BEYOND ALL REASON by John Macklin

We're on a kick with these Macklin collections, which are a rush of fresh air after one too many duds from the likes of Brad Steiger and Warren Smith. Macklin once again presents a bunch of ghost stories as "true case studies" from his files - Macklin being a pseudonym, this is a delightful bit of fakery and primes us for some enjoyable drama.

Standout chapters include "Bird of Death" and "The Curse of the Chinese Magician." The "Bird of Death" is a quickie chapter that simply nails the maybe-fiction formula, with a frightening specter and a neatly done twist.

The "Chinese Magician" chapter, meanwhile, hinges on a family never translating the Chinese characters on a cursed plate. Of course nowadays we could just point our phone at it! Macklin lets the weight of history settle on his stories, for the better: the family's cursed in the first place because their patriarch "Sir William Belford" is an attache to the British embassy, and players in the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi would like some revenge for the Opium Wars and national humiliation that China had been put through. As Britain moves through the years to WWI and WWII, the curse unfolds with historical precision. Another sign of the times: Macklin calls Cixi "Tzui Hsui" in the old Wade-Giles style.

"The Pointing Bones" is another good chapter, creatively describing an Aboriginal death curse against a wealthy sheep farmer, with a climax at a horse race - Steiger would never go the extra mile here! In general Macklin writes with a great deal more subtlety than Steiger ever bothered to, not always giving us the easy answers or such neatly wrapped up storylines. Sometimes, even in fiction, the unknown is truly that.

This volume is very light on real (or "real") Forteana, but does feature the channeling musician George Aubert, who (supposedly!) was able to play music from the greats like Mozart and Bach without any training, and indeed without any control over what exactly he played. Aubert is poorly documented online: he makes a brief appearance in this article by one Melvyn J. Willin for the Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, and in this thesis, also by Willin. I'm assuming that Macklin's grisly end for Aubert (slashing his own throat in an alley after his gift has failed to enrich him) is a bit of dramatic license. Either way, poor Aubert.

True to maybe-fiction style, Macklin doesn't cite many of his sources for the true story chapters - though the final, very beefy chapter, about "An Age-Old Power Beyond All Reason," does cite such historical figures as Paul Le Jeune, Henry Schoolcraft, and Sir Cecil Denny, as Macklin explores Amerindian and First Nations healing and cursing. Macklin also references The Role of Conjuring in Saulteaux Society by Alfred Irving Hallowell - though he misspells Hallowell's name as Hollowell!

It's not all pale faces in this final chapter: Macklin names one Wan-Chus-Co, former medicine man turned Christian convert, which leads us to a writeup by one William Johnson in an old French publication from 1871 titled the the Revue Spirite Journal D'Etudes Psychologiques, available in more readable form at this link. Who knows how many more dusty journals and brittle old books Macklin paged through to whip up his chapters ... all we have in the current moment is this volume in front of us.

The back cover promised that Macklin "soars beyond the horizon into the shadows of silent, endless nights" ...  well, he's knocked another one out of the park, anyways! Or if that's too hyperbolic, at the very least, he's hit a triple. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1970

A LOOK THROUGH SECRET DOORS by John Macklin

Join the "internationally recognized expert in psychic phenomenon" John Macklin for thirty chapters of true terror, sure to leave your head spinning and your soul caught between this world and the next!

The very first chapter on "The Haunted Fish Tank" is a total drip (ha!), but the next story about "The Woman Who Was Haunted by Owls" is a nasty good time, too much fun for me to spoil even. Right away we get the idea: these "true tales" are all supposed case files from Macklin's psychic investigations which likely have no earthly basis, and instead function as that classic form of maybe-fiction, presenting melodramatic ghost stories with the framing of Dr. So-and-so and Mr. Credible-witness telling Macklin about this or that horrible specter or awful incident, and Macklin trying to deny to the last that these unbelievable accounts just might be true ...

Macklin sprinkles in some Fortean frequent fliers like the Joyita, Foo Fighters, and Ogopogo to break up the maybe-fiction meatloaf, but it's not really needed, as his writing is much higher quality than (for example) Brad Steiger's similar volume of "true (fake) tales" Possession.

Another classic case Macklin covers is the Filipino "fangs of the invisible monster," and going by Garth Haslam's research, Macklin borrowed his version wholesale from Frank Edwards' telling - Macklin copies Edwards' incorrect dating of 1951 (actually 1953) and the misspelling of victim Clarita Villanueva's name as "Villaneuva." Steiger liked this story too. Another repeater: moving coffins in Estonia, which Peter Robson also covered in his Dialogue With The Dead.

As noted previously, cryptozoologist Karl Shuker traced John Macklin as a pseudonym belonging to one working writer "Tony James" ... whoever he was, he was sure one mean ghostly writing machine, as the back page adverts attest! Further confirmation for the James identification comes from this issue of the Association TransCommunication News Journal, which reprints an article credited to John Macklin/Tony James:

If you're looking for spooky ghost stories mixed with seasoned Forteana, you could do a lot worse than Macklin. Ace Books also did a nice job with the cheap but effective abstract cover art.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1969

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: BEYOND BELIEF

Stefan Elg's Fortean collection Beyond Belief is now available to read and download at archive dot org! This marks the title's digital debut.

Courtesy Tower Books, 1970 (original pub. 1967).

ZANTHODON by Lin Carter

Author Lin Carter follows Edgar Rice Burroughs in naming the second book in his underground series after the location itself, and Zanthodon sure is a great name for a lost world created by an anti-matter meteorite that shot straight down a volcano and exploded deep within the earth! It's populated with all kinds of dinosaurs, ancient reptiles, mastodons, and monsters from the id, alongside peoples ranging from neanderthals to really sexy cavegirls to lost Barbary pirates.

When I said sexy cavegirls, I meant it, by the way - Princess Darya is Carter's version of Dian the Beautiful, and our two fisted hero Eric Carstairs can't get enough of her hot 17 year old body, as he tells us at length. Like a classic ERB heroine, she's strong willed and skilled in survival, but also alternates between getting kidnapped and swooning for our hero. She also lets one breast hang free from her furs in an example of primitive, energizing freedom. This may be a little spicier than I remember ERB being, but it's along his lines of robust primitivism being good for the spirit. 

Zanthodon opens with Darya having been spirited away by a thakdol (pterodactyl) at the end of the debut novel, Journey to the Underground World. Poor Eric fears she may be dead! Ah, but we know better ... True to ERB's style, Carter drags us through cliffhanger after cliffhanger, and of course ends this entry with Darya kidnapped yet again. Also like ERB, Carter claims to be presenting the writings of his hero character as real missives from the earth's core, which lead to him spending a lot of time explaining via Eric's POV how and why the narrative is the way it is - choppy and jumping back and forth between characters. It's not really necessary and just draws more attention to itself. Carter doesn't really distinguish himself in terms of prose here, but it all hangs together well enough.

Carter also borrows the threat of some disgusting monster civilization that's preying on humanity inside the earth. For ERB it was the pteradactyloid Mahars, for Carter it's the slimy Sluagghs - did you know that "Sluagh" are the "souls of the unforgiven dead" in Scottish and Irish folklore? Me neither! 

The somewhat awkwardly posed cover art is by Thomas Kidd, who also provides some interior illustrations. These are nice enough, though we're sadly lacking his take on a thakdol.

Carter provides a character guide at the end of the story:

Over at the ERBzine, Steve Servello has written an overview of the Zanthodon series. He points out that Carter's titling follows ERB's through further volumes, and also includes a homemade map of Zanthodon, as Carter never provides one! Elsewhere on the ERBzine, Den Valdron provides a linguistic comparison between the made up words of Zanthodon and Pellucidar.

Did you catch that earlier? After all that running around underground, the story ends with Darya kidnapped yet again! Zanthodon earns a cheery 2/4 for acceptable thrills. When you need a prehistoric pastiche in a pinch, it will do!

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Daw Books, 1979

THE EYE OF THE GODS by Richard Owen

We've got a real throwback here, a lost world thriller set in the Venezuelan jungle and featuring an expedition to the mysterious Autana: a jagged plateau shot through with caves that are supposedly home to Cuyakiare, a surviving Tyrannosaur. Add some very modern terrorism to the mix and author "Richard Owen" seems ready for blast off.

It's too bad, then that the most interesting thing about the story is the background of its author: Richard Owen is a pseudonym for writers Dennis Fawcett and David Nott, of whom there's not a lot of information about online. The original Richard Owen, of course, was a pioneering paleontologist who coined the word dinosaur, and Fawcett and Nott also reference some paleontological history with their background on character Page Foster's great-grandfather Egil Edward Foster, who's a Cope and/or Marsh type trailblazer of American paleontology. Our heroic writer/newsman Morgan used some of great-granddad's crackpot ideas about surviving dinosaurs to juice a bestseller about the Autana, so now he feels some kind of way about helping out Page on an expedition to find Cuyakiare.

The hardcover edition

It's all a lot of cute set building that feels wasted on the resulting story, which is strangely overpacked yet empty, with the terrorist subplot and endless jungle trekking that drags on and on. It even opens on a dud note with lots of arguing back and forth between Morgan and his editor about whether he's going to cover Cuyakiare or the terrorist plotting over Prince Karim of El Hajjaz, a tiny Emirates country - his entourage is in town in Caracas to work out some deals over oil. The terrorism is masterminded by "Emiliano," an obvious reference to Carlos the Jackal.

After a lot of plot and not a lot of payoff, the mighty Cuyakiare finally gets a big to-do, and, well ... he does alright. After all that build up, the beast munches on some terrorists and stalks about a big cave like a lesser Harryhausen set piece. And speaking of such things ...

As we traipse through the jungle with Morgan and Foster the story starts to feel like one of those low budget '80s Italian sci-fi/action films - something like Top Line or Alien Contamination, which padded out intermittent special effects with cheap location shooting and would-be screwball dialogue between the leads. David Warbeck would have been great as the put-upon Morgan, and why not pair him with his costar from The Beyond, Catriona MacColl? Maybe director Antonio Margheriti could have contributed some scale model FX and a scary T-Rex, too! Maybe, maybe ...

A novel doesn't have the budgetary concerns of a film, though, so it's pretty sad that Fawcett and Nott's scenery feels so impoverished. How come there aren't any other dinosaurs, for one? A Kirkus review from 1977 calls the novel a "shaggy-dinosaur love story" and damns it with faint praise as a "winningly mindless adventure-romance." I would drop the "winningly" from that description ...

On a final note, the paperback artwork does Morgan dirty: one of the more endearing parts of the novel is how he's a middle-aged schlub, not a he-man adventurer type. Page is also noted as having dark hair, not blonde as the cover shows. Fawcett and Nott's The Eye of the Gods limps to a miserable 1/4 rating: all wind up and no pitch.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1979 (original pub. 1977)