TERROR ZONES by Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey

And it's terror time again as that titan of triangular tomes, Ms. Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey, takes us through a gripping global tour of TERROR ZONES! Right off the bat we have one of countless appearances in the paranormal literature by the apocryphal, untraceable death ship SS Ourang Medan, adrift in the Indian Ocean with a slaughtered crew, victim to some unknowable force from beyond. The Comte de Perouse disappears on a mission for France in 1789, and earlier still Dutch captain Bernard Fokke sails on a Sunday in 1650, cursing himself into history as the Flying Dutchman! In this opening chapter with the Indian Ocean, Adi-Kent outlines her thesis on the "terror zones," areas where the normal rules of time and space can suddenly be suspended. Ivan T. Sanderson's vile vortices get name dropped, and Jeffrey uses terror zones, triangle zones, and vile vortices interchangeably throughout the text, leading to some odd configurations:

How exactly are we supposed to orient our deadly triangles in the Indian Ocean? Never mind that, we're on to the next stop and a good one, the dreaded Sargasso Sea! Already we have the tone for Adi-Kent's text: lots of cheesy recreations with invented dialogue and events and less than rigorous historical sourcing. Dig cabin boy Elisha Thompson's wild ride into the Sargassum, as the sole survivor of the J.G. Norwood. The rest of the crew is washed overboard in a storm, and the ship becomes tangled in the legendary seaweeds of the Sargasso, whereupon Thompson deboards and explores several trapped derelicts including the SS City of Boston and the lost American warsloop Wasp.

E.S. Hodgson's lovely painting of the romantic Sargasso

Nowadays it's common knowledge that the classic romantic image of the Sargasso Sea as a graveyard of ghost ships is exaggeration, but that didn't stop writers like Jeffrey and many before her from spinning their tales, nor did it stop the mad lads at Hammer from making one of their most outlandish horror/sf films, the 1968 Sargasso shocker The Lost Continent, complete with an inbred society of Inquisition-era conquistadores who have been trapped in the weeds for generations, threatened by mutant monsters and the world-shattering arrival of a modern tramp steamer full of lost souls! In this feverish thriller we see how the paranormal is constantly reimagined and re-established with interplay between pulp fiction and "true" accounts.

All this and Dana Gillespie too!

This leads us into another of Jeffrey's stories, that classic triangle yarn on the Ellen Austin and the derelict, lifted wholesale from author William Hope Hodgson's short story "The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship." Jeffrey gives us a very dramatic blow-by-blow recreation of events, in the best cheeseball style of Brad Steiger, all the more incredible for how completely fabricated it all is!

"The desert is the haunt of mystery. Sometimes men hear whispers of its past."

That's Adi-Kent quoting columnist Paul Wilhelm on the mystique of the desert, as she moves us away from the oceans and into the shifting sands. It seems that there's a legend of a lost ship stranded in the dunes of the American Southwest, and our author runs through some variations including Spanish galleons, a Chinese junk, a viking longboat, and a modern vessel that fell victim of the Salton Sea's shifting shoreline. Maybe the lost ship is full of gold and treasure, maybe it's cursed by its dead crew, maybe it's a will-o'-the-wisp luring the unwary to their doom ... who can say? Before we can dawdle too long, it's time for the next chapter on the Fata Morgana and a regional Hungarian variation called the délibáb, or déli báb as Jeffrey writes it. I guess mirages could be terror inducing, especially if you were lost in the desert or on the empty expanse of the Great Hungarian Plain ... but as the book goes forward, we can see that we're straying from the nominal focus of TERROR ZONES and into a general grab bag of worldwide weirdness. The people of the tiny St. Kilda archipelago, part of the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland, are said to have ESP and to be generally strange or noteworthy. The Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina are creepy enough, to be sure, but after that we move into a long chapter about long lived folk, including 142 year old Khaf Lasuria of Georgia, 170 year old (!) Shirali Muslimov (Jeffrey calls him Milimov) of Azerbaijan, 125 year old Miguel Carpio of Ecuador, and the Hunza people of Pakistan who all live for hundreds of years thanks to their special diet, which Adi-Kent notes briefly became a fad here in the West. Suffice to say none of these incredible ages are verifiable, but Jeffrey tries to work them into her model of TERROR ZONES nonetheless, theorizing on localized time dilations, human potentiality, and the like. It's pretty weak sauce, honestly.

Khaf Lasuria ... she don't look that old!

A fractured chapter follows on the Hollow Earth, with a slight but straightforward sketch of the idea and a quotation from John Symmes before Adi-Kent launches into the tale of three Norwegian boys who brave the maelstrom, with only Peter Arneson surviving as he latches onto a barrel and is catapulted out of the deadly whirlpool! Our author name checks Poe and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as well.

The terror manages to return with some rains of flesh and blood through the years, as well as an annual rain of sardines in Honduras, and a spectral sniper on the "missile mile" in the south of England who leaves bullet holes in car windscreens, without any attending bullets! Jeffrey calls these "supernormal assaults" and they're an apropos subject to finish up the book. Maybe this wasn't the most elegant volume from Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey, but it's hard to argue with how much strangeness she stuffs in, even with the disjointed results. She tries to tie a bow on everything at the very end with talk of parapsychology and the expanding frontiers of science, but nothing doing! It looks to me like our author wanted to keep her Triangle theme going from her prior works, but we know a classic Forteana potpourri when we see one, Adi-Kent!

Another edition made use of this incredible art from science fiction illustrator Peter Elson which plays up the Bermuda Triangle theme:

Panther Books, 1978 (original pub. 1975)

BLIZZARD by David James

White death in the frozen north! The city of Duluth, MN is on the brink of crisis as the storm of the century settles down in a smothering blanket of lethal chill, and author David James puts you there in the middle of the BLIZZARD!

Not to be confused with George Stone's 1977 technothriller of the same title, James' story is gritty slice of life stuff, as the citizens of Duluth find their routines suddenly interrupted by that most innocent of things, a November snow. Kids cheer for a day off school, but nothing doing, and so stolid, cancer riddled Ed Gerlowski slides into the driver's seat of his big yellow bus one last time and drives off into the white nothing ... Ed's not alone, there's a whole cast of solid midcentury characters with names like DeWurth, Jordan, Selzner, Polinski, and a delicious stew of '70s melodrama with adultery, workplace sexism, end-of-the-world parties, and more wracking at our characters' fragile nerves. That storm's worse than we thought, and suddenly Duluth is cut off from its natural gas lines, and then the power plant fails, and now thousands of people are facing the cold hard prospect of freezing to death in their own homes! James slaloms easily between his different threads, giving us the authorities, the media, city workers and the cops ... and US. What's to become of us? Like all the best disaster fiction, James sketches a believable portrait of failing systems and fractured people. There's no cheesy villains or out-of-this-world obstacles, just the implacable forces of nature arrayed against us, the living, and the terrifying simplicity of an all encompassing cold which numbs the body, slows the mind, and kills, kills, kills in ways both dramatic and banal, shocking and predictable. Duluth will be there after the thaw, but not everyone will have made it, and the survivors will be left with broken lives, new beginnings.

If James comes off as a capable author it should be no surprise, for he's actually one of several pseudonyms employed by writer David Hagberg over a long career that also included 20+ entries in the long running Nick Carter series of men's adventure pulp paperbacks, a successful series of technothrillers starring superspy Kirk McGarvey, and assorted other spy, tie-in, and thriller works. Blizzard was one of his first books but he writes with a sure hand here, making the story a pure pleasure to read. Hagberg was from Duluth, by the way, and it's always fun when an author socks it to their hometown.

The copious ad pages in the back feature a blurb for Rochelle Larkin's The Raging Flood featured on this blog just the other day, with an odd detail. For whatever reason, it looks like Larkin almost published her story under the pseudonym of John Pendleton Kennedy, a real American who served as Secretary of the Navy under Millard Fillmore and is notable for his abolitionism and early advocacy of the telegraph, as well as being a man of letters! Was this some kind of misprint, maybe a filler name chosen for pseudonyms not yet finalized and not meant to see print? I have no idea! The folks at cheapie publisher Belmont Tower were full of mysteries.

A final word should go to the cover art: it's simply beautiful, an evocative swirl of snow flurries nearly obscuring the blanketed countryside and Forrest Jordan's imperiled Cessna. Bravo all around for another winning disaster piece from Belmont Tower!

4/4

Belmont Tower Books, 1975

COVER UPDATES: MYSTERIOUS VISITORS and GOD DRIVES A FLYING SAUCER

A very cool Chris Foss style flying saucer on this 1975 edition of Mysterious Visitors by Brinsley Le Poer Trench from Pan ...

And a hazy portrait of the heavens for this 1971 edition of God Drives a Flying Saucer by R.L. Dione from Corgi Books. UK publishers loved lavishing lush paintings on their paranormal cheapies!

THE RAGING FLOOD by R.T. Larkin

Plastic flowers in her hair

Don't they make a lovely pair

Met last night at the slot machines

Him in leather, her in jeans

It was built to last a thousand years ... but something's gone wrong with the Warren G. Harding Dam, and now nine trillion gallons of water are about to blast across the desert towards the glittery resort town of El Paradisio, stuffed full of tourists, entertainers, and high rollers who have no idea they're three steps from armageddon courtesy THE RAGING FLOOD!

Cheap, fast, and nasty: the setting matches the story, as author Rochelle "R.T." Larkin spins out a stock disaster tale with the sure hand of a seasoned pro. Just read that first paragraph, with our haunted prophet Cordovan three sheets to the wind and cranking out some hard boiled self pity into the bottom of a shot glass. Cordovan has discovered something about the big dam out in the desert, a dangerous weakness brought on by nuclear testing, and he doesn't have much time to warn the authorities ... so Larkin doesn't waste much time! To the credit of her and her characters, once Cordovan gets through to hard nosed Governor's aide Steve Hilliard a gargantuan operation immediately goes underway to tackle the problem. Meanwhile the hottest casino in town, The Conquistadores, is hosting superstar comic Jackie Janssen to a packed house, and we follow him, his agent, assorted guests, and mobbed up owner Danilo Simonetti as they dance the dance of the damned, unaware of the catastrophe brewing miles out of town. Danilo's got a hot new squeeze named Penny, by the way, and she thinks she's found her ticket to the good life in the explosive Capo. But if only they all knew ...

You may have noticed that the setting seems like an obvious alias. For a little fictive distance, Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam have been rechristened El Paradisio and the Warren G. Harding Dam. All the story's geography is based on Nevada - minus the detail of how far the state capitol is from Sin City. Perhaps to keep her timeline tighter Larkin shortens the distance some of her official characters have to ferry back and forth, to 200 miles rather than the real world distance of 400+ miles between Carson City and Vegas.

Like I said, Larkin works fast and hard. She's not afraid to kill her darlings, either. Characters are drawn with depth and sympathy, even jerks like scummy ol' Danilo, and their respective fates remain up in the air until the brief, brutal ending. Some lush farmland outside of El Paradisio gets sacrificed in the operation, and Hilliard is shocked at the venom the salt of the earth farmers have for the people of Sin City - why should they abandon their life's works for a bunch of worthless whores and crooks? But there's twists and turns that shock even the bitter farmers, and some chilling government arithmetic that rings true all these years down. Quotes Cordovan, after the flotsam has settled, "There is a tide, in the affairs of men ..."

Cause wedding vows in Vegas

Aren't meant to last for ages

You've got to be courageous

To play the odds that love will win

There's not a lot of info out there about Larkin, except that she also wrote a mafia series called The Godmother. And speaking of mobsters, did you dig the overheated ad spread for The Marksman series above? Die, killer, die!

Whatever city you're in ... whoever you were, wherever you are R.T. Larkin, god bless ya for this prime piece of disaster sleaze! The Raging Flood blasts its way into a rating of four out of four stacks of waterlogged casino chips:

Belmont Tower Books, 1975

COVER UPDATES: EDGAR CAYCE ON ATLANTIS

Today we've got a terrific triple feature of cover updates for the very silly Edgar Cayce on Atlantis, by Edgar Evans Cayce! It must have been a hot seller because reprints and multiple editions abound. Up first is this very cool 1968 edition from Warner Books ... dig the slick graphic presentation of Egyptian/Mayan brotherhood, just a taste of some of the lost civilization themes inside.

Next we have the sixth printing from the Paperback Library, from 1969. We get some cool watery ruins and a stock shot of the man himself looking thoughtfully psychedelic, as he did on so many Paperback Library titles.

Last and definitely least, here's a very plain, disappointing tenth printing from the Paperback Library, from 1971! I can see this copy languishing on a grocery store spinner rack, counting on some bored housewife to shrug and toss it in the cart on her way to checkout. It was long ago and far away ...