COSMIC DEBRIS: Successful Meditation With Lobsang Rampa

The Rampathon returns for a limited time with unbeatable prices on spiritual enlightenment! Robes, prayers, incense, figurines, and THE ONLY AUTHORIZED RECORDING of Lobsang Rampa's meditation guide can all be yours if you enclose a check or money order now! Note the botched title Caves of the Ancients in the third party advert from the Metaphysical Centre of San Francisco, which should read as a singular cave:

See?

Rampa's meditation record is available for listening on youtube:

From Fate, Volume 23 - Number 02, February 1970. 

BOMB SQUAD by Mark Andrews

Goldman, obviously no longer the star of the show, just smiled at Jake and walked away. As he crossed the studio he heard a muffled gunshot in an adjoining room. And he knew that Dr. Daniel Rubenstein had been taken care of - permanently.

It was a pity, in a way. In his day, Rubenstein had been a genius, probably the world's top authority on nuclear weapons.

But nuclear experts were a dime a dozen now. These days, practically anyone could make a bomb.

It started with letter bombs: some were duds, and some were disarmed in time. Some killed and maimed. Then the church in Harlem blew sky high from a basement packed with high explosives. Then a group calling themselves the American People's Liberation Army made their demands known. And now, the working men of the NYPD's Bomb Squad, pushed to their limits by the panic gripping the city, have 24 hours to find and disarm the last bomb.

The Hell Bomb.

Author Mark Andrews mixes the best classic disaster genre tradition of specialized workplace action - the Bomb Squad! - with some classic '70s domestic strife and a heartless, unflinching perspective of the lives and limbs shattered when time runs out.

Bomb Squaddie Tom Gilbert thought things were going pretty great with his mistress Mary Jo, until she opened up a letter bomb while at her secretary job for a big Madison Avenue ad agency. Now Mary Jo is atomized, and Gilbert's in danger of cracking up - his wife almost killed their newborn baby in a benzo'd out haze, to boot! But the bombs keep coming, and then the letters too, and the Bomb Squad realize that this isn't your average crank mad bomber, no way. The APLA have got big plans for NYC, and America afterwards, and it might have something to do with that mysterious Danny Lee - Is he a student? A man about town? - who Mary Jo was catting around with while Gilbert dreamed of remarried bliss.

Danny has some friends from China. And from Congress. And some friends who know how to build a basement nuke ...

At times things get a little too loose, and Andrews jukes us around a little too much dropping threads and switching gears. Bomb Squad really has only the barest skeleton of a story per se, and every time we think we might be settling in to some traditional plotting ... well, we ain't! The mystery of the bombers' identities is resolved pretty damn quickly, for us readers anyways, and characters mostly walk into fait accompli like clockwork automatons winding down to detonation. But the dark, crackling energy of Andrews' writing holds it together.

Andrews (if that is his real name) also penned two horror novels for Leisure Books the same year of 1977:

The two fisted Paperback Warrior blog reviewed Bomb Squad a few years back, and let's just say our opinions differ:

I have a suspicion that Andrews wrote this in a particularly bad part of his life – like a child dying or a downward spiral into financial ruin. That is my hope. If not, then this guy has a hard-on for destroying people and property and channeled his maniacal depression through some sort of how-to guide masquerading as a men's action-adventure novel. Make no mistake, Bomb Squad is the nuttiest thing I've ever read. And extremely dangerous. Consider yourself warned.

I'll agree on one point though: Bomb Squad is nuttier than all hell, and reads as coming from a very dark place indeed from Andrews! This being Leisure Books, typos abound, and we don't even get any juicy back page ads.

Mark Andrews' wild and wooly writing carries Bomb Squad to a 3/4 rating. No foolin', this stuff'll kill ya!

Leisure Books, 1977

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: THE DEVIL'S SEA

The psychic survey of The Devil's Sea by Elizabeth Nichols is now available to read and download at archive dot org. Featuring the ESPer visions of Otto Binder, Irene Hughes, Ted "PK Man Owens," and others, alongside classic Triangle terror tales ...

Courtesy Award Books, 1975.

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Ancient Egypt

More elucidating illustration from Pyramid Prophecies by Max Toth! For pyramid power, more often than not the map is the territory.

Courtesy Warner Books, 1979.

ANCIENT ASTROLOGICAL SECRETS OF THE JEWS REVEALED by Reuven Shomroni

Before the fall, when they wrote it on the wall 
And there wasn't even any Hollywood 
They heard the call and they wrote it on the wall 
For you and me, we understood

By now we've seen plenty of midcentury pop astrology guides, offering love, prosperity, and understanding for those bold enough to grasp them. But now comes "the eminent Hebrew authority," one Reuven Shomroni, with the ancient system to beat all ancient secrets, Chinese or otherwise: ANCIENT ASTROLOGICAL SECRETS OF THE JEWS REVEALED!

Shomroni leads with an uncomfortable philosemitic argument which takes Exodus as read for historical fact and writes off non-Kabalistic astrology as built on the blundering failures of dirt eating medieval Christians:

The cultural gloss may be unique, but Shomroni's attitude is par for the course for any vintage astrology text: simply disclaim your competition as a bunch of morons! Unlike those other useless, simpering astrologists, Shomroni claims that Hebrew astrology is a rock solid science of unseen influences and forces, a truly intellectual tradition that offers amazingly accurate insight into our modern lives!

And just how does Hebrew astrology reach these dizzying heights of accuracy? Simple, according to Shomroni: it starts with an adherence to the older five planet system of astrology, which our author tells us is superior to the modernized eight planet system. Furthermore, each traditional sign is granted a "governing intelligence" named for one of Jacob's twelve sons, and each planet is granted a "guiding intelligence" or sephiroth, named after archangels and bestowing additional qualities! Finally, every sign is given a Kabalistic number. Thus, a sign's profile would look as such:

As we've seen already, and in common with other pop astrology writers, Shomroni makes a lot of hay out of the failings of rival systems, and in his chapter on Scorpio he claims that other astrologists almost never deal with Scorpio's darker side. We know this just isn't true - Scorpio's dark side is half the fun! Sexy and scary, passionate and obsessed Scorpio is, for me, the highlight of any pop astrology guide, and Shomroni's "ancient" Hebrew style sounds identical to every other midcentury guide (no matter how "elevated" the authors claim to be) in warning, ever so titillatingly, of the dangers of mixing it up with these powerful personalities.

The text could have benefited from some Kabalistic charts or ancient illustrations, but the good folks at Lancer are too cheap for that.

The back page ads feature a plug for the psychic self help text How to Use ESP by Dorothy Spence Lauer and Brad Steiger.

A wooly man without a face, and a beast without a name! This vintage title goes for far too much money online, so in the interest of information, Reuven Shomroni's guide is available to read and download at archive dot org, absolutely free of charge!

Lancer Books, 1970