Thursday 24 June 2021

Pulp Non-Fiction:
The Satan Trap:
Dangers of the Occult

edited by Martin Ebon
(Doubleday, 1976)








A companion piece of sorts to last week’s post on The Satan Seller, I don’t have much to say about this odd hardback - recently liberated from a box of books on its way to the charity shop - which can’t be easily gleaned from perusing the scans above.

As you will note from the list of his other works, Martin Ebon (1917-2006) seems to have been knocking out paranormal tomes of one kind or another at a prolific rate through the ‘70s (having apparently moved on from his previous specialist subject of communism). As such, ‘The Satan Trap’ has a “clips show” kind of feel to it, consisting almost entirely of brief extracts from articles first published in journals edited by… Martin Ebon.

Giving it a skim, it’s all much as one might expect, complete with a hang-wringing introduction citing campus unrest, “rootless frustration”, horror movies and LSD a factors encouraging young Americans to blunder blindly into meddling with forces they cannot understand.

Though I can claim no knowledge of Mr Ebon’s wider oeuvre or personal beliefs, his war-time service in the U.S. State Department and Office of War Information tends to suggest he was no greater fan of the communist regimes he spent much of the ‘50s and ‘60s writing about, causing me to reflect on the unhappy possibility that the poor fellow actually spent his entire career studying things he didn’t like. (There’s a beautiful symmetry to the fact that he published ‘World Communism Today’ in 1948, followed by ‘Witchcraft Today’ in 1971.)

Be that as it may, I do love the photograph of him holding court at the American Society of Psychical Research on the back cover here. I really hope that he kept a human skull on his desk in his wood-panelled study, and had the decency to smoke a pipe whenever naïve young people came to consult him on matters pertaining to the dark arts. I mean, you’d have to really, wouldn’t you?

The interesting cover painting for ‘The Satan Trap’ is by Kurt Vargo, a veteran New York-based artist who appears to still be working today.

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