MENDAGA RETURNS

My novel Mendaga's Morning was first published as a paperback in the United Kingdom in1979. The cover rather inaccurately described it as "a super-shock novel of satanic possession--the ultimate in horror." In this book I am presenting the actual background of the novel in the occult revival of the 1960s along a short story that I wrote long afterward as a sequel I am also including a half-dozen other stories with various supernatural themes that, like the novel, present otherworldly entities not at all "satanic" but far more like the humans responsible for their existence.

As a philosophy professor I have long been writing about what it means to accept or reject religious belief, and my first books approached occultism as a counterpoint to a completely materialistic view of human existence. Eventually I decided to add to the familiar tropes of occultist fiction with the idea of a demonmonger, someone able to negotiate with the gods or demons presumed to be for hire. If there is one theme running through all my stories it is the attempt to deal with love and loss defines not just our human world but also whatever lies beyond it.