OUT PAST THE CAMPFIRE LIGHT: Hauntings, Horrors, and Unsolved Mysteries of the Great Outdoors, Troy Taylor, 275pp, illustrated, indexed, Whitechapel Press, $18.95
Troy Taylor tackles a broader subject than usual, sidestepping his stories of haunts and hauntings with a look at the outdoors. It's not that he ignores ghost stories, but he also brings in Bigfoot, lost treasure, mysterious disappearances, the Donner party, and other unusual occurences.
As always, Troy offers a very readable and entertaining book.
Everybody has heard about the Donner party being stranded in the mountains and driven by starvation to turn to cannabalism. Here Taylor presents a thorough summary of the tragic tale. He also presents a quick history of the Bigfoot phenomenon, a topic which is appropriate for the book although, as he admits, somewhat outside his usual area of interest. Personally, I found special interest in the treasure of the Superstitition Mountain (a complicated multi-peak formation often erroneously referred to in the plural), having written a magazine article on the subject that was never printed.
Taylor doesn't stint on ghost stories, his real specialty, offering plenty of background (ever notice that actual ghost stories are really pretty boring without the background?...somebody once heard footsteps, somebody else saw movement, etc.). Taylor has admitted that he's telling history, just in the context of ghost stories.
Nevertheless, there's plenty of other material for the reader interested in a broader view of the bizarre and unusual.
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