But in his black magic books he executed vibrant flashes of dark fantasy that hold up as horror fiction. Sapper) or as skilled as his successor Ian Fleming. Even his biographer, Phil Baker, called Dennis Wheatley “one of the all-time great bad writers.” From what I’ve read of Wheatley, I wouldn’t either praise him or damn him that much: he was a middle-of-the road author of pulpy thrillers who wasn’t as interesting as his predecessors John Buchan and Herman Cyril McNeile (a.k.a. His estate has revived them in digital editions, although I can’t imagine many people will want to read these antiquated thrillers and their stuffy Imperial British attitudes. By the 1960s, Wheatley’s occult tales had eclipsed his other works, and today mention of his name almost immediately brings up the topic of “witchcraft.”Īfter his death in 1977, most of Wheatley’s books fell out of print and stayed that way for decades. Wheatley returned to black magic themes sporadically over the decades: Strange Conflict (1941), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil-A Daughter (1953, filmed by Hammer in 1976), The Satanist (1960), and They Used Dark Forces (1964). The Devil Rides Out was the first of his “Black Magic” series and an enormous success on first publication. Early in his career he discovered that black magic and Satanism made interesting topics to add to his formula.

But like many best-sellers of yesteryear, Wheatley has faded from popular consciousness to the point that he’s now relegated to the domain of pop culture scholars and people like me who watch Hammer Horror movies.įrom the 1930s until his death, Wheatley was primarily an author of espionage thrillers and historical adventures.

Who is Dennis Wheatley, you might ask? Funny that anybody has to ask that, since Wheatley was once one of the world’s most popular writers. Since we finally have a North American Blu-ray release of The Devil Rides Out (1968), that’s the first film from their catalogue I want to examine this October.īut since The Devil Rides Out is based on a best-selling and influential novel, I’ll take a literary horror detour first and look at Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 thriller before moving on to the film. For me, October is “Hammer Country”-the season of watching Hammer Films’ Gothic horror classics from the 1950s–1970s.

The devil rides out book