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Excellent book btw. The back copy is pretty wild but the authors actually do an incredible job navigating all the weirdos into cattle mutilation in the 70s/80s.
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Feb 14, 2022 01:11
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:36 |
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Gutter Phoenix posted:How have I never heard of that book?! It's awesome and iirc almost 400 pages long. Really dense and educational, some wild scammers on the scene back then
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Feb 14, 2022 01:23
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Happy Valentine's Day thread        ~please enjoy this extra repeat attachment that I don't know how to delete~ 
Dr. Jerrold Coe fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 05:35
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Here's a fun old genre: knockoff Forteana! Two authors named Steiger and Smith churned out a bunch of these 1966-1972, copying stories from earlier writers like Charles Fort (duh), Frank Edwards, and Ivan Sanderson. Illustrator unknown. Some of the pictures aren't even on the right books! I think Steiger and Smith must have had a shared slush pile that they'd pull stories from and have illustrations done for the flashier ones, and occasionally mixed things up in editing.        The Witch Queen of Hell looks like a real nice lady 
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Feb 16, 2022 01:28
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Drimble Wedge posted:I love the "not now, thanks" gesture the would-be victim of the child-witch is making. "Talk to the hand, chile"
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Mar 3, 2022 04:25
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"The midnight visitor's FUCKIN DEAD!"
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Mar 3, 2022 04:25
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A cool trippy cover for a not-cool trashy book: Just going to c/p my review I wrote: https://paperbackgods.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-occult-in-orient-by-christopher-dane.html Mystery man Christopher Dane takes us to the other side on the other side of the world for a sinister survey of THE OCCULT IN THE ORIENT! Nice to see a fresh face around here ... or so you would believe! Things are never what they seem in the world of the paranormal paperbacks however, and author "Christopher Dane" is none other than bad old Brad Steiger, moonlighting under yet another pseudonym. This particular title is Steiger's store brand version of John Keel's influential occult travelogue Jadoo and Dane must have been Steiger's more upmarket moniker, because Popular Library spared no expense with this volume, shelling out for some cool cover art and even a table of contents - that's almost unheard of for them! A colonial haze hangs over the stories, whether we're talking phantom hitchhikers in Okinawa or a drawn out death curse afflicting an American consul's house servant in Jakarta. That servant, Djam Hari, draws the ire of a rival when he attains the rank of "Number One Boy" in US Vice Consul Robert Pierson's household. You see, Steiger informs us that "an Indonesian's position on this ladder [of servant rank] decreed the degree of respect accorded to him from his people." Djam Hari is a grown man, by the way, but Pierson and Steiger still refer to him as "boy" throughout. This casual infantilization casts a sickly pallor over the rest of the book, especially since the story drags on far too long before we get the expected ending. It's pure page padding and an especially bad sign of things to come since we're only three chapters in! Moving on, we start to recognize Steiger's formula as he staggers quick hits (like a "Negrito ghost child" whose disembodied voice calls to the living) between longer chapters, mostly pulled from his prior books or summarized from Fate magazine stories. Thankfully none end up as overlong as Djam Hari's tale, and Steiger is good enough to credit the original Fate writers when necessary. He gives a decent overview of the New Guinea UFO flap of 1959, when multiple Anglican missionaries and their local flocks reported seeing low flying spacecraft crewed by mysterious beings. This flap is sometimes named "the Gill Sightings" after one of the missionaries, Father William Gill. Another Fate summary follows with the very British sounding Arthur Grimble (of Her Majesty's Colonial Service) witnessing a death curse he christens as "Raku-nene madness," where the spirit of Raku-nene is called forth by a spurned man to possess the woman he desires and drive her to madness and death. The original story Steiger cites by writer E.P. Herman can be downloaded at the Luminist Archives, as part of the September 1953 issue of Fate. Three Argentine Navy cadets have a scare when Deception Island vanishes from sight, leaving them adrift in a dingy on the open ocean! This is from another Fate article, written by one of the cadets, Carlo Bel Moro. Steiger mines the Flying Saucer Review for some UFOs over Hawaii, and then recaps Mary Margaret Fuller's piece on Balinese cremation rituals, which can also be downloaded from the Luminist Archives as part of Fate's August 1954 issue. The ghost of an executed French soldier haunts some Americans at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, having been "decapitated like a common criminal" by the cruel communists after they overran his position. Steiger laments the "fierce, though vain struggle" by the brave Frenchman, another example of the upside down moral logic of colonialism. This chapter ends with a cornball joke about the Frenchman being able to look for his own head after death because he was a radar officer. The ruins of Nan Madol give Steiger a chance to mention Lemuria as well as American atomic testing at nearby Enewetak Atoll, another clash between the modern space age and a mythical golden age. Steiger mines the August 1954 issue of Fate again for missionary May Elliot's experience in Tahiti with a spirit named Uratua. Strange lights in the South Pacific skies include a report by the crew of the Morgantown Victory in 1966 and a 1774 sighting off New Caledonia by the naturalist Johann Forster, recorded in a diary of Captain James Cook's second voyage. Steiger calls this "Captain Cook's sighting" though he's not named as seeing anything. That's typical ballyhoo by Steiger, and it's followed by a repeat of the invisible biting bug eyed monster of Manila, a Steiger staple through the years. The hoaxed Monongahela sea serpent report is also here, again, having just been seen in Weird Unsolved Mysteries by Steiger writing as Eric Norman. Burton Klein, an American GI in Vietnam, saves his wife Janice from a car accident 9,000 miles away with an ESP message. Another GI, WWII veteran A.R. Thompson, relates his story from the May 1955 issue of Fate about a disembodied voice that has saved him from plane crashes and car accidents. And now Steiger really starts to recycle, with four straight chapters of Max Freedom Long and his manufactured Huna magic! It's a good chunk of pure nonsense padding. After this, another headless ghost visits soldier Lawrence Stevens in Seoul and performs a gruesome show, holding up his own head and saying "I'll sure be glad when these three months are up!" Later Stevens realizes that the ghost predicted the end of the Korean War! Steiger stretches the definition of "the Orient" when he profiles Komar the Hindu Fakir, whose real name was Vernon Craig and who hailed from Ohio, USA. Komar performed feats of endurance in character, and there's a brief but touching post at the Magician's Forum by someone who remembers him. Steiger and Komar would later coauthor a book, seen below:  The occidental fascination with Eastern thought continues with Steiger's next subject, the Master Subramuniya, who was born Robert Hansen in California before a religious experience at the age of 6 inspired him to walk the path of enlightenment. After reaching Sannyasa in Sri Lanka, Subramuniya eventually opened an ashram in Hawaii, where Steiger catches up with him. Steiger doesn't spill much ink over the guru, just noting that he disapproves of drug use and and is happy to see more young people meditating. Disappointing that this intriguing man doesn't deserve more than a quick filler chapter, while Max Freedom Long gets five whole chapters to to peddle his fraudulent "Huna" magic. You can tell that Steiger is just looking to fill pages now. Author and photographer Wilmon Menard stars in another long story of murder and magic in Tahiti which is padded with pulp fiction prose by Steiger. Did I say five chapters of Huna bull? Yes I did, because Steiger now slips in "Huna Healing Techniques" as if realizing he still has some content to fill before the end. And after this is another telepathic warning, saving soldier John E. Rebel Thomas from death at Guadalcanal. American missionary and CIA operative Harold M. Young relays a grisly account of jungle werewolves in the hill country of Thailand, and like Edward Lansdale's faked vampire attacks in the Philippines the story reveals more about the casual sociopathy of imperialism than about primitive monsters or native superstition. Young describes shooting a Taw werewolf and tracking the blood trail to a hut. Inside that hut is a dead man with a bullet wound, and Young's mind is boggled at the implication. We all know from the movies that dead werewolves revert to human form, so Young must have really shot a werewolf! The darkness inside modern "civilized" man is laundered through purported barbarity and illogic in the "savage" Third World. True to form, Steiger reused the story of the Taw multiple times. Turning and turning in the widening gyre ... Popular Library, 1974. really fascinates me digging in and seeing how the sausage was made for these old paranormal books, Steiger clearly had a system to collect/collate stories and then filter them into book titles. sorry for the triple post! Dr. Jerrold Coe fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 04:34
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Lol this is a crazy book. Hitler has his brain transplanted into a hot countess in the bunker right before "he" kills himself and then the protagonist gets involved in 70s Franco Spain, there's a compound where all the Nazis are hiding hot Hitler and the protagonist has sex with him before realizing the sexy Countess is actually Hitler!
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Apr 17, 2022 04:51
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Heath posted:Dear Penthouse, The narrator gets the story sitting on a park bench from the protagonist, and then some orderlies come up and take him back to the mental hospital!
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Apr 17, 2022 04:54
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Gutter Phoenix posted:Now I only want to read it more!! It's a great gonzo novel!
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Apr 17, 2022 05:17
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Just finished this excellent 70s disaster thriller, reminded me of the '78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a WHO doctor tracking an epidemic thru San Francisco  Love these classic paintings for 70s novels, every genre from disaster to historical romance: 
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May 10, 2022 04:52
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Dropping by to shill for my paranormal book review blog: https://paperbackgods.blogspot.com/ Some recent covers, click to embiggen:    
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Jan 8, 2023 03:42
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Desert Bus posted:I'm more into tracking dumb fantasy/sci fi tropes from like early biblical type poo poo to bros Grimm to Lord Dunsany/Verne/Poe etc to the 70's pulp explosion to modern high fantasy/space opera/cyberpunk. I may not share your particular enthusiasm, but I get it lol. No doubt if I read a bunch of your books i'd be all "OH LOOKIT THIS NEAT THEME CLEARLY THEY WERE READING...." tossing this quote into book thread, there's a great intersection of Lovecraft and "nonfiction" paranormal writings which started to bubble up in the 50s with reprints of his work, taking Lovecraft's alien gods as fact and connecting them to UFOs/the occult. Once von Daniken published his Chariots of the Gods the formula was cemented. The Cult of Alien Gods by Jason Colavito is a good read on the subject.
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Jan 8, 2023 05:11
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I only know White Wolf by reputation but that's enough, lol. Some more covers, of an abominable nature:    Eric Norman was a pseudonym Smith and frequent collaborator Brad Steiger shared - in this case it was Steiger writing solo under the name
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Jan 8, 2023 06:07
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Droogie posted:I recently learned about- and was horrified by, a book published in 1922 that my great grandmother contributed to, but it's in regards to my own cultural identity, and I'm not going to make others consider unless people are interested in that and this survivor of a thread. Thanks for posting and I'm interested, very much.  This image looks positively subversive nowadays, like deliberate protest art
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Jan 9, 2023 03:54
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Droogie posted:The Rabbit and the Crow, Jemez Pueblo  That's incredible though, thanks for taking the time.
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Jan 10, 2023 03:34
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:36 |
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Desert Bus posted:I am 100% sure that I have accidentally sold/given away books with $20's inside of them. I need to leave neater stuff in books cause I agree, it's very cool. I once found a love note written into a copy of The Stranger by Camus. Lost to a flood. I found some newspaper clippings in my copy of Abominable Snowman: Legend Come to Life by Ivan T. Sanderson:   
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Jan 23, 2023 03:31
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