Read in the Light

Scary Books, Kiddies!

One Dark Night – Troy Taylor

 LOTS OF FUN, A FEW FORMAT BOOBOOS

             This is a fun read and well written.  Taylor is a good narrator.  He bundles these tales of mysterious figures and odd crazes as tales of “sinister strangers.”  Which is a nice penumbra for topics from clowns trying to grab kids into vans, to so-called black ghosts or vampires American-style.

            I was mildly irritated by Taylor’s inability to decide how to handle an en dash in his text. Sometimes we have a single hyphen, sometimes two hyphens—sometimes in the same paragraph!

Some photo captions have a period at the end, some do not (pp 184-85 for example).

There are a few line-spacing issues near some of the photos, which I have encountered myself when dealing with photos and text in WORD.

            Most of the tales woven by Taylor were news to me.  I bought the book because of its subtitle.  My parents were born and raised in Mattoon—home of the Mad Gasser and his 1944 reign of fear—and to my eternal regret, I never quizzed them on THEIR memories or thoughts anent the fellow.

            I certainly DID NOT know that the Mad Gasser had a very similar precursor, in Virginia, in the winter of 1933-34!

            There are a few proofreading issues, but not a lot.  The most silly is on page 232 when Taylor says that the Mad Gasser case “left an edible mark on our history.”  The correct word, of course, is “indelible.”

            I was very happy to see a bibliography and list of sources at the end.

            Overall, I recommend this book as a sometimes creepy, sometimes wry recounting of some “sinister stranger” tales that you too might not have heard of—until now.

See you on Wednesday!