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The Devil Rides Out / Gateway to Hell

The Devil Rides Out / Gateway to Hell

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: ARGGHHH
Review: A truly facinating, horrific, compelling and surreal read. I first read this book 12 years ago and have just re read it....if anything the experience was twice as threatening...I also lent htis book to my wife...it gave her nightmares for a week. A truly scary read.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Best place to read on the beach
Review: As a late commer to the work of Dennis Wheatley I hope to hunt out more of his books and I urge others to do the same. The Devil Rides Out is a very entertaining read holding back just enough to keep imagination going. Probably the best horror thriller I have read in a long time.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Classic Tale of Occult Horror
Review: Dennis Wheatley's fabulous supernatural thriller 'The Devil Rides Out' on its publication in 1934 was hailed as the best thing of it's kind since Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' and the comparison is entirely justified. This classic tale of devilry might also be said to have been strongly influenced by the ripping occult fiction of Sax Rohmer as well. Set amidst the dashing world of the wealthy in 1920's England, Wheatley conjures up an amazing yarn of satanic horrors and hidden diabolism lurking amid the shadowed mansions of St.John's Wood and in luxurious West End hotels, of midnight car-chases through the English countryside in Hispano limousines and bottle-green Bentleys - we are transported into a glamorous era of aristocratic manners, exotically beautiful women, regally-appointed apartments, burgundy smoking jackets, fine aged cognacs and Hoyo cigars. The narrative is fast-paced and truly thrilling with many episodes of chilling terror and laden with a genuinely dark atmosphere of oppressive supernatural evil. The eternal Manichaean struggle, the world-old conflict between the forces of Light and the powers of Darkness is epitomised in the battle between the elegant connoisseur the Duc De Richleau and the suavely malevolent Satanist Mocata who has Simon Aron in his clutches. Wheatley researched the occult elements in this book to quite an impressive degree , garnering many details and esoteric data from Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers and the Jamaican occultist Rollo Ahmed whom he knew in the 1930's. 'The Devil Rides Out' is certainly far superior fare to much of todays etiolated, depressing and confused horror fiction and in no small part this is due to the almost mediaeval dualism which pervades Wheatley's mindset.
This is a fantastic read by the 'Prince of Thriller Writers' as he was called in his heyday and as Dennis Wheatley's friend Christopher Lee has eloquently commented, it also conveys a timely warning against injudicious incursions into the darker regions of the occult with their attendant psychic pathologies. Superbly entertaining and a real 'old school' classic of the genre.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Boring and very, very dated.
Review: I simply cannot agree with any of the other reviewers where this book is concerned. There are a great many novels that also double up as text books on the subject material (Neville Shute's "No Highway" was a prime example of a story about metal fatigue.) Dennis Wheatley's "The Devil Rides Out" is both a story about the battle against evil and a handbook illustrating almost every kind of black magic and witchcraft across its pages. This may be no bad thing except that the manner in which we are told of the dark science is usually insipid, incredible and wholly unnecessary. The characters take turns in giving large amounts of evidence about what black magic is - complete with case studies. The effect is not one of a dialogue between two people, but of a public information announcement where two people take turns to tell you a monologue.

Throughout Wheatley uses this method to explain to us what is going on or what may happen, and it simply comes out as overkill. The author could have cut the explaining text by 90% and replaced it with greater story telling and you would have had a far more interesting read.

The trouble that Wheatley obviously had was that the characters probably talked in exactly the way the man in the street talked at the time. Reading just a few pages and you instantly feel transported back to Britain in the 1930's. It is however a great pity for the author and the reader that the 1930's Britain depicted in this story was a rather dull and vacuous place.

I am sorry to say that I found this book tedious in the extreme and really struggled to finish it. Difficult to read and very much like an incomprehensible text book, "The Devil Rides Out" has dated far more than many books written before it. I feel that the prolific Dennis Wheatley was of his own time, and no other.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: As good as it gets!
Review: I've read many books but I liked only a few of them,about let's say...5% or maybe less.The last book I liked was The Equinox by Aleister Crowley(interest for the supernatural is obvious I think...).I found "The Devil Rides Out" which in Greek is translated in something like "Aussault of Satan" in a bench of an old lady who almost begged me to get it in a ridiculous price and I'm really lucky I did because a week later she was already gone.My problem with novels is that I can't stand the long,boring descriptions because I read REAAAALLY slowly!When I started reading the book I said:"Wow!This looks great!" After a few chapters though action was missing(for just 2 chapters) and I left the book(big mistake).After a month or so I started it again and I was found finishing it in 2 days!To begin with it is a very good novel with vivid descriptions which you can ACTUALLY feel and it also mentions things that anyone who might be interested in magic,mysticism etc.would find them really precious as to where he should begin from.So it's 2 in 1.Plus,the book is amazingly easy-read.Last but not least I cannot understand this language "problem".I had been reading it translated but the "strange language" was translated as well and if you consider the time that the story was taking place then in which way should the characters be talking?As if they were living in 2525?Another thing that picked my interest was the descrition of the Greek places and I was really excited that those steep places and the way people were living back then were described exactly as they were and still are in some villages up there!Really good work and a book that is absolutely worth reading!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Wheatley's most famous, but hardly his finest..
Review: The Devil Rides Out is perhaps best known for its late 1960s screen adaptation starring Christopher Lee. It's because of this that folks seem to recall Dennis Wheatley as the guy who wrote The Devil Rides Out. For a man who has pumped out more than sixty novels in his life, this is a rather sad legacy.

The Devil Rides out is follows roughly the same formula as other Dennis Wheatley's "Black Magic" novels. Devil worshippers recruit unsuspecting nice guys into their satanic rituals, with some amateur sleuths chasing down these villians before all hell breaks loose (..pun intended). Dennis Wheatley of course can't resist offering mini-lectures on the history of the occult too, proving that he really was an authority on the matter.

So does The Devil Ride Out offer reading pleasure? Well, firstly the novel was written in the 1930s but feels much older; it evokes images of mothballs, gaslight, and worn cardigans. Compared to Wheatley's The Satanist, written some 25 years later, it seems very archaic indeed. Secondly, the story itself is not very enthralling. Wheatley is known as a storyteller, but not as a great writer of literature. So The Devil Rides Out suffers from both poor writing and a lame story. At least The Satanist has a much better story; I think to a degree Wheatley got better with age and experience.

Bottom line: a musty, dusty piece of gothic nonsense. Wheatley has written better 'black magic' novels; he was sort of a Stephen King back some 30+ years ago. It's best to hunt down those novels (which are, sadly, out of print).

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Wheatley's most famous, but hardly his finest..
Review: The Devil Rides Out is perhaps best known for its late 1960s screen adaptation starring Christopher Lee. It's because of this that folks seem to recall Dennis Wheatley as the guy who wrote The Devil Rides Out. For a man who has pumped out more than sixty novels in his life, this is a rather sad legacy.

The Devil Rides out is follows roughly the same formula as other Dennis Wheatley's "Black Magic" novels. Devil worshippers recruit unsuspecting nice guys into their satanic rituals, with some amateur sleuths chasing down these villians before all hell breaks loose (..pun intended). Dennis Wheatley of course can't resist offering mini-lectures on the history of the occult too, proving that he really was an authority on the matter.

So does The Devil Ride Out offer reading pleasure? Well, firstly the novel was written in the 1930s but feels much older; it evokes images of mothballs, gaslight, and worn cardigans. Compared to Wheatley's The Satanist, written some 25 years later, it seems very archaic indeed. Secondly, the story itself is not very enthralling. Wheatley is known as a storyteller, but not as a great writer of literature. So The Devil Rides Out suffers from both poor writing and a lame story. At least The Satanist has a much better story; I think to a degree Wheatley got better with age and experience.

Bottom line: a musty, dusty piece of gothic nonsense. Wheatley has written better 'black magic' novels; he was sort of a Stephen King back some 30+ years ago. It's best to hunt down those novels (which are, sadly, out of print).

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Race Against Time
Review: The race through Salisbury Plain was breathtaking. The best I have read - beats all the wannabes which came later.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A well-written, scary tale with excellent factual bases.
Review: This was the first Dennis Wheatley book I ever read. I now have the full collection. The premise of the story is one of fantasy, however, as the plot unfolds, Wheatley sprinkles in liberal amounts of facts pertaining to the occult, numerism,Devil-worshpping and just plain history to make it credible. I defy anyone who gets to the chapter 'Within the Pentacle' to be able to put it down until at least the chapter after that! Never have I been so scared while reading a book. I have read most of the more contemporay 'horror' writer's offerings, but they pale when compared to this man, who was the master of his craft. If I have one criticism, it's the rather 'snobbish' english, but allow for the fact that the book was written in the days when the upper-class in Britain actually DID talk like that!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best read on a dark stormy night
Review: Unputdownable supernatural thriller which grips from the first page. Rex and de Richleau struggle to rescue friend Simon from the clutches of satanist Mocata. Mocata doesn't give up easily ("I won't be back. But something will"). Great characters and lots of convincing detail make it a riveting read.


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