Now here's a juicy wad of psychic peril and telekinetic terrors courtesy the stalwart working writer Warren Smith. And who should contribute an introduction but that paranormal powerhouse, Warren's friend (and yours and mine too) Brad Steiger! Steiger wants us to see ESP as an innate ability we all have, contrasting this to the more elitist view of an evolving sect of supermen destined to surpass Homo sapiens. However, for most of us plebs ESP is a skill that appears only in the most extreme situations, similar to the adrenaline rush that allows a mother to lift a car off her child. Steiger name-drops his befuddled buddy John Pendragon as among those select few who have easy, consistent access to their ESP skills, alongside such luminaries as superstar Jeane Dixon. "Primitive" people such as Bushmen and the Australian Aborigines also have an easier time, their minds being unclouded by the noise of modern technological society. With that framing in mind, we're ready to dive into Warren's text!
Smith aims to shock right off the bat, with a housewife's vicious vision of the Richard Speck murders. Next is a brutal child slaying, with the guilty priest unmasked through another psychic vision. Smith tries to class things up relating William Butler Yeats' ambivalent obsession with the paranormal, only to follow through with yet more murders. Gruesome! A boy with the microfilm mind and a lady with the mental radio harken back to Smith's "strange" Popular Library series but we rubber band back to the grue with a teenage girl's death premonition from a fiery plane crash. Seems tacky on Smith's part, exploiting another true tragedy by inventing paranormal details that are MIA in other available accounts. Smith knocks out a few more dead kids over the course of the book. Fully adult "Speed King" Donald Campbell has a bad feeling before his final, fatal speedboat run - Brad Steiger recycled this story for Beyond the Strange, writing as Eric Norman. Smith describes the classic creeper the Mad Gasser of Mattoon as a "mental epidemic," a case of mass hysteria. I'm curious if he or Steiger ever mentioned this case elsewhere while leaning on the more sensational interpretation.
Historic Cree chief Big Bear (Mistahi-maskwa) gets an insulting chapter where "angry braves" spout dialogue like "The spirit demands white blood!" and "You talk like a squaw!" before committing the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. Other, whiter, historical figures get more flattering chapters, including Mark Twain, Amelia Earhart, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Things get really creepy in the chapter "The Strange World of Mind Control," with Jose Delgado, pioneering neuroscientist and renowned master of mechanical mind control, theorizing ways brain control chips could quell ghetto riots and keep the underclasses in their place. Smith reports this with a chipper attitude, marveling at the wonders of scientific progress. This is much more disturbing than visions of the Speck murders and so on, especially given the effort from some quarters even today to downplay any untoward aspects of Delgado's legacy.
An "ESP King of the racetrack" wins at the horses, and may have been left over from Steiger's Beyond Unseen Boundaries, as he's illustrated on the back cover of that volume but nowhere to be found within. That's the sausage being made! The funniest entry with the benefit of today's hindsight is "His Hunch Saved His Country," about a humble police rookie in 1954 Iran who nails a communist traitor in the ranks and "saves the oil fields of Iran for the free countries." I love a happy ending! And speaking of endings, Smith really knows how to pick em with Georges Harrar, an Israeli psychic who predicts that America wins Vietnam in 1967! Seems a bit lazy to leave that in when your book doesn't come out until 1968, but again that's how the sausage gets made. There's also the obligatory nuclear war with Red China, this time against the USSR for control of Siberia. Some of the stuff we're supposed to be scared of seems silly now, and some of the silliness has turned sinister, but good ol' nuclear war will always be a bad time.
It's a bloody business, but this volume must have sold well because at some unknown date, Ace Books reprinted it with the new cover art above. We get one small sketch of a spooky tree and house too, as if all the horrible things we've read need any flourishes.
Ace Books, 1968
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