Steward’s new book makes me ponder anew the fascination we humans have with the startling. Be it a fire, a notorious murder, or stories of torture and mayhem, we stop, stare and tingle. Is this impulse a sympathetic response to the victim(s) or is it an adrenaline rush from a vicarious encounter with danger that we seek? True Tales of Terror will elicit both emotions. It is also a work of intelligent research, well written, and therefore worth placement on the speleohistory bookshelf.

Unlike Steward’s fictional work (Tales of Dirt, Danger, and Darkness), this new book is a factual and eclectic collection about underground deaths. One can quibble over the inclusion of a handful of stories of lore (such as the alleged Cave of Treasures where Adam and Eve lived after their expulsion from Eden). But overall the author has compiled a collection of compelling and documented cave incidents from around the world and through the centuries.

For me, the underground gem of this book is the first chapter which details the discovery of a body in a West Virginia cave in 1975 and the subsequent suicide of the presumed murderer, caver Peter Hauer whose decomposed body was found hanging from a tree. The NSS Spelean History Award was posthumously named after Peter Hauer, attesting to the caver’s many speleological contributions; it also shows the caving community’s willingness to pronounce Hauer’s horrific crime as either not conclusively proven (the view of a few of his friends) or, more commonly, a pronouncement that Hauer was ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. This surely is a remarkable and unusual community forgiveness of one of its own. I might add that I am a social worker whose clients have all been committed NGRI of their various crimes, so my interest in the story is inevitably above average. Lacking only in a full description of the caver’s speleo-achievements, excusable because such was outside the book’s scope, I think Steward’s respectful presentation will help secure Peter Hauer a fuller historical reputation befitting one so honored by the NSS.

As mentioned earlier, True Tales of Terror is an eclectic collection, certainly neither exhaustive nor necessarily representative. There are numerous stories of persons being trapped in caves and there murdered (by fires set at the entrance, by guns and bombs, by starvation) and conversely many of the stories concern murderers who hide out in caves, the Sawney Beane family of Scotland being amongst the most notorious. There are accidents and suicides, unresolved disappearances, even a few seemingly paranormal events. The book does not pretend to be comprehensive, which I think fortunate since its readability would inevitably suffer from overabundance; Steward has wisely culled the field for his book. That said, I look forward to a second installment. Paul Steward has garnered a reputation for his interest and research in the speleo-macabre and I am sure he is gathering old and new material to appease the reader’s horrific appetite.