DISASTER

And so it begins... I'd been waiting for something extraordinary to start things off with and during this wait, and excessive twiddling of thumb, I realized it's better to just start with whatever presents itself. So I grab a paperback off a shelf and here we go.

Troy Allen, Disaster. Barclay House. 1974 Paperback Original.

This is my favorite disaster book ever, and I've never actually finished it. What makes this book stand out is the beautifully overdone prose that graces the covers. As a lover of the comically awful, this leaves me speechless. Whatever defect I possess that makes me love such things as the films of Coleman Francis as much as I do is also to blame for my love of the back cover of Disaster. Scanning this just now, I laughed out loud again, even though I've read this countless times. It's as if it was written for me. I would quote my favorite passages here, but that would pretty much be the entire text of the back cover. So, to avoid further typing, here is the back cover which I will let speak for itself.



Sadly, the prose within is much more tame. I've read small portions of it now and again, scanned through it more often, looking for something that might jump out at me with its awfulness but it just sits there in its mediocrity. My guess is an overzealous copywriter composed the cover text. And I applaud him with a retyping of the first stanza of his now-poem, "Disaster".

DISASTER

killer winds that swoop down without warning

into crowded streets,

tearing heads and arms from twisting bodies

and leaving torn human trunks

streaming blood...

winds strong enough to dash a man

against a brick wall and

leave nothing but a bloody blob

of pressed flesh

and crumbled

bones!

The publisher Barclay House evidently published some interesting titles back in the day: Orality by the science fiction publisher Richard E. Geis; Oral Sex and the Teenager by H. Hadley Williams; and Black Sex by Aaron J. Abelard. Other titles are Savvy Secrets of a Teen Sex Swinger, Teen Sex '69, Cycle Sex, The Mattress Girls, and, of course, Scatology by Harvey J. Leathem, M.D. with Hugh Jones. And no, I don't have any of those (yet).