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has been visited by and has established close relations with an alien race, the maseni. These are humanoid creatures with thick, pallid skin, bulbous foreheads, deepset yellow eyes, slit mouths and finger-sized tentacles where ringers should be. Naturally, there has been severe cultural shock here on Earth. And the maseni haven't helped things much. It seems they have always been able to contact the supernatural analogue of their world, and they take ghosts, werewolves, and other such creatures for granted. When they come to Earth, they bring their own other-worldly creatures with them—besides showing mankind how to open relations with the supernatural creatures of their own race. The result is a world of men, maseni, and the supernatural creatures of both races. The world borders on chaos, but the maseni assure Earthmen that it will only take a century or so for us to learn to live in harmony with our supernatural brethren. Meanwhile, we must deal with vampires (and their like) as well as with maseni; and the resultant hoaxes, murders, plots, and counterplots require a specialist in untying complex knots. We have two specialists, our lead characters. (All this background is worked into the first few chapters, as the plot develops.)
    Characters
. Our specialists are Jessie Blake, a former Interpol operative and now a private investigator who specializes in cases involving the maseni and supernatural creatures—and his aide and friend, Brutus. Brutus is, of course, the Hell Hound, a supernatural beast whose form is that of a large dog perhaps bigger than a husky Great Dane. Brutus has the soul of a man condemned to Hell two thousand years ago, but he's forgotten who he was in his human form. He can, of course, reason as well as a man and perhaps better, and he can speak. He and Blake met while Blake was thinking of quitting Interpol. Brutus has worked off his debt in Hell and could either accept final rest or reincarnation, but he enjoys being a Hell Hound. They decided to team up, to mutual advantage, and formed their own detective agency four years ago. They've maintained an infallible record. The maseni have only arrived seven years before; there is one hell of a lot of terror and confusion—and more than a little of running amok.
    Theme
. The overall theme of the book is that man makes his own fate, creates his own heavens and hells. This is fortified by the nature of the supernatural creatures themselves, who are governed in part by what men have always believed about them. A vampire, for instance, really does have to hide from the sun, but only because generations of belief in this facet of the superstition, on the part of the
real
world people, has led to a deep and deadly psychological fear of sunlight on the part of vampires.
    Tone
. The tone of
The Haunted Earth
is of underlying humor, while containing as much suspense and terror as possible. The book is fast-paced, fast-action adventure, done to absorb the reader's attention with this complex future society.
    The enclosed sample chapter is the first chapter of "Book One: The Alien Graveyard." The remainder of that section of the novel will run thus: Returning to their office, they meet their new client, a distraught maseni. The maseni's brood brother, an alien named Tesserax, has supposedly died and been buried in the special maseni cemetery outside of Los Angeles where maseni government people permanently stationed on Earth are quartered. The family was not notified until long after burial, and no service was held. The maseni seems to feel that something suspicious is going on, and he hires Jessie and Brutus to look into matters. Formal application for disinterment has been refused, and the higher maseni officials appear to be clouding the issue of Tesserax's death. Digging into the case, Jessie and Brutus discover that other high-ranking maseni have been reported dead and have disappeared in similar suspicious circumstances. Their investigation leads them among supernatural maseni haunts, into encounters with a variety of murderous spectres who seem intent on stopping the investigation. In a post-midnight raid on the cemetery and a bit of grave robbing, they discover that there is no body in Tesserax's grave. Caught in the act, they are arrested by maseni soldiers, thrown into jail and, on the following day, are introduced to Tesserax himself, who is not, after all, dead.
    Tesserax explains that various high-ranking maseni on Earth
have been secretly