In the spirit of the season, two books from different ends of the spectrum:
PASSING STRANGE: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors, by Joseph A. Citro; Chapters; 320 pages; $19.95.
Joseph Citro gives me the creeps - which is exactly what he sets out to do in this collection of well-documented but never truly explained happenings from New England. The title comes from an adopted aunt who died in 1975 at the age of 100. If something was strange, the aunt would say so. "But if an event surpassed even that, if something was exceptionally uncanny, she'd say, `That's passing strange.' " And that's exactly what these tales are.
Citro, himself a native of Vermont, has only experienced these things secondhand, he says. But as a writer and as producer of a "New England History and Mystery" program for public radio, he has collected a wide variety of stories that fall under the strange-but-true heading.
There are the requisite ghost stories, of course, but much more: pale-skinned demons with red eyes that appear to numerous witnesses; Men in Black, who spook UFO investigators; water that pours unexpectedly from dry walls; big, hairy beasties; bodies that won't stay dead; doctors that never die.
Citro traces the rise of the spiritualism movement in New England - the beginning of contact with the spirit world by seances and mediums (but only alludes to the Salem witches; that story has been well-told elsewhere, he says).
And all of his stories are supposedly true. He injects an occasional note of skepticism and offers a possible other explanation here and there, but he lets most of the stories stand on their own merits, passing along the documentation he has found.
Many of the creepy stories occurred in the olden days (we are happy to say), but there are also tales from the 1950s and '60s and later - enough that it does make you wonder about all that supposedly goes on in this old world of ours.
THE BOOK OF THE SPIDER: from Arachnophobia to the Love of Spiders, by Paul Hillyard; Random House; 218 pages; $25.
Some people might find Paul Hillyard equally creepy in an entirely different way; he's a man who not only tolerates spiders but LIKES them. And while he admits that of all the creepy crawlies out there, spiders are one that freaks a lot of people out, he also thinks that if people understood how amazing and interesting spiders were they might not be so afraid.
In his book Hillyard, an arachnologist at the Natural History Museum in London, covers the full range of spiderhood - from folklore and myth to scientific studies. He looks at various kinds of spiders and discusses the intricacies of web building.
The text is readable and interesting, filled such such bits of information as:
- There are 35,000 known species of spiders. Only about 500 are capable of inflicting a "significant" bite on humans.
- The study of spiders goes back to Aristotle. The first known book on spiders was an 80-page tome put together in 1544 by one Caelius Secundus Curio.
- The largest spider has a body about 4 inches long.
- In Kentucky, it was believed that spiders eaten by the handful on bread and butter would cure constipation (a case of the cure being worse than the complaint?).
And Hillyard also notes that the world needs spiders - they play a significant role both as a predator of insects and as a source of food for birds and other animals.
You don't have to love them, but you can at least better appreciate them.