With over 61+ chapters of Fortean freakshows in 190 pages, author Warren Smith brings us a real drive-in Saturday with THE STRANGE ONES! It's another free-for-all with monsters, ghosts, ESP, UFOs, "wacky" news items and trivia, and whatever else Smith could cram in to reach his quota of strangeness. Arthur Godfrey saw a UFO! The poet Virgil built a tomb for his pet housefly! It's wild out there!
Some of his chapters are truly trivial, with barely a paragraph describing potential mummy powered motors or someone who laughed themselves to death. It happens, honestly, and it's horrible! His hollow earth chapter is weak sauce as well, considering how Smith managed to fill whole books on the subject elsewhere. His final thought on the subject here: "It is one of the wildest theories in history." Don't hold back, Warren!
That back cover critter in the Black Museum looks a cousin to the Glamis Beast from Brad Steiger's The Unknown, but I'm not sure what tale he's supposed to feature in here. The closest match is the Museum of the Souls of Purgatory in Rome, but there's no horrible monsters skulking about, just some real bad vibes, man.
Smith mixes and matches chapters from his own back catalogue and swipes from Frank Edwards' Stranger Than Science for the tale of John Keely's mystery motor among others. Edwards launched the careers of many copycat writers such as Smith, who also recycles the Ourang Medan ghostship which at this point was instant filler for any Fortean text. Smith drops in ol' Officer Herbert Schirmer and his UFO encounter from his own Gods Demons and UFO's, and would reuse Herb's distressing story in future work. Other frequent flyers on the Forteana circuit include "PK Man" Ted Owens, the Boggy Creek Monster of Fouke, Arkansas, psychics Olof Jonsson and Countess Amaya, and the fearsome Yeti of Fremont, Wisconsin, this last bogey also featured by Brad Steiger this same year of 1972, in his Strange Encounters With Ghosts! C'mon guys, try a little harder! Tombstone funnies and silly folk medicine are two more easy entries that barely merit inclusion.
I can't stay too mad at Warren though, not when he finally kicks it up a notch and brings in werewolves and the wolfgirls of Godamuri to spice up the strange. Too bad those feral gals never really existed, according to a French surgeon/historian anyway, but we're used to that with Smith. The party's over, the big names have split, but Warren's mixed some jungle juice from the backwash and damn if it won't do in a pinch. Time to get strange ...
Popular Library, 1972
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