Are aliens kidnapping the snowmobilers from the hills around Stratton?

You might think so if you labored through “River of Fear” (Morningstar Communications, 2003) by Rod Davis. Davis, who owns land in the Stratton area and loves to snowmobile, tells us that a “circle of distorted air” (CDA) first absorbs birds, then deer, then the family pet, snowmobiles and their riders and finally, airplanes and their passengers.

On the book jacket, Sandy Isgro, a waitress at White Wolf Restaurant in Stratton, said “River of Fear” is an “accurate description” of winter in the Maine woods and “true-to-life stories about things that really do happen in the Maine woods.”

Rich Day of Porter is quoted as saying that the book “is pretty close to being a true story.”

Before I ran for my life, I decided to call Isgro and Day, in case they, too, had been kidnapped. Both took a few steps back from their jacket blurbs.

Isgro said there have been no actual alien kidnappings, but there are places in the woods around Stratton “where you can’t get a compass reading.” A week earlier, White Wolf Restaurant patrons went outside to the parking lot where they watched “strange lights in the sky which zipped one way, then the other.” While hunting for fiddleheads in the woods,

Isgro lost several hours until people came looking for her. She said there also have been stories of hunters who became disoriented in places around Stratton they had hunted for decades, then lost some time. But she admitted “that there are no little green men coming to take me away.”

Day agreed that snowmobile kidnappings had not actually occurred, but numerous stories exist about riders becoming “disoriented” for several hours at a time in the woods around Stratton.

It was only after I labored through the 374 pages of “River of Fear” seeking, finally, a resolution to the loss of people and things to the “CDA” that I realized this was only the first book in a trilogy and I would have to get the other two installments to find out what happened.

No thanks.

“River of Fear,” like too many horror novels and movies, suffers from the “cellar stairs syndrome.”

You know the scene. A teenage baby sitter is alone in the house when she hears a noise in the cellar. The rest of her family has already been butchered and placed in a food processor, but, for reasons unknown, she stays in the house instead of running screaming down Main Street to the police, National Guard or FBI. When she hears the noise, naturally she picks up the (dying) flashlight and walks down the (creaking) cellar stairs to confront the huge and hairy monster.

In the book, Rob Day and his dog Rudy (gratingly called Toot-man about 300 times) are taking a winter walk in the woods when silence descends around a familiar beaver pond. Then a CDA appears above the pond and swallows a hawk, which had the misfortune of flying by.

This alone would be enough to send me screaming to the safety of the Rangeley Inn.

Not Rob.

He calmly returns to his cabin and tells his wife about the disappearance. She is not alarmed, either. Obviously the Days are made of sterner stuff. As their pets and neighbors gradually disappear into the CDA, the couple display an alarming, inhuman lack of concern which prohibits us from identifying or empathizing with them on any level. Eventually a pilot friend calmly comes for a visit with his sophisticated gear to record the electronic activity from the CDA.

In an expansion of the cellar stairs syndrome the two men actually fly from the Rangeley Airport over the Stratton hills to track the CDA. Not surprisingly, the CDA reacts with a burst of energy which comes close to ending the plane, the adventure and the book. I found myself rooting for the CDA as I turned page after page, waiting for some resolution, any resolution.

This is not the “page turner” designation that most books seek. The book is so poorly produced that a large paragraph is repeated on page 232. When driving a car, one character stepped on the “breaks” instead of the brakes, which most people use.

This group simply does not know the meaning of panic. Even when the aliens finally appear (first in leisure suits, then aboard snowmobiles) Rob and company calmly stay in their cabin instead of fleeing for their lives. Finally, in an improbable fistfight with the aliens (while the visitors are trapping animals with Havahart Traps), the visitors admit they are from a parallel universe.

If the aliens have the ability to visit from that parallel universe, wouldn’t they have better technology than snowmobiles? Wouldn’t they have the power to survive (and win) a snowy fistfight?

These were some of the questions I pondered while I turned page after page.

In an interview on his Web site, Davis said his interest in the paranormal stemmed from an incident where he lost some time in Las Vegas.

I have lost some time, too. The time it took to read “River of Fear.”

Emmet Meara’s weekly column appears Saturdays in the Style section. He can be reached at emmetmeara@msn.com.