“Sinister Forces” is a paranoid road trip through America’s history – mainly, but not entirely, its more recent history. It is actually 3 books: The Nine, A Warm Gun and The Manson Secret. The last book gives you the overarching obsession of the three tomes. It starts with Manson, and ends with Manson, but it goes all over the place in between. (Well, technically it ends with the author, Peter Levenda, afraid to answer his phone, but technically that’s in the Epilogue.)

This isn’t your usual conspiracy book. It’s much much weirder than that. Levenda is less concerned with the tangible threads that connect the atrocities and horrors that are the dark underbelly of American history than he is in the strange coincidences and parallels between the events themselves, or the places in which they occur. From the Indian mounds in the town where Charlie was born, as well as several near prisons where he was incarcerated, to UFO’s and the Nine, to the strange timings of murders and other dark deeds close to dates of possible occult significance, Levenda ties these all together into one grand Danse Macabre. What he is looking for, or at, is the underlying connections, the synchronicities. The acausal connecting principles that don’t rely on conspiracies as we think of them: with the tangible man (or men) behind the curtain pulling the strings. Levenda seems to be saying that it isn’t someone but something (or things) – Sinister Forces.

As part of the framework of his proof, he lays out the reported occult obsessions of many of our leading figures: politicians, celebrities, members of intelligence agencies such as the CIA as well as the military. The most famous, of course, and one probably known to most readers of Alterati, is Jack Parsons – member of a California Thelemite Lodge and one of the inventors of solid state rocket fuel, who was also involved with the infamous L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. There are others – some not quite so famous, but just as influential – far too many to list in a review. Levenda lays these out- the serious practitioners, and those who are just looking for a shortcut to power. He follows their careers and the aftermath and wonders, what is it these people are messing with? What have they invoked into our collective psyches? Especially those looking to use brute force to plow through what is, essentially, a spiritual path? Are we as a nation paying the price for their hubris?

One might be tempted to look on this as one big book of crazy, and to a certain extent it is. The Lovecraftian Epilogue of the last book certainly hints of that: the author sits alone in his hotel in Malaysia, unwilling to answer the phone. He knows too much to feel comfortable or easy in the world anymore. But there’s one element of the story that I think merits some serious consideration. There’s a lot about informational warfare, as well as just messing with people’s minds: from the decision of the military to ridicule the concept of UFO’s because they couldn’t discover what they were (see also the Robertson Panel), Giordano Bruno‘s(6) De vinculus: “…a virtual operating manual for manipulating consensus reality” (Sinister Forces, Book Three: The Manson Secret, pg 65), to MK-ULTRA(1) and the Psychic Driving experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron, and the strange story of Candy Jones. Whether or not you believe Candy’s story is less relevant than the fact that the CIA (and other agencies) are intensely interested in Behavior Modification – for all kinds of reasons – and marketing firms are, as well. My point (and Levenda’s, too, I think) is less that we should be afraid of our government or marketing firms than it is highlighting the importance of working to understand ourselves and our psychologies at least as well as these agencies do. The better we can know ourselves the less subject to manipulation we are by these agencies that have demonstrated they are less interested in our individual welfare than they are in getting results.

OTOH, if you’re not looking for any heavy messages you can also read it as Levenda’s Monster Book of Black Humor and get just as much enjoyment out of it.