Author C.B. Colby delivers this collection of stories taken from his "Adventure Today" newspaper column. There's no pretense to "fully documented" facts in this one, as Colby cheerfully admits that these are campfire stories meant to be shared and enjoyed. There's a load of urban legends here with multiple vanishing hitchhikers, ghosts in graveyards, and specters like ol' Ocean Born Mary and the Shadmock! That missing Eskimo village is back again, along with that missing Chinese army. Colby also includes frequent flyers like Flight 19 and assorted saucers, plus the Devil's Footprints of Devon and the moving coffins of the Barbados Vault. All told, Colby packs in 99 bite sized entries in 125 pages, a rapid fire pace that rivals Smith and Steiger.
Given their status as spooky campfire tales, Colby's not above a little fabrication here and there. For example, the story of the "Tragedy Atop the Glacier" which references a real plane crash of a C-46 cargo plane in the PNW. In Colby's telling, the bodies of the dead mysteriously disappear and are never found, an assertion not backed up by any documentation. Most of the stories lack enough specifics to even necessitate any fakery on Colby's part, and he invites the reader to take it or leave it as part of the fun.
Other stories give a hearty dose of American culture in the 1940s, especially a trio that deal with Native Americans. These three tales reinforce the ontological identity of the "dead Indian" wherein Native Americans exist solely to die out, making room for white settlers. In "The Old Chief's Tomahawk" a dead Indian returns to save a white child from a hungry wolf, the young girl having previously shown him a kindness as he was dying. "The Indian Guide" is a similar tale of a girl saved from a blizzard by her old Indian friend, unaware that he's been dead for two days! "Outsmarting the Indians" is a more straightforward story of frontier conflict, as a pioneer woman outwits marauding Indians by rolling heavy cheese wheels down the stairs.
A reprint by Scholastic Books in 1963 cemented the title as a nostalgic memory for many, with multiple reviews and retrospectives available online, including this one which showcases some of Colby's illustrations, which are MIA from the 1959 Popular Library edition.
C.B. Colby: the name that guarantees cheap thrills!
Popular Library, 1959 (original pub. 1940)
Wow! Dumbstruck.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in my collection of books is one from the 1990s called 'Scareforce', the cover talks it up as X-Files type revelations, but the contents like this book were a bunch of unverifiable ghost stories.
ReplyDeleteAs to Ashton Scholastics output, the one book of their's I'd love to find is a 1970s volume entitled 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth and other Horrors', that's right they published a volume of H. P. Lovecraft aimed at small children...
HPL Kiddies presents: The Crayon Out of Space ...
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