EARTHSOUND by Arthur Herzog

The DISASTERTHON smashes on! Tonite, we feel the earth move under our feet as disaster maven Arthur Herzog scribes us the EARTHSOUND!

Your name is Harry Vail. You have a tragic backstory involving the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 which struck Alaska with a vengeance - maybe this would have been a gripping story on its own, but you've moved to Rhode Island with your new wife and live a quiet life as a geological surveyor, mixing with the beautiful people and secure in the knowledge that the East Coast's staid tectonics won't reignite your trauma ...

Or won't they?

Herzog makes a bold play here, eschewing LA, Japan, or even NYC in favor of a small town tableau, mixing folk horror with the classic disaster formula. The results are uneven but interesting, as Harry Vail must navigate the treacherous ground of an insular New England community as he tries to unravel the burgeoning threat from below. Midcentury bourgeois angst blends uneasily with the frisson of nature's fury, as nasty party games lead to domestic paranoia and some Stephen King-style conflict with the local dead end youths ... what's the difference, really, between the physical upheaval of an earthquake and the shifting ground of a failing marriage, a failing life?

Sadly, Herzog's juicy mixture doesn't quite land on solid ground. There's too many loose ends and dead ends, and the final quake is (rather realistically) limited in scope: there's only so much destruction an isolated peninsula can endure. Threads of poltergeists and Edgar Cayce (Cay-cee, not Case, Herzog helpfully informs us) clutter up the scene without adding much suspense.

Above, the Pan edition, for Commonwealth readers.

Herzog's Earthsound earns 2/4 for an uneven ride with tremors of feeling. Anything is better than nothing!

Signet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)

COLISEUM by Barney Cohen

Fire, flood, famine! Man's endless capacity for violence and the knife's edge of survival between us and the abyss, filtered through the best midcentury pulp entertainment! This is the DISASTERTHON, and it's on all November long!

First up: an assassin in the Astrodome! Or at least, a thinly veiled version thereof, in the best disaster fiction tradition ...

It's a pungent midcentury milieu here, with the Coliseum booked for a wild weekend featuring superstar rocker Skanky Baggs (not "Shanky," as the inside cover typos), superstar Swami Daktananda, and a Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY blowout game featuring superstar quarterback Bo Detwiler! Of course, someone has other plans for the 100,000 plus souls packed into the techno-wonder stadium.

Plans written in blood.

Referencing Black Sunday and The Towering Inferno on the cover takes some cojones. Can author Barney Cohen redeem himself, after the awful crocodile schlock he'd put out two years later in '77? Well, almost.

There's a little bit of technothriller grist around the huge stadium's air conditioning system, and the psychological architecture that went into planning for mass panic and stampedes, but Cohen (unfortunately) puts most of the focus on the stadium staff's detective work around the sniper's deadly plans. This is truly unfortunate for an American audience 50 years later, as the staff scratch their heads over spent shells, bullet holes in seats, and cryptic notes ... not to mention straight up threats of a mass shooting, written on office stationary! At some point we gotta say c'mon guys, get it together!

I guess it was a different time.

Digressions into the hot dog racket by sleazy vendor Israel "Fuzzi" Nussbaum are a welcome respite, as is the color Cohen puts into the Swami's cult, who swarm the stadium for a mass love-in/flower sale. Skanky Baggs gets less detail but this also works well - there's nothing worse than square authors trying to write hip rockstars, so we can fill in our own blanks on what makes Baggs and the Family Dawg such a phenomenon.

The stadium's staff are a little overstaffed, so to speak, with one too many Dannys and Davids and Jasons barking orders and stalking the halls with purpose and so on, but Cohen does manage a successful unspooling of the sniper's identity - even as we're screaming at the cast to do something, for God's sake, we're still unsure of who the would-be assassin is until Cohen decides to reveal all.

The killer gets some good psychology too, and his "game plan for disaster" is a disturbingly half assed plot which only makes things tenser. We know things won't go to anybody's plan, and this psycho's about to be trapped in a packed stadium with 100,000 targets and a complacent command structure.

More filler: the romance between default protagonist Danny Haber and secretary Sandy is a total dud. Give us Fuzzi's sausage swindle any day!

Dell stuffed this title with ads for mainstream titles, including thrillers from Robert Ludlum and William Goldman, and nonfiction titles about James Dean and Charles Bronson.

If the likes of Basil Jackson could nourish you on your long trip to some beautiful vacation destination, then Cohen's work here is equivalent to a soggy egg salad sandwich you bought at the train station. It's edible, technically, and you'll finish it, but it could have been a little fresher, had a little more flavor. Cohen's Coliseum earns an undistinguished two star rating for some low level thrills.

Dell Publishing, 1975

COSMIC DEBRIS: Wise Sayings of Lobsang Rampa

Closing out our RAMPATHON for October, here's a selection of wise sayings collected from Rampa's works and presented in The Thirteenth Candle, with notations as to titles and page numbers:

A man has to hold his mouth open for a long time before a roasted partridge flies into it! Mrs. Maria Pien organized the topic index from The Thirteenth Candle which also uses this title abbreviation system:

Courtesy Corgi Books, 1973. THE END!

TIGERLILY by Mama San Ra'ab Rampa

Mrs. Rampa speaks! The world cried out for more Rampa, and Sarah aka Ra'ab aka Mama San obliged with this slim autobiographical volume that details the life and times of the Rampa family, and their special bond with a special cat named TIGERLILY!

Mrs. Rampa sprinkles her text with quotations galore, in a flimsy New Age framing that cites Kahlil Gibran, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain and others on the topics of friendship and happiness. Like her husband, Ra'ab writes in a treacly, maudlin style, and whereas Lobsang's overriding mood was miserable, hers seems melancholy, with sad remembrance of things past. The psychedelic cover art is mismatched with the restrained autobiography, and Ra'ab notes that Lobsang often takes issue with the cover art for their books, remarking that at times he looks like a corpse! Here of course, he's some kind of weirdo cat man.

Ra'ab details her childhood, a lonely one, and her marriage to "Carl" (aka Cyril, aka Lobsang), a good match that nonetheless sees the two loners set against the world. Carl works in advertising while the couple hunker down during the Blitz. Names and faces are often forgotten in Ra'ab's memories, lending a dreamlike quality that only heightens once she finally gets around to the big reveal of Carl's transference to Lobsang. Readers looking for a blow by blow will be disappointed however, as Ra'ab spends far more time on the topic of feline constipation than on specific details of Carl/Lobsang's identity, which she says readers may find in his book As It Was! Mostly she just defends him from the ever present, ever evil Press.

In his defense, Ra'ab strenuously emphasizes that Carl's father was a water engineer, not simply a plumber, and that Carl himself never pursued that trade at all. Like her husband, Ra'ab is a true blue Britisher (despite newly attained Canadian citizenship), also defending the Royals from Press libel and spending some time on the uncertain status of the Commonwealth. Lobsang's changeover from Carl/Cyril is just another one of life's bumps in the road, to be dealt with as the Blitz or bad health.

As with her husband, Ra'ab seems happiest writing about their cats, with Siamese cats being the Rolls-Royce or Cadillac of the cat world! Like Lobsang, Ra'ab talks telepathically with Miss Cleo and Miss Taddy, their current cats, who provide much commentary on the writing of this book.

The Rampa's life together before the change is notated as PR (Pre-Rampa), by the by. Ra'ab ends her book with a plug for Lobsang's latest, Three Lives. 

Like all of T. Lobsang Rampa's works, Tigerlily by Mama San is available to read and download at the official T. Lobsang Rampa website.

Corgi Books, 1978 (original pub. 1976)

THE THIRTEENTH CANDLE by T. Lobsang Rampa

The RAMPATHON rolls on, as we dig into Rampa's big thirteenth book, answering more reader questions and airing more dirty laundry on the astral plane. Hold on tight, as we light THE THIRTEENTH CANDLE!

In this Author's opinion the Press is the most evil force which has ever existed on this world; in this Author's opinion unless the Press be checked and controlled and censored the Press will eventually control the world and lead to Communism.

One thing you can say about Rampa, he doesn't mince words - even if it does sometimes seem like he's mashed his prose flat with a meat mallet! Ya also get the feeling he'd have been happier writing "straight" fiction, as this thirteenth volume is filled with "comical" vignettes of people debating the truth of Rampa's writing. It starts off with a couple of stupid housewives who bicker about a news account of a near death experience, until they go next door to their wise neighbor who's got a whole shelf of Rampa to set them straight. She doesn't lend books though, because that's unfair to the author! Here Rampa details more of his magic accounting that sees him getting something less than 1% of 1% of a book's asking price, damning him to a life of poverty.

Nobody's suffered more in this life or the next.

"Oh, woe is me."

The housewives are named Martha MacGoohoogly and Maud O'Haggis, to give you an idea of Rampa's sense of humor, and things continue in this vein with the next scene of butch dyke Lotta Bull and her femme charge Rosie Hipps, who ditch a sleazy London bar to make out on the couch and debate Rampa's views on homosexuality.

Rampa alternates scenes of disgusting, pig-ignorant Westerners arguing over his books with a throughline of a young lama's training in Tibet. These scenes are more naturalistic and much less venomous. Rampa comes off as a genuine misanthrope when writing about people, and only softens up when on the subject of cats or fantasy caricature Tibetans who can serve as mouthpieces for his cracked New Age melange. This time around it's breathing exercises, more astral travel, and more about that enigmatic Overself of which we are all simply avatars. We also get a silly section on Shakespeare, where Rampa innovates the anti-Stratford conspiracy with the reveal that the stupid peasant boy William was actually possessed by an enlightened astral presence, which is the only reason he could write so good!

Rampa really lets it rip in the last couple chapters, as he takes aim at Women's Libbers:

This particular Author has a screw loose about certain things. One is about the moronic press, and another is about the so-called Women's Liberation Movement. This particular Author firmly believes that women have a very important job in life, raising the future population. If women would only stop aping men—and they do definitely try to ape men and try to wear the pants, forgetting that they don't have the figure for it—then the world would be a better place. This Author believes that women are responsible for most of the troubles of the world through wanting to get out and be ‘free’, as they wrongly term it, instead of accepting their responsibilities as mothers. Women say they want to be equal, but are they not equal? Which is most important, a dog or a horse? They are different creatures. Men and women are different creatures, a man has never given birth without the assistance of a female, let us say, but a female can give birth without the assistance of a male by parthenogenesis. So if the Women's Lib Movement wants a boost, why not boast about that?

What greater proof of equality or even superiority can there be than that women have the task of providing and bringing up the future race? The male co-operation in the matter only takes a few minutes, but a woman— well, she should bring up children until they are able to get on by themselves, and how she brings them up, the example that she sets them, that is how the future race will be. But now women want to beetle off to the factory where they can talk scandal, they want to be a hash-slinger, or anything except to accept the responsibility for which she is so well qualified by Nature. Women's Liberation? I think the sponsors of the Women's Liberation Movement should be slapped across the backside—hard!

The question goes on to ask why women never aspire to the highest Lamahood. Because women are irrational, that is why, because women cannot think clearly, that is why. Because women let their emotions run away with reason, that is why. If women would only stop being such asses and face up to their responsibilities, then the whole world, the whole Universe, would be a better place.

As one reads through this enlightened lama's works, one can't help but notice how unhappy Rampa was. The bulk of his writing is taken up with a deep, abiding misery over his poor health, the state of the world, other people in general, the youth and the press and women in particular, along with Catholics and immigrants and Hottentots for good measure. No one is safe when Rampa's cheesed off, excepting the Royal Family who have suffered nearly as much as Rampa at the hands of an unfair press.

Perhaps the greatest proof of Rampa's fraudulent identity is this deeply ingrained British pessimism, a small minded provincialism that sees the entire world laid before you in all its wonder and complexity and says, "aw, none of that for me, guv!"

One of the only other topics that seems to cheer him is modern technology: ships and planes and industry, which account for much of his scene settings. The Buddhist writer David Michie noted the same emphasis when he received some personal photos from Rampa's estate:

The slides were mostly of travels in the latter years of his life – Europe, South America, USA, Canada and even Australia. I was disappointed to find that almost all were of landscapes, buildings, ships and aircraft – he clearly had an enthusiasm for mechanical innovation and technology. I had hoped to discover that he had been photographed with other people known in the worlds of psychic studies, psychology or spirituality more broadly.

Overall, the materials were more striking for what they didn’t contain as what they did. There is nothing in any of them to suggest that, through all his extensive travels, Lobsang Rampa ever visited a Tibetan Buddhist centre, met practitioners from any lineage, let alone the more prominent Tibetan Buddhists who had begun to visit Western countries. No passing references to interesting books he’d read or conversations he’d had with fellow authors or kindred spirits. These may have happened, but if you didn’t know the occupation of person who’d sent the items in that old cardboard box, from the vast majority of them you would probably conclude that he was some kind of engineer.

This volume also contains a useful index of topics, compiled by one Mrs. Maria Pien for all of Rampa's books thus far. An updated version covering his entire body of work is available at the official T. Lobsang Rampa website.

Like all of Rampa's book, The Thirteenth Candle is available to read and download at the official T. Lobsang Rampa website.

Corgi Books, 1973 (original pub. 1972)