"A new casebook of psychic phenomena?" Sign us up! Unfortunately, author Robert Tralins gives the game away in his preface: he says he's randomly chosen 50 examples of womanly ESP out of the staggering 3,668 case histories and reports in his files, all never before published, all deliberately written down in a casual style for ease of the reader, and all stripped of any confusing jargon or scientific distractions. Hmmm ...
This is, in fact, another story collection a la Steiger and Smith, with zero evidentiary or archival value. Since these are all "never before published," we don't even get any reused stories from Fate or the Society for Psychical Research! Note Tralins' cheeky admission that he's changed some of the names in a few of the cases ... more like, he's made it all up whole cloth! The clumsy and obvious stories that follow the preface make it obvious that Tralins is pulling our chain.
His prose is sub-Steiger. Consider the very first story about the "death bobbins" - not content to give Mrs. Chun a vision of a miniaturized grim reaper cutting yarn, Tralins also throws in that, oh yeah, her mother told her about this very phenomenon as a child, but somehow Chun "can't say how [she] knew" what the vision meant! Make it make sense, Bob!
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| Author Robert Tralins (1926-2010) |
Tralins was a prolific working writer who put out a handful of paranormal titles, so we can't judge him too hard for phoning in this one. It must have sold decently enough, because Lancer Books reprinted it a few years later:
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| Lancer Books, 1973 edition |
The rest of the stories follow a type: people rush home just in time, or pick up the phone at just the right moment, or follow some sign to a date with destiny. The just-so sameness drags on, as does Tralins' seeming lack of care. Consider the chapter about a white tiger. Judith Satterlee has a vision of the beast while on safari ... in Africa. Now, maybe spectral felines aren't exactly bound by time and space, but it seems to me that Tralins didn't do his homework, as tigers aren't native to Africa! The actual ESP portion of this chapter is lackluster as well, with Mrs. Satterlee knowing her father has died because she dreamed of the tiger eating him.
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| "A tiger? In Africa?" |
Just about the only chapter with any real verve to it is "Mrs. Henry's Dead Dog," a predictable but well done short about a sick woman's dead dog visiting her in hospital. This chapter works well enough to be on par with John Macklin, even!
Meanwhile, a chapter on "Armagh Armageddon" shares Macklin's train fixation but falls flat, as Mrs. Lucy McHugh warns her uncle and brother not to take the train. They don't listen to Lucy, and so it's bye bye uncle and brother as they ride straight into the Armagh rail disaster of 1889! A list of the dead doesn't feature any McHughs, and this would be an odd one for Tralins to have changed names of real people for (if for the sake of humor we take him at his word), so here Tralins is making up fake victims of a real life tragedy. He also seems to have picked the Armagh disaster at random, because there's no details about the actual crash in his chapter and nothing about it is especially relevant to the story he came up with. A large number of the real life victims were schoolchildren on an excursion, which feels like it may have made for a more dramatic chapter, but as Tralins has written it, a couple guys took the train, it crashed, and they died. No moral!
That's sort of the problem with the whole text, really. After the preface, Tralins never actually engages with the idea of clairvoyance in women and what it could all mean. It's just story after story, until the very last chapter, and then: the end.
Lancer gives us just three measly ads in the back for more paranormal thrills, including another Tralins title and our pal Steiger promoting psychic Dorothy Spence Lauer.
After all is said and done, Tralins' Clairvoyance in Women sits alongside Steiger's Possession as a maybe-fiction meatloaf and shelf filler. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org ... if you dare.
Lancer Books, 1970
