Netherwood and Night Tide

Finally managed to get round to buying a copy of Netherwood by Stephen Volk - it's the last part of  The Dark Masters Trilogy of novels. It's a strange experience reading it, as I can see how much background material has been used from Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley. The author remains very faithful to much of the detail about the house and characters such as Vernon Symons, while introducing a sinister villain of his own invention. It should also be said that Dennis Wheatley had met Crowley, but never visited him at Netherwood. Very flattering really and I have to thank the person who alerted me to it at my Treadwells talk last year.

In the acknowledgements in the back Stephen Volk thanks me and my co authors for the book, which he bought from a 'dingy' bookshop (I know the one) in Hastings Old Town on a research trip. It's great to know that some of one's work is inspiring or being used by other writers, artists and musicians. I know that a play has been written about Netherwood (not sure if it has ever been performed) and it has been used in the work of Gareth E Rees. Subterranean city has been an inspiration for a number of artists including Stephen Walter (see here), fiction writers and a dancer.

Also this week I watched a newly reissued film called Night Tide (1961) starring a young and handsome Dennis Hopper. See here. Once more a Crowley connection that I hadn't been aware of when I bought it. Director Curtis Harrington was a friend of Kenneth Anger and appeared in his film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), together with Marjorie Cameron about whom he later made a film called Wormwood Star (1956). See here. She also appears in Night Tide. Harrington was obviously mixing in the LA occult circles chronicled in The Unknown God; apparently he financed his final short film Usher by selling a signed Crowley book he owned. He was obsessed with the work of Edgar Allen Poe and it's interesting that a version of The Fall of the House of Usher was made at Netherwood by George Ivan Barnett during the time that Crowley was living there (see previous posts).

Cameron (she was often known just by her surname) had been the lover of Jack Parsons  and the sex magic partner for his infamous Moonchild operation, about which Crowley wrote to Karl Germer: 'Apparently Parsons, or [L Ron] Hubbard, or somebody is producing a Moonchild ... I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.' To Parsons Crowley wrote 'I cannot form the slightest idea of what you can possibly mean.'

I haven't seen the American television series about Parsons called Strange Angel (some episodes were directed by Ben Wheatley). As it was cancelled after season 2, maybe it will emerge on DVD.

Incidentally, Crowley still manages to generate shock horror headlines over 70 years after his death - see this Daily Mail article from this week.