Dark Sanctuary By H.B. Gregory

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It also has the benefit of pulling the reader into the story almost immediately Dark SanctuaryI was surprised at how good this book turned out for an old print a family curse that must be broken and the last one of the family has his whole being set to end it with the help of two newly introduce friends and the knowledge the know that they will teach him in order to end the curse he thinks this just may be what his whole lifes meaning has come to but how right he was just may be his whole lifes end I can t say much but it was a good story Dark Sanctuary A fun piece of rare weird fiction that was almost completely lost to obscurity but survived due to Karl Edward Kane s infamous reading list It was the only book that HB Gregory wrote Fans of Lovecraft.

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The novel opens with Anthony Lovell Sr. Dark Sanctuary booker master of the ancient abbey of Kestrel and its like named island off the Cornish coast raving in madness and fear over the ancient family curse that dwells in the bowels of the abbey rock What has caused his madness is unclear but it is obviously linked to something seen or experienced in Kestrel s ancient crypts Lovell s son is called back from London and soon thereafter John Hamilton a free lance journalist and friend to the younger Lovell makes his way to Kestrel as well The first thing worth noting in Dark Sanctuary is its use of a historical record to provide authenticity The history of Kestrel given in chapter one is as fictitious as the abbey and island itself but it includes just enough real historical data to be believable Positioned as it is early in the novel Weird Tales and Hodgeson s House on the Borderlands will appreciate this Gregory writes with what seems to be an authentic understanding of the occult and my only complaint is the clearly Christian overtones Dark Sanctuary A very happy day it was for me but a very unfortunate day for my bank account when I first discovered the website for Ramble House books Specializing in impossibly obscure sci fi horror mystery and weird menace titles from the first half of the 20th century the publisher has an overwhelming catalog of reasonably priced volumes that will surely make any fan of those genres salivate books for the most part that are available nowhere else I have already written here of Greye La Spina s wonderful horror novel Invaders From the Dark 1925 only available from Ramble House and now would like to tell you of a book that I recently read from the company s Dancing Tuatara Press imprint that is even of a rarity The book in question this time is H. Dark Sanctuary kindle cloud which mainly dealt with books of metaphysics and spiritual matters but which also published some like minded fiction The print run was apparently limited to only 400 copies most of which were destroyed in a warehouse during the London Blitz The book sank into immediate obscurity for 43 years until the renowned editor author Karl Edward Wagner included it in his now famous list of The 13 Best Supernatural Horror Books This would lead to the novel s resurrection in 2001 by Midnight House books in a print run of fewer than 500 copies which almost instantly sold out But fortunately thanks to Ramble House this once impossible to find horror novel is now a snap to obtain The company s 2012 edition not only features two highly informative introductions by Ramble House s late mainman John Pelan and by D. Dark Sanctuary kindle app H Olson but also surprisingly an interview that Pelan conducted with Gregory himself in 2005 when the author was 92not to mention some beautiful cover art by Gavin O Keefe who seems to have provided the artwork for hundreds of other Ramble House books as well I would say thus that this is the edition of Dark Sanctuary that you want to get the definitive edition if it weren t the only one that you re likely to find at a reasonable price And incidentally I might add that I just saw an online bookseller offering that Rider Co first edition with dust jacket for over 6000 That s how scarce the book once was As for Gregory himself he was born Harry Beare Gregory in Derby England in 1912 Dark Sanctuary is his only novel of any kind although in his interview he reveals that he also wrote five sci fi short stories for young adults in the 1950s A man of a deeply devout Anglo Catholic bent Gregory s faith deeply imbues his only novel a good old fashioned tale of good namely the God of the Bible and His ministers vs evil as in Satan and his acolytes and the forces of Outer Chaos The author would ultimately pass away in 2007 at the age of 94. Book Dark sanctuary cap Gregory s book has as its unique setting the ancient abbey of Kestrel which itself sits atop the small fictitious isle of Kestrel three miles off Cornwall s north coast Around 400 years before the main action begins King Henry VIII had given the abbey to one Sir Anthony Lovel who had proceeded to evict and or slay the monks who were then in possession The head abbot had then placed a curse on Sir Anthony and all his future descendants which curse still seems to be in perfectly good operational order as Gregory s book begins Thus we see the current owner of Kestrel another Sir Anthony screaming in delirium after having witnessed some kind of monstrosity in the caverns beneath the edifice s basement crypt His son the worthless playboy Tony Lovell as the surname is spelled today is called to his father s bedside from London and Tony soon wires to his friend journalist John Hamilton to send a worthy psychotherapist down at once But what a practitioner Hamilton chooses at random for the job Thus Dr Nicholas Gaunt is soon at Kestrel on the case and Lovell Sr seems to make a miraculous recoveryonly to succumb to a chance accident shortly after. Book Dark sanctuary cap As the book proceeds the handsome but sinister Gaunt sends for his colleague the immensely fat and toadlike Simon Vaughan to assist him and Tony in expelling the Kestrel curse once and for all Kestrel we learn was once a section of the legendary Lyonesse and home to the wizard Merlin himself who had succeeded in rending the veil to the Outer Chaos and entrapping a monstrosity of pure evil in the underground caverns We also soon learn that Gaunt far from being a kindhearted doctor is in actuality a practicing Satanist that Vaughan despite his middle aged looks is a century old defrocked priest and Gaunt s underling and that the two rather than eliminating the horror plan to release it into the world in the name of their lord Satan Young Tony proves to be easily duped and is even worked on to the point where he becomes a willing initiate in the evildoers cult When Hamilton makes a chance visit to the island he is startled by the change in his old friend and decides to spend some time on the Cornish coast three miles across the water in a little fishing village called Pentock There he befriends the local elderly rector Michael Bennett and begins to fall in love with the rector s niece Valerie And as events proceed toward a culmination and a red sulfurous fog enshrouds Kestrel and the surrounding sea blocking it from approach Hamilton and his two new friends realize that they must do something anything to avert an almost literal hell on Earth In his introduction to the 2001 edition reprinted in this Ramble House release D H Olson tells us that Dark Sanctuary is a very Christian novel and that statement was borne out by Gregory himself who said in his interview several years later As a practicing Anglo Catholic I hope the book will strike a blow for Christianity in these faithless days What makes the book so very Christian Well putting aside the fact that Father Bennett absolutely secure in his faith is the coolest and most levelheaded amongst our heroes there is also the fact that prayers to the Almighty do seem to have a marked effect here despite Jim Morrison once telling us that You cannot petition the Lord with prayer Several religious services are lovingly depicted by the author and the mere spectacle of the Eucharist is enough to bring Hamilton and even to a degree Tony back into the fold The book even manages to work in a literal deus ex machina into its story line although the sentence Then God came might make the disbelievers chuckle out loud And yet if one can buy into the notion of forces of evil and Outer Chaos why not the warriors of Heaven as well But I don t wish to give you the wrong idea here Despite its overt Christian elements Dark Sanctuary as its title suggests is very much a horror novel a melding of Lovecraftian elements although the cosmic horror here is very much on full display not merely suggested as in so many of H P s works with a touch of Dennis Wheatley particularly his 1934 classic The Devil Rides Out which itself featured a story with the friends of a young Englishman attempting to rescue him from a Satanic cult The book features any number of smashing and scarifying sequences including Tony Gaunt and Vaughan s first sighting of the monstrosity deep beneath the abbey crypts Tony s initiation into the Devil worshipping cult at Gaunt s home in Hampstead the harrowing ordeal that Hamilton and Valerie go through when after being trapped in a storm in their sailboat they manage to wash up on Kestrel isle the absolutely nerve racking sequence in which Gaunt uses his power of mind control to compel Valerie into the monster s pit the Black Mass ceremony that Tony participates in with Gaunt and Vaughan during which the Eucharist wafer is stabbed by Tony and begins to drip blood the highly atmospheric sequence when that mephitic and hellacious fog blankets the entire area and the mind boggling denouement during which our heroes paralyzed by Gaunt s magic are forced to watch as the necromancer attempts to not only set the monstrosity loose on the world but rend the veil to the Outer Chaos and allow all its fellow monstrosities entrance And speaking of which this book s monster really is a doozy As Gaunt puts it it is the most tremendous evil force this world has ever knowna monstrosity of the Outer Darkness an intruder from the chaos which exists behind the Veil of dimensional matter. EPub Dark sanctuary Adding further horror to the conceit is the fact that all of Gaunt s magics are than highly effective Picture the man as a handsome suave but supremely evil Dr Strange Thus not only can Gaunt compel others to do his will but with the use of his crystal globe he can communicate with others from afar send another person s Ka or spirit double off on dastardly missions and show images from another person s mind With his hazel staffed iron pronged blasting rod he can shoot bolts of lightninglike power And Simon too who is well over 100 yet looks only half that proves no slouch in the necromancy field himself his cabalistic diagrams on the crypt floor setting up an impenetrable force field of sorts Truly this is a book of frightening and startling marvels No wonder Wagner was induced to include it in his famous list of top supernatural horrors For the rest of it Dark Sanctuary features some wonderfully described locales with Pentock Kestrel and the entire Cornish north coast being convincingly set forth The book s six main characters are likewise realistically fleshed out Gregory had a very nice way with natural sounding dialogue and Gaunt and Simon make for wonderful and hissable villains The book is exciting gripping suspenseful occasionally nightmarish and builds steadily to its bravura climax What a film it could possibly make To be honest this reader found Dark Sanctuary to be fairly unputdownable an absolutely splendid horror novel that deserves to be better known I can t imagine any fan of well written shudders not loving this delicious supernatural tale. Book Dark sanctuary cap And yet having said that I must concede that Gregory does make a trio of mistakes during the course of his work To begin with he mentions that Henry VIII s Dissolution of the Monasteries began in 1532 whereas in actuality it was 1536 He tells us that James Lovel was the son of the abbey s original owner Sir Anthony back in the 16th century but later tells us that James was his nephew Huh And he gives the wrong title of a Swinburne poem that is quoted it should be Swinburne s Hymn to Proserpine not Before a Crucifix But that s pretty much it Dark Sanctuary is otherwise a wonderfully solid reading experience and it is to be regretted that this novel was Gregory s only foray into the realm of horror I d surely have been ready for As it is we should all be thankful for the miracle that allowed Karl Edward Wagner to find one of the book s scarce copies to begin with and then alert the world to its existenceas well as to Ramble House for making it widely available today The publisher has several other items from the Wagner list as well as from Wagner s two other highly quoted lists The 13 Best Sci Fi Horror Books and The 13 Best Non Supernatural Horror Books and I hope to be getting into some of them as well as some other horrific Ramble House obscurities in the months ahead Stay tuned By the way this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at a most ideal destination for all fans of supernatural horror Dark Sanctuary Excellent atmospheric novel with depth and nuance than one might ve expected and one infused with Christian hermeticism Pelan describes it as early Christian answer to fictions of H P Lovecraft in his introduction and it very much reads like that though it is not at all preachy Worthy of being rediscovered nowadays especially as it is made easily available by Ramble House Those who are not easily offended by Christian themes are in for a treat Dark Sanctuary I m completely baffled by how this book could ever end up in a best of list It s a rare publication yes but maybe there was a reason for that The closest I can think of it s one of those super minor gothic novels of the early 18th century that kept re telling the same tale using the same characters and boring over and over again too many readers: Dark Sanctuary kindle cloud B Gregory s Dark Sanctuary which comes preceded by great word of mouth from those few who have experienced it. Book Dark sanctuary cap The book has a short but interesting printing history It was originally released as a hardcover in 1940 by the British publisher Rider Co, Kindle Dark sanctuary We re in the realm of the cliche up and down all around, Kindle Dark sanctuary No atmosphere no eerie scary passages no suspense and no purpose for this book to exist. Kindle Dark sanctuary Some parts of the story had you re kidding right written all over: Dark sanctuary swtor Clearly I can see no talent here Dark Sanctuary