every face is twisted ever so slightly, as if their souls had been stripped away and only the beast remained. The images are haunting and stay with you long after you're finished with the book.

The story is simple. A man, who works for the Registry of Death as an eliminator, now finds himself targeted by that group, seemingly out of nowhere. He has to strive the onslaughts of his former colleagues, a group of unrepentant sociopaths, as he tries to figure out the truth.

The book is simple, yet within it I find a complexity. Every time I read this book, I see something new. It's an overlooked masterpiece that stays with you for a long time afterward.

Buy it here