Review by William Rowlandson – Damned facts: Fortean essays on religion, folklore and the paranormal ed. Jack Hunter
First published in: Time and Mind, 13:1, 111-113
Some writers are influential enough to have their own adjective – Shakespearean, cervantino, Dickensian, Kafkaesque, Orwellian. (Douglas Adams should have one, but Adamsian sounds odd). Charles Fort is honoured not only with the adjective Fortean but also with the noun Forteana. What is, what are, Forteana?
Weird stuff. The creepy goings-on reported over and over in different times and different cultures: ghosts and ghouls, hauntings and hexings, raining frogs and hailing eels, shadowy creatures of the deep and hairy beasts of the hills, imps and goblins, telekinesis, mind-reading, apparitions of the dead, things that go bump in the night…