Stunning artwork from 'Klumpok' in Stranger Than People (1968)
I owe a great deal to a wonderful but sadly long-since-forgotten compendium of famous true-life and fictitious mysteries entitled Stranger Than People – as I explained in the introduction to one of my own volumes, Dr Shuker’s Casebook (2008):
Here I am with the two books that sparked my lifelong interest in cryptozoology and other subjects of mystery (Dr Karl Shuker)
“It is well known that my passion for cryptozoology was ignited by the 1972 Paladin paperback reprint of Dr Bernard Heuvelmans’s classic tome On the Track of Unknown Animals, bought for me as a birthday present by my mother when I was around 13 years old. However, my interest in mysterious phenomena as a whole stemmed from an even earlier present – a copy of Stranger Than People, an enthralling compendium of mysteries from fact and fiction, published in 1968 by YWP, and aimed at older children and teenagers, which I saw one day in the Walsall branch of W.H. Smith when I was 8 or 9 years old, and was duly purchased for me as usual by my mother.
“Within its informative, beautifully-illustrated pages I read with fascination – and fear – about Nessie and the kraken, vampires and werewolves, the Colossus of Rhodes and Von Kempelen’s mechanical chess player, dinosaurs and the minotaur, witches and zombies, yetis and mermaids, leprechauns and trolls, Herne the Hunter and Moby Dick, giants and the cyclops, feral children, the psychic powers of Edgar Cayce, and lots more. It even included two original – and quite superb - sci-fi short stories: ‘Klumpok’, about giant ant-like statues found on Mars and what happened when one of them was brought back to Earth; and ‘The Yellow Monster of Sundra Strait’, in which a giant transparent globe containing an enormous spider-like entity rises up out of the ocean; plus a thrilling (and chilling) fantasy tale, ‘Devil Tiger’, featuring a royal but malevolent weretiger that could only be killed with a golden bullet.
“Needless to say, I re-read the poor book so many times that it quite literally fell apart, and was eventually discarded by my parents. After I discovered its loss, I spent many years scouring every bookshop for another copy, but none could be found. Not even Hay-on-Wye – world-famous as ‘The Town of Books’ with over 40 secondhand bookshops – could oblige. A few years ago, however, the Library Angel was clearly at work, because one Tuesday, walking into the bric-a-brac market held on that day each week in my home town of Wednesbury, on the very first stall that I approached I saw a near-pristine copy of Stranger Than People! Needless to say, I bought it, and to this day it remains the only copy that I have ever seen since my original one.”
Indeed, due to this book’s great scarcity today, it recently occurred to me that few people will have been fortunate enough to have ever read any of those marvellous short stories from it that I mentioned above.
Consequently, after more than 40 years, utilising the Fair Dealing/Fair Use convention I am delighted to be able to rectify this sad situation by presenting here in The Eclectarium of Doctor Shuker, in the context of review, and on an entirely non-commercial basis, my own personal favourite – Klumpok.
Just click on the following scans for readily readable enlargements of the original pages (pp. 86-92) from Stranger Than People, which also reveal the stunning artwork that accompanied this story. (Unfortunately, I am unable to name-check either the author or the artist responsible for Klumpok, because no credits of any kind were given in Stranger Than People for this particular story.)
I hope that you enjoy Klumpok just as much as I did – and still do:
And click here to read the second gripping original sci-fi short story that appeared in Stranger Than People - 'The Yellow Monster of Sundra Strait'.
