Most folks, if they remember the term, "the fickle finger of fate," at all, remember it from ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN. But that classic series didn't start until 1968. There was also a very forgettable movie starring Tab Hunter. Before either of those, however, was this satirical novel by John Keel with cover and illustrations by the great MAD artist Al Jaffee.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
The Fickle Finger of Fate by John Keel
Most folks, if they remember the term, "the fickle finger of fate," at all, remember it from ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN. But that classic series didn't start until 1968. There was also a very forgettable movie starring Tab Hunter. Before either of those, however, was this satirical novel by John Keel with cover and illustrations by the great MAD artist Al Jaffee.
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I heard Patty Duke use the term today on the Patty Duke show (Me TV?), which apparently went off the air in 1966 (when this book was published), so she might have beat them all. (It was some episode where she replaced a gold bracelet with a phony.)
ReplyDeleteJohn A. Keel is best known today as the author of a series of very strange UFO / cryptozoology / generally weird books in the 1960s and 1970s (often with covers by Frank Frazetta in the paperback editions), the best known of which, "The Mothman Prophecies" was later adapted into a film starring Richard Gere. He was one of the first UFOlogy writers to claim that UFO inhabitants, Bigfoot, elf sightings in the middle ages, Men in Black, etc. were all different manifestations of the same phenomenon - "ultra terrestrials" rather than extraterrestrials - earth-bound entities probably closest to Native American trickster legends. An odd duck but a good writer.
ReplyDelete- Mike C.