Monsters of all kinds! Slimy, hairy, scaly, scary, and of the human variety as well. Many strange bigfoots and sea serpents, including several bogus Russian lake monsters, and some real space creeps too.
Smith's lined up some heavy hitters here, including one of the earlier pop culture connections of Dracula to the historical figure Vlad Tepes (referred to here as Vlad III). Just a few years later Raymond T. McNally and Rudu Florescu would deliver their essential In Search of Dracula rendering quickie treatments like Smith's two page chapter moot. Serial killers H.H. Holmes, Belle Gunness, and the Bloody Bender Family are more examples of stories well trod nowadays. The Patterson-Gimlin film is also allotted a two page chapter which doesn't particularly stand out among the other sundry savage bigfoots and ape men. It's interesting to see which "monsters" here have endured in pop culture and which, like "Pennsylvania's Puzzling Purple Glob," have faded away. The famous Beast of Gevaudan gets a beefy chapter, and another chapter is a ritual for becoming a werewolf.
Smith does his usual mixing and matching too, with those vicious hairy dwarfs of Venezuela popping up, Florida's dinosaur/penguin from 1948, and yet another variant of Smith and Steiger's story of the jungle sentry attacked by a hairy, "oily" monster. A creepy "black dwarf" who bedevils some medieval monks before tunneling away would later resurface in Steiger's Mysteries of Time and Space. Smith sources "Florida's Mysterious Sandman Monster" from Joan Whritenour, editor of the Saucer Scoop newsletter and also a collaborator with Steiger.
The final page is a wisp of an entry on that titan of terror, the Mothman - no mention of the Silver Bridge collapse or other peripheral weirdness later popularized by John Keel in his 1975 book.
Popular Library, 1969
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