Some of y’all might remember that a while back, I reviewed a 2022 novel titled The 666 Murders by a British author named Alan Golbourn, which I enjoyed quite a bit, with some caveats. So recently, when Golbourn contacted me again and offered me a review copy of his latest novel The Cult From Beyond, I was happy to accept.
The book is his third full-length work (his first was called Famuli Cani, which he sent me months ago and which I still haven’t got around to reading yet, much to my shame), and it’s actually a sequel to The 666 Murders, featuring many of the same characters involved in a new story. I will note that you don’t necessarily have to have read The 666 Murders to know what’s going on in The Cult From Beyond, as it’s pretty much its own thing, but there are a lot of callbacks and repeat characters from the earlier book, so to get the full experience, you might want to read both.
Once again, our main protagonist is private investigator Randolph Landon, but this time around, his life seems to be in a much better place at the start of the tale. It’s now 1970, four years after the events of The 666 Murders, and Randolph and his wife Thelma have reconnected, their son Matthew is doing well, and they have another baby on the way. They’ve also just moved out of London and into a comfortable new house. Besides that, Randolph has decided to give up the PI game for good, especially after all the crazy supernatural shit that happened in the previous book. The work is too dangerous, he realizes, and he wants to spend more time with his growing family and have more of a normal existence. He’s even taken a job fitting carpet with a family friend, and finding he actually enjoys the physical labor.
You just know this placid state of affairs isn’t going to last, though, and sure enough, his old life slowly starts creeping back to haunt him. One day while out with his family, he notices an older man looking at him sort of intensely and possibly following him, which triggers his PI spidey senses. Randolph straight up approaches the guy and asks what his deal is, and the flustered old man, whose name is Norman Parker, tells Randolph that he recognized him from all the media surrounding the serial killer case in the previous book. Norman apologizes for being a creeper, but he really needs the services of a private investigator, and Randolph now has the reputation of being the best of the best.
Randolph tells Norman in no uncertain terms that he’s retired from investigative work, but the old man is so crestfallen that the grizzled PI offers to give him the names of some of his associates that may be able to help. Norman is disappointed, but accepts the consolation prize with as much grace as he can muster.
Trouble is, none of the other investigators Randolph recommended are available, and the old man is so distraught and pitiful that Randolph starts hemming and hawing about whether he should actually step in and get to the bottom of Norman’s problem.
Said problem is Norman’s son Oliver, who is in his twenties and has completely disappeared. The police haven’t been much help, since Oliver is an adult and can vanish voluntarily if he wants to. Norman knows his son, though, and he knows Oliver wouldn’t have just taken off without telling his dad where he was going. Compounding the misery is the fact that Norman’s wife (also Oliver’s mother, obviously) has recently died, and Norman feels as though his son is all he has left in the world, and thus the old man is desperate to find him.
At last, after much soul-searching, Randolph agrees to look into the case, though he refuses any payment and tells Norman up front that he’s not really “officially” taking it on; he’s just going to have a poke around and see if there’s anything the police might have missed regarding Oliver’s disappearance.
Right away, Randolph duly finds a clue that the authorities overlooked: on the back of a photo of Oliver’s mom that was in a frame in the young man’s room, Randolph finds an unusual symbol that’s been drawn there. A little bit gun-shy because of all the Satanic shenanigans from the last book, the investigator calls up a professor he knows to see what the meaning of the bizarre symbol could be, but at first, the prof can’t really identify it, as it doesn’t resemble anything he’s seen before.
Meanwhile, Randolph has the idea to visit the cemetery where Norman’s wife is buried, on the off chance that Oliver has been there to visit the grave, since he and his mother were very close. And he hits paydirt: the groundskeeper says that he saw Oliver at the graveyard only a few days before, accompanied by a young woman with green hair. Luckily for Randolph, the green-haired girl is so distinctive that he’s able to dig even deeper, and comes up with several more sightings of the pair.
So far, so good it seems: Oliver at least seems alive and well, and Norman is relieved that nothing terrible has befallen him. But if Oliver is fine, why hasn’t he contacted his father to at least reassure him that he’s okay? Is he being held against his will, perhaps? Or did Norman do something inadvertently that drove his son away?
The more Randolph investigates, the murkier the whole situation becomes, and it soon becomes clear (and this isn’t really a spoiler, because the word “cult” is right in the title) that Oliver is somehow mixed up with some strange and possibly sinister sect led by a mysterious man in a white suit.
Like The 666 Murders, The Cult From Beyond is like an old-school detective story with supernatural elements that get much more pronounced as the narrative unfolds. Also like the prior book, the location of the action moves back and forth from England to another country (France in 666, Ireland in Cult). There’s also something of a conspiracy angle, as some supposedly trustworthy authority figures end up not being what they seem. Additionally, there are reappearances of characters from the previous novel, such as wealthy hotel mogul Timothy Andrews, who pops in and out and uses his money and connections to aid the investigation; and upright police officer DCS Kendall Quincy, who factors largely into the events of the climax.
The Cult From Beyond has more of a sci-fi slant than The 666 Murders, though; whereas the prior novel was more akin to something like The Believers or The First Power, this one has slightly more of an X-Files-meets-folk-horror vibe. Because of that, I think I enjoyed The 666 Murders more, because Satanic serial killers are more my jam than transcendental space cults, but this was still a solid read.
I will say, though, that some of the issues I had with the previous book are still evident here, such as the overly expositional tone and dialogue, and the tendency for the author to tell instead of showing. Because everything is told from the (third-person) perspective of Randolph Landon, there are several scenes where some compelling stuff happened to one of the other characters, but we only hear about it second-hand, when that character is telling Randolph what went down. It might have been cool to have the perspectives shift from character to character as necessary, so that the events could have been described as they happened and been more action-focused, rather than just being long paragraphs of dialogue describing something that happened “off screen.”
There’s also a lot of that unnecessary and overly jocular small talk going on between characters that I mentioned last time, though it seems significantly trimmed this go-around; The Cult From Beyond, I’ll note, is more than a hundred pages shorter than The 666 Murders, and I think that’s to the story’s benefit, though there were still some sequences that probably could have been shortened or removed.
Lastly, there were also a few events which seemed like they were setting up something ominous, but actually were just there for plot convenience; for example, at one point, Randolph is trying to get hold of Timothy over the phone to ask for some help, but Timothy doesn’t answer for like a day or two; this seems like it was being built up into something having happened to Timothy, but really nothing did, he was just busy and couldn’t answer the phone.
Overall, though, I liked this quite a bit, and was interested in the mythology of the cult, which was gone into in great detail. If you like detective fiction with a conspiratorial, sci-fi edge, give it a whirl and see what you think.
And until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.
The Scare Salon 