Unidentified bestselling authors, flying saucers, scaring readers

May 13-16, 1975 I read:
The Eiger Sanction, Trevanian

Trevanian is the pseudonym for an author who, as one website puts it, "managed to successfully sell 5 million books without making a single promotional appearance." Or even divulging his real name. Back in 1975, reading mainly books from the public library, I didn't know such a thing as publicity for books existed. Whoever Trevanian was, he excelled as a storyteller, and that was all I wanted to know then. We now know who Trevanian is--Wikipedia has information about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevanian


May 13-16, 2005 I read:
Communion, Whitley Strieber

Because I'm writing a ghost story, I picked this book up again to see if I could discover why it was one of the two or three books I've read in my life that scared me most. A friend recommended it in the mid-1980's and said, "Just don't read it when you're alone."

That seemed like an easy precaution back then. I made sure my husband was home when I read it. But that didn't help, because the author in this supposedly true UFO abduction account was spirited out of bed without disturbing his sleeping family. Worse yet, when you get right down to it, we're always alone in the most existential state, aren't we?

This book scared me so much I didn't want a copy around the house for years. Just seeing the cover art disturbed me. But when I read it again over the last few days, it didn't even summon up a shiver. I'm still going to go back over the structure to see how he got me back then. (There's special technique for doing that--I won't go into that now.)

What happened to dilute the impact?

I think that the success of Communion and similar books, followed by the wave after wave of books, TV shows, and movies on UFO abductions robbed it of some of its impact. Once you've seen The X-Files and Men In Black, Communion seems awfully talky and argumentative. I was inclined to skip the parts where Strieber goes on and on about, "Maybe the real explanation is A, or it could be B, on the other hand it might be C, let's not rule out D, & etc., & etc."

I think that's another thing fear has in common with humor--once you've heard the joke or seen the monster, it has less impact, even to the point of not making you laugh or scream the next time.