Here's a treat: one of Brad Steiger's very first Fortean collections, before he settled into his STRANGE series for Popular Library. Dig that Fred, he'll never leave you! Dig too that blurb from bullshit artist Ivan T. Sanderson acclaiming Steiger's attention to facts ... ha!
What follows is the classic Steiger stew of recycled Forteana, though Merit Books at least graces us with an author's foreword and a gushing back cover letter from editor Tony Licata. Interestingly enough, Licata groups this title with Steiger's two previous books on movie monsters as examples of the "far out," indicating that Steiger hadn't quite staked out the boundaries of his turf yet.
There's lots of words from both Licata and Steiger about Brad's bold status as an explorer of the unknown, and Steiger quotes Francis Bacon, Herbert Spencer, and Harold Schjelderup to poopoo "skeptics" and anyone who doesn't buy his paper-thin stories as proof of things beyond our ken. In the very first chapter after his author's foreword, Steiger describes how he "rose quickly to the scent of the Unknown" when his friend Jannes Lumbantobing tells him of an Indonesian love curse. This chapter should have been a natural for recycling in Steiger's The Occult in the Orient, but nothing doing.
Some Fortean frequent fliers include the Ourang Medan, the moving coffins of Barbados, Captain Cringle's 1893 sea serpent sighting - with his usual attention to detail, Steiger spells the ship's name Umfli instead of Umfuli - and Count Saint-Germain. His chapter on people who disappear bundles in Flight 19 along with Charles Ashmore, David Lang, and Ambrose Bierce - Steiger would drag these guys out years later for his Strange Disappearances of 1972. Spontaneous human combustion and pyrokinesis also feature.
Steiger finishes up with three chapters of werewolves: the hoaxed feral "wolf girls" Amala and Kamala, a short slip of a chapter with young Marie Bidel attacked by werewolf Perrenette Gandillon, and a longer piece on French werewolves which covers Giles Garnier, Jean Grenier, and others, but doesn't mention the famous Beast of Gevaudan! Steiger ends with a very midcentury note: Since earliest times, men going into battle have either dressed in the skins of fierce animals or identified themselves with beasts of gore. The Nazi werewolf troops of World War II, the Lion men of Tanganyika and the Simbas of the Congo bear bloody witness to the power of sadistic suggestion on the minds of primitive and propagandized men.
Warren Smith would reuse the two-hearted Italian strongman Agostino Colli for Into the Strange in 1968. His version is shorter but better, lacking Steiger's silly padding of an invented scene of Colli thwarting bullies as a child. Steiger loved his melodramatic "recreations" and cheesy dialogue, turning even otherwise staid and documented events into manipulative maybe-fiction.
Smith's Into the Strange would also reuse the Umfuli sighting (keeping Steiger's Umfli misspelling) and Dr. Robert Menzies' monster fishing, some details from Steiger's chapter on "America's Lost Race," and wholesale copies his ahistorical chapter on the Thuggee with minor tweaks to wording.
Steiger's Thuggee chapter begins:
No organized group of criminals has ever killed as many people as the Thuggee. In the 1830's this Indian murder cult strangled upwards of 30,000 natives and travelers as a sacrifice to their goddess Kali.
While Smith's chapter starts:
No known group of organized criminals has ever killed as viciously and as frequently as the cold-blooded murderers who belonged to the dreaded Thuggee Sect of India. These cutthroat cultists strangled over 30,000 persons during a deadly reign of terror in India during the 1830s. The very mention of their name cause courageous men to cringe with alarm. The victims of each Thuggee massacre were dedicated to their goddess, Kali.
The rest of Smith's chapter continues identical to Steiger's, with rearranged sentences and wording like a 7th grader trying to avoid getting caught for plagiarism.
Merit Books credits Health Knowledge Inc. for three reprinted chapters, "Houses That Harbor Hatred," "People Who Disappear," and "How Many People Are You?" Steiger would recycle that last chapter in 1969's Other Lives, co-authored with Loring G. Williams.
Just like Popular Library, Merit is too cheap to give us a table of contents, so here it is typed out:
1. Author's Foreword (5)
2. The Hex of the Horrible Cupid (8)
3. True Monster Madness (12)
4. Instant Cremation (20)
5. Phantom Ships (23)
6. A Friendly Ghost (26)
7. The Legend of the Vampire (28)
8. The Restless Coffins (32)
9. Genius Idiots (35)
10. Witchcraft - 1965 (38)
11. Cult of Killers (43)
12. 2000 Year Old Man (46)
13. The Witchdoctor's Curse (49)
14. Psychic Cops (54)
15. Surmounting Space and Time (57)
16. Phantom Army (60)
17. People Who Disappear (62)
18. Tracking the Abominable Snowman (72)
19. Black Magic For Sale (75)
20. Hercules With Two Hearts (77)
21. How Many People Are You? (80)
22. America's Lost Race (88)
23. The Mischievious Spook (90)
24. Human Flame-Throwers (95)
25. House That Harbor Hatred (98)
26. Who Was Jack the Ripper? (111)
27. Astrology - Guaranteed? (115)
28. The Wolf Girls (118)
29. Werewolf! (122)
30. France's Epidemic of Werewolves (125)
Merit Books, 1965
