COLLISIONS WITH REALITY by John Macklin

It's time for another round of maybe-fiction "true" stories from John Macklin! The first chapter is a good start, with a mysterious memorial to a dead Luftwaffe pilot in the UK. Things get even better with the ugly ghost of Hoddeston, showcasing Macklin's relative subtlety in a field awash with the likes of Brad Steiger and Robert Tralins. We also get some treatments of relatively true tales like French UFO occupant sightings, Rasputin, and the Wilkins-Sherman ESP tests.

One chapter, "The Cave Monsters of Galloway," is an obvious fictionalization of the legend of Sawney Bean, with the cannibal patriarch renamed Cashel Logan. Bean's apocryphal cannibal clan have been used for horror thrills by L.A. Morse as The Flesheaters and Guy N. Smith as, well, Cannibals.

Another chapter, "The Man Who Was Murdered by Light," is taken from a bogus news item about German soldiers buried alive and living for years underground before being released. From The Madera Tribune, June 18th, 1951:

Macklin names one of the soldiers Kurt Holz and says he immediately dies of a heart attack upon exposure to sunlight after his rescue! Wild, John, wild! For more real world thrills, psychic bullshitter Gerard Croiset gets a promotional chapter, as does spontaneous human combustion and 1966 UFO sightings at the Wanaque reservoir. Kaspar Hauser and an Ica-inspired Brazilian pebble carving of a UFO round out some more Forteana in between more stories of "true" hauntings and supposed "case files" from Macklin's archive - now, remember, Macklin is a pseudonym, so how the heck does he have case files?

Speaking of Macklin's enthusiasm for trains, here he makes up a Welsh train disaster in 1927 that killed 16, at "Cynon Gap." Two boys on a cycling tour in 1956 see a spectral reenactment of the crash during a storm, and signalman Joshua Thomas laughing maniacally. The chapter is titled "Witness to a Train Disaster - 18 Years Afterwards" which is truly some kind of collision with reality if you do the math.

The final chapter is another Fortean classic, the missing Eskimo village of Lake Angikuni. Researcher Garth Haslam at the Anomaly Info site has outlined the history of this story, which was popularized by Frank Edwards in Stranger Than Science. Oddly, Macklin uses the "Angikuni" spelling, whereas Edwards wrote it as "Lake Anjikuni" - both are listed as variants online, while Haslam calls Anjikuni a misspelling, but either way it means that Macklin made a deliberate decision to spell it that way even though it's most likely he got the story from Edwards in the first place!

If your appetite's been whetted for more spooky true stories, Ace provides some ads for more Macklin madness, a whole page of Hans Holzer titles, Michael Hervey's Strange Happenings, plus a Steiger book on reincarnation. 

Macklin's Collisions With Reality is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1969

CLAIRVOYANCE IN WOMEN by Robert Tralins

"A new casebook of psychic phenomena?" Sign us up! Unfortunately, author Robert Tralins gives the game away in his preface: he says he's randomly chosen 50 examples of womanly ESP out of the staggering 3,668 case histories and reports in his files, all never before published, all deliberately written down in a casual style for ease of the reader, and all stripped of any confusing jargon or scientific distractions. Hmmm ...

This is, in fact, another story collection a la Steiger and Smith, with zero evidentiary or archival value. Since these are all "never before published," we don't even get any reused stories from Fate or the Society for Psychical Research! Note Tralins' cheeky admission that he's changed some of the names in a few of the cases ... more like, he's made it all up whole cloth! The clumsy and obvious stories that follow the preface make it obvious that Tralins is pulling our chain. 

His prose is sub-Steiger. Consider the very first story about the "death bobbins" - not content to give Mrs. Chun a vision of a miniaturized grim reaper cutting yarn, Tralins also throws in that, oh yeah, her mother told her about this very phenomenon as a child, but somehow Chun "can't say how [she] knew" what the vision meant! Make it make sense, Bob!

Author Robert Tralins (1926-2010)

Tralins was a prolific working writer who put out a handful of paranormal titles, so we can't judge him too hard for phoning in this one. It must have sold decently enough, because Lancer Books reprinted it a few years later:

Lancer Books, 1973 edition

The rest of the stories follow a type: people rush home just in time, or pick up the phone at just the right moment, or follow some sign to a date with destiny. The just-so sameness drags on, as does Tralins' seeming lack of care. Consider the chapter about a white tiger. Judith Satterlee has a vision of the beast while on safari ... in Africa. Now, maybe spectral felines aren't exactly bound by time and space, but it seems to me that Tralins didn't do his homework, as tigers aren't native to Africa! The actual ESP portion of this chapter is lackluster as well, with Mrs. Satterlee knowing her father has died because she dreamed of the tiger eating him.

"A tiger? In Africa?"

Just about the only chapter with any real verve to it is "Mrs. Henry's Dead Dog," a predictable but well done short about a sick woman's dead dog visiting her in hospital. This chapter works well enough to be on par with John Macklin, even! 

Meanwhile, a chapter on "Armagh Armageddon" shares Macklin's train fixation but falls flat, as Mrs. Lucy McHugh warns her uncle and brother not to take the train. They don't listen to Lucy, and so it's bye bye uncle and brother as they ride straight into the Armagh rail disaster of 1889! A list of the dead doesn't feature any McHughs, and this would be an odd one for Tralins to have changed names of real people for (if for the sake of humor we take him at his word), so here Tralins is making up fake victims of a real life tragedy. He also seems to have picked the Armagh disaster at random, because there's no details about the actual crash in his chapter and nothing about it is especially relevant to the story he came up with. A large number of the real life victims were schoolchildren on an excursion, which feels like it may have made for a more dramatic chapter, but as Tralins has written it, a couple guys took the train, it crashed, and they died. No moral!

That's sort of the problem with the whole text, really. After the preface, Tralins never actually engages with the idea of clairvoyance in women and what it could all mean. It's just story after story, until the very last chapter, and then: the end.

 

Lancer gives us just three measly ads in the back for more paranormal thrills, including another Tralins title and our pal Steiger promoting psychic Dorothy Spence Lauer.

After all is said and done, Tralins' Clairvoyance in Women sits alongside Steiger's Possession as a maybe-fiction meatloaf and shelf filler. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org ... if you dare.

Lancer Books, 1970

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: STRANGE POWERS OF THE MIND & STRANGE POWERS OF E.S.P.

It's a double dose of psychic flimflam from the gruesome twosome of Warren Smith and Brad Steiger! Both Strange Powers of the Mind and Strange Powers of E.S.P. are now available to read and download at archive dot org. This marks the digital debut for both titles, chock full of midcentury parapsychology, psychic predictions, and that old reliable maybe-fiction:

Original reviews are here and here, from way back in 2022.

 

THE FINAL FIRE by Dennis Smith

I have no time to watch TV

Yours is the face that interests me 

I loved you when you lost your raincoat 

I'll love you when you lose your fear 

Fire girl, say you will

HUMAN FUEL! New York City, 1975 ... a powder keg in more ways than one. Ripe for the firebugs, for the insurance fraudsters, and for the decades of deferred maintenance and subpar construction. Just waiting for a spark, a short circuit, somewhere, anywhere: in the ghettos, uptown, on Broadway ... just one little spark, and it will all go up in flames ...

Firefighter and man of letters Dennis Smith had previously written a nonfiction book about firefighters in the South Bronx, and here he turns his not-insubstantial skill at drawing out real life drama to even greater heights of fiction. You are there! As brothers Tom and Jerry battle flames and human foibles, as Smith drags us through the gritty NYC infrastructure, and as we learn, in the best disaster genre tradition, of just how badly things are about to go wrong. This is the NYC of Serpico ... and of the Wolfen, where fact and fiction spring forth from the polluted asphalt loam. This is the same lousy, stinking town of Cravens and Marr's The Black Death, where millions of souls are held for ransom by institutional ignorance and the vagaries of fate. Today, it's a dead baby in a smoked out tenement ... tomorrow, it might be Manhattan.

Around the same time he wrote The Final Fire, Smith also founded Firehouse magazine, which is still running to this day. Here, he offers a free issue and an attractive discount price for a year's subscription. Readers left slavering over his destructive prowess may want to educate themselves further on the real life issues:

Signet offers some back page ads, including David Lippincott's disaster dud Tremor Violet. No thanks, Jack! Believe the hype: The Final Fire is a 4 alarm inferno! See for yourself, because it's available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)