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Dwellers In Darkness
158 pages
First published January 1, 1968
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May 12, 2016
I'm using this review as a standard for the 4 Macklin books I have
When I was a kid in the mid-late 70's, I was growing up through the big Paranormal/UFO/Occult/Bigfoot boom, as typified by tv shows like IN SEARCH OF and various Sunn Classics "documentary" films. And I read a TON of these kinds of books (I believe the first ever books I was allowed to take out from the library in grade school were a book on sea-serpents and a book called UFO & Ifo: A Factual Report on Flying Saucers - and I had to be given special dispensation because they were from the section for older students). I read SO many of these types of books that I eventually became something of a connoisseur: I would get burned out on certain topics (UFO and Sea Serpent/Lake Monster books get *very* repetitious after a certain point), learned to steer myself from certain areas after some investigation (New-agey / space brothers / ancient Atlantean & Lemurian guff), came to know certain authors as being interesting and varied (I was lucky enough to discover Charles Fort in fourth grade, and loved John Keel, Loren Coleman and Janet Bord & Colin Bord), other authors as bores (Hans Holzer for example), and others as mixed bags (Frank Edwards, Ivan T. Sanderson).
John Macklin was one of these mixed bag/leaning towards bore writers - looking at his books now, he was probably a newspaper/magazine or radio columnist and then repurposed his short pieces into books like this one. To me, he was a bore because his content was almost always the same - the shallow end of the paranormal pool: ghost stories, visions, sea serpents, the occasional UFO, prophetic dreams, curses, coincidences, disappearances, etc - a low-rent, faded copy of Fort or Elliot O'Donnell with a talent for giving his short pieces lurid titles ("The Skeleton Hand That Pointed To A Killer", "Horror Behind The Black Velvet Mask") that always promised more than they delivered.
When I was a kid in the mid-late 70's, I was growing up through the big Paranormal/UFO/Occult/Bigfoot boom, as typified by tv shows like IN SEARCH OF and various Sunn Classics "documentary" films. And I read a TON of these kinds of books (I believe the first ever books I was allowed to take out from the library in grade school were a book on sea-serpents and a book called UFO & Ifo: A Factual Report on Flying Saucers - and I had to be given special dispensation because they were from the section for older students). I read SO many of these types of books that I eventually became something of a connoisseur: I would get burned out on certain topics (UFO and Sea Serpent/Lake Monster books get *very* repetitious after a certain point), learned to steer myself from certain areas after some investigation (New-agey / space brothers / ancient Atlantean & Lemurian guff), came to know certain authors as being interesting and varied (I was lucky enough to discover Charles Fort in fourth grade, and loved John Keel, Loren Coleman and Janet Bord & Colin Bord), other authors as bores (Hans Holzer for example), and others as mixed bags (Frank Edwards, Ivan T. Sanderson).
John Macklin was one of these mixed bag/leaning towards bore writers - looking at his books now, he was probably a newspaper/magazine or radio columnist and then repurposed his short pieces into books like this one. To me, he was a bore because his content was almost always the same - the shallow end of the paranormal pool: ghost stories, visions, sea serpents, the occasional UFO, prophetic dreams, curses, coincidences, disappearances, etc - a low-rent, faded copy of Fort or Elliot O'Donnell with a talent for giving his short pieces lurid titles ("The Skeleton Hand That Pointed To A Killer", "Horror Behind The Black Velvet Mask") that always promised more than they delivered.
Displaying 1 of 1 review