Mark of the Beast (1976, Brian Ball)

 

I first discovered Brian N. Ball on the back of becoming aware of a series of German language horror books that went out under the series title 'Vampir horror roman'. Published on a weekly basis and in a magazine style format, the series eventually ran to just over 450 titles. These were a mixture of books which were written especially for the series, as well as abridged, German translations of pre-existing English language books.

One of the English titles to get that treatment was Ball's book The Devil's Peak. The Vampir horror roman cover for that one- featuring naked women lusting after a goat monster- selling it much better than the bland Linford Mystery Library edition of that book which is currently in circulation in the UK.

Brian Neville Ball was born in 1932, according to many sources in Cheshire. This however turns out not to have been the case, Ball was in fact a Mancunian and was born in Salford. He appears to have had a hard start in life- as you would do having being born in Salford- and was raised for the first few years of his life by the Barnardo's charity until he was returned to his family. Yorkshire is the place that Ball made his own in his horror novels though, nearly all of which are set around that area, suggesting a personal connection to the place and an ability to pump that location for the maximum of atmosphere. Ball's books are some the most Yorkshire horror novels you're ever likely to read.

Ball seems to have been mainly remembered for his children's books, one of which was even read out on Jackanory - something that clearly wasn't going to be repeated with Mark of the Beast. These were followed in popularity by his brainy science fiction novels, with his run of occult horror books being a distant third. Considering how Ball's name was never really synonymous with horror, and how those books have become forgotten about even within his own bibliography, I was surprised at how well I've gotten on with his horror output. Ball wrote five such books during the satanic seventies...Lesson for the Damned (1971), The Devil's Peak (1972), The Venomous Serpent (1974), Mark of the Beast (1976) and its sequel The Evil at Monteine (1977). Then followed those up years later with Malice of the Soul, which is copyrighted 1992 but doesn't appear to have been published until 2008.

Mark of the Beast concerns Alan and Jan, a young suburban couple who make an ill-advised venture into the occult, attending a seemingly harmless séance preceded over by Mrs. Worrell, a west Indian medium (with a taste in colourful dresses that evidently didn't meet with Ball's approval). During the séance, Alan witnesses the manifestation of a demonic beast, but then manages to convince himself that it was all some strange dream caused by him falling asleep at the séance. Soon after though, Jan begins to act in a manner suggesting she's under the influence of the devil...running around naked, having sex with Alan without closing the curtains, sacrificing animals, corrupting a priest...and generally making a nuisance of herself. Alan's desperation leads him to the troubled, shambolic mess that is Ruane, a hard living ex-priest who is battling with the bottle, but might also be the only man in Yorkshire capable of saving Jan's soul.

I have heard Ball's work described as folk horror, although in fairness just about every British book, film, TV series or public information film that has a scene set in a field tends to get claimed as folk horror these days. Mark of the Beast definitely has a stronger claim to folk horror than most though, what with it's themes of the old world clashing with the new. Something that is even reflected in the setting, Mark of the Beast mainly taking place in the fictional town of Mersey Pagnall. A coal and wool town, very much rooted in the past, onto which a new suburban development has started intruding on the landscape, one which Alan and Jan called home. There is the sense both here and in The Devil's Peak of Britain's pagan past coming back to seek vengeance for it's desecration by the modern world. When Alan tries to reach out to the civilised 20th century world for help, he is met with disbelief and skepticism. Most memorably when he expresses his concerns about Jan's demonic possession to a doctor, who merely advises Alan to take up golf.
All of Ball's horror books are centered around a traditional battle between good and evil, warning of the corrupting influence of the occult, something which could lead you to believe them to be the work of a man of faith. Surprisingly though, Ball was in fact an atheist, and therefore these themes must just have been Ball playing to the genre he was writing in. I sense what Ball was really interested in tapping into with his horror books was the conflict between men and women. These books do cast Ball as the ringmaster in the battle of the sexes. Mark of the Beast reflecting the 1970s male's fear of female sexuality and the growing role that women were playing in society. The book is Ball trying to give breadwinner men the fear that the women they leave behind in suburbia are scheming against them. Jan proving a bad influence on the other women in the suburban development, who form an exclusively female coven and whose antics are at one point memorably described as "some diabolical women's institute outing". In a rare instance of the book giving an insight into Jan's head, we learn that she thinks "it didn't do to let men know what you thought. They knew too much already". It would be easy to condemn Ball as a chauvinist but his later book Malice of the Soul does attempt to redress the balance and suggests an author who was equally adept at seeing the world through women's eyes. Malice of the Soul being written from a first person, female perspective and whose heroine has to deal with an unfaithful boyfriend, a man-child ex-husband, hormonal issues and insecurities over a younger female colleague...who happens to be in league with satan.

Although it didn't occur to me the first time I read Mark of the Beast, after reading Malice of the Soul, I do have to wonder if the Myra Hindley case was playing on Ball's mind when he wrote this. Malice of the Soul's heroine being a social worker whose job brings her in contact with a young, female juvenile delinquent who idolizes Hindley.
Mark of the Beast has its own Myra, called Myra Bentley, who is part of Jan's coven that kidnaps children and is attempting to sacrifice them on the moors. As much as the Manson family forever changed the way people saw hippies, the Hindley case in the UK did change the way people saw women and forever shattered the thinking that monstrous behaviour was only the domain of men. The cultural shock waves of the Hindley case do reverberate in Brian Ball's books as much as they do in movies from the period like Frightmare and Blood on Satan's Claw. The 1970s was definitely the era when people woke up to the fact that women weren't just housewives, mothers or sexual objects, they could also be cold blooded killers and devil worshippers too.

Ball's 1970s books were originally put out by sleaze publishers like NEL and Mayflower. Then, with the exception of the elusive 'Lesson for the Damned' were all republished in the 2000s by the Linford Mystery Library. These might have been the same books, but these two editions were clearly aimed at very different demographics. The 1970s editions have the 'Page 3 girls get sacrificed to Satan' type covers and were heavily aimed at the exploitation market. Whereas the Linford Mystery Library editions were large print, meant for libraries and aimed at an older audience. The Linford covers of both Mark of the Beast and The Devil's Peak could easily be mistaken for belonging to anti-satanism Christian books, whose covers were going out of their way to be as inoffensive as possible.

UK and German covers of The Devil's Peak


Unfortunately despite the Linford editions claims to be 'complete and unabridged', someone -possibly Ball himself- did take it upon themselves to censor and awkwardly modernise Ball's texts. Mark of the Beast does at least dodge the bullet when it comes to the modernization, something that effects The Devil's Peak, a book written in 1972 in which characters own a CD player in the Linford edition, or the Linford version of 1977's The Evil at Monteine in which a character somehow manages to send an email. I haven't read the original edition of Mark of the Beast, and must admit to being curious as to whether a passage in which Jan lewdly poses naked on a couch before a mortified Alan was part of the original text. On account of the fact that Ball has Alan compare her to the type of 'large bosomed' and 'bold eyed' models who appear on paperback novel covers 'only for the delectation of men who couldn't take their pleasures normally'. All of which seems strikingly self aware for 1976, and a book that was indeed marketed back then in such a fashion. Could that part have been written by Ball in the 2000s as a way for him to address the issues he had with his work being presented as tits and bums material back in the 1970s? Incidentally, the original Mayflower cover for Mark of the Beast was photographed by Beverley Le Barrow, who later became a famous Page 3 photographer under the name Beverley Goodway.

What is telling about the audience that the Linford edition was targeted at is less what was censored from the book but rather what wasn't censored from the book. From what I can work out, swearing was the chief casualty of the Linford edition yet the type of language that was really on the cultural naughty step by the 2000s was allowed to remain. Namely references to the West Indian Mrs. Worrell as a 'negress' and to a young boy who the coven decide not to sacrifice to the devil on account of him being a 'spastic child'. While bad language was a no-no to the senior, library using crowd of the 2000s, they clearly had no such issues with outdated language.

However the censorship can't erase the fact that Mark of the Beast is still very much a product of the sex and satanism obsessed 1970s. Both in its attitudes and its locations, the majority of Alan's interactions with Ruane taking place at either a pub or a transport cafe. Ball, like Guy N. Smith, did have this gift for rooting his books in very relatable, down to earth settings, only to then pile on these far from ordinary horror elements. It's a lively, exploitation driven read, a far cry from the quiet, old fashioned horror book that the Linford Mystery Library were trying to sell it as. Of the five horror books of Ball's that I've managed to read, The Evil at Monteine is the only one I wasn't crazy about. So I'd say that liking four out of five books by the same author is a pretty decent ratio, and I don't think you'll regret going balls deep into Brian Ball's work.

According to those who have read the original edition of Mark of the Beast, one of the biggest dialogue losses in the Linford edition occurs early on in the book when Alan gets his first indication that all is not well with Jan after she has a severe reaction to a cup of hot chocolate. In the Linford edition it states 'she told him what to do with the hot chocolate - graphically' whereas in the Mayflower edition she says "fuck the cocoa". So if your local library does happen to have the Linford edition, take it out, cross out 'she told him what to do with the hot chocolate - graphically' and write 'fuck the cocoa' in blood red ink instead. The power of Jan compels you.