An Odd Look at Veteran’s Day

So, did everyone’s great-grandmother keep scrapbooks where she pasted clippings from news stories about all the military personnel from her general area? Or was it just mine?

Click on all photos to see an enlarged version. This photo is very interesting. It’s such a basic reaction to shake a hand when offered and I wonder what would have happened to the soldier had he not caught himself in time.

My maternal grandfather’s mother spent untold hours of her life pasting newspaper clippings about military members into these now-crumbling scrapbooks. I am unsure how many of these she kept – I inherited these three after my mother died. They span from active war during WWII through the end of the Korean War and cover everything that could possibly happen to a person during and after war. Obituaries, mostly death in action notices. Missing in action notices. Deployment. Notices of boot camp graduation. Repatriation after internment in prisoner of war camps. Slices of life back home with new babies. Marriage notices. Fun stories about war brides who were waiting for their American GI husbands to get them back to the United States. Just thousands upon thousands of clippings about the men who served in WWII and the Korean War and who hailed from towns in and around Abilene, Texas.

There are some articles about men who were not Texans – for example, she saved a story about the four Roosevelt family members were were serving in active duty overseas and a story about a man from New York who died in action before ever meeting his triplet daughters who were born after he was shipped out – but the vast majority are stories about men from the towns around where she lived. I can only guess at her motives for maintaining these scrapbooks but I am beginning to suspect that I came honestly by my own obsessive interests and compulsive need to gather around me as many books and magazines as possible.

The pages of these scrapbooks are quite fragile. It’s impossible to really pore over them the way I want because the pages have all separated from the bindings. Some of the pages are crumbling and I really need to find a way to preserve them before they all turn to dust. These scrapbooks are piecemeal documentaries about war and places in time that seem worth holding onto for as long as I can. The newspaper articles are decidedly un-PC, referring to “japs” and “krauts.” They at times seem irreverent, discussing “Hitlerland” and “Nazi-Land.” Heartbreaking stories of teen boys killed in the line of duty bracketed by slice of life stories stateside. Harrowing stories of battles across both theaters of WWII. Some of them are baffling, like a soldier who initially refused to be traded with a Korean prisoner of war and repatriated, though he later changed his mind. I would love to know more about that one. Pages and pages and pages of the background characters in the story of the world, each the main character in their own story, even if only for a moment, but preserved for decades in a demented old woman’s scrapbooks. It would be terrible for these stories to be lost once and for all. I would love to somehow scan all of these clippings and get them on genealogy databases. I bet there’s a lot of lost family lore in these rotting pages. If an archivist comes across this paragraph and has some ideas, please let me know.

Her interest in all of these men and the wars that shaped their stories has, in a small way, rehabilitated my image of this woman who died before I was even born. Mary Isabelle “Mollie” Day was born in 1877, and like many women of her time, she had a passel of children and there was a significant, almost-generational gap between her oldest and youngest child. My grandfather was the youngest and he was tasked with taking care of his mother after his father died. I’ve discussed Mollie obliquely on this site before, mostly in a discussion of antinatalism, of all things. She was an absolute terror, or at least she was in her later life. Mollie ran roughshod over my sensitive and anxious grandmother and made my aunt a nervous wreck. My mother had to live with the old woman most of her youth and claims that she escaped unscathed but signs point to that statement being “a cope,” as the kids say. Mollie died in 1962 and all I knew of her is, of course, second-hand and, outside of knowing that in many respects she was a vile Irish hag, I know precious little about her.

When not documenting the soldiers from her old stomping grounds, Mollie collected feel-good stories about the war that probably made national news in some regard. I’d love to know her selection criteria because some of the clippings are straight-up loony. Like a cartoon depicting former German police dogs chasing down a terrified Hitler. Or one where a soldier who gave blood to save Tojo’s life was delighted when the man was hanged.

The poor thing lost part of its tail during a freeze.

Rummaging gently through the scrapbooks kept by a foul-tempered old woman is possibly the best way to remember the Armed Forces in America. It becomes hard, especially for someone who is not young herself anymore, to look at those earnest, well-scrubbed faces and know they all died, at ages far younger than me, decades before I was born. You see all those faces, all the specific people who carried the military mission on their backs, and you feel all sorts of emotions. Pride at the way the country came together during WWII (less so with the Korean War, at least for me), sadness at all the loss, empathy for mothers, wives and families who forever lost their futures, fury at the absolute waste of human potential, and bafflement when all those stories are flanked by a fluff piece about a dude who somehow brought a monkey back from the Pacific Front.

In among all these clippings, I did not expect to see a female Russian sniper.

You need to feel pride, sadness, pity, anger and bafflement when you think about the men and women who have served and currently serve in the American Armed Forces, I think. I wish I knew if this was something Mollie did her entire life. Are there scrapbooks of young American men who died in World War I that got separated from the ones I inherited? Why did Mollie decide to do this, aside from the obsessive compulsivity I mentioned earlier as a potential inherited trait. Mollie died in 1962, so she didn’t get a chance to collect clippings about the Vietnamese conflict, and by then the world was changing. I don’t think we’d see the same sort of oxymoronic jaded innocence seen in Mollie’s scrapbooks – breathless stories about human triumph sandwiched between virulent racist caricatures were on the wane in the 1970s, though I probably shouldn’t say that with such conviction. I suspect had Mollie lived into her nineties and continued this endeavor, I’d walk away with similarly conflicted feelings.

War can show you the best and worst people can do, and in a weird way, Mollie’s scrapbooks reflects this dichotomy as it applies to her own legacy. These days I don’t immediately think “vile Irish hag” on the rare occasions I think about my great-grandmother. I now just think of her as Mollie, a weird, complicated old lady who probably would have understood my love of death photography. Mollie collected the images and faces of the people who lie beneath all those photos of military cemeteries you’ll see in your timelines today, and I wish I could share all of them today but I can’t. Even if time were not a consideration, I fear messing around too much in the scrapbooks lest they completely fall apart. But hopefully I shared enough of Mollie’s obsession that it makes this day a bit more complicated for you, too.

Lots of full-size photos of the scrapbooks under the cut.

Oddtober 2024: Ben Thompson’s Gravestone

This is a repeat of an older entry that I ran during Oddtober 2017. It’s one of my favorite creepy Austin locations, and reading back over it makes me realize it’s been entirely too long since I took off on a “weird places” jaunt. Enjoy!

Ben Thompson doesn’t have the level of posthumous fame as his exploits should have earned. I think it’s because he didn’t have a catchy nickname. In the early days of Texas statehood, among impulsive, gun-crazy men with a violent streak, he was first among equals. But fame is fickle and it’s hard to pin down why some gunslingers are well-remembered and why some become footnotes. In many regards, outside of Texas history buffs, Ben Thompson is a footnote.

Still, among lovers of Old West or Texas history, some of us do remember Ben Thompson and this is a perfect time of the year to share his story. He was a soldier and a lawman, but among Texas lawmen during the 1800s, it was not uncommon for lawmen to also be criminals, and Thompson was definitely a criminal, and a violent one at that. So violent was his life that some people interested in ghosts and the paranormal say the power of his character affects his final resting place.

Ben Thompson was like many of the wild men who made Texas their home – he was a jack of all trades before he found his niche as a gunslinger. Born in England in 1843, his family emigrated to Texas in 1851. In his teens, he worked as a printer’s apprentice and in 1859 he went to New Orleans to work as a bookbinder. It was in New Orleans that the man he was to become showed himself when he killed a man whom he claimed was abusing a woman. Stabbed him to death. He was fifteen or sixteen when this happened.

He served in the Civil War, fighting with the Confederates, but the battles he fought didn’t quell his love of guns and rough justice because after he returned to Austin he shot and killed a man during an argument over a mule. A mule. Seriously. And since the mule was technically Army property, Thompson was arrested. That didn’t slow him down though because he busted out of prison and fled to Mexico where he joined Maximillian’s forces until the good emperor lost the war in 1867. Clearly a man unable to function outside of conflict, Thompson returned to Austin and promptly shot his brother-in-law for abusing Thompson’s wife. Oh yeah, Thompson got married during his stint in the Civil War. The civilizing effects of marriage didn’t really take with him.

So, Thompson was tried and sent to prison in Huntsville, and this time he was unable to break out. He served two years of his four year sentence until pardoned by President Grant. Once free he headed up to Abilene, Kansas with his family and opened a prosperous saloon with an old Army buddy, Philip Coe, and seemed to be doing reasonably well. That changed when Thompson was in a terrible buggy accident that injured him, his son and his wife, who lost an arm. While Thompson was recovering from the accident, Coe went and got himself shot by Marshal “Wild Bill” Hickok.

By any measure Abilene of the early 1870s was a tough town, and its city marshal – James B. (Wild Bill) Hickok – was up to the challenge of taming its rowdy visitors. Although there may have been many reasons that Hickok and Philip Coe did not care for each other, it is likely that the basis for their dislike was a woman they both cherished. Apparently she chose the gambler over the lawman and was going to leave town with Coe – or so she thought. During the evening of October 5, 1871, Hickok shot Coe, who had been firing his pistol into the evening air on a street in Abilene. Tragically, in the confusion of the shots taken at Coe, Hickok also shot and killed his deputy. (Texas Cemeteries, Harvey)

After that, Abilene, Kansas was tired of Hickok and all the cattle drivers who passed through, making trouble at the drinking and gambling establishments, so they relieved Hickok of his duty and banned undesirables from entering or remaining in the city. That included Thompson so he went to Ellsworth, Kansas and began his time as a professional gambler. Interestingly, it was in Ellsworth that Thompson encountered another name we all remember more than poor Ben:

After the shooting of Coe, Ben Thompson left town for Ellsworth, Kansas, where he met Wyatt Earp in one of the Old West’s classic “in the streets” confrontations. Looking down the barrel of Earp’s gun, Thompson backed down and soon left Ellsworth for the Texas Panhandle. There Thompson would meet and, in the ensuing years, form a life-long friendship with Bat Masterson. (Texas Cemeteries, Harvey)

Interestingly, Thompson’s brother shot and killed the Ellsworth, Kansas sheriff and fled. A couple of years later he stood trial and was acquitted – the Thompson family seemed to be able to avoid the worst penalties for their impulsive and criminal natures, but so did a lot of men during that time. Rustle some cattle and you’d hang immediately if caught but shoot a sheriff and people could understand how the sheriff may have had it coming.

From 1874 to 1879, Thompson made his living as a professional gambler, traveling around various Texas cities, and of course he got into trouble as he did it. On Christmas Day, 1876, a fight broke out in the Austin Theater. Thompson, seeing a friend was causing the commotion, decided to help his friend out and jumped into the fray. When the theater owner emerged with a rifle and shot at Thompson, Thompson returned fire and killed him in three shots. It was determined later that Thompson had killed in self-defense.

Looking for quick money in the Colorado silver mines, Thompson went west and while there teamed up with his friend, Bat Masterson, who had assembled a team of hired guns to work for Kansas-based railroads that were embroiled in a right of way dispute with Colorado railroads. Thompson was well-paid for his efforts so he returned to Austin and opened a gambling saloon that he called the Iron Front Saloon. Here’s where it gets kind of funny: Ben Thompson was scrupulously honest in the way he ran his gambling tables and earned the respect of Austin citizens as being an honest man, so honest that the citizens in Austin elected him to be city marshal, not once, but twice. And the hell of it is, he was an honest man. He just liked shooting people. So why not have an honest shooter serve in law enforcement?

And it was a pretty good decision – plenty of people thought Ben Thompson was the best marshal Austin ever had. But rest assured he didn’t stop killing people. In 1882, Thompson visited the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio and felt that the card tables at the establishment might not meet his level of scrupulous honesty and shot the theater owner, Jack Harris, to death. He was indicted for murder and resigned as marshal and it will surprise no one that he was acquitted of murder. Presumably the theater owner had it coming. Thompson returned to Austin and was given a hero’s welcome

Now, you and I, if we shot a popular entertainment establishment owner to death, we might be emboldened a bit if we returned home to the 1880s version of a ticker tape parade, but it takes a really bold person to return to the scene of the crime. Thompson went back to the Vaudeville Theater in 1884. He and his friend, John King Fisher, one helluva gunslinger in his own right, sauntered into San Antonio like they owned the place and news of their arrival spread quickly.

What happened inside the Vaudeville Theater depends on the sources. Some say that within minutes of entering the saloon area of the Vaudeville Theater, they were both ambushed and shot from behind. That’s some cowardly crap right there but, it must be said, that there would have been little chance for anyone to kill him in a straightforward gunfight. But other sources indicate that perhaps Thompson pushed things too far. He had already run into some of Jack Harris’ business partners inside the Vaudeville Theater, but stayed for the show and pressed his luck in the saloon

Thompson and Fisher had been drinking heavily in the saloon. Inside, Simms, Foster and three confederates were waiting. When the subject of the murder of Jack Harris came up, Fisher wanted to leave. But Thompson pushed on, eventually slapping Foster and putting a pistol in the saloon owner’s mouth. Almost immediately shooting broke the tension and silence of the room. As the smoke cleared, both Thompson and Fisher lay dead on the floor. Fisher had never drawn a gun, and Thompson managed but a single shot. Yet the bodies of the outlaw lawmen had nine and thirteen wounds, respectively. Ironically, a coroner’s jury in San Antonio ruled the killings self-defense. (Texas Cemeteries, Harvey)

Legends of the ambush grew far outside of the reality of what really happened. Texas history junkies talk of how it was that Ben Thompson killed six of the men who ambushed him with a single six-shooter and hit them each square like ducks in a carnival shooting game. The reality is that even in the scenario where he pressed his luck, he barely knew what hit him. I bet he’d have liked the way his own murder played out in terms of the myths that arose around him. But no one was ever charged with killing him, and his body was shipped back to Austin. He’s buried in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery.

I first heard about Ben Thompson from a ghost hunter. I don’t hunt for ghosts, but I do like looking into ghost legends, and ghost hunters can be really helpful in finding out interesting stories. The lady I met told me that it was impossible to take a good photo of Ben Thompson’s gravestone because he hates the stone that was put on his resting place because it isn’t the one he won in a card game, so he makes sure all the photos people take are marred in some manner.

Bear with me, this story has some merit. The late Charley Eckhardt wrote up a lot of what he knew about some of the better and more interesting Texas legends and he wrote a short article about how it was that Ben Thompson won his tombstone in a card game. One night a tombstone salesman named Luke Watts played poker at a table at Iron Front Saloon and it just so happened that Ben Thompson was playing that night at that table as well. Watts tried to sell Ben Thompson a tombstone, but Thompson didn’t seem too interested. But when Watts had lost every penny in his pocket, Thompson’s demeanor changed.

Watts was not as good a poker player as he thought he was, and sometime after midnight he announced that he was cleaned out and was leaving the game. Thompson asked him how much his tombstones were worth. “It depends on what kind it is,” Watts replied.

Thompson said he wanted the best tombstone Watts had. Watts told him he had a fine marble stone that was worth $200. Thompson told him to bring it up and put it in the game. Thompson would accept it in lieu of $200 cash. The game began again and Thompson won the tombstone. Watts suggested that he carve at least Thompson’s name and date of birth on it, but Thompson said no. The stone sat in the poker room in the Iron Front for a few months, until Thompson ordered it moved to the basement.

Not long after this Ben Thompson died in the ambush in San Antonio, but according to Eckhardt his resting place in Oakwood Cemetery lacked a headstone until 1925, and that the tombstone he won remained in the basement of the Iron Front Saloon until it was demolished. Eckhardt wasn’t certain if the stone that was eventually placed on his grave was the stone he won in the card game.

I don’t know one rock from another but the stone that marks Ben Thompson’s resting place does not look like it’s fine marble and I don’t think that anyone was too pressed to rescue a slab of marble from the basement of a saloon marked for demolition.

Oakwood Cemetery is a favorite of mine and many others in the area. I spent a lot of time there searching for the burial places of the victims of the Servant Girl Annihilator, and while I was there years ago, I remembered that legend the ghost hunter told me and I took a photo of Ben Thompson’s gravestone.

And there you go. Maybe Ben really is angry about his stone and interferes with good pictures.

Join me under the cut as I behave like the killjoy I so often am.

Murder Can Be Fun, the Naughty Children Edition by Johnny Marr

I was hoping this black cat hovering over this ‘zine would create an air of menace. It didn’t work.

The Murder Can Be Fun ‘zines were my favorite ‘zines from the nineties. I let people borrow copies, never to get them back, and now all I have left is issue #17, which handles the topic of children who kill.

I believe I purchased this copy at the old Fringeware store on Guadalupe sometime in 1997 or 1998. At the time I was a walking, talking, fretting true crime podcast, though podcasts had yet to be invented, and when I saw this edition of my favorite ‘zine, I had to purchase it. (As an aside, talking about Fringeware, the alt.culture in Austin that began to die shortly after we moved here, the delightful feeling of finally finding people with similar interests on late nineties message boards, are my version of “I remember when you could see a movie for a dime and could leave the front door unlocked at night.” They are memories of a halcyon time when suddenly information became available and only a few of us knew it was out there.)

This ‘zine set off a maniacal attempt to find as much information about a youthful killer as I could. The only mention she has in Murder Can Be Fun #17 is in the quotes section, a sort of “Child Killers Say the Darnedest Things” where Marr collected some statements by killer kids. There were two quotes from an eleven-year-old girl named Mary Bell but she isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the ‘zine.

I’d like to be a nurse because then I can stick needles in people. I like hurting people.

and

Murder isn’t that bad. We all die sometimes.

There is a famous picture of a little girl who survived life in a concentration camp who is told to draw her home. She drew frantic, jagged circles and her thousand yard stare cuts viewers deep. Mary Bell had the same stare.

For the next two years I scoured the earth for mentions of Mary Bell. I was unable to find much but eventually tracked down a book by investigative journalist Gitta Sereny, who spoke at length with Mary when she was freshly convicted. Long out of print, I could only get a copy from the UT law library but after killer culture become much more popular, Sereny released another, updated book about Mary. Sereny said that Mary Bell endured some of the worst child abuse she had ever seen or heard of, and in general had a lot of sympathy for Mary.

Mary, with a friend named Norma Bell (no relation, strangely enough) strangled two boys to death. Mary was eleven and Norma was thirteen but Mary was the dominant of the two. Mary deliberately lured the two toddler boys to their deaths and wrote odd notes left in a nursery school taking responsibility for the murder of one of the boys, Martin Brown.

The most puzzling note Mary wrote said, “I murder so that I may come back.” Mary and Norma had a history of attacking small children, and after they killed Martin Brown, they enjoyed tormenting the family as they mourned. They took turns asking Martin’s mother if they could see him. When Martin’s mother gently reminded them her son was dead, Mary replied that she knew he was dead and wanted to see him in his coffin. At age 11 years and six months old, Mary was the youngest convicted murderer in the UK, a record she still holds.

Mary escaped confinement at least once but she was eventually let go from prison when she was 23. She had a baby, a little girl, in 1984 and lived in relative peace and without further offenses but in 1998, the press discovered the new name she was given upon release and outed her and her teenage daughter. Mary had to be relocated and given a new name, and Mary fought very hard to ensure her daughter was able to maintain anonymity.

I keep harping on this point, but the beauty of most ‘zines for me is the potential for larger conversations or to fall down rabbit holes. Mary Bell became a years-long rabbit hole for me because of two quotes in a ‘zine about murderous children.

This ‘zine covers several killers whose names may not ring bells with even the most seasoned true crime fans. The most “famous” of the children discussed was the terror Jesse Pomeroy but few others have much name recognition, like Hannah Ocuish, a mixed race child who lived in miserable poverty in the late eighteenth century, and she slashed another girl’s throat over an argument about stolen strawberries. Much of the book discusses “trends” in childish mayhem, like the amusing pastime of derailing trains and strange drownings. Very interesting to me were the stories of children who were executed for their crimes. Hannah Ocuish appears to be the youngest person executed in the United States, but there were two slave boys who were not too much older when they went to the gallows for murder. The youngest murderer recorded in the USA? In 1921 in Rhode Island, a three year old boy deliberately strangled his playmate because he didn’t like her anymore.

This is a fact-packed ‘zine, and though it is hard to find a copy, should you find one that is affordable, you could do worse things with your money.

Reflection by Compact Squirrel

If this were Instagram, there would be endless comments about how Basic Bitch my perfume tastes are.

Reflection is another artfully folded micro-zine that feels like someone is sharing both their talent and their passion directly to readers. It has the same level of intimacy I found in I Got That B-Movie Autism, and it has the same ability to provoke conversation. The drawings in Reflection are quite pretty, and the message is one that matters less and less to me but is an important one for young women (and possibly men, too) who are grappling with identity and how their appearance shapes their prospects in life. It can often feel like we have to take off our real selves and put on a new appearance as easily as we change clothes and this little ‘zine focuses on that issue in a visually appealing but creepy way.

This is a conversation that each new generation of women is forced to have, for a variety of reasons. It can be easy to place the blame for female self-image problems on social media, the male gaze, relentless marketing that makes young women feel as if they need to change their appearances to achieve what the current arbiters of beauty decide is the new standard. We are currently seeing a cultural shift in how American woman are supposed to look and women who made drastic changes to themselves will find it hard to meet new standards. For example, women who received brazilian butt lifts are out of luck as the thinner silhouette is gaining ground again, and over-filled lips are being replaced by more defined cupid’s bows. What will happen to all the women who got buccal fat removal when it becomes chic to have chubby cheeks?

It’s not lost on me how violent this image is. It reminds me of the skin suits Jame Gumb made in Silence of the Lambs.

However, while culture influences this sense that our appearances are coats we should shed as the world sees fit, the fact remains that what women experience today is what women experienced two thousand years ago. Makeup, hair dye, body henna, altering body shape with clothing, different hair styles from one generation to the next… It almost seems as if pursuing continual changes in appearance are an innate part of the female human experience.

Remarkably, I recall where I got this ‘zine and why I bought it. I got it from Compact Squirrel’s Etsy store and I bought it because the title and the artwork were appealing to me. I’m an Elder Hag so the beauty standards have little significance in my own life, but I’m going to tell you something strange about me: I don’t look like me. And don’t ask me to explain it because I’m not entirely sure what that means. When I talk about it, people assume I am describing some form of body dysmorphia or a lack of face recognition. Neither are at play for me. It’s just that I intuitively know that when I look in the mirror, the face that looks back at me isn’t quite right. Part of the problem is that I look so different from photo to photo that even if I did not have this “problem” I still wouldn’t see the “real” me in photos. But the main issue is that I have what seems like a memory of a face that is like the one I have now but different somehow so every time I see myself it’s startling. It’s not because I am aging because I recall thinking this way when I was a teen. I wonder if other women feel similarly and find it just as difficult to speak about it coherently. Perhaps my bizarre reaction to my face is secretly common and fuels youthful body and facial alteration. Probably not, but you never know until you speak about it.

Also I feel I need to mention that ‘zine authors are notoriously generous about sending fun freebies with a ‘zine purchase. Along with the ‘zine, Compact Squirrel sent me some tentacle stickers and what appears to be a glow-in-the-dark tooth sticker that I gave to Mr. OTC. Good times!

Lady Killers by Sian Dunn and Arinn Westendorf

Two ladies killing me because they won’t let me make the bed.

Lady Killers pretty much does what it says on the cover: it discusses several women who killed. Sian Dunn handled the text, while Arinn Westendorf created stylized drawings of the murderous women. It’s a mini zine, but the content is pretty detailed. The only downside to this ‘zine is the small font size, necessary for the author to be able to include so much information on what is essentially a quarter of a sheet of regular typing paper.

While this ‘zine doesn’t really bring a new concept to the table, it’s very clearly a labor of love for the two creators, a collaboration between friends who really enjoy true crime content. Yet even though the concept isn’t fresh nowadays, what with all the true crime content saturating the media landscape, the authors still managed to discuss two women I had not heard of before.

The cases discussed in the ‘zine are the Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme case from New Zealand, Sada Abe from Japan, Elizabeth Bathory from Hungary, Madame Popova from Russia, Leonarda Cianciulli from Italy, Christine and Lea Papin from France, and Juana Barraza from Mexico. It seems as if the creators wanted a more global representation of feminine mayhem and I really appreciate the deviation from the usual North American and English fare of Aileen Wuornos, Karla Homolka, Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Susan Smith or Casey Anthony.

I had not heard of Madame Popova, a murderess for hire who killed off abusive husbands for her female clientele. She was executed in 1909 at the age of thirty and it’s believed she killed off at least 300 men. Equally unknown to me was Juana Barraza, a young professional wrestler from Mexico who killed old women as a stand-in for her abusive mother who literally sold her into sexual servitude in exchange for three beers. I really appreciate it when people who create true crime media actually go out of their way to find topics that may be lesser known or obscure. If I never again hear the names Jody Arias or Lori Vallow, it won’t be a moment too soon.

The creators of this ‘zine filter a couple of the cases through a feminist lens, so it was a bit surprising to me that the case that calls out the most for such a lens was overlooked. There are some among us (hi!) who think that Elizabeth Bathory never killed a single village girl, but rather was the victim of the King of Hungary. The king owed Elizabeth Bathory a tremendous amount of money and did not want to repay her. Bathory was a wealthy widow, and without institutionalized male protection, was easy to malign with impunity. With Bathory accused of having the largest female serial killer body count in history, it was far easier to seize her land and wealth. But this isn’t a widely-held opinion and we’ll never know exactly what really happened. Plus even if it is true, it’s not like it will ever tamp down the imagery that the Bathory case has made ubiquitous. Aging but still beautiful women bathing in the blood of young virgins to remain young infests horror imagery and will die hard.

All in all, this was an unexpectedly novel look into serial killer lore with an eye to presenting new or lesser known cases. Sadly, I do not recall where I got this ‘zine and cannot find a link so that readers can get their own copy. But such is the way of the ‘zine and one of the reasons I want to share some of the ‘zines I found stashed away. I suspect that before too long the majority of the ‘zines I discuss will be unavailable for purchases so best to record their existence so future generations will want to look into the life of an Italian grandmama who turned her friends into soaps and cakes.

Yasunari Kawabata and What Can You Do With a Sleeping Girl (and why would you do it?)

Because I don’t sleep for the USA Olympic Insomnia team and am thinking about going pro, I find myself falling down rabbit holes online at 4:23 a.m. You know how it is. Lately I’ve been lucking out and find myself falling down smaller, less tunneling holes. The rise of what I like to call “weird shit” YouTube channels are a great source for short-term rabbit holes and one of my favorites is Nick Crowley’s channel. He’s covered some of the more time-intensive Baby’s First Late-Night Google Search topics like Dyatlov Pass, Elisa Lam, and Black Eyed Children, but he also branches out into lesser known weirdness.

For extra nightmare fuel, she’s clutching a humanoid-shaped object covered in blood. You’re welcome.

He earned a permanent place in my heart when he was among the first to share the debunk of the extremely messed-up Seattle Zombie Woman story. I’d long suspected it had something to do with medical current events, but I wasn’t sure because it was, frankly, so well done that I couldn’t immediately rule out that she was a gravely wounded woman who had suffered all kinds of abuse, be it at the hands of a maniac in a torture chamber or a maniac in a medical lab.

I wandered a bit into his back catalog a few months ago and caught his two videos on MrSleepyPeople (first video, second video). The topic weighed on me for a lot longer than I would have expected. Both videos show the actions specifically of the man who was behind the now banned MrSleepyPeople YouTube channel and, in general, others in that bizarre community. As one so often experiences in these sort of “watch me do something taboo behind the scenes” videos, Nick demonstrated an escalation of grossness within the community.

MrSleepyPeople had a catalog of videos that showed he liked to lick – thoroughly lick – the eyeballs and tear ducts of sleeping women. All of the women he featured in his videos were passed out asleep with their similarly unconscious boyfriends next to them. MrSleepyPeople would pry open the females’ eyes, touch their eyeballs and then begin to lick them. It beggared belief that just alcohol intoxication could render the girls so out of it that they did not react when light and wet pressure were applied to their eyeballs, but I suspect other sedatives were at play. Nick also explained that it’s possible, especially if it occurs during certain stages of sleep, to engage in such intrusive behavior without the victim waking. A couple of times the women stirred a bit when he touched their faces and he quickly retreated, but for the most part he was able to lick the eyes of a variety of women without them reacting.

It seems likely from repetition of backgrounds and a certain amount of context that these women knew MrSleepyPeople in some manner, as he had access to their sleeping spaces, as if they became intoxicated in his home and stayed there overnight. There was never any sign he broke into homes to perform his fetish. I wondered too if these women had given him permission to do it. Perhaps they didn’t care what he did to their eyes when they were sleeping. I also wondered if there was a quid pro quo element, trading access to their sleeping eyes for money, drugs, or just a place to crash for a while. I guess it’s possible that these women had given him permission but it seems unlikely because the creepy subterfuge was very much an element of the fun for MrSleepyEyes, as much of it took place in the dark, with other unconscious people. Permission would have spoiled the fun for him.

It’s equally unlikely that these women were actors. Pretend to be asleep knowing someone plans to pry open your eye and lick it for a prolonged period of time and see how long it is before your voluntary neural control shifts into automatic neural control. You can control when you blink, to a point, but the instinct to force the eye shut when lids are pried open or an object is lowered onto the eye is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to control without a lot of conditioning. I doubt these women were subject to such lengthy pre-video conditioning. There was an unexpectedly robust comment section on these videos, and his watchers urged him to do other things to the women, like play with the unconscious women’s feet, or to put his fingers in their mouths or up their noses.

Oddtober 2020: Expiration Date by Laura Flook

Book: Expiration Date: Special Deadition

Author: Laura Flook, illustrated by Brian Williams

Type of Book: Comic, (dark) humor, horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s so over the top and tasteless and reminiscent of the early, irreverent, impolite and extremely fun days of Internet usage, it’s almost old school in it’s approach to gross humor. The font colors, size and unique lettering also required a new bedside lamp and, I’m not even ashamed to admit, a magnifying glass to read. That was a first, and, I fear, a sign of things to come, when not even progressive lenses will be up to the task.

Availability: Self-published by Flook in 2015, you can get an autographed copy from her website.

Comments: Long-time readers of this site, of whom there are at least three, may remember my discussion of Expiration Date from what feels like last year but was really seven years ago. It was delightfully weird, somewhat silly, made references to The Misfits and basically wallowed in comedic grossness. I was very charmed by the toe tag Flook sent along with the comic.

Expiration Date: Special Deadition is a re-print of the 2000 issue, with a second part that includes the dark illustrations represented on the cover, along with a page from The Rotten Times, a newspaper that is evidently mostly obituaries and reprinted letters sent to an advice columnist who offers sage wisdom to parents whose shoe-polish consumption results in children needing better toothpaste as well as kids seeking ways to deliberately develop diabetes. I note that one of the obituaries is of a gentleman named “Don Morris,” who also gave Flook a rave review for the 2000 edition of Expiration Date. It’s fun noticing little details like that, little self-referential Easter eggs. It’s also nice to see that Flook is really fond of her fans.

The comic showcases the antics of Jelly, a funeral home director, and her demented assistant Calvin. Jelly collects genitalia from their dead clients (relatives will ask if you remembered to put Granny’s contact lenses on her dead eyeballs but will never notice if you’ve absconded with her vagina) and Calvin collects boils.

It’s the sort of funeral home wherein people come in to plan the funeral for the baby they intend to kill and MeeMaw may end up looking like Ziggy Stardust in her open casket. The second part is devoted to the newspaper I reference above, because Jelly attended an autumnal equinox party that left her so plastered that she remained unconscious but uninjured for days after a car accident and is among the obituaries until she wakes up.

Lots of gross humor, irreverent references to child abuse, yet no necrophilia (which would have been too on the nose, I think). The comic costs $15 plus shipping, which may strike some as a bit pricey for a comic that is around 2/3 reproduced content. But it’s not like it will be easy to find the first issue anyway so you are unlikely to end up owning both, the illustrations are suitably angular and sharp, given Jelly and Calvin’s edgy humor and use of scalpels, and sort of unlike anything I’ve seen recently, the price is actually pretty good given the production values, and it’s refreshing to come across content that is so utterly unrestrained.

But mostly the real reason to buy this is because Laura Flook is all about the details. No toe tag this time, but she had it shipped the same day I ordered it and it was impeccably packaged with a very striking gift tag.

I was touched to see the comic was dedicated to her late dog, Trocar, who was Flook’s dog equivalent of my late Adolph. I remembered her dog because I looked up his name when I bought the first edition of Expiration Date (as per the Internet, a trocar is “a surgical instrument with a three-sided cutting point enclosed in a tube, used for withdrawing fluid from a body cavity”).

Plus it’s nice to have the chance to directly support artists you like. Flook has other merch on her site, like face masks, interesting funerary-inspired jewelry, and clothing (if your leggings have embalming instruments on them, who cares if you look a bit sausagey wearing them, is what I am telling myself…).

Shortest entry I’ve written, probably ever, but this is a brief comic. There are times when the having of media so well-produced and dedicated to a specific craft and sub-culture is equal to or greater than the time spent actually consuming said media, especially when you find the creators interesting in and of themselves. It’s a comic about a demented funeral director and mortician and it’s really sort of pretty. It’s worth owning on that merit alone but it’s also funny, gross and clever.

Check back soon for more Oddtober content but until then feel free to recommend your favorite optometrist.

Oddtober 2020: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll by Jean Nathan

Book: The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright

Author: Jean Nathan

Type of Book: Non-fiction, biography

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: The Wright Family was odd. Dare Wright’s upbringing is a perfect distillation of what would happen if you crossed Grey Gardens with Martha Stewart’s micro-managed zest for living with the entirety of the old “cluster B” section of the DSM.

Availability: Published in 2004 by Picador, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This didn’t turn out to be as creepy an analysis as I had hoped. I may have misjudged the overall creepiness because I’m not really scared of dolls. I never understood the people who were and still are scared of the Chucky franchise. It was too campy and an active fire and competent voodoo priestess could have wrecked that doll’s shit right quick. The Annabelle franchise is a bit more frightening, I guess, but I also feel that if a possessed doll could be safely secured in a glass case in the home of two elderly fraudsters (no real shade, I love Ed and Lorraine Warren) who kept chickens in the house, maybe all you have to do if confronted by an evil doll is send it to whomever is in charge of the Warren estate and ask that it be put behind glass too. Or maybe encase the doll in concrete and send it to the Vatican or drop it into the Mariana Trench? But really who cares because if I’m not scared by dolls, I won’t get it and people who aren’t scared by people wearing masks will not understand my utter revulsion at Slipknot or the original Shatner Michael Myers configuration. Horror is relative.

But creepy or not I am going to continue because maybe the creepiness is the books we read along the way. This is the second part of my look at The Lonely Doll and Dare Wright. You may want to have a look at the first part because in that entry I discuss the book itself and my speculations behind what was at work in the book and what may have happened to Dare Wright to cause her to create such a needy, emotionally shattered character in what was meant, one supposes, to be a pretty little children’s book. I wondered why Dare included the spanking scene and what the reader was supposed to take away from the message behind such a spanking. I had some conclusions, given my tendency toward armchair psychoanalysis. Among them:

–The Lonely Doll was terrified of abandonment by a male father figure, and that she would submit to any sort of punishment if it meant that the father figure, Mr. Bear, would stay.

–I wondered if Mr. Bear and Little Bear’s sudden arrival signified a stepfather and step-sibling, forcing Edith into submitting to a male figure who was essentially sprung on her, while negotiating a relationship with another child, whose own rebellion against a father figure could create all sorts of problems.

–Because of these two possibilities, I pegged Dare Wright as having been a little girl whose own parents were divorced and who missed her father. I thought perhaps she had a stepfather whose assertion of his authority over her was at times draconian but she still wanted to please him because he represented stability and because her new step-sibling brought her companionship she missed out on when her mother was single.

I was kind of right but I was also very wrong.

Oddtober 2020: The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright

Book: The Lonely Doll

Author: Dare Wright

Type of Book: Children’s fiction, photography, inadvertently creepy

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it’s only odd if you’re a grown-up.

Availability: Initially published in 1957, it went out of print for a while but the copyright was renewed in 1985. I cannot find a publication on my copy but it was published by the Sandpiper division of Houghton Mifflin, and is visually identical to copies you can purchase new:

Comments: When I was bouncing around the idea of trying to get out of my rut and rev my writing engine for Halloween, my friend and PUBLISHER WHO IS STILL PATIENTLY WAITING FOR MY FINISHED WORK ON MANIFESTOS, Chip Smith, mentioned that last year’s foray into children’s books was interesting and made a few suggestions on other works I could pursue. He didn’t mention The Lonely Doll, but his enthusiasm for the topic reassured me I was on the right path. So here we are, discussing this pretty but potentially alarming book.

This book was not a part of my landscape as a child. It wasn’t just that dolls didn’t frighten me – I never set eyes on this book until very recently. I first became aware of the book when actress Famke Janssen filed a police report believing that someone had broken into her apartment and did nothing but leave behind a copy of The Lonely Doll. Police were highly skeptical about her claims, though they never charged her with making a false police report because they believe Janssen believed this happened and was sincere when she made the claims. There were no signs of entry, the security cameras at her apartment never showed a break-in attempt, and inside the book the police found a to-do list that was written by Janssen herself. It was the book that grabbed my attention more than the notion that an actress would make up such a story because regardless of whether or not the break-in really happened, I’m still left wondering about the significance of the book and why anyone, Janssen or an intruder, would feel the book conveyed malice or ill-intent.

The story was not enough to provoke me into purchasing The Lonely Doll, but over the last couple of years, the book has come up on various list sites (Top Ten Sewer Disasters, Five Reasons Why You Personally Are Worse Than Hitler, etc.) when the topic of terrifying things from childhood make their rounds. I’m unsure how all my years in the book arena, from childhood to a year ago, passed without me seeing this book but I suspect it’s the case that I tune out that which is not relevant to my interests. I very quickly passed from picture books with minimal text to books marketed to teens and adults, and when I was still reading books for little kids, I liked drawings more than photos. I also tended toward smaller books, like the Little Golden Books. So the uneasiness this book caused some readers and still causes adults who investigate the book wasn’t something I experienced either as a child or in retrospect as an adult who read this book as a child.

The awkwardness in the final sentence in the above paragraph is intentional because it’s important to narrow down who is upset by this book and why. From what I have seen, children don’t really respond poorly to this book, or at least the children who were the target market for this book during its heyday, and that audience is mostly women who now are between 40 and 70 years old, though younger readers of the book pop up from time to time. I walked an uneasy line when looking into this book because I genuinely don’t want to know much about books, even fluffy picture books, before I look into them for myself but one statement came up so often that it was unavoidable, words to the effect of:

“I didn’t realize how creepy this book was until I found my old copy in a box in the attic and thumbed through it for the first time in decades.”

Though I was terribly interested in what sparked such a retrospective reaction, I managed to stop reading before these (mostly) women explained themselves. I’m glad I did because I was able to see the book through mostly uninfluenced eyes and, in the end, my reaction as an adult who did not read this book as a child is similar to the women who did. When I went back to review their reactions, there one one large commonality that I will discuss in a moment, but mostly we all felt a strange uneasiness that is hard to pin down. And though I feel I must emphasize that this is a book that is despised by the woke among us, the fact is that this is not a wicked or deliberately unpleasant book. It’s a relic of its time and possibly a very useful tool in armchair psychoanalyzing the author, a favorite pastime of mine. Unless one was a child who was very frightened of dolls in general, this book is unlikely to be that upsetting. More modern children may have a negative reaction because of changing mores regarding appropriate discipline for children but much can be said for any book about children written before the 1970s.

Though this is a very well-conceived, well-executed book, it’s an emotionally taxing book for an adult to read.

Little Edith, the Lonely Doll, is terribly lonely, to the point that she begs pigeons to stay and be her friend but all they do is eat the bread crumbs she leaves them and fly away. When Mr. Bear and Little Bear show up, it is literally an answer to this forlorn toy’s prayers, and that it is visually adorable helps draw you in.

The bears and Edith quickly settle into a domestic life that involves lots of playing, mischief and even vacations to the beach. All is right in the world until one rainy day, Edith and Little Bear find themselves at loose ends because it is raining and they cannot go outside. Mr. Bear is not there – running errands one presumes – and the two decide to explore the house, finding a wardrobe full of clothes and shoes and a dressing table covered in cosmetics, perfume and jewelry.

This scene is compelling for little children who enjoy dressing up and especially compelling given the grown-up nature of the items they find on the dressing table, like jewelry and expensive perfume. The two play dress-up until Little Bear dares Edith to put on lipstick. She demures, certain Mr. Bear would be angry if he found out. Little Bear is feeling rebellious and takes the lipstick and writes, with a nod to Christopher Robin, no doubt, “Mr. Bear is just a silly old thing.” He then hands the lipstick to Edith, egging her on. She puts on the lipstick, playing along with Little Bear’s antics. Of course this is when Mr. Bear walks in and is appalled that she is wearing lipstick, something he believes she knows better than to do.

And this is where most people focus their unease with the book. Mr. Bear spanks her.

After her spanking, still defiant, Little Bear still stands by his “silly old thing” comment but Edith breaks down into sobs, terrified that Mr. Bear will leave her and take Little Bear with him if they continue being bad. Little Bear, immediately chastened, soothes Edith and together they clean up the mess and then seek out Mr. Bear for absolution.

Mr Bear, who was reading the newspaper on the couch like a furry Ward Cleaver, was waiting for an apology and willing to forgive them both of the heinous crime of acting like children.

There’s a lot in this book that adult me finds unpleasant. The spanking thing is kind of nasty but let’s bear in mind that in the 1950s spanking was the norm and perhaps being spanked over the knee of a teddy bear isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a pretty, unsupervised doll. But the rest of the book is disturbing outside the realms of relativist parenting techniques.

Like, who the hell does this bear think he is and why does he think he has the right to spank this doll? If Edith is a doll, where is the child who plays with her? Where are the other toys? If she’s a stand-in for a little girl, where are her parents? Why was this doll left utterly alone in this house that she hasn’t even explored enough on her own to discover the dressing room before the bears showed up? These are real toys interacting with real objects, which gives the reader a voyeuristic feeling as they watch photos that maybe shouldn’t be shown to others.

The author of this blog uses The Lonely Doll as a graphic stand-in for the way adults view spanking of children versus the spanking of adults and wonders if people are upset about Edith’s spanking because they are blurring the lines between childish fantasies about the secret lives of toys and their own reactions to past and present spankings in real life. The author finds fault with some of the negative reaction to this book because the adult is viewing the punishment from the lens of receiving it as an adult, and even if I may not agree, I can see the logic. Whether or not there is anything sexual about spanking Edith, and plenty think that there is indeed an erotic element, the fact that spanking children was not taboo when this book was written and photographed is important.

But we also need to ask ourselves what this spanking was meant to convey. I’m deliberately shying away from discussing spanking in media aimed at children because up until the 1970s, most cases of spanking in children’s media at worst were portrayed as a necessary evil and the children receiving such spankings – think of Tom Sawyer and similar – were just fine. There were some rather Dickensian looks at abuse but the wholesale beating of a child was generally not seen as appropriate discipline and was a thing apart from spanking. Moreover, the spankings were not the larger message of such books. They seldom were the actual message of any media that presented spanking. Through the 1980s, media as a whole, including advertising, didn’t shy away from spanking – a trope that seems fairly negative – as they sought to sell their products because the message the ads were conveying was so outrageous as to be culturally understood to be outrageous, or they sought to avoid spanking altogether. Ads featured children and adults alike being spanked. When it was a child receiving the punishment, the message the ads conveyed was that use of their product could avoid discipline issues that led to spanking, which was a thing a good parent would want.

As for spanking adults, most of it was tongue-in-cheek, slyly implying that a wife might be a slattern or slipshod in the hopes of receiving an erotic spanking over the knee of her husband.

Sometimes the script was flipped and the man got the spanking but most of those ads were deliberate inversions of previous ads and it was difficult finding an “organic” use of a woman spanking a man. This one comes very close. The man in this ad is not being spanked but her dog bit his ass, ruined his pants, and he ends up humiliated and sprawled over her knee with a pained posterior. The posture of this ad is of submissive acceptance of authoritative dominance and her arm is raised up above her head in a perfect mimic of spanking. Incidentally, this whole ad encapsulates why the seventies was so very awful.

It’s remarkable how many movie posters featured spanking. These ads invariably show how fun spanking a full-grown woman is, especially if there’s at least one person watching as it happens. Spanking was “racy.”

Women evidently wanted to be “tamed” by old screaming men, and, again, it was all in fun, even if the dude looked downright homicidal like John here. This is a nicer version of the poster – another shot has a crowd gathered, presumably to cheer him on as he wrecked this woman for sass or maybe she put on some lipstick, too.

While few modern women will look at these ads and find them wholly amusing, it’s hard to get too worked up over adult women in heels and shellacked hair getting spanked in perfectly posed technicolor.

But mostly these images are deprived of miserable impact because of how fucking stupid they are. Spanking a wife for not “store testing” coffee or implying drug store shampoo will help a modern woman assert disciplinary dominance are on their faces really stupid premises, deliberately stupid, in fact. Spousal abuse was less discussed when these ads ran and physical violence in relationships was a societal ill that still plagues us but the audiences then, as well as now, understand that these ads are hyperbolic, and that only a lunatic would hit their spouse over supermarket coffee and lunatics were not the target audiences for these products or films. Audiences today might see far more violence in these images than a 1960s housewife but within the times these ads ran, the audience understood the message being conveyed – buy fresh coffee, get the right shampoo, we can’t show you pent up perverts penetration on film so spanking will suffice. At no time is the actual message, “Beat your spouse.”

As an aside, I found this image when searching for spanking images.

Our grandparents were absolute madmen. Jesus Christ, the kid is farting so often that his teacher has to get involved, dragging his mom into class and everything. But helpful Ovaltine saves the day, proving that the boy isn’t a bad kid, farting up the place on purpose. No, the problem is with the parents since dad leaves his idiot wife alone to her devices and without him there to instruct her, she evidently feeds her son like a goat at a petting zoo. But as remarkably awful as this ad is, the message is to avoid spanking your kid by reducing his flatulence.

Back to the book. What is the message behind Edith’s spanking? The doll in this book is one of the most emotionally desperate child characters one can find outside of depictions of war. She’s utterly alone, bereft and literally praying for relief from her torment of loneliness. Then two bears – an adult and a peer – arrive and a weird power balance develops wherein Edith is now subject to the will of a masculine parental figure and the whims of her brother-bear can result in this adult bear hitting her (because Little Bear egged that shit on, for sure). For Edith, the power of the spanking is not that she has disappointed her father figure because she engaged in behavior that any loving caretaker would want to correct, but rather the fear that a spanking is the prelude to future abandonment, a fate she will do anything to avoid.

The message can vary but it boils down to variations of a child learning appropriate boundaries and trusting that bad behavior will not result in parental abandonment. These two do not have such a boundary set in place, so shown when Edith is spanked and this resulted in her sobbing from fear of being alone again.

And let’s discuss how she got spanked by a random male doll who showed up one day to live in her home. I do not yet know much about Dare Wright though I hope to have her biography finished today so I can discuss it next, but I guarantee you many young girls whose mothers remarried after divorce or just moved their lovers into the house understand a message very specific to their lives. One day, a male figure whose arrival and possible departure has nothing to do with you or your wants, has physical and social control over you. How many abusive stepfathers were seen as Mr. Bear spanked this emotionally shattered doll? For many adults, childhood is a horror they compartmentalize until they are old enough to cope with it all and I can see very easily how an adult woman can see herself in this doll and remember being a child who was not treated fairly and who feared being left behind more than physical violence.

But you don’t even have to have this specific memory to feel uneasy about a book that features a stand-in for a little girl who begs pigeons to stay with her and talk to her. When confronted with this book, you see dolls interacting in a human environment, standing in for humans. There is a reality to this book that I did not encounter in my Little Golden Books. It is very easy to assign Edith a human role even though she is clearly not a real little girl because the rest of the book is very real. Plus the environment is clean, pretty and the dolls themselves are very cute. A sad little girl is finally given a sort of family and then BOOM! The goddamn big bear is apparently looking right up her dress as he spanks her and she descends into a fit of sobbing despair. That they seem like they’ve mended fences at the end is nice, but that is not the ebb and flow of childhood. It takes a long time to overcome the misery of years of loneliness and fear. The reality of this book mirrors the reality of the unstable nature of childhood itself, where lessons have to be learned over and over and children don’t always spring back.

Dare Wright produced eighteen other books in the Lonely Doll series (one features a kitten and another features Edith kidnapped and tied to a tree), and this book still routinely makes “Best of” lists for children’s books in defiance of how adults may feel about it. Clearly the message children receive from this book, even modern little children, is very different than mine. I don’t know what they see when they read this book but the beautiful photography, cuddly bears, pretty doll, the allure of the make-up and high heels during dress-up all likely play a role in the enduring interest some children have with this book series.

But I still wonder, what message was it that Dare Wright wanted to convey? What caused her to create such a sad, needy character? Did she even realize Edith was needy and miserable? Why did she create a scenario wherein a doll is spanked by another doll in a genuine attempt at discipline? Did she really think Edith deserved a spanking for something so minor? Was the scene a touching look at a father’s attempt to tame an unruly child, or was there something far more malignant that only distance from childhood can show us? Will any of this information help us understand why this book was involved in an actress’s presumably delusional belief someone planted the book in her home?

We’ll find out in my next entry. Until then, share with me any books you read as a child that now as an adult freak you out.

Oddtober 2020: Biblio-Curiosa No. 5 – The Children’s Books Issue

It has been far too long since I have discussed Chris Mikul on this site. When I decided to devote a bit of Oddtober to media for children, I remembered that Mikul had released a Biblio-Curiosa devoted to kid’s books and the authors of said books. As is the case with just about everything Mikul writes, I could write reactions to his articles that are longer than the articles themselves but I will work to restrain myself. In the past, Chris Mikul sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole chasing the memory of the man known as F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, as well as discussing the book that has since become my odd book Holy Grail, The Pepsi-Cola Addict by the surviving Gibbon twin, June, a name likely known more to fans of strange phenomena than to bibliophiles.

His body of work is what I’ve often said I hope OTC can be when it grows up, which it probably won’t. Which is just as well because Mikul’s work approaches being sui generis, and it’s a bad idea to mimic that which is one of a kind, though it’s always nice to have such inspiration. Issue 5 isn’t creepy or Halloween-y in a supernatural way, but all the books he discusses in this issue have some element to them that is strange, eerie or odd. Emphasis on “odd” because, as the title reveals, one the books he covers is actually entitled Odd.

The fact that the cover is re-enacted in my neighbor’s backyard in no way influenced me where Mikul’s look into this book is concerned. It should also not be surprising that I would be kindly disposed toward a book that features two little girls washing a pig.

This was one of the shorter of the seven articles in this edition, but it struck me as being the most relevant to my interests and as being the story that best illustrates one of the many paths a child can take to becoming an odd adult. Odd tells the story of six-year-old Betty, daughter of an MP and the middle child of five. Her two elder siblings are close in age and her two younger siblings are twins, leaving Betty on her own. She is literally the odd one out. One day Betty accidentally knocks one of her younger brothers down and is locked in a storage room with a Bible (!!) as punishment. Her nanny tells her she cannot come out until she memorizes a Bible passage. And it’s here that the “weird kid” roots begin to take hold. Mikul describes the scene:

Turning its pages, Betty comes to the Book of Revelation and the text “And I came unto him, Sir thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” Betty learns the text by heart and becomes obsessed by it. She finds out what tribulation means, and after that asks everyone she meets if they have experienced it yet. She is terribly worried that tribulation is only for grown-ups, and if she dies before experiencing it she won’t go to heaven.

This resonated with me strongly. As a child who grew up in a large city in the American South, I cannot be the only kid who, when confronted with another child’s steadfast opinions regarding baptism and salvation, became convinced that I was going to hell because Southern Baptists didn’t baptize babies (or at least my church didn’t). Luckily I was able to ignore conversations about full body immersion versus top of head christenings and avoid a freakout because I figured that even if the top-of-headers were correct, the top of head got wet in a full body immersion so pretty much everyone would be fine in the end.

So the middle and odd kid’s parents have to go away and in what I feel like is a typically upper-class British manner, the kids are sent to live for six months on a farm their nanny’s brother owns, and are permitted to run amok unsupervised in manner that would likely make the evening news if it happened in my neck of the woods. Betty meets all sorts of grownups, including a church organist, who gives Betty a puppy, which predictably causes Betty to worry about whether or not her dog will go to heaven. Betty develops a friendship with the father of a dead little girl, and genuinely enjoys the company of adults, and in turn the adults in her life don’t mince words or treat her like a foolish little child. They don’t speak to her like an equal, but they also do not shelter her and as a result she takes the slings and arrows of life with more equanimity than many modern adults would. The book ends with a tribulation that involves a mad dog and sacrifice and if this sounds familiar know that Amy le Feuvre’s Odd was published in 1897 and that she handled the way such a plot plays out far better.

In this issue, Mikul also shares the story of E.W. Cole and his astonishing book store in Melbourne, Australia, Cole’s Book Arcade, and his charming picture books that appeared to have a preternaturally Aquarian Age reliance on rainbows. He has me rather interested in finding one of the Wallypug novels by G.E. Farrow, a series of books influenced by but not nearly as smarmy-sounding as Carroll’s Alice books. He also revisits an author he discussed in issue two. Murray Constantine, who wrote Swastika Night in 1937, was actually a lady named Katherine Burdekin and she wrote a book aimed at children in the 1920s called The Children’s Country under the name Kay Burdekin. In retrospect this is a heavy book for children if they are skillful in picking up on subtext. I wonder how modern, woke audiences would feel about Burdekin’s blurred sex/gender lines.

If nothing else, this issue shows how many books for children and young adults were written by women. Amy le Feuvre is clearly a woman’s name but one could be forgiven for assuming Erroll Collins and EE Redknap were men, writing heavy and at times brutal science fiction with a splash of fantasy for young readers. Nope, those were the writing names for Ellen Redknap, whose hardcore militaristic and intensely martial story lines ensured that a reader like me would not have enjoyed her writing when I was her target audience. What makes this writer all the more remarkable is how… girlie she was. Evidently she was known as “Goody” as in goody-two-shoes. Deeply maternal and helpful, she raised her siblings after their mother died, lived as a spinster while offering all sorts of assistance to aspiring writers, all the while writing books aimed at aggressive pre-teens entitled The Black Dwarf of Mongolia and The Hawk of Aurania.

The oddest book Mikul looked at is the utterly bizarre, plot-driven Susie Saucer & Ronnie Rocket by Stella Clair, illustrated by Edward Andrewes. Whew lad, this is one hell of a book and hopefully Mr. OTC adds this to the “need to buy if I come across it” list. Heavily influenced by the 1947 description of “flying saucers” and the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this 1957 children’s book is a synthesis of that which is cute, that which is arcane, and that which is absolutely fucking terrifying.

Honestly, she’s waving a little handkerchief that matches her bloomers. How could something this adorable be so creepy?

Stay with me: Okay, so on Venus, the business men decide to stop making flying saucers and Susie is one of the last ones constructed. Susie is recruited by “Flame,” who is a Lord of Venus, to be his… I don’t know, spaceship ward, and he places her in service on a huge spaceship carrier called Jupiter. On a mission to Earth, Susie meets a rocket, Ronnie, and the two race each other and get up to all kinds of shenanigans but Susie gets stuck in a pond and she and Ronnie are found and taken in to be examined by Earthlings, certain Ronnie and Susie are enemy weaponry. Ronnie gets help, Susie is rescued but Ronnie is caught again and turned into a bomb and the UFOs have to save the day.

This story is full of absolute WTF-ery that make it absolutely mind-boggling, especially given how adorably illustrated it is. Here Mikul is discussing when Susie and Ronnie meet:

They strike up an awkward conversation, with the rocket’s “gorgeous dorsal fin” making Susie’s magnet quiver.

Later, when Susie is captured, the attempts to disassemble her sound very close to rape. It’s a weird little book to be sure.

The part I liked the best about Susie is clearly she was a means by which true believers in UFO-ology were trying to make the topic approachable for children, going so far as to mimic a widely known but disputed photograph of a UFO.

The book benefits greatly from its colourful and charming illustrations by Edward Andrewes. Susie, with her ribbons and polka-dot outfits, must surely be the most feminine flying saucer ever conceived. Andrewes based her closely on the iconic flying saucer Adamski claimed to have photographed in December 1952. This looks like a hubcap (probably because Adamski made it from one) and has three round protuberances at its base (probably light bulbs). In Andrewes illustrations, these become Susie’s three legs, clad in polka-dot material with frills.

I feel like I need to say something here but words sort of escape me.

You know terribly scary and awful Christian cartoons are? Like Davey & Goliath and basically all those weird vegetable and fruit animations? They mean well but they are invariably off-putting at best, nightmare-fuel at worst. It’s good to know ufology attempts to recruit the young suffer from similar shortcomings. I guess dogma marketed to children will be a tough row to hoe, so to speak.

There’s much more to the article than this and I’m holding myself back because this is a “worth the price of admission” article. Actually, every article in this issue is worth the price of admission. If this is the first time you have encountered Chris Mikul’s work on my site, I should apologize for my sloth of late because you really need to be made aware of him annually, if not quarterly. I plan to discuss his most recent book, My Favorite Dictators, here as soon as I reasonably can, and you can have a look through my “Authors A-Z” list and see more of my looks at his work. Also, if you are interested in buying issues of Biblio-Curiosa or Mikul’s equally fascinating Bizarrism, you can contact him at cathob@zip.com.au to get costs and shipping rates.

Mikul’s look at children’s literature was an excellent starting place to discuss media for children that ended up being unintentionally disturbing to children or alarming to adults. And what better time to consider terrifying children than during Oddtober?

Odd Things Considered

Category: Uncategorized