Shaverology: A Shaver Mystery Home Companion - Paperback

by Richard D. Horton (Contribution by), Richard Toronto (Author)

Shaverology, the sequel to Richard Toronto's groundbreaking War Over Lemuria, is an encore performance of two of science fiction's most controversial figures: Richard S. Shaver and Raymond A. Palmer.

Shaverology contains previously unpublished accounts from the people who knew these two men best. It answers questions that have been on the minds of science fiction fans for years: was Ray Palmer an unrepentant sci-fi hoaxer, as his critics claim, or was he a true believer? Did Richard Shaver really believe his claims of mutant robots living inside the earth, or did he disavow the entire Shaver Mystery on his deathbed? These questions and many more are answered in Shaverology.

Shaverology is your ticket to sunny Palm Springs, and the home of William L. Hamling, the man who made Shaver a wanted criminal. We'll take a side trip to Richard Shaver's rock-strewn Wisconsin farm, and even better, to Ray Palmer's vast, uncharted mind. And here's something you will find nowhere else: two chapters written by the daughters of both Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver, full of details that only a family member would know.

The angst, treachery, suspicion, and hope that comprised the Shaver Mystery all converge in Shaverology. With more than 170 illustrations from the author's personal files, Shaverology contains rare, never-before-published Shaver Mystery artifacts.

A Shaver Mystery Home Companion is a self-guided tour of the minds and lives of the two men that made one of the craziest science fiction promotions of all time. So, climb aboard the Shaver Mystery for a wild ride to another era.

Author Biography

In 1972 Richard S. Shaver opened a letter from an inquisitive California kid named Richard Toronto. As the story goes, Shaver's reply changed Toronto's life forever. For the next four years until Shaver's death in 1975, Toronto enrolled in Shaver's rock book correspondence course, where Shaver encouraged him to photograph rocks and become a writer. A few years after Shaver's death, Toronto founded Shavertron, a fanzine for Shaver Mystery buffs. In time it gathered a cult following, keeping Shaver's memory alive for 29 issues from 1979 to 1992 as "The Only Source of Post-Deluge Shaverania." It took another 35 years before Toronto wrote the book that became Shaver's first published biography: War Over Lemuria. Since its publication in 2013, Toronto's California-based Shavertron Press has produced several ground-breaking new works on Shaver and the Mystery. ROKFOGO, a two-volume set devoted entirely to Shaver's Outsider Art career of painting and photography, was the first of its kind. The Shavertron collection, Toronto says, is his farewell to Shaver, as he plans to gafiate from the Shaver Mystery in 2014. Toronto attended San Francisco and Sacramento State Universities, graduating in 1994 with a BA in Journalism. He worked in the Arts in Mental Health program at Napa State Hospital in Napa, California, where he taught photography to the criminally insane. He also covered the arts and entertainment beat, among others, as a reporter for a suburban daily newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first magazine article about Richard S. Shaver appeared in Beyond Reality magazine in 1976. In 2002 he converted Shavertron to an E-zine, where it can be found at www.shavertron.com to this day.