That Black Magic itself had somehow sanctioned Dennis Wheatley to write its stories… and that stayed with me. Now, don’t laugh but you know that thing kids do, when they let their imaginations run away with them? I had it in my tiny head that this line meant it was official. The words at the top read “A BLACK MAGIC STORY” and something about that struck me. It had the title in stark white print beneath a glowing eyed goat skull.
I remember seeing the cover for The Devil Rides Out for the first time. Although Wheatley himself was long dead, a few of his occult novels had resurfaced to cash in on this horror boom. Anyone who’s seen some of these from the 80s will know that quite often the blood-soaked, titillating, psychedelic paintings on the front were often far better than the lacklustre words inside. I remember when I was a little kid, one of my hobbies (and, bear with me, I was kind of a weird kid) was browsing the racks of my local newsagent at all the pulp horror covers.
Bloomsbury UK are releasing the majority of Wheatley’s fiction for e-readers alongside sleek paperback reissues of key titles and I can’t stress enough what a serious treat this is for fans of genre fiction. I’ve scoured second hand bookshops, fought white-knuckle bid wars on eBay and wasted hours of my life tracking down tatty old paperbacks from my grandparents’ era but now, at last, he’s getting the re-appraisal he’s always deserved. Of all my favourite authors, Dennis Wheatley is the only one whose work has been largely out of print throughout my lifetime.
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