February 2024. Strange People by Frank Edwards
1961, New Saucerian, 192 pages. Written in English, read in English.
When I was young, there was a youth magazine which had a weekly feature called Stranger than Fiction — that was my favorite, the part of the magazine I always flipped to right away whenever I had a chance to read it. Those were non-fiction tales of the paranormal — ghosts, paranormal abilities, monsters, freak coincidences, clairvoyance. Once a year, a book came out collecting some of the stories published in that feature, and I have purchased and devoured these books as well.
Strange People was first published in 1961, and some careful math shows that David Bowie was 14 at the time. Which would make his fascination with the subject matter understandable — at least in my mind. Strange People concerns itself with the paranormal, and extraordinary ability aspect, of real people — no monsters, UFOs or ghosts are included in the book, but there are a lot of stories — some very short, some much longer — about some people in history and their unexplained abilities. Edwards starts the book with a section taxonomizing what can be more crudely refered to as circus freaks — the tallest and smallest people in history; the most obese people in history; people with conditions causing them to grow hair all over their face and body; people with extraordinary deformities (including an elephant man who is not Joseph Merrick); and the most fascinating part in my eyes — people who have retained parts of their twins when they were born — people with extra limbs, extra eyes, sometimes extra faces.
After exhausting that subject matter, Edwards moves briefly to discuss savants — ordinary people, sometimes with a less than average intelligence, who had incredible abilities in one area, like rapid mental calculation or a very advanced memory, and then, on to more interesting cases — some of which refer to people who have evolved incredible abilities while being comatose; some refer to people with incredible clairvoyance abilities; some refer to strange coincidences.
The stories are not exhaustively researched, nor is there necessarily enough information to determine if they’re demonstrably true — but that is not Edwards’ point — his point is to shed some light, a few windows, into the possibilities of the human psyche, and to the abilities that some day we may all be able to share — abnormalities that may one day become normalities, or, the sheer luck that some people have by gaining abilities that others don’t have.
The March 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford
