POSSESSION by Christopher Dane

Hot on the release of The Exorcist, here's a walloping load of pure bollocks from Brad Steiger (under his Christopher Dane pseudonym) as he drags us through 16 chapters featuring totally true cases of demonic POSSESSION!

There's no intro, no outro, just one terror after another: the first chapter sees Lady Monica Stewart decapitated by her chauffeur Henry Ferguson on her way home to Stewart Manor one rainy night in 1929. The Lady recently bought some antique jewels, and it seems that they originally belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots - when Ferguson sees them, the spirit of Mary's executioner Gavin Bulle possesses him to do the deed! Ferguson is committed to an asylum. Next is a very slim story of a dead sailor possessed by a preacher's spirit - before his burial at sea, he temporarily revives to plead with the rest of the crew to repent their salty ways. This takes place onboard the HMS Wellington but Steiger assures us that this was not the ship's true name ... are these guys in the witness protection program, Brad? Next, Bill and Mona Adams of Omaha, NE face a demonic entity that possesses Mona and tries to turn her against husband Bill. He perseveres, but Mona ends up in an asylum like ol' Ferguson. after this, we travel to Dhaka, Bangladesh, as youth Yusef Pundit stays out drinking all night with some bad kids and winds up possessed by a dead girl's wandering soul for his troubles! His mom and dad are not happy, to say the least, and Steiger wags about "a girl in a boy's body. Oh, the very idea of it!" There's plenty of cornball dialogue through all of these stories, by the way, and Steiger pads some of them pretty egregiously. The prominent Dr. Mueller recommends a witch for Yusef, and she's able to exorcize the girl's spirit. Yusef remembers nothing and says, "Father forgive me, but I did not intend to go out drinking!"

After this we're back in the USA for the case of Teri Vruche and her uncle's dybbuk. Poor Teri spends some 30 years possessed by her dead uncle's restless soul, until Rabbi Salamon Friedlander exorcizes Uncle Sandor and his soul is granted eternal rest. There's lots of italicized Judaisms in this chapter like shofar, minyan, and Zidduk Ha-Din. Indiana farm girl Charlotte Werner is tortured between two opposing forces when two spirits invade her! We learn that the evil one was a lecherous monk and the good spirit his nun victim, seduced into damnation! Charlotte's family demolish their farmhouse and the monk's "cache" is discovered in a well in the basement, banishing him. What's in the stash, exactly? Steiger never says! He follows this with a short chapter on Socrates and his daimon, which Steiger posits was his "extraordinarily heightened subconscious self" that aided Socrates with hunches. After this comes a LONG chapter about poor little Davey Demaray, possessed by an evil spirit from a haunted sofa! This chapter is overlong and underwritten, with Davey's parents finally burning the couch at the town dump and freeing Davey. Yeesh!

Warren Foley of Salem, OR is murdered by friends who stage his body as a suicide. His spirit possesses teen Janice McMillan and exposes them. This story seems like it should be ripe for corroboration from the archives, with names, a date (1942), and a US locale that should yield records. But would you believe that not a one of any of these stories have any corroborating information online today? Not a one! Names, dates, places lead nowhere. There's a Castle Stuart near Inverness, but the real Lady Augusta Mary Monica Crichton-Stuart lived to 1947 and was not brutally murdered by her chauffeur. Other distinct names like Yusef Pundit and Rebecca Eliaphas yield not a single clue through the great god google. I know Steiger sometimes liked to source from Fate magazine, so I checked my (admittedly anemic) collection of '60s Fate issues and didn't score any hits either. We're more than halfway through, so let's carry on!

Jonathan Rundquist, aged 6, hits his head on the sidewalk and becomes a doorway for the recently deceased! Dr. Holten recommends a medium, who convinces the spirits to move on and leave Jonathan be. It's a happy ending and the medium even says that young Jonathan could be a crackin' psychic one day! The next tale is a more somber one: young Kelly Markham is hit and killed by a car. Her spirit sticks around to commune with her 3 year old sister Stacy, but soon other, more sinister forces gather about them. Her parents hire an exorcist and the day is saved with some cheesy dialogue when Stacy wakes from her possession to see the exorcist in front of her: "Did you come to play with me, mister?" "You might say so, Stacy. You might say so ..." More goofiness, this time from Stacy's dad: "Of course, Judith. Philadelphia might very well be the city of brotherly love, but nobody has bothered to tell the crooks that yet. Everything is locked up.” We zip back in time to 1871 in Schleppendorf, Germany, where young Jewish girl Rebecca Eliaphas is trysting with gentile army officer Franz Dornbach. Her shame manifests as another dybbuk, this one identified as a local ne'er-do-well named Jacob Levi. The rabbi beats the dybbuk out of her, huzzah! When she comes around, she tells her parents she's had the strangest dream. Oddly, Jacob's soul is described as being barred from Hell - Jewish Hell? It's a tricky question, turns out!

We're in the home stretch now, with another tale of a corpse possessed to speak. This time it's Josie Peterson, 17, late of Eau Claire, WI. Firstly, she gives her family a vision of her own passing. Then, she dies, and her body is possessed by multiple spirits who all talk with the family. Finally they leave, and poor Josie is at rest, for good. Next is a too-good-to-be-true story of a Russian woman, Victoria Blok, who has her soul ripped through time and swaps bodies with an Italian countess from 1356! Poor Victoria goes mad in the late medieval era, winding up in a nunnery, while the Countess lives it up in her hot new body! "My original husband was old and flabby," she says, unlike her young new beau! Steiger says she becomes a social butterfly and moves to the Russian colony in China, where she thrives until passing away in 1927. I swear Steiger has used a similar Russian tale before, about a male peasant who has an uncomfortable trip through time, but I'll be damned if I can remember where I read it! Another tale of psycho-horror follows with orphan Susannah Nolan of Sarasota FL, who gets molested by would-be sweetheart Bobby Carson in lover's lane. She fights back and he almost slits her throat with his switchblade before a passing car interrupts. Afterwards, Susannah's guilt manifests as an entity that attacks her! Her body bloats horribly and her family and Dr. Cargill are all at a loss ... until they move her to an aunt's place upstate. You see, paranormal investigator Stephan Boyd determines that her guilt is tied to her home in Sarasota and her brother-in-law Nathan's strict household, and the entity dissipates when she moves away. Sweet Susannah is revived and declares her intentions to live and love to the fullest. Now, the final chapter: dateline Minneapolis, 1967! Sharon Larson has come to stay with her sister Cindy, whose husband has been captured by the North Vietnamese! Having her sister around is good for Cindy, but both ladies become intrigued by the mysterious Mrs. Hastings, an old lady who is possessed! Dr. Thorenson says she's just schizo, but then the sisters are bizarrely possessed themselves, by an urge to act out a meditation ritual over the course of three days. When they finish, they learn that Mrs. Hastings has been freed from her madness! And then, the book ends!

It's possible Steiger borrowed these tales from another paperback writer like Susy Smith or Hans Holzer, but I'm betting that each and every one of them was 100% fabricated! As such, this title stands as a perfect example of Steiger's forte, the genre of "maybe-fiction" as described by author Tanner F. Boyle in his essential survey of The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction. Quoting from The Fortean Influence:

1. Maybe-fiction contains fantastic or SF-esque stories and events.

2. Maybe-fiction involves often contentious subject matter.

3. The authors claim the stories to be true and/or the resulting hypotheses to be entirely possible.

4. Maybe-fiction creates a vast web of intertextuality between the various texts.

We're assured the stories are "100% proven true" but this is merely a device for our immersion into the narratives - no real evidence is ever proffered and Steiger gives no analysis of any of the tales. The "true story" is simply a framework, identical to the modern online creepypasta, with the dramatic events and thrilling reveals in each story giving us a frisson of fear from every demonic visage and on-the-nose piece of dialogue - says Mrs. Hastings to the sisters, "why, it was just about 11 o'clock in the morning when it happened!" It's fitting, then, that the back page ads are for more horror fiction.

In a final insult, none of the back cover teasers ("Egyptian witch," "suicide victim,") are actually included. And as usual, Popular Library gives no table of contents:

1.  Possessed by a Killer (5)

2.  Spectral Preacher Who Invaded a Corpse (17)

3.  I Lost My Wife to a Demon (21)

4.  The Marauding Spirit Who Stole a Teenager's Body (35)

5.  Possessed by Her Uncle for Thirty Years (45)

6.  Tortured Possession Between Two Opposing Forces (53)

7.  Socrates Was Possessed (65)

8.  The Possession of Davey Demaray (71)

9.  Possessed by a Dead Man (99)

10. The Little Boy Who Was Possessed (111)

11. A Three-Year-Old's Terror (121)

12. The Possession of Rebecca Eliaphas (133)

13. Possession of a Corpse (141)

14. Time Travel and Possession (147)

15. "I Will Kill You" (153)

16. They Fought a Demon (167)

Popular Library, 1973