“Blood spurted from the wrist stump, a scarlet salute to the king of crabs, rich wine spurting into the wizened, lusting face.” This is a taster from GN Smith’s masterpiece Crabs on the Rampage – and if curmudgeonly crustaceans are not to your taste, you may prefer one of his other, similarly lascivious tales involving bats, locusts, slavering cannibal creatures and The Sucking Pit.
These are a perfect example of the titles people have proposed for my Bad Book Club, which, for some time, has been part of my stand-up act. And now I’ve put the best ones together in a whole book of bad books. Mind you, there are far fewer around these days. Where, for example, is the New English Library, publisher of pulp magnificence throughout the ’70s, to save us from these postmodern doldrums?
One of their authors, Peter Cave, used to be the supremo of the Hell’s Angels novel, most famously Chopper and Mama: “He was dead before the front wheels stopped spinning.” Another typically bleak end for an Angel, but the reader is secure in the knowledge that this victim of his own handlebars will have experienced a sumptuous amount of bonfire-lit sex and bike-chain-swinging violence before his demise.
It’s not all fictional sex and violence on my shelf of special books, though. It’s real ghost hunters, alien visitors and right-wing prayer chains too. Spirits, God, religion and superstition feature large. Can cancer be a gift? If you read What God Does When Women Pray, then yes: “God allowed me to have cancer and go through chemotherapy for a year. One month ago he [her husband] received Christ!”
According to Evelyn Christenson’s book, one of the best techniques to woo your godless husband to the righteous path is with a potentially fatal tumour. You will also discover that the power of prayer can shift a painful kidney stone. If this is enough to convert you, though, you’d better take a close look at your record collection: if you’re not careful, your choice of music could be poisoning your house with a low hum of Satanism. To prevent a portal from hell opening in your lounge you must buy John Blanchard’s Pop Goes the Gospel: “Songs, in short, have become the new pornography.” By the book’s conclusion you should have purged your vinyl collection of Pink Floyd, Donna Summer, Led Zeppelin and Olivia Newton John.
If you ignore the Christian message, you can still dabble with psychics. If you find TV psychic Derek Acorah’s beyond-the-grave conversations with Pat Phoenix too low-brow, then The Twentieth Plane by Albert Durrant Watson offers contact with a much better class of ghost: Byron, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Albert’s Mum. Many great writers died before they could finish imparting their wisdom, so Albert contacts them on their ethereal plane and retrieves their wisdom. Not tempted by these beyond-the-grave chats with pillars of the literary establishment? Then you might enjoy The Days the Gods Came, in which George King shares his communications with aliens, with phrases like the enigmatic “nim nim eight seven eight two eight.”
Those particular extraterrestrial beings do not appear to be the ones who brought the gift of civilisation to earth. If you want to meet those aliens you’ll have to read Robyn Collins’s Did Spacemen Colonise the Earth? “Research into many very old and authoritative records of Earth’s chequered history indicates an overwhelming probability that our world has, on countless occasions, been host to extraterrestrial spaceship visitations.” Wasn’t the star over Bethlehem, itself, actually a UFO? It all started with a humble desire to unwind with a novel about crustaceans bringing hell to the Welsh coast and before you’ve realised, your casual reading of odd books has caused you to redraw the lines of your own reality.
Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club: One Man’s Quest to Uncover the Books That Taste Forgot is published by Sphere in July. Tickets are now on sale for the last ever Book Club comedy show on 14 July, and for this year's run of Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, 16-19 December, both at the Bloomsbury Theatre.
