Supernatural Strangers

by Robert Tralins

125 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another bedtime reread of some paranormal/fortean obscurity of my youth. In truth, this book is very close to the quality of the John Macklin books I recently reviewed - that is to say, not very good or interesting, bottom-drawer "true weird phenomena" stuff. These also read, like Macklin, as if they were excerpts from a weekly column or feature, possibly in a youth magazine or tabloid (the writing is pretty standard and each piece is rarely longer than a page or two) and possibly in Europe (given the fact that almost none of the "strange events" happen in America, and quite a lot happen in the Middle East, Africa, India and South America).

The contents - well, again, much like Macklin but focused on "beings" (so no curses or precognitive dreams, etc.) but here "beings" means not only genies, mermen, monsters and the odd alien or two, but also lots and lots of ghosts: phantoms, spirits, poltergeists, specters, haunts, etc. (some of whom, yes, foretell a curse or send a prophetic dream image). The use of terminology is sketchy - most of the stories have alliterative titles like "The Wilczyn Werewolf", "The Gumti Ghost", etc. (another hint at the age level of the intended audience?), so "The Beguni Banshee" features a supposed wailing, death foretelling spirit in Tanzania - which would of course not be called a "banshee" by any stretch of the imagination.

Another cute trick worth noting - many of the stories, although telling very standard folkloric tropes, give day and date of the event - which, if you think about it, is really a savvy writing scam. It lends authenticity to say a local legend, "The Ghostly Organ Grinder," supposedly appeared outside an apartment in Santa Venerina on April 16, 1963 (just when the apartment's owner passed away) because "ah ha!" thinks a gullible child "I could go research that and verify it, or at least the death as having happened..." because, yeah, someday you're going to go to Santa Venerina and dig through old records for no good reason.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is filled with two-three page synopses of supernatural encounters, written in a slightly eerie but completely non-threatening style that used to be very common for books like these. It’s so non-scary that I was easily able to read a few stories from it just before going to sleep. That’s not something I can do with, say, Stephen King.

I suspect most of the stories are completely made up. Sometimes the real weirdness is not in any supernatural element but in, why did the authors choose that descriptor?

On the evening of September 3, 1967, while walking south toward Lezzeno, Italy, to get someone to repair their auto which had broken down on the road five kilometers from the town, a young couple came upon the terrible lemur of Lezzeno—a nocturnal monster of the supernatural which attacks and devours living beings.

Why is this monster named after a lemur? The authors don’t indicate in any way that they’re even aware that a lemur is a real creature. Further, there is no hit on “lemur” and “Lezzeno” in Google. If this is a real legend, it has disappeared from public consciousness before any of the many cryptid web sites could pick it up. Even stranger is that the “young couple” is named—Paccini and Feriga Fiamma—and somehow the authors managed to come up with names that literally don’t exist.

I’ve done a lot of searches on names that sound unique while researching the origins of community cookbooks. A name so unique that it doesn’t produce multiple people with that name is extremely rare; I don’t think I’ve ever run across one. And yet the two names in this story, one that I just now randomly opened the book to to get an example of, do not exist at all.

That’s eerier than any story in this book.

Slightly less eerie but still weird is that, like many books of the era, there is an advertisement for another book in the back. It’s for {% link Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" %}, which I just read in December.

That said, this is very good for what I got it for; I’ve jotted down several notes for ideas for my regular Kolchak: The Night Stalker game. The format—two or three pages—naturally produces simple ideas that would fit into a four-hour-slot for a convention game. I’ve been doing a lot of UFO/ancient alien/technothriller scenarios lately, and I wanted to get back to basics this year.