Paperbacks of the Gods

Sunday, January 17, 2021

LOVE, SEX, AND ASTROLOGY by Teri King

Teri King gives you everything you need per the title: quizzes, compatibility charts, and funky illustrations of "typical" sign traits by John Munday, plus strategies for bedding the men and women of each sign! That last bit is tactfully phrased as "asking them in for coffee" but King's not coy about what that entails. King writes for the layman public, outlining the astrological precepts that undergird the seemingly breezy content.

As to those illustrations: Aquarius Woman has an "open face with wide apart eyes and a pleasant mouth" and brings to mind none other than iconic 70s actress Brooke Adams. Makes sense, since that is indeed her sign! Oddly enough, her career didn't start to take off until after the publication date for this book, meaning Munday most likely did not deliberately model his Aquarius Woman after her. Confirmation bias on my part? How many other celebrity lookalikes, deliberate or accidental, are mixed into Munday's illustrations?

The book must have sold well, because Barnes and Noble also put out their own paperback edition of this title in 1973:

The original hardback release from St. Martin's Press featured the lovely author herself on the cover. As a former model King had the perfect off kilter beauty to sell some weird cosmic vibes.

The digital age hasn't caught up to King's career, leaving many gaps and unanswered questions. A defunct fan page offered up these precious few photos and plenty of dead links:

Wherever you are now Teri King, may the stars guide you. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org!

Harper & Row, 1973

Thursday, January 14, 2021

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: The Damned Thing of Dubois Farm

From an article by Bradley Earl Ayers, "The Thing That Stalks the Game Preserve," concerning an otherworldly visitor to the Carlos Avery Game Preserve in eastern MN. Strange sights and sounds continue there to this day.

Featured in Fate, Volume 30 - Number 12, December 1977.

COSMIC DEBRIS: Somebody Else Is On The Moon

Make way for the lunar superiors! An ad for George H. Leonard's pareidoliacal masterpiece, now a classic of the fringe genre.

From Fate, Volume 30 - Number 12, December 1977.

TIDAL WAVE by Martin Wallace Tyler

What's presented by publisher Leisure Books as a classic '70s disaster piece is actually a hard boiled, hard man action thriller! You'd think from the back copy that Colonel Malone is charged with enforcing martial law in the face of disaster, but really he's on a drunken bender through Kuna, the smallest and most fictional of the Hawaiian Islands, that just happens to intersect with a planned heist of a mob casino by the would-be revolutionaries of the Hawaiian Liberation Front ... all while that damned tsunami rushes across the Pacific at 500 miles per hour. Tyler writes with a clear eye, especially as concerns the HLF members and their doomed scheme, but the book as a whole reads like a fix-up, with the tsunami sections bolted on to push the casino plot to feature length. We get pages and pages, for example, on minor character Captain Nakamura and his impending death by tidal wave, while the actual climax is over before it's begun and several other named characters are left in limbo.

The cruelest twist of the knife involves a big, big spoiler - the big wave never arrives! Those of us with a thirst for apocalyptic destruction need look elsewhere for our fix, sadly. If you're looking for some smut though, there's a corker of a scene starting page 118!

2/4

Leisure Books, 1975