COVER UPDATES: BEYOND BELIEF

Beautiful, FANTASTICAL artwork for this alternate cover of Stefan Elg's Beyond Belief. The more you look, the more delights you find - dig that rhinoceros beetle!

Tower Books, 1967

THE FIRE CLOUD by Kenneth McKenney

Love is the plan.

Love like the warrior Popocatépetl had for the princess Iztaccíhuatl, enduring after death, immortalized by the pair of mountain peaks that bear their names. Love like the poor housecleaner Carmen Barbadillo for her children, like the vain President Ramirez for his own image, countered by General Jesus Mendoza Sanchez's love for the entire people of Mexico. Like the old man El Cacique's love for old gods and old ways, like would-be revolutionary Felipe Lopez Vargas' love for righteous violence.

The plan is death.

Popocatépetl stirs from his long slumber, sending deadly clouds of ash and stone across the land. The President dithers as pressure builds, paralyzed by careerism and superstition while General Mendoza contemplates the ultimate betrayal. Carmen Barbadillo seeks her children, kidnapped by El Cacique for an unspeakable sacrifice to placate the volcano. And Vargas kills, kills, kills in his vainglorious crusade, a catspaw for hidden forces working against General Mendoza, forces that may condemn 13 million people to eternity in a burning charnel house. Because if the American geologist Harry Carter is right, in six days Popocatépetl is going to explode, and nothing will survive THE FIRE CLOUD!

Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl, with Mexico City in the foreground

McKenney's novel is 310 pages, and not an ounce of fat. He never uses two words when one will do, and darns his threads with a delicate precision. Consider Felipe Vargas' ambush of three policemen on the beat, machine-gunned in their patrol car as a shock publicity statement for his terror gang El Partido del 10 de Junio.  Another writer may have buried us in pages of character description for the doomed officers, sketching in their lives, loves, favorite ice cream flavors, all in an attempt to heighten the violent impact. But here, the attack is over in half a page and we know as much about the dead as Vargas does - nothing at all. The effect is actually more extreme, as we barely "see" these men in our minds eye before they are cut down. We don't even know their names. We never will, because Popocatépetl's initial violent outburst knocks everything else off the front page, happenstance that sends Vargas after bigger and bigger fish ... which suits his handlers' strategy of tension just fine thank you. The same restraint is held for El Cacique and his cultists, characters who would rapidly wear out their welcome in a lesser novel but appear here only when absolutely necessary and never veer into lame Satanic caricature. The doom laden atmosphere leaves no room for extraneous material, and the raw power of the land blends with General Mendoza's last ditch emergency plan that's a New World redux of Exodus  - the roads are ruined, and all of Mexico City are to walk out of the danger zone - into something truly epic, beyond a banal genre label. Past and present, tradition and modernity, the soul and struggle of Mexico brought to the brink.

That American Harry Carter has a cutting edged theory about ignimbrite rocks, a product of pyroclastic flows, and about how to defuse a ignimbrite blast before it blows. General Mendoza is on board, but there's just one hitch. The sticking point is a capital-A bomb, to be thrown down Popocatépetl's throat and detonated like one goddamn big pressure release valve. Now we reach another point where so many novels stumble, the realm of high stakes geopolitics. Again, McKenney handles this with grace and a light touch, mixing fact and fiction with the Brazilian junta offering their secret weapon as calculated collateral to spur American aid. And oh, those Americans ... arrogant, ignorant, sympathetic in their way but forever foreigners in this land. Except, that is, for the outcasts, the adrift, like Carter with his crank ideas and the cynical NY Post journalist Mary Alice Jackson, sent down Mexico way to get some "sensational" copy but finding herself catatonic in the chaos until saved by Carmen Barbadillo's stolid peasant courage. One very pointed moment is past in a flash, when a crummy cowboy actor compliments General Mendoza on his English during hotline negotiations. But it's not McKenney's way to belabor a point. The final 20 pages move at a blistering pace into a cinematic climax worthy of the most state of the art SFX from ILM circa 1980, as a helicopter squad flies straight into Popocatépetl's hellmouth to deliver the payload.

The grasping ash, the burning pit, the pages practically char in your hands as the heat rises to a nuclear finish, with millions of bodies and souls at stake. For its passion, for its power, The Fire Cloud earns a full four pitiless pyroclastic flows out of four.

Avon Books, 1979

COSMIC DEBRIS: The Doctrine of Moles

Perhaps two lesser know fields of fortune telling, beauty marks and metoposcopy!

From The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, by Zolar! Courtesy Popular Library, 1970.

TREMOR VIOLET by David Lippincott

There's blood in the streets

It's up to my ankles

Blood in the streets 

It's up to my knees

Here it comes, for the umpteenth time. Los Angeles is gonna get the Big One, the one that's gonna knock California into the sea, a 9 on the Richter scale and worse to come ... Tremor Violet. A lyrical title, and one hell of an explosive cover, but does author David Lippincott bring the noise? Does he ring in the apocalypse in style?

Blood in my love
In the terrible summer
Bloody red sun of
Fantastic L.A.

Let's just say, he gets an awful lot of mileage going over well tread ground. The plotting is paint by numbers, with concerned scientists, crooked public servants, and oblivious private citizens all lined up to say their lines and get put through the cataclysmic wringer. Lippincott's prose is belabored: 

To the outsider, this section of Beverly Hills is both awesome and puzzling; there is no way to be certain whether the gates are meant to keep strangers out or the strangers who live behind them in.

And his characters are contrived, right down to their names: Digit Vorhees, Adam Mosely, Mishi and Addie, Oskie and Pokress, a cast of dozens who fail to convince, neither compelling or realistic enough to become anything more than a parade of thin '70s stereotypes, mere meat for the grinder. Some of it is just plain distracting: why is 15 year old Mishi's dialogue written as if she were a precocious 8 year old? She's a Japanese living in the Hills and speaking ESL, but Lippincott's cutesy rendering of her speech - she learned colloquial English, we're told, by watching old movies - cements her firmly as a stereotype in our minds, and not the awkward adolescent fumbling through her sexual awakening that the author is clearly attempting. None of Lippincott's attempts at a grand tapestry of disaster hold together, leaving us with disconnected episodes which seem even more unsatisfying in their disunity. And the main event? Tremor Violet herself, the "tremendous wallop" that promises to upend LA with her big, scary, epic violence?

It's alright.

Nothing special, really. Less Earthquake and more Smash-Up on Interstate 5 -  a made-for-TV apocalypse. Lippincott manages a decent set piece when some of his victims must rappel down a collapsed penthouse restaurant's glass elevator shaft, but he falls flat with his other scenes of destruction. His main problem seems to be pacing, as scenes and characters are built up interminably over the book, only to sputter out when called upon for their big moment. Wild animals loosed from a zoo, eating earthquake survivors? Sounds horrible, I'll take it! But that bit's over before it even really begins. The dams at the Van Norman Reservoir have blown, flooding the valley? Ditto, it's over and done with. Lather rinse repeat, and Lippincott's big one is a big flop.

And as if to make up for this quaalude of a quake, near the end of things out of nowhere Lippincott springs a brutal rape scene upon us, as poor, alienated Mishi is sodomized with a shotgun by the pervert jailbird Pokress. Pokress gets his head blown off for his troubles, but Lippincott lavishes entirely too much detail on Mishi's ordeal and has done nothing in the preceding 250 pages to earn this savage shock value. It's a Hail Mary pass that lands somewhere south of good taste and nowhere near successful. Just about the only successful piece of this work is the end - I'm not being a wag, Lippincott ends things on a cliffhanger with another tremor imminent, and the suspense works. It'd work even better though, if he hadn't fumbled everything else.

Lippincott's paint by numbers apocalypse gets a miserable rating of one seismograph out of four.

Signet Books, 1975

PROMINENT AMERICAN GHOSTS by Susy Smith

Great Lincoln's ghost! From authoritative authoress Susy Smith comes this crinkled copy detailing PROMINENT AMERICAN GHOSTS! Who were they? Where are they? Who do they spook? Susy's gonna give us the rundown!

The appeal of any text by Susy Smith is her discerning taste, a cut above certain other authors who pile up endless anecdotes to no real end. Here we get a delightful historical tour, with deep dives into local histories and persons, and even if you think ghosts are capital-F FAKE the context and emotions around each story will draw you in. The Winchester Mystery House of Santa Clara is one such story, a tale of loss and longing as gun magnate widow Sarah Winchester threw herself into additions on her manic manse, compulsively adding random rooms, hidden passages, and dead ends meant to "confuse malevolent spirits" even while she met with mediums to contact her husband and child on the other side. The house is a big tourist attraction to this day.

After Steiger's rancid recycling of hack haole "Huna magic" it's nice to read some real Hawaiian mythology concerning Madame Pele, goddess of fire and lightning. Beware traveler, if you meet Madame Pele on the road it's advised you mind your manners ... if not, she just might blow her top! 

Of course, Susy tells the tales of Ocean Born Mary and the Bell Witch, two very prominent ghosts who showed up time and again in the paranormal genre, usually in the likes of Steiger and Warren Smith's quickie paperbacks without any substantial sourcing. But Susy Smith is nothing if not meticulous, and would you believe that Ocean Born Mary does seem rather thin on the ground, when you get down to her? Susy loves her anyways though, and you gotta admit she is a romantic image all red haired and green eyed in the sea mist, burying pirate treasure, like something out of a classic gothic paperback. Smith gets cheeky in another chapter, looking for any and all ghosts named Smith and almost coming up snake eyes - but thankfully there's a little old lady ghost in Maine who fits the bill!

These are just a few of the all-American apparitions Susy runs us through in a very dense 218 pages. She also includes a nice bibliography, per usual. Always a class act!

Dell Publishing, 1967

COVER UPDATES: THE WAVE

Beautiful looking cover showcasing The Wave by Christopher Hyde. Courtesy Playboy Paperbacks, 1981 (original pub. 1979).

COSMIC DEBRIS: Your Master Plan of Fate!

A whole bundle of goodies here, but google yields no photos, and neither hide nor hair of the "world famous" Joy Marie and Lin Kha Shang! Were they even real people? Or just names on an ad? Do any personalized scrolls of eternity lay moldering in an attic or basement somewhere?

From Fate, Volume 18 - Number 1, January 1960.