‘The Ghosts of Austin: Who They are and Where to Find Them’ by Fiona Broome

(2007 Schiffer Books)

     I was heading out to be a part of the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Austin, Texas.   When I plotted my course, I observed that my route would take me close to the home of Schiffer Books in Atglen, Pennsylvania.   I contacted the Schiffer Books offices through my editor, Dinah Roseberry and arranged to pick up a case of my book, ‘Spooky Creepy Long Island’ to bring along with me to the show.   I had prior authorization from my boss to sell copies of my book over the table of the Fearwerx booth.   When I told Pete and Dinah at Schiffer where I was going and what I was doing, they asked me if I was interested in taking any other books along with me.   Via e-mail I agreed to try out a case of ‘Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town’ by Red Wassenich.

     I got to the home of Schiffer Books later than I had anticipated, but Pete Schiffer Jr. was still in the office and received me most hospitably.   During the course of our conversation, I received a tour of the facilities.   The warehouse was like the end scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.   Palette after palette stacked with boxes of books.   When it came time to leave, I checked out the ‘Keep Austin Weird’ book and seeing it, I decided that it probably wouldn’t go over that well with the Fangoria audience.   Pete offered ‘The Ghosts of Austin’ as a last-minute replacement and I quickly and easily agreed that it was a much better candidate for the convention I was attending.

     Twenty-seven hours later and I’m in Austin.   I decide to read ‘The Ghosts of Austin’ so I’d know a little bit about the book that I was selling.  

     The prose is light and engaging, making the book both easy and pleasant to read.

     The stories fulfilled my expectations.   I expected tales of ghosts from the free-wheeling wild west era of Texas frontier past, and this anthology of ghostly tales provides exactly that.

     From the pioneering battles of the state’s first colonists in conflict against the Mexican Army and Native American tribes, through the early years of statehood and the strife of the civil war, the victims of the vicissitudes of fortune, often only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, continue to linger in the locations where the forces of earthly attraction tethered them to the physical plane.

     An interesting element of this book is the author’s dual service as an author and a medium who claims the ability to speak with the lingering spirits of the physically deceased.   This ability enabled the author to include at the end of many of her chapters her “conversations” with the paranormal presences which haunt Austin’s many historical locations.   The spirits are open about the reason for their persistent presence at their selected locations.   This is the first time I encountered this literary device, although I have been made aware of the popularity of this device in conversations following my encounter with and discussion of this book.    

     Of course, the gunslingers and whorehouse madams and Indian spirits are here, not as single spirits, but in battalions.   But the author presents a wider range of tales than I had anticipated.   The author presents her collection of stories covering the chronological and geographical history of Austin and its surrounding areas.   The book is also generously populated with photographs and illustrations to accompany its spine-tingling tales.

     I have to begrudgingly admit that although I spent the weekend in Austin, I learned much more about Austin and its environs from ‘The Ghosts of Austin’ than I learned from my infrequent visits to downtown Austin.   Austin is a ghost town in more ways than one.   For a celebrated party town, it has an early bedtime and I drove its silent streets at 3:00 a.m. at fifteen miles and hour, calmly acquainting myself with the unfamiliar area.

     Also begrudgingly I admit that I didn’t sell a whole lot of ‘The Ghosts of Austin’ at the convention.   Of the twenty-five copies I brought with me, I returned twenty-three.   One of which I retained to read and review, and the other copy, my display copy, was bought by a woman, a self-professed librarian, who said that her library just must have this book for its collection.

      I attribute this not as a reflection on the quality of the book, which I enjoyed as much as I have enjoyed any regional paranormal book.   Instead I attribute this to a general decline of literary interest in our culture.

     If you’d care to prove my pessimism fallacious, then, by all means, please go to the address provided below and acquire a copy of this informative and entertaining book.

You can order this book @ www.SchifferBooks.com

Posted by Rob G at 01:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Collecting Monster Toys by John Marshall (1999 Schiffer Books)

     I stopped by the home of Schiffer Publishing on my way from Providence, Rhode Island to Austin, Texas for the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors.   Pete Schiffer Jr. and I went down to the warehouse so I could pick up the case of my book ‘Spooky Creepy Long Island’ that I had asked to pick up and take along with me to try my luck at selling a few copies over the table at the Fearwerx booth.   When we were heading towards the exit, I saw the cover of John Marshall’s ‘Collecting Monster Toys’.   I said ‘Cool!’ and picked it up to thumb through it.   Pete said I could have it if I wanted it.

     The book was on top of a stack of books, which was one of several stacks on a palette which was walled off on three sides and about half full with chest high stacks of books.   Pete explained that Schiffer Publishing takes great pains to insure that the books shipped to their customers leave the warehouse in pristine condition.   If a book suffers any injury, any scratch, ding, or dent, it gets stacked on the palette that goes to the pulper to re-enter into the commodity stream as recycled paper pulp.

     Finding this out and being a bibliophile, I asked if I could rifle through the stacks to save some books from their untimely fate if I promised to review anything I took.   I ended up with about a dozen books.   Mostly from the regional paranormal or “ghost books” series.

     ‘Collecting Monster Toys’ does not claim to be complete or comprehensive.   I appreciate it all the more for not claiming completeness.   Too often a book will claim comprehensiveness, and even amateur enthusiasts of the topic will soon realize significant omissions.   Although citing the deficiencies of “comprehensive” guidebooks is a guilty pleasure of most enthusiasts of all things horror it is a welcome respite to encounter a book which does not claim to be a complete guide to the topic it addresses.

     A problem that plagues many of the books that do claim comprehensiveness is that they soon become dated due to the static date of the book, and the passage of time after its publication.   I was surprised when I looked up the date of publication for the book to realize that it had been first published nine years ago.   The book has weathered well in the passage of time.

     Part of the durability of this title may lie in the style that the author chose to present his material.   Instead of using a chronological format, which would reveal the publication date of the book as the end of the world after which the world would seem suspiciously vacant, the author chose to break the book into sections of pictorial representations of a selection of items.   Although there are six chapters in the book, the book is loosely divided into Universal Monsters and Japanese Monsters.

     For those that don’t know what a Universal Monster is, a brief explanation.   Universal Studios produced a series of monster movies in the 1930s.   The first films of each of the franchises were so successful that the studio produced many sequels often using many of the same actors in the films although not always in the roles they originated.   The characters most often considered the essential core of the Universal Monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.   It is permissible to include The Phantom of the Opera, The Invisible Man, and the Metaluna Mutant from ‘This Island Earth’, but omission of the core six characters is considered a significant oversight.   This philosophy regarding the primacy of the major characters of the Universal Monster movies is reflected in the packaging and variety of merchandise available for the characters from those films.   The author also reinforces the primacy of these characters by grouping the memorabilia by character with several pages devoted to each, smoothly transitioning into the next.

     The author avoids the pitfall of presenting a stale and uninspired survey and price listing of the memorabilia which would reasonably be included in his chosen genre by infusing his introductions to each chapter and the brief notes accompanying the hundreds of beautiful color photos with humor and an ironic, but not sarcastic awareness of the oddity of collecting toys when childhood has long been left behind.   At the same time, the author avoids reaching too far to infuse humor, and successfully maintains the balance between recognizing the natural humor in toy collecting without seeming to pander to his audience.   The introductions are well-written and illustrate the author’s awareness of the histories of the characters without being too dry or exhaustively informational.

     Monster enthusiasts needn’t bother reading the infrequent pages of introduction to enjoy this book.   The primary attraction for your average enthusiast of monster movie inspired collectables is that this book is a perfect guidebook for a trip down memory lane, or spending an afternoon exploring the dark recesses of nostalgia national park.

     A strange change has come over me in the past few years.

     I used to be a collector.   I enjoyed the satisfaction which accompanies the acquisition of a complete set of any kind of limited set of collectables.   As I’ve grown older, this compulsion has metamorphosized into an appreciation of the existence of objects divorced from the previously accompanying desire to own them.

     This is why this book was so enjoyable for me personally.   I was able to see all of the rare Universal Monster memorabilia that I no longer desire for my personal ownership.   All of those rare and highly collectable Aurora models that it’s almost impossible to see together in one place.   The author has assembled a high-quality photographic archive of complete sets of these rare collectables.   So although I will never own a full set of the Universal Monster Aurora model kits, I can vicariously enjoy their existence any time I want to by leisurely flipping through this book.

     But it’s not just the rare collectibles that I will most likely never see in real life that attract me to the contents of this book.   There are many toys and collectables that I used to own, but have been lost to the carelessness of youth or the generosity of my nature.   Seeing these objects again rekindled long forgotten memories from my youth.

     When I was five years old I had the chicken pox.   I was quarantined for a week with two other young boys.   We spent the week in our bathing suits and there was a child’s wading pool set up in the kitchen that we spent most of the week in when we weren’t taking baths or having calamine lotion liberally dabbed onto the little red bumps dotting our skin.   They didn’t want us to scratch and scab and scar, you see.   So they fooled us into staying moist by making that week into an indoor pool party.   It might have been my birthday, but I can’t remember, it might have been conciliatory gift-time to console us young prisoners.   I was given a colorform set as a gift.   I thought I imagined that colorform set, because it disappeared from my life when I was still too young to remember where things disappeared to and I never saw it again.   There it was.   Pages 129 through 131.   The ‘Space Warriors Colorforms Adventure Set’.   The feeling of nostalgia it awoke was intense.   It’s unlikely that I would be able to share that feeling with anyone else, but that was part of the attraction of the emotion.

     The only way I’m able to share that feeling is by sharing the book, which I did inadvertently while at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors.   A small group of late night revelers ended up at my hotel room and when they saw the book on the coffee table each person in turn flipped through it.   Everyone recognized something special from their childhood.   Each person recognized something different, but they all said the same thing, “Holy shit!   I used to have that!”.   If this review was compressed into one line, that would have to be the one.   Because that’s what everyone says when they flip through this beautiful little book.

     It was nice to see the Universal Monsters Little Big Heads figurines, because for some reason they are the only full set of collectables I’ve kept.   And I admit I felt a twinge of the guilty pleasure I mentioned earlier in this review, when I noticed that the second series of the Little Big Heads, the black & white set, which I own in its entirety, was nowhere to be found in the book.   And I also admit that I felt a small surge of the collector’s infatuation when I saw the Remco Mini-Monsters collection, complete and carded and accompanied by the ‘Mini Monster Play Case’.   But I know that if I were to go to all the trouble of acquiring the object of my desire it would be exciting for about a day and then end up packed away, neglected, in some sort of storage.

     But thankfully John Marshall has saved me the pain of experiencing the buyer’s remorse which inevitably accompanies the acquisition of something long sought after.   Instead I can flip through this book anytime I want and vicariously enjoy the satisfaction of ownership.

This book, as well as many other books about toys and collectibles is available from Schiffer Books.

www.schifferbooks.com

Posted by Rob G at 01:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)