THE GHOSTS OF THE ZEITGEIST

Monica Black. A Demon Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors and Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany. Metropolitan Books, 2020.

Looking at Germany today it is almost impossible to imagine the wrecked and devastated nation described in this book. After the moral collapse of society in the Nazi years, the country was plunged into near-anarchy with the disappearance of all the arms of government, the destruction of the physical infrastructure, and the arrival of millions of homeless refugees.

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INTO THE TWILIGHT ZONES

Mike Jay. Stranger Than Fiction; Essays by Mike Jay. Daily Grail Publishing, 2018.

Mike Jay will be familiar to Magonia readers as the author of books and magazine articles on the ‘twilight zones’ of the human mind, with titles which have covered the history of drugs and other mind-altering processes.

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SLENDERMAN - LIVING THE LEGEND

Trevor J Blank and Lynne S McNeill (Editors). Slender Man is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet. University Press of Colorado, 2018.

Who by now who follows Fortean themes, especially the contemporary ones, has not heard of the Slender Man? For the handful of you who may have emerged from your survivalist compound in the woods in order to top up your hoard of jerky, he/it is an abnormally tall, thin humanoid, dressed in a black suit and tie. Faceless, he loiters in the shade in children's playgrounds in exactly the manner that one should not.
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SIZING UP SLENDERMAN

Nick Redfern. The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life. New Page Books, 2018.

By now, most followers of forteana will have heard of the Slenderman. This creation, if that is what it is, started out ‘life’ on the website Something Awful, which is a comedy site. The creature itself loosely resembles a man in a black suit and wearing a black tie. All likeness to a human being stops there, as the face is blank, it is far too tall and thin and, on occasion, it has tentacles.

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FROM THIN AIR

Shire Chess and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man. The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave, 2016.

Something happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on 31st May 2014. That something was the attempted sacrifice of a human being. The incident involved three 12 year-old girls. According to reports in the media, two of the girls enticed the third into local woodland. The two then stabbed the third nineteen times and left her for dead.
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HOLD ON TIGHT...

Frank Bures. The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death and the Search for the Meaning of the World's Strangest Syndromes. Melville House. 2016

Frank Bures was inspired to begin his investigations into the effects of culture in different parts of the world when he left his home in the American Midwest to spend a year in Italy as an exchange student. He writes: "After one short year immersed in Italian society I felt like a different person, and I was disturbed by the depth of this change". 

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JUST CLOWNING AROUND

Benjamin Radford. Bad Clowns. University of New Mexico Press, 2016.

According to the back-cover blurb of Benjamin Radford’s Bad Clowns it will “blend humour, investigation and scholarship to reveal what is behind the clown’s dark smile.” Certainly the first four chapters (roughly forty pages) supplied me with a fair degree of engaging scholarship.
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AWAY ON THEIR HEELS

Jacob Middleton.  Spirits of an Industrial Age: Ghost Impersonation, Spring-Heeled Jack and Victorian Society. The Author, 2014,

The popular idea of ghosts today is of apparitional figures that appear in specific locations and which are either filmy and insubstantial, or alternatively are indistinguishable from ordinary mortals until they do something odd like disappear or walk through a wall. 

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DON'T PANIC!

Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall. A Colorful History of Popular Delusions. Prometheus Books, 2015.

Robert Bartholomew, in association with several collaborators, has written a series of books on a number of popular panics, rumours and dubious beliefs, most recently a comprehensive discussion of schoolyard panics. In this present title he and Peter Hassall offer a generalised round-up of irrational mass actions, arranging them in a typology ranging from vague rumour and gossip, to full scale riot.
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CLASS REACTION

Robert E. Bartholomew with Bob Rickard. Mass Hysteria in Schools: A Worldwide History Since 1566. McFarland, 2014.

It’s not impossible that an episode of mass-hysteria might have sparked a major Middle-Eastern conflict. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but for a while it was a definite threat. In 1983 schoolgirls at a Palestinian school in the Israeli West Bank began to complain of headaches and blurred vision. They said their symptoms began when they started to smell a sulphurous odour which leaked into their classrooms. The school was evacuated.
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FEEL THE FEAR – AND EAT IT ANYWAY

Harvey Levenstein. Fear of Food. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Subtitled: ‘A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat’, this book might sound like a strange choice to be reviewed as Magonian food for thought. Yet it is curiously appropriate, being primarily concerned with major modern ‘flaps’ – panics about certain types of food – and the heresies involved in refusing to believe the hype of big corporations with vested interests. 

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DEVILISH DOINGS

Robert Ziegler. Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-Siècle France. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

On the first page of the first chapter the author informs us that “In Britain, renowned occultist Alfred Waite characterized France as fertile ground for the spread of black magic . . .” Arthur Waite was indeed one of the leading occult authors of the time, but this does not encourage us. Later, he refers to “the Hindu goddess Shiva”.
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HOLD ON TIGHT - THE GREAT PENIS PANIC

Scott B Mendelson. The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Mass Hysteria. The author (Createspace), 2010.

Psychiatrist Dr Scott Mendelson examines the outbreak of koro in Singapore in October 1967. In this culture-bound syndrome, men believe that their penises are retracting into their abdomens, and if this actually happens they will die. Some women were affected also, believing that their breasts were shrinking away. Men rushed into hospitals holding on to their penises, or clamping them with various ad hoc devices. 

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DON'T PANIC!

Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford. The Martians Have Landed; A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes. McFarland, 2012.

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Guy P. Harrison. 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Bartholomew and Radford’s book carries on from a number of other titles by Bartholomew, looking at social delusions, as well as another book on panics and hoaxes co-edited with Hilary Evans. This seems to be a rather slighter volume with over thirty topics dealt with mostly in fairly short chapters.
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BEASTS AND RUMOURS OF BEASTS

Jay M. Smith. Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast. Harvard University Press, 2011

It is the aftermath of a world war and a strange rumour is abroad that preternatural forces are at work in the land. This is not, however the USA after the 'Second World War' and we are not dealing with flying saucers. This is France in the aftermath of its defeat in the Seven Years War of 1756-1763, and the rumour is a much more concrete and deadly one.
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TRACKING THE BOY JONES

Jan Bondeson. Queen Victoria's Stalker: The Strange Story of the Boy Jones. Amberley, 2010.

'The Boy Jones' - Edward Jones - gained notoriety in the 1840s by making a series of intrusions into Buckingham Palace. At the time this was not as difficult as you might think, the Palace being run on a ramshackle system stretching back hundreds of years which seemed to have ensured that no-one was particularly responsible for anything. 
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MONSTERS, ANCIENT AND MODERN

Stephen T Asma. On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Monsters, prodigies, ill omens, images of raw wildness and chaotic disorder haunt the human imagination and have done, presumably from earliest period of our humanity. Whether manifesting as huge, lumbering beasts, or physically or morally deformed human beings, they have inspire terror and awe through the ages.
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