Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle

Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle stopped my recent cryptozoology obsession right in its tracks, almost as the female bigfoot with the 'pendulous breasts' stops, mid-stride, in the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage. Prior to this, I had breezed through several crypto-themed books, including Darren Naish's excellent Hunting Monsters at the usual speed I apply when I'm going through one of my periodical obsessions. But Pyle's book forced me to slow down. Not because it's bad, but because it is in fact a vast, many-chambered take on the Bigfoot mythos that simply demands that you take your time with it. It's big, yes. It's long, yes. But that's not the point. It's heavy.

Where Bigfoot Walks is unlike any book on cryptozoology you'll ever read. I mean, plenty of great books (Naish's among them) take the time to examine not only whether cryptids exist (spoilers: they probably don't) but why we need to believe in them. It's pretty common for thoughtful but science-minded writers to be skeptical on the subject of 'ol Biggie, and yet still admit a fascination with him. It's only Pyle, however, who seems to have taken this attitude to it's greatest extreme. Pyle examines Bigfoot as a real ecological possibility, as a symbol of the wild and our relationship to it, and as a classic image of mid-20th Century America. The sheer breadth of this book is astonishing. It is simultaneously a monster hunt, a psychological investigation of those who would hunt monsters, a spiritual examination of Bigfoot and the true nature of reality. How Pyle could focus on a (probably) fictional animal to create his celebration of ecology on Earth, and make this never for a moment feel inappropriate, is unbelievable. Where Bigfoot Walks is, incredibly, mostly a legitimate ecology book.

The book chronicles Pyle's attempts to hike across the Dark Divide, a mountain range in southern Washington state, a region that is awash in Bigfoot lore. He's not looking for Bigfoot per se. He's more interested in considering whether Bigfoot could be possible, from an ecological point of view. Where would it live? What would it eat? He's also interested in the people who believe. Why do they need this? Are they capable of being truly scientific? Whatever would they do if they actually caught the bloody thing? It turns out that the ethical ramifications of this are more complex than you would think. And it turns out that some believers wish to remain exactly that - believers, such that if actual proof was brought out into the cold light of day, another of the world's mysteries would be dead to them.

Pyle sympathises with this take, though he does not share it. For him, the scientific discovery of Bigfoot would force governments to place vast areas of the creature's forest home under strict protection. For Pyle, Bigfoot would be the ultimate protected species: one close enough to man to make us uncomfortable.

Where Bigfoot Walks takes many meandering strolls into a variety of realms. As I said at the top, it's a slow, varied read: sometimes light, often heavy. I especially enjoyed Pyle's takedown of conventional European religious society as an alternative to his semi-mythical, Bigfoot-centered nature worship. He believes, as I do, that for whatever reason we have taken a misstep somewhere along the way, and distanced ourselves from the rest of life on Earth, and that this separation is damaging both to nature and to ourselves. To Pyle, Bigfoot is a noble and majestic creature that has been ill-treated by decades of supermarket tabloid ridicule. And though he's writing in the 90s, before the filter bubble age and before cryptozoology became synonymous with close-minded folks who want to believe at all costs, I think he's onto something very important. Bigfoot, and an understanding (if not an appreciation) of fringe belief is more important now than Pyle could ever have guessed when he first penned this incredible book.

Book Review: The Man Who Missed The War by Dennis Wheatley (1945)

My job, for odd reasons, gives me access to untold amounts of beat-up old pulp paperbacks, which gives me no end of joy. Dennis Wheatleys are fairly common, probably because here in the UK, it seems up until some point in the 70s, every house was contractually obliged to have at least a small number of them. Despite being something of an amateur expert on Britain's 'occult uncle' (I even read the mammoth biography The Devil Is A Gentleman), I'd never heard of this week's offering, The Man Who Missed The War. That's partly because Wheatley was so damn prolific, but also because it's not one of his occult-themed books, so it has been somewhat forgotten about over time.

Book Review: The Abominable by Dan Simmons (2013)

I guess I have a complicated history with Dan Simmons now. His last mammoth, brick-like epic novel about survival in extreme cold, The Terror, stuck around my house for months haunting me before I could bring myself to crack into it. But once I did, I became consumed by its tale of the 1845 Franklin expedition and its doomed attempts to find the NorthWest passage. The book got me through a weird, lonely time in which I returned to my house one Christmas only to find that nobody else was home, and the heating was broken. I shivered through several days before either of these situations could be rectified, eating up the pages of Simmons' masterpiece, glad only that I was at least safe from the twin horrors of cannibalism and being stalked by unknowable Arctic monsters. The book even left me with a recurring fascination with polar exploration, and the Franklin expedition in particular.

The Poisoned Island (2013) by Lloyd Shepherd

Buoyed by my enjoyment of The Age of Wonder, I spent Christmas in the grip of a fixation with the Georgian period. As I’ve said before, it’s not a period I’ve been traditionally particularly interested in. It’s the Victorian age that still rules my heart, don’t worry about that. But while the Georgians might have lacked fashion sense and pseudo-modern technology, they sure knew how to conquer other countries; and as such, they built the model of Empire that the whole world was soon to tremble to during the Victorian age.
Their Empire-building may have been ramshackle and occasionally haphazard compared to what came after, but they set the scene for it. So to that extent, I’ve taken an interest in them. I spotted the just-released Poisoned Island at a WHSmith’s at Gatwick airport on the way home for Christmas and thought that it looked an appropriate read considering my new area of interest.

The Poisoned Island is a novel that takes the idea of Empire as one of its central themes. It’s essentially a detective novel set in London in 1812, as a ship called the Solanderpulls into the docks of the East End. The book is a sequel; the second featuring the proto-detective Charles Horton of the River Police as its hero. It being so early in the development of modern policing, Horton is rather ahead of his time in his insistence on such niceties as motives and evidence. When sailors from the Solander start dropping dead about East London, Horton sets to finding the killer using his box of new detecting tricks. Before you can say The Madness of King George, Horton is traipsing around Wapping, Rotherhide, and other places in the east of London that I pass through quite frequently on the DLR.

The book touches on quite a few themes that I found interesting. It was enlightening, for example, to meet Sir Joseph Banks again, so soon after his appearance as the hero of an early chapter in The Age of Wonder, and see him shown in a different and less flattering light. In that tome, Banks had been a young, open-minded adventurer with an interest in everything, and who made the most of his trip to the paradise of Tahiti. He absorbed the Tahitian culture and made the most of the willing women of the island. In The Poisoned Island, Banks has become the elder statesman of British science, large of girth and conservative in his philosophy. His south-sea adventuring as a young man is here treated with quite a good deal of cynicism; the possibility of rape, both literal and figurative, is toyed with continuously. And just as the destruction of the Tahitian way of life by the Europeans has resulted in something poisonous coming back to haunt London, Banks’ past amorous doings too come back to demand payment.

I enjoyed Banks as a character in this book; I liked his relationship with his head gardener and fellow scientist/explorer Brown too. Any time the book took a turn into their world of early 19^th-century botany, I perked up quite a bit. But then, this is a world I am currently exploring myself for the first time, and all the characters and discoveries they reference seem like new friends to me. Fish in a barrel, I guess. I am located squarely in the target audience for this stuff, no doubt about it.

As for the detecting stuff, well, it’s still not for me. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for crime fiction, not even Sherlock Holmes, despite Conan Doyle being one of my favourite authors. And whenever the book lapses into whodunit territory, I lose interest. In fairness, there aren’t many ‘crime-only’ sections. Almost none of the book is devoid of historical interest, what with this version of Georgian London being overrun by corrupt adventurers, famous scientists and half-breed aboriginals. There’s always something interesting happening. It’s just that the central plot – a mystery about someone killing other people – failed to grab me, as is usually the case with crime fiction, and as a result the book occasionally felt like a bit of a chore to me. I guess for me, this book is a bitter pill thoroughly coated in very enticing sweet stuff.

The Ghost Hunters (2013) by Neil Spring

Borley Rectory is, for me, the ur-haunted house. The original. The most 'pure' manifestation of the idea of the 'haunted house.' When I close my eyes and think of a haunted house, it's that Victorian red-brick monstrosity I see, its twin front windows staring malevolently. Before there was Hill House, before there was the Belasco House, there was Borley Rectory. I can't even hear those two words without being forcibly yanked back to my childhood: a childhood filled with 'real-life' books about ghosts and hauntings that I collected obsessively.

And those books were filled with Borley Rectory.


Colin Wilson and Peter Underwood had a lot to say in their books about Borley Rectory, but the one that first introduced me to that rambling Suffolk mansion was the Usborne supernatural guide Haunted Houses, Ghosts & Spectres. I've still got my copy, and the painted illustrations in it still give me the creeps. I remember reading it on a sunny summer's day, aged about ten, and within minutes being so terrified I couldn't bring myself to took out the window, lest the ghostly nun of Borley Rectory be there, looking in at me, as she looked in on the Bull family so frequently. Eventually, I read, the rector was forced to brick up the dining-room window.

Brr.

So I think it's fair to say that I was pretty excited to find that someone had finally dramatised the story of the Borley Rectory haunting. Neil Spring's book The Ghost Hunters tackles the haunting of the house, and it's investigation by Harry Price. Price was one of my heroes as a child; the books I read painted him as a heroic man of science who investigated the most unusual unexplained phenomena the pre-war world could muster. He was a psychic investigator; a ghost-hunter. I must have thought the man had the best job in the world. To this day, I still believe that ghost-hunting ought to be done by English men in tweed who are scrupulous scientists and sift through their evidence in wood-paneled libraries, and not by fat, uncritical middle-aged American southerners who listen to too much Coast To Coast Am.

Great cover.

The story of Price's investigation of Borley Rectory has always been one of my favourite stories of 'scientific' paranormal investigation. As a kid I was mad for the idea of the time between the wars being a world in which intelligent men of science could properly investigate - and maybe just prove - the existence of the supernatural. Price investigated spiritualists, mediums and ghost reports, talking mongooses and even magickal demon-summoning. But his most famous investigation, the one with which he would always be associated, was the haunting of Borley Rectory.

The nun - THE NUN!

Spring rightly focuses on Price in his book, mixing fact and fiction skilfully throughout. His narrator is the fictional Sarah Grey, Price's assistant during his investigations at Borley Rectory. Sarah is a young woman who begins working with Price in 1926. Gradually her life comes to revolve around Price and the Rectory. It's a clever way to make a study of the man, and though Spring doesn't stick scrupulously to the historic record, and isn't afraid to bend the facts to fit the story he's crafted, I feel that he paints a portrait which is correct in tone if not in detail. Harry Price was a showman as well as a scientist; as much P. T. Barnum as he was Sherlock Holmes, and was in reality frequently accused of faking the phenomena he was supposed to be studying. My early fears that this aspect of his character would be glossed over in the book in favour of a more clean-cut, heroic version of Harry Price, were thankfully unfounded.

Harry Price - who you gonna call?

When Sarah first meets Price, he's a confirmed skeptic who delights in exposing false mediums. But when they hear stories about 'The Most Haunted House In England', they wonder if Borley Rectory just might be the case that changes Price's beliefs. Price and Sarah meet the various inhabitants of Borley Rectory (who are frequently not what they seem) and become involved in the haunting - and Sarah comes to wonder if the horror at the Rectory has come to take over her own life.

There were a few little things that didn't quite work for me in this book. The story takes place over many years, with years sometimes passing in just a few lines. This has been done to follow the true story, but it does result in some occasionally odd plotting. Also, there are just a bit too many plot twists, with Price's character flipping and flopping quite a lot as to whether he's a skeptic or a believer, some of his revelations happening off the page and some of his behaviour being a little inconsistent. And there's some clunky dialogue in the opening chapters that didn't sound like anything any real human being would ever say, including a cameo by a historical character who basically turned up and name-dropped a bunch of things that he's famous for.

Borley Rectory

BUT, having got the bitching out of the way, I can say that The Ghost Hunters is a fantastic book. I can't remember the last time I devoured a book as quickly as this one. It took me three days to read, but that's just because real life kept getting in the way. If I'd been left to my own devices, I would have read it in one sitting. And it's not a small book either. It captured my interest and filled my mind. Granted, I was already fascinated by the subject matter, but Spring does the subject proud.

Spring's greatest skill is in his treatment of the supernatural. Just as he straddles the boundary between fact and fiction, he leaves us ever unsure as to whether human agencies are causing the 'haunting' or whether something fantastic is really happening. Like the actual reports of the haunting, the manifestations are mostly low-key but extremely disturbing. There are some real scares to be had in this book, and had without forgetting the complex reality of the Borley Rectory story. The line between truth and lie becomes so tangled that it'd hard to know what to believe or what to expect. many characters have reasons to make up stories about the house, but some of the phenomena remain inexplicable. The sense of mystery, rather than in-your-face horror, is masterful. The nun chilled me just as she did years ago, the seance scenes tapped into my sense of wonder, defeated the cold, logical part of my brain and left me wondering if it was just possible that communication with the dead wasn't all just smoke and mirrors. And it's this dichotomy between belief and skepticism, between the real and the fake, that fuels the plot of the book.

This IS the definitive version of the Borley Rectory story; not the true story, but the legend that Borley Rectory has become. There will never be a better fictional take on it. This book is the closest you'll ever come to spending a night in a haunted house with the first ghost-buster, Harry Price, back when people believed that science was going to prove the existence of life after death. And not just any haunted house, either:

The original.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (2008)

The Age of Wonder sat on my to-read pile for over a year. I go in and out of periods of enjoying non-fiction, and it wasn't until this December that a Christmas reading of Treasure Island got me interested in the18th century again, and I thought that it was time to dust off this tale of Enlightenment science. It's a setting that's a bit earlier than my usual period of interest. Traditionally I've been fascinated by the Victorian period, partly because I love their dress sense, and I've always been turned off by anything involving powdered wigs and ridiculous-looking breeches and high socks. But I remembered reading through the first chapter previously and being struck by the tale of the first Europeans visiting Tahiti, so I cracked into the book for real this month.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

I live near Michael Caine. I just wanted to say that.

I seem to review a lot more books here than movies. There's definitely a paucity of British-Empire-themed movies compared to books, and the movies that have been made are sometimes pretty hard to come across. Though I had virtually no knowledge of this particular film before someone gifted it to me, it's considered something of a classic. Well, who knew? I didn't know just how much I needed to be reminded of why I own a pith helmet.


The Man Who Would Be King is a film version of a Kipling story. Now if you've been following the blog, you'll know that I've recently come around (in a small way) to Kipling after not liking him for years. As such, it's rife with allusions to other works of the Bard of Empire.

Things get off to a fine start with Maurice Jarre's stirring theme, which includes a version of the Irish revolutionary air The Minstrel Boy (though sung with Christian English lyrics). The music contains echoes of nostalgia for a time when big-whiskered men could be big-whiskered men, and could ride out into the wilds of British India's North-West Frontier to Have Adventures.

Christopher Plummer, his days as a Shakespeare-spouting Klingon in Star Trek V (special thanks to my brother for correcting me on that!) still ahead of him, plays Kipling himself in the wraparound sections that give the movie the flavour of a round-the-campfire tale. One night, Kipling is working hard in his newspaper office when a wreck of a man shambles in. Kipling doesn't recognise him until he reveals himself to be one Peachy Carnehan.

'You?' says Kipling in disbelief. Carnehan then replies with one of cinema's great lines:

'The same... and not the same... as the man who sat beside you in a first-class carriage to Malwar Junction, three summers and a thousand years ago.' It's stirring and wonderfully evocative of adventure, like everything in this first section of the movie.

Carnehan reminds Kipling of a similar night some years earlier, when two cheeky but charismatic jack-the-lads entered that selfsame office: Carnehan and his hetero life-mate Daniel Dravit. There's some footage of these ne'er-do-wells in their earlier adventures; wheeling, dealing, throwing respectable Indian citizens out of trains ('Out the window Baboo!) and falling foul of authority. As Dravit says, they know India; her cities and deserts, her palaces and her jails.

'It was detriments like us who built this bloody empire,' snarls Carnehan to one starched-shirt official. He's speaking with more truth than he knows: particularly in the early 19th-century, it was irresponsible and irrepressible characters such as 'Rajah' James Brooke, Stamford Raffles and John Nicholson who enlarged the British Empire by literally carving out kingdoms for themselves in the East, with or without official consent from London.

And this is precisely what Carnehan and Dravit intent to do. With Kipling as a witness, they sign a contract stating that they are never to rest, nor to dally with drink nor women until they are kings of the central Asian state of Kafiristan. They have chosen this place - now in modern-day Afghanistan - because it is inaccessible and little-known. When Kipling wrote the original story, Kafiristan didn't have long to wait before becoming first a Muslim state and then a vassal of the British Empire for real.

Having signed the document, the two leave Kipling and set off for some adventure (and some serious pith-helmetage). They head for the Khyber pass - realised most convincingly by the stunning Moroccan scenery -and come across Private Mulvaney, a Kipling character from Soldiers Three. Dravit mentions that the last time he came through this way he was with General 'Bobs' Roberts, a reference to the 2nd Anglo-Afghan war of 1879. And so they make their way towards Kafiristan, and destiny.

It's an amazing first act. And it's almost an amazing movie.

It's got all the elements of a classic adventure movie: brave, likeable and mischevious heroes, a clear quest, an exotic land. But there's something about the pacing and the plotting that feels wrong. As soon as they two men begin assembling their little empire the whole thing feels more like heavy-handed allegory than an adventure. The beats come slowly and predictably, and the plot feels less driven by characters than by a godlike story-teller who wants the characters to learn an IMPORTANT LESSON. It's still a good movie, and is never less than watchable. But for me, it doesn't quite make it up into the top category.

Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds (1978)

-->

Deep breath… and now, an exorcism of sorts.

A piece of classic 19^th-century science-fiction - and one that probably stands as my favourite – that I’ve steadfastly refused so far to review is H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (WOTW, as I’m going to call it). I’m not really sure why this is. Perhaps I’m just scared of getting bogged down in a marsh of Wells’ metaphors. WOTW is after all a thematically rich story that manages to comment on science, evolution, religion, colonialism, and the human condition. I have a lot to say about the book. It’s not easy to write an effective piece of commentary on such a dense work by scribbling furiously on the back of a beermat in the downtime between organising interplanetary smuggling runs and solving supernatural-related crimes for beautiful widows, all over the course of a burboun-soaked weekend (that’s how I’d like you to imagine I write all my reviews).

Instead I’m going to take the easier option first and talk about a later adaptation of the book: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds (or JWMVOTWOTW, as I’m probably not going to be calling it).

Which is a 1970s progressive-rock opera retelling of the tale.

With disco elements.

Oh yeah, and it’s set in the original Victorian time period.

Maybe this isn’t really the easy option.

Well, I’m going to make things slightly easier for myself by talking about how I first came across this batshit crazy musical. As a kid in the early 90s, I had a neighbour whose older sister knew that we liked a bit of sci-fi. Back then, sci-fi in movies or other media wasn’t really easy to come by though, and besides a few blurry, overwatched, taped-off-the-English-channels VHS versions of Jurassic Park and, um, Innerspace, we didn’t get exposed to an awful lot of scifi. Okay, there was Star Trek The Next Generation, but every eight-year-old knew that Star Trek wasn’t real sci-fi because there was too much talking and standing around and their ships moved real slow like submarines instead of fast with pew-pew-pew lasers like the ships out of Star Wars. And besides, there weren’t any dinosaurs or giant robots. Note that these are all lessons Star Trekitself has learned since: JJ Abrams’ new Trekhas lots of creatures and fast ships and no people standing around talking whatsoever, and definitely nothing that would make you think above the level of an eight-year-old. That’s called progress.

So the sister, bless her, presumably hearing the bizarre combination of Richard Burton’s drunken ramblings, blood-freezingly terrifying string music, and mysterious alien encounters that opens Jeff Wayne’s opus, didn’t think gee, that’s fucked up, what the hell was wrong with people in the 70s like any normal person would, but instead thought hey, my little bro and his weird friends sure would like this, where’d I put that Jason Donovan cassette where he vomits during the hidden track? I sure could tape over that shit!

So yeah, big thanks to her. We used to listen to the cassette in a garden shed that was our hangout. It had nice chairs and a boombox (well we probably called it a ghetto blaster back then, but you know, the world has changed for the better since then, so let’s get with it, yeah?). The album went on for what felt like hours.

And we usually emerged completely traumatised.

Uh-oh.

Seriously, I don’t think I ever equated horror with sci-fi before hearing Jeff Wayne’s lunatic endevour. Perhaps I was just a bit too young to deal with it, but for whatever reason the story always struck me as being very disturbing. I’d heard of War of the Worlds before and was desperate to read the book, but I’d never come across a copy of it, and the Jeff Wayne version was the first time I heard the story told in any detail. And was it ever heavy: Martians land in Woking in Surrey; cold, inscrutable and utterly alien Martians that set innocent people on fire and burned them to a crisp with weapons no humans can understand. Then they proceed to destroy (English) civilisation, leaving mankind a shallow wreck of its former self, peopled by lunatics and delusionals, with no hope of victory or redemption. There is the infamous 'happy' ending of course, though as a child I found it somewhat tacked-on. I found the description of the alien invasion chillingly realistic and believable, but found the quick-fix-it ending (nothing the humans do succeeds; the Martians are killed by bacteria) unconvincing and therefore unconsoling. And all of this set to the most otherworldly sounds that British 70s prog-rock could offer.

The red weed: H. G. Wells was ahead of the game with the whole 'invasive alien species' thing.

 

 A couple of years later, we discovered that another neighbour living down the road had the actual LP from the 70s. This opened a whole new level of trauma: the paintings of the Martians themselves contained within the booklet and on the front cover. The tripods just looked so alien; they seemed so organic with their insect eyes that we were unsure whether they were supposed to be the Martians themselves or if they were machines controlled from within, which only added to the horror. This lunatic notion, though clearly contradicted by the text, was due largely to one image of crows tearing bright red strips of flesh from a fallen tripod. But for me, the most stirring illustration was of a tripod destroying a London street, with Victorian pedestrians fleeing in terror, passing so close to the ‘camera’ that we can see the blood and sweat and fear on their faces. Horrifying. When I read the book now, I see it as an ingenius and original book in which the Martians are stand-ins for various issues that troubled the Victorian psyche. Back then, I couldn’t see anything other than the sheer horror of the invasion.

Aaaargh!

 

  














And possibly the most important factor that made this traumatic for me was that it was all happening in the 19^thcentury. I was deeply troubled that these people were being confronted by a horror that they had no means of understanding, never mind combating. They used useless superstition (ie, religion) to try to explain what was happening, because the truth was beyond anything they could understand. I found this incredibly sad.

Partly because of this exposure at an impressionable age, and partly because unlike virtually every other adaptation (that shitty Asylum movie never happened lalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU) the album keeps the Victorian setting of the original, it has always stuck with me as being the definitive version of the tale. Even as I read the book, and I’ve read it many times, when I imagine the Martian tripods wreaking havoc on small-town Surrey, it’s Wayne’s iconic silver green-bug-eyed tripods that I see. When the tripods raise their hoods to utter a call of triumph across the Home Counties landscape, it’s Wayne’s terrifying UULLLLLAAAAAAAAA that I hear. And I know that I’m not alone: a quick gander at the Amazon review for the album confirms that for many people, Jeff Wayne’s Warremains a disturbing and definitive retelling of Wells’ original.

Years later, I bought a 2-disc CD version of the album at HMV out of curiosity. It had always remained in my head as this incredibly spooky, terrifying story. And when I put on the disc that first time, I was absolutely flabbergasted …

…at how discoit was.

It’s amazing how things affect you as a child, and it’s amazing how your mind filters out the stuff that’s not meaningful to you. Back then, it was the visceral alien-invasion stuff that resonated. I didn’t really know or care what disco was, so that part of the experience simply washed over me. There’s no denying that the album is very 70s. But once Richard Burton’s stern (though surely not sober) voice began that ominous narration that I still know off by heart so many years later, and those eerie strings started their staccato wailing, something deep inside rumbled, my spine tingled with real fear, and I looked to the skies with trepidation.

SHE'S BEEN TAKEN... by the Martians.