Callous Facebook advertisement for a Chernobyl air humidifer

I've seen and heard a lot in my 54½ years, so it's hard to shock me. But I did a disgusted double-take when advertisements for a Chernobyl nuclear power plant air humidifier began showing up in my Facebook feed. 

"Where history meets health," states one advertisement.

"From disaster to delight," states another.

In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in what is now Ukraine, exploded and caught fire during a routine test that went catastrophically wrong due to a critical reactor design flaw. Deaths eventually totaled in the thousands as radioactive contaminants spread across Europe and the Soviet Union.

How many thousands? That's a difficult question to answer, given the uniqueness of the disaster, the complication of tracking radiation across a vast area, and the reality of long-term health effects that take years to emerge. The conservative scientific estimate is that between 4,000 and 16,000 deaths can be directly attributed to Chernobyl. Other assessments that cannot be lightly dismissed put the death total as high as 90,000.

And those are just the human deaths. No one, to my knowledge, has attempted even a ballpark guess on the number of animal deaths.

But, hey, from disaster to delight, right?

Also, more than 300,000 residents across three countries were permanently displaced due to deadly radiation levels.

Here are passages about Chernobyl, then and now, from the 2021 book "Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape," by Cal Flyn:

• "In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear accident, there was a huge spike in ionizing radiation. But many of the radioactive elements released were highly unstable. They self-destruct, sometimes in seconds. Others over weeks. The most feared product of nuclear fission, in terms of its health impact, is iodine-131, which is easily absorbed by the body. Iodine-131 is stored in the thyroid, where is emits harmful beta radiation, damaging flesh in the immediate area or causing either the gland's destruction or, in lower doses, cancer. (At least four thousand cases of thyroid cancers among the children of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia have been attributed to the radionuclide's effect.)"
• "Seventy percent of the [Chernobyl exclusion] zone is now forest. Pripyat is the territory of the birch and the maple and the poplar, and their leaves lie in a thick litter on the tarmac, branches bare and colorless  but for the globes of green mistletoe and the mustard lichen that mists their bark. Matted shrubs crowd their lower reaches, flecked with the red points of rosehips gone soft. Ivy weaves between their legs. Apartment blocks rise like concrete islands from a sea of green. The trees are standing too close, crowding doors and blocking windows, growing in tight against the walls."
• "It is the most radioactive environment on Earth. These radioactive hinterlands are the consequences of human folly, hubris, of deaths made with the devil."

So, yeah, let's not support crap like this humidifier. We can be better.

Greye La Spina, "The Gargoyle" and Spinnerstown, Pennsylvania

Greye La Spina (1880 – 1969) is notable for being one of the relatively few women whose horror and fantasy writings were published in pulp magazines during the first half of the 20th century.

She wrote mostly short stories, but also serials, essays and a couple of novels. Her 1937 essay "On Scaring Oneself into Conniptions" was published in Science-Fantasy Correspondent, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. And I cite it today because it's the first-ever appearance of the word "conniptions" on Papergreat.

"[La Spina] published an incredible number of stories — as many as 100 in a bunch of different genres, including men’s adventure, horror, women’s magazines, etc. In her prime, she was more successful than H.P. Lovecraft, and was very important to the early years of Weird Tales magazine. Readers loved her and clamored for new stories by her. And then, after she stopped writing in the early 1950s, people started to forget her," Michael W. Phillips Jr. told Paul Semel for a 2023 interview posted on Semel's website. 

Phillips had just edited Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, a collection of La Spina's works. You should definitely check out all of Semel's interview with Phillips, which goes into great detail about La Spina's writing career.

Before 2023's Fettered and Other Tales of Terror, others tried to keep La Spina's work in the spotlight over the decades. A significant part of that effort was today's featured 1975 paperback, The Gargoyle. It includes the 1925 serial The Gargoyle and the 1932 novella The Devil's Pool. The book measures 5½ inches by 8½ inches and features a compelling cover illustration by Vincent Napoli (1907-1981).

If you're already intrigued, there are copies on eBay, as of today, for as low as $20. I'm holding onto my copy, because, despite my ongoing downsizing, it's too cool to give up for that low of a price.

This book's publication was the work of (and clearly a labor of love for) Robert Weinberg (1946-2016). According to Fancyclopedia 3, Weinberg was a member of the fanzine community with a huge interest in pulp magazines. That interest led to some big things: "In 1968, Bob began publishing readers guides to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, eventually expanding both to book length and publishing additional guides and books about the pulp magazines and the authors who wrote for them. 1973 saw his publication of WT50, an anniversary tribute to Weird Tales, a magazine to which Bob would acquire the rights in 1979 and help revive. He was editor-in-chief of Arkham House from 2009–16."

For Weinberg's publication of The Gargoyle, the copyright page notes that both of the included stories were reprinted with the permission of Celia La Spina (1900-1982). (She was born Celia Geissler, the daughter of Greye La Spina and Ralph Geissler. After Ralph Geissler died, Greye married Robert La Spina, Baron di Savuto, an Italian aristocrat. According to Geni, Celia married Eduardo La Spina, her stepfather's brother.)

The copyright page also notes that the front cover illustration (Napoli) and lettering (Andrew Brosnatch) are from "the collection of Robert Weinberg." Officially titled The Gargoyle and One Other, this was #3 in Weinberg's series of "Lost Fantasies" and sold for $5 in 1975.

Here's a passage from "The Gargoyle" that perhaps helps to explain why it's subtitled "A Tale of Devil Worship":

"Against this background stood, at irregular intervals, great white crosses before which were sculptured figures in black, figures that made him shudder with uncontrollable horror at their repulsive and abhorrent ugliness. It seemed as if the human imagination had here attained the climax of revolting, horrific distortion and deformity in sculpture and pictorial art. Not a statue, not a painting, but showed the human face and form in such revolting deformity as to send sickly shudders through the observer's sinking frame. The purpose of this ghastly place was obvious ...

"The red light shining everywhere now attracted Luke's attention. It originated in a crystal sphere, hung on almost invisible chains in a shrine just back of the altar."

* * *

One of the niftiest things I came across is that Greye La Spina spent a signficant portion of her life in rural Pennsylvania! An article in the March 10, 1946, edition of Allentown's Sunday Call-Chronicle is headlined "Greye la Spina, Weaves Weird Tales And Tapestries, Finds Life Is 'Fun' Amidst Solitudes of Spinnerstown."

Spinnerstown (new to me!) is a census-designated place in northwest Bucks County. It has a hotel that's been in operation since 1811, and one of the notable (and regrettable) incidents in the hamlet's history is that a massive, 400-year-old chestnut tree was blown up with dynamite in 1919. 

According to the Sunday Call-Chronicle article, La Spina moved to Spinnerstown around 1926, "seeking solitude and peace in the Pennsylvania countryside after the turmoil of life in Brooklyn." 

I love the article's summary of how La Spina's writing career began: "[In 1920] she suddenly got the urge to write down some of her observations on the occult. 'I decided to write a werewolf story, so I sat down, dashed it off and sent it to Street and Smith. They liked it, and wrote me asking for more.'"

She told that newspaper that she planned to remain in Spinnerstown, despite concerns regarding a theory that the East Coast could be turned into a swamp by rising oceans. (My thought: She may have been reading too much Edgar Cayce.)

She also planned to stay there because, in her words, "I have a one-legged cat-bird who comes and sings in the garden. I don't know what happened to his other leg, but I should hate to leave him."

No animals left behind is a sentiment I can get behind, too.

Stubby seemed like the best housecat to pair with this book. It should be known, though, 

that this particular black cat likes belly rubs and purrs very loudly at meal time.