The Enemies Within by Trevor Loudon

The USA is in trouble thanks to the liberals, ladies and gentlemen. High school cafeterias will soon be forced to offer pita as well as white bread, shopping malls will have to let women breastfeed in the food court, and if things couldn’t be worse, we’ll have to let kids opt for soccer instead of football. Some say it’s the president. Others say it’s Congress. But regardless, one thing is certain; it’s all a big conspiracy!

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand based expert on our country’s problems, has uncovered a massive conspiracy by Communists to undermine traditional values. California, for instance, has made Cesar Chavez’ birthday an official holiday, adding to such other nuisances as having to pay for public education. Now tell me, what could be any worse than immortalizing a labor organizer, a man who had the chutzpah to say that grape pickers deserved a raise? Thanks to him we have to pay an extra ten cents every time we buy 20 pounds of grapes!

As if the Cesar Chavez holiday weren’t bad enough, Al Franken (Senator from the all-powerful state of Minnesota) has friends who are Communists. Another Minnesota politician, Keith Ellison, is a member of the Nation of Islam, an advocate of terrorist Assata Shakur (who’s been living in Cuba for 30 years and hasn’t left) and Kathleen Soliah (who spent 25 in hiding.) You may not have heard of Congressman Ellison, but he’ll be big stuff soon. I bet he’s going to destroy America by asking Minnesota public schools to offer pork-free meals to Muslim kids. We’re screwed now!

Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi really crowns things with his unpatriotic antics. He damaged American supremacy by letting US medical students go to Cuba. I kid you not, he told Castro that there was a physician shortage in Mississippi, so Castro offered to let US students go to Cuban medical schools on full scholarship. This is an outrage, to let our students study in Cuba instead of taking out six figure students loans! If this utterly irresponsible Communist pandering isn’t grounds for impeachment, Thompson went on a “fact finding” trip to Cuba with two aids, and do you know how much the trip cost? $1298.26! That’s less than $2000 for a four day trip for three people, paid for by a private foundation. Who does this sleazeball Congressman think he is, doing a project under-budget? What kind of precedent does that set? Very soon we’ll have members of Congress refusing to waste public money, all because Congressman Thompson refuses to waste our tax dollars. How dare he!

Nobody could possible know this stuff better than Trevor Loudon, a man who must have spent at least two weeks in the USA, and researched this book from the dangerous streets of Christchurch. It is clear from his book that the Soviet ideology hasn’t really been dead for the past 25 years, but alive and well thanks to a conspiracy by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Whether anything in this book is true or not, I don’t know, but one thing is certain. Right wing conspiracy fanatics will be fleeing to New Zealand, and I’ll gladly help them pack their bags.

True UFO Accounts

The minority of you who actually read my reviews know that I love first hand accounts. This book is a collection of articles from Fate Magazine and its years of UFO reporting, going all the way back to the 1960’s. As for the history of UFO sightings, I had no idea they occurred in ancient Egypt. Sure, I learned about Erich Von Daniken’s “Ancient Astronaut” theory back in 5^th grade, but I’d never heard of the 1865 sighting in Britain. Yes indeed, a man names James Lumley claimed he saw a burning object hit the ground with a strong smell of sulfur. Now are you going to tell me that it was a stray artillery shell, and that the smell of sulfur was from the propellant? As the English would say, not bloody likely? And then there’s the trapper who found rocks covered in hieroglyphics in the mountains of Missouri. Now if this man was a trapper, would he have known enough about hieroglyphics to fake them? It seems that a space-faring race have crashed their vessels in Ancient Egypt, Missouri, and Roswell. Were they attracted by the clean air and natural beauty of those places? A nature-loving race would not have been drawn to Chicago or LA, I guarantee!

The 1949 article gives a good reason to consider a Martian visit to our planet. But first, listen to another theory; some say it was the Soviets piloting some giant experimental aircraft. But who would benefit the most from that suggestion? Boeing and Northrop Grumman! They were paid billions to make stuff for NASA and the army, so the “Soviet spacecraft” idea would be profitable. They made a fortune when Sputnik went into orbit, and the USA went haywire to compete with the Soviets. The Military-Industrial Complex isn’t found in the conspiracy theory section. It’s real!

But seriously folks, why else would aliens come here other than nature? The summers are warm, the winters aren’t bad, and there’s plenty of water in the ocean. Mercury is too hot, Mars is too cold, and as for Venus, well the pressure there is so high that we can’t send a probe.

Looks like Earth is the next stop for the alien tourist.

Spindrift by Jan Bryant Bartell

I was forced to read this book by a malicious spirit who takes great pleasure in leading me to long out-of-print books. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m a sucker for all things nostalgic, and I was drawn to Jan Bartell’s Spindrift: Spray From a Psychic Sea by unexplained forces. Some weird psychic demon lured me into reading this old book, and by the time I was done, I could hear that demonic spirit laughing at me. The prince of darkness can be a real comedian.

The story begins without any dynamic whatsoever. Jan Bartell and her husband move into 14 West 10^th Street, and right away they get noises, shadows, trips and falls. But there’s nothing frightening about the story, nor is there any suspense. What’s frightening about I got up for a drink of water and I heard the creeping noise again when there's nothing leading up to it? There’s no buildup of suspense, no sense of foreboding, no great discovery. It’s got nothing on The Sentinel or The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, where the story gets scarier as it progresses. Spindrift seems more like a bored housewife than a ghost story.

The author’s writing style is annoying. Take this line for instance: returning home, I was chilled less by the flaying winds of winter than by the cold facts of contemporary life. Well I doubt that very much, because if she were truly “chilled” by contemporary life, then she would’ve wised up and not written this rag. She’s trying to “wax poetic” which doesn’t work in a horror story. And for goodness sake, did she have to include every word from her high school vocabulary workbook? In the part at the end when they finally move out, she says it struck me as incredible that I was being dispossessed from my home by an unseen entity, who on a material plane had long since ceased to be. That’s not the way you describe something you fear. Is this a horror story or is she writing about a science experiment? Either way, She’s trying to write about a scary experience in a poetic way, and it doesn’t work.

I first heard of Spindrift in a 1998, in a Time Out NY article about “haunted Manhattan.” Other than that, the only source is Ghosts I Have Known by Hans Holzer, the exorcist they hired to “cleanse” the house. No, the exorcism didn’t work and the demonic spirits followed them when they moved after 20 years. Regardless, the house at  #14 West 10^th Street has a long and dynamic history of its own. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a residence of Mark Twain, and throughout the 19^th century, the area was home to the city’s elite wasp families. It’s also the house where Joel Steinberg beat his daughter to death and left his wife with a mangled face. There’s a horror story for you right there.

New York City is a great place to stage a thriller. Rosemary’s Baby and The Sentinel were supernatural horror stories set in New York City, and they work perfectly, with lots of suspense building up to a creepy climax. But Spindrift isn’t scary, nor is it interesting. Worst of all, Bartell passed up a great opportunity to write about her neighborhood. She’s only a few blocks from Washington Square Park and the Beat scene. There had to be a million interesting things going on there. Why waste the effort on a horror story?

Maybe this story is fictional. Was the author desperate to get at least one book published? Was it an exercise in self-indulgence? We’ll never know because the author died in 1973, right before it came out. There isn’t much information about Bartell on the web, except that she had a few minor acting roles, her neighbors knew her as spoiled, neurotic, and possibly bipolar, and her husband died in 1990. Some say she killed herself, others say she died of a heart attack. I suspect that regardless, the “ghosts” were probably hallucinations.

When I go to bed at night, I bet I’ll hear a mysterious, creepy voice say “I suckered you into reading this rag, and you will keep on reading trash like this for the rest of your life!”

Comical Tragedy of Mister Punch by Neil Gaiman

I never could understand why Punch and Judy are a kiddie show act. Not only are they the creepiest puppets ever, but the plots of the stories deserve an R rating; punch spends the whole show beating his wife, throwing the baby down the stairs, and tormenting everyone he can. I used to see Punch and Judy shows in England, and I sat through them out of stubbornness. The urge to run away was overwhelming.

The story here is equally creepy; a little boy spends the summer with his grandfather at his creepy seaside amusement park, and along comes a creepy Punch and Judy showman to make things creepier. In contrast to the boy is the showman’s assistant, a teenager who looks as though the job is the only thing keeping him out of jail (and not for too long, judging by his outlook.) While the boy is both fascinated and frightened by the showman and the carnival (and his grandfather, for that matter) the teen sees right through the whole thing. He knows that the show and the carnival are relics of a bygone era.

Only Dave McKean could illustrate something as frightening as this. By combining photos with hand-drawn illustration, he creates a haunting, lurid backdrop reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer’s animation. For those of you unfamiliar with Dave McKean, he’s the guy that did the Sandman covers in the 1990’s, and those things used to give me nightmares. Sandman was DC’s foray into mature-themed material, and Mister Punch would fit right at home in there.

A little research tells me that Punch comes from Pulcinello, a character from Italian puppet shows, and his name means “chicken” thanks to his massive nose and a voice like a rooster’s squawk. He’s violent, deceptive, and when confronted with something he’s done, he’ll feign ignorance and/or stupidity. He’s usually paired with Arleccino (or Harlequin in English), his agile trickster alter-ego, who I might add is descended from a more demonic character of legend (hence the multicolored costume.)

No matter how much English kids love this guy, I can’t look Punch in the face without getting creeped out. Those beady eyes, the leering grin, he is scary.