I am the first one to admit, I spend far too much time on YouTube. On the other hand, it is much less a time waster than Facebook (which I visit occasionally) or Twitter (which I abandoned completely because of the endless and ever-growing tide of liberal hate), and it is often a source of vital information. After all, where else are you going to find short, easily digestible videos about the important things in life--meteor impacts, steampunk music, model building, zombies, woodworking, dogs, UFOs, traffic accidents in Chula Vista, ancient, civilizations, volcanoes, comic books, the Fermi Paradox, abandoned shopping malls, silly rants, science fiction, the foibles of humanity, old TV series, Simulation Theory, and, of course, kittens?
Now and then, something I watch on YouTube leads me to a new book. I found out about The Three Body Problem on a channel called Quinn's Ideas...smart fellow, that Quinn. And all the hullabaloo about that terrible Rings of Power series (Amazon itself soured me with their own teasers, trailers and first fifteen minutes of the series) led me back to rereading LOTR after more than fifty years...overwritten, surely, but Tolkien's facility with the English language makes you wish he had overwritten more. From Gary Lovisi's channel, I learned about a novel featuring HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as characters...a little embarrassing, that one, since it was published twenty years ago, and I should have known about it. And sometimes a channel leads me to an unexpected and pleasant surprise.
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| ISBN 979-8435530322 |
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| ISBN 979-8835857425 |
I've been a fan of the YouTube channel Bedtime Stories for several months. Despite the name, the stories they relate are not the kind of nighttime tales you want to tell your kids before they go to sleep, not if you actually want them to go to sleep. The fare offered touches upon aliens, ghosts, mysteries, unexplained phenomena, true crime, odd deaths and urban legends. They are delivered in a delightful English accent (Yorkshire?) and are accompanied by evocative art with some animated effects. The channel has been around for five years, so I have been slowly working my way through past episodes. In one of them, they mentioned the publication of two books, each containing forty stories previously presented to viewers.
I was hesitant when I heard the word "transcripts," but I took author Richard While at his word that the chapters were more than verbatim copies of the episodes. He was correct. The reader gets revisions, added information, further speculation, and, sometimes, corrections...no matter how thorough one may be in researching, authors are fallible creatures, but one of the strengths of Richard and his colleagues is that they never really close a case, always searching for more information as investigations turn up new data and witnesses.
The stories really are a mixed bag. In the first forty tales we have the high strangeness of "The Ikley Moor Alien," the historical conundrum of "The Flannan Lighthouse Mystery," the very disturbing case of "The Body on the Reservoir" from Brazil, and my favorite, "There is Something in the Woods." In Volume Two, we have "The Lair of the Wendigo," an examination of the folklore also used by Ambrose Bierce in his classic story; "Tales from Skinwalker Ranch," looking into Indian legends and UFOlogy; the urban legend of "The Manchester Pusher," which asks the question of whether a secret serial killer might haunt Manchester, England (much like the perhaps-mythical Smiley Face Killer in America, also covered by the channel); and "The Kentucky Goblins," a UFO/demon story near and dear to me since I used to live just a stone's throw from Hopkinsville in the 70s.
If you like mysteries, unsolved crimes, paranormal phenomena, UFOs, cryptids, urban legends, ancient folklore impinging upon modern life, or wonder why so many people vanish without a trace in the national parks of America, these books might be of interest. They are available in paperback and in less expensive e-book versions. I got the paperbacks, myself. As one reviewer noted, the books are easy to pick up, but hard to put down. Me? All I say is, don't read the stories at bedtime.
