Strange Creatures from Time and Space

John Keel Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1975)
I read this when I was a kid, as borrowed from a friend at school whose dad was obsessed with such things and had a UFO detector in his back garden - procured through the classifieds in Abduction Monthly or something of the sort. I found a copy in Hay-on-Wye when in my twenties I'd taken to reading more or less just comic books and UFO literature. This changed when I discovered Richard Dawkins around 1995 and went a bit fundamentalist for a while. I got rid of all my crackpot paperbacks but always regretted ditching this one, plus a few by Brad Steiger. Keel and Steiger always seemed to deliver the goods, regardless of whether or not you actually believed any of it.

Here John Keel takes the position that UFOlogy and related paranormal investigations have been historically held back by a desire for logic, or at least for accounts which we can just about believe because they hint at some sort of science-fiction narrative with which we are already familiar - visitors from the stars and so on. Clearly he has a point, and it seems that many well-known accounts of unexplained phenomenon have often left out the weirder details for fear of ridicule; leaving us with the amusing possibility that the more hypothetically probable accounts are going to be the least plausible because anyone feeling inclined to just make something up for chuckles isn't going to bother trying to fence some of the wacky shit related herein as anything which could really happen - therefore maybe it did. John Keel is very much in the tradition of Charles Fort as one who chronicles the improbable or impossible for the sheer joy of contradicting consensus reality.

That said, whilst he writes well and generally stands head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries, Keel is himself not without his blind spots. Much literature of this kind has an unfortunate habit of fixating on established science as the enemy so as to forge a bond with the more paranoid readers who never trusted those book-learnin' guys in the first place. It needs science to be its enemy to the point of refusing even to negotiate, because negotiations will inevitably work in the favour of the other side. Most crucially, science as a scapegoat shifts focus from the fact that there's really not much to say about the bloke who insists he saw a strange light in the sky and it didn't seem like a plane and then he felt a bit funny.

Keel tends not to dwell on the sceptics so much as others often do, but still descends to pointless sniping at what he describes as Type B scientists. Type A are the ones who invent shit, the guys you're not going to pick a fight with because you'll end up looking like a fucking idiot - Edison, Einstein and so on. Type B scientists are the university types which television stations call in when something needs denouncing as light from the planet Venus refracted through swamp gas; or in one specific case to suggest that something weird found washed up on a beach might be the supposedly more prosaic remains of a recently defrosted mammoth, prompting Keel to fume accordingly:

The iceberg hypothesis is not merely unscientific, it is moronic. So far as is known, no animal - modern or prehistoric - has ever been found encased in a floating iceberg.

Which is great except that he invokes the same frozen in an iceberg explanation for some other peculiar beastie discussed a couple of pages later, so it's fine when he makes certain suggestions...

Happily, there's not too much of this kind of defensive argument, and even if he doesn't state it directly, I would guess that Keel appreciates there's not much joy to be had in pouring scorn upon the laws of physics. Indeed, his strength is that he thinks about his subject and even engages in a degree of scepticism over and above that which is customarily adopted by UFOlogists aspiring to present a ludicrous veneer of scientific rigour, a veneer of scientific rigour which tends to exclude all the wackier tales.

The buffs tend to lump everything hopelessly together and try only to categorise the descriptions of the objects which are, as we pointed out earlier, so varied that the data negates itself. We must, to be successful, turn our attention to studying the witnesses and the psychological and physiological effects they experience. The answer to the whole mystery probably lies in that direction, not in the stars.

Leaving aside the major problem that what we have here are essentially anecdotal accounts of anecdotal evidence, this book works because much of this stuff is bananas - hence hugely entertaining, even thought-provoking, and genuinely scary in a few cases - and because while Keel speculates aplenty, he avoids didactic conclusions and never assumes the reader to be either an idiot, or even necessarily on his side.

As to whether I've just re-read a couple of hundred pages of nothing at all, I just don't know. A great many of these accounts describe events which seem to have the logic of a dream or a hallucination - winged creatures rising into the air without said wings actually flapping, for one example - but hallucinations shared by a number of people; and then there are the parallels - similar stories of similar occurrences told by people who have never met. In certain respects we don't actually know much about the human brain and almost certainly hold an excess of faith in what is generally regarded as objective experience, as distinct from the imagined. I'm inclined to wonder if visions of - for example - mothmen with glowing red eyes, might simply turn out to be a glitch of consciousness, just as certain phantom odours can sometimes signify more serious neurological problems; but there doesn't seem to be a single simple explanation for any of this stuff which covers everything, not even the possibility of it all having been made up. The best that can be said is that one hell of a lot of people appear to have experienced something weird, regardless of whether that experience was real in objective terms; and of all people, John Keel does a great job of trying to beat some sense out of the subject.

Half Past Human

T.J. Bass Half Past Human (1971)
I read The Godwhale by the same guy a while back. The Godwhale  was the second of the only two full length novels he wrote. Bass was, or possibly is, some sort of medical geezer, one who has penned a number of serious looking scientific textbooks, and his fiction is heavily informed by a thorough understanding of nutrition intake, codones, phenotypes, mutation, and so on. Accordingly The Godwhale gets off to a frankly astonishing start, describing the miserable existence of future humans sustained by engineered tapeworms inhabiting the sewer pipes of their hive, after which the novel inexplicably dissolves into undifferentiated narrative sludge making it a real struggle to get to that last page. Half Past Human inhabits the same future world of our remote hive-dwelling descendants and, being the first book, it seemed a safe bet. When Bass was good, he was amazing, and he must have done something right if they paid for a second volume of this stuff.

Unfortunately and peculiarly, Half Past Human suffers from the same problems as its sequel, getting off to a great start on a vividly rendered, entirely unfamiliar and seriously weird future Earth. Four-toed humans are crammed into subterranean hives where the dead are recycled as nutrition-rich patties because every little helps, as they say down at Tesco, whilst mechanical agromecks tend crops on the surface, troubled only by small bands of five-toed throwback humans who have reverted to a stone age level of civilisation; and then some other stuff happens for the remaining two thirds of the page count. Some of the other stuff is to do with a robot guitar called Gitar who floats around on his sound box and becomes a major player in the cult of Olga, a pseudo-religious belief system developed from half-remembered knowledge of a colony ship which left Earth many years before; and what I took from this was that not even a fucking robot guitar could save the story.

The craft landed and opened its hatch. Gitar floated out on his peanut magnet's sandwich field. Val nocked an arrow.

'Planning on shooting me?' asked Gitar, pushing the arrow aside with his tractor beam.

What the fuck is a sandwich field? Whilst we're asking, what the blow jobbing sloppy seconds is a peanut magnet when it's at home? This passage appears in the last chapter and it's the first I've heard of either sandwich fields or peanut magnets, although admittedly there may have been some reference I missed whilst zoning out during passages of this general kind:

Walter accepted the massive muscles as a reflection of the physical existence outside the hive. The buckeye's elevated neurohumoral axis resulted in hypertrophy of the vestigial endocrine organs—ten times larger than the Nebish. Kaia's pituitary was so large that Walter could see it with his naked eye. Citizen pituitaries were microscopic. Adipose tissue was almost absent— Cachexia, a Nebish body had a specific gravity of less than 0.85. It always floated. Kaia's body read 1.005. It sank in fresh water.

Well, it would, wouldn't it. Obviously.

The problem is that although it isn't all like that, there's enough of it to get in the way of anything which might actually be trying to tell a story; and so all the hard work which has gone into the kind of science-porn I might find fascinating given a chance, is wasted, resulting in what may as well be derived from a transporter accident involving Richard Dawkins and Mark E. Smith. There's a great book in here somewhere, but then there are forty-seven potentially great books presently sat on my to be read pile which remained untouched whilst I forced myself to finish this shit, and I'm willing to bet that very few of them will present quite such a slog as Half Past Human.

It's probably not so bad as I may have made it sound, but there's a massive margin for how much better it should have been.

The Black Cloud

Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud (1957)
I had been trying to get hold of this one ever since I saw Dawkins rate it on one of those books you read as a kid shows, back when Dawkins was less annoying. The one I ordered from Amazon turned out to be an abridged effort printed for schools, about as thick as an After Eight mint and with half of the already reduced page count taken up by teachers notes and questions along the lines of why did the scientist think the Earth would become colder when the Black Cloud arrived? My friend Andy told me there was no point reading an abridged Black Cloud, so I didn't.

Nevertheless I kept looking because I'd promised myself I would find the thing, and was buoyed along by a vague childhood memory of my granny having fetched another Fred Hoyle science-fiction novel from the mobile library for me to read when I was ill. Only recently have I positively identified said novel as having been Into Deepest Space, not Neutron Star as I remember for some peculiar reason given that the latter title refers to a collection of short stories by Larry Niven. Anyway, I enjoyed Into Deepest Space immensely, so it was probably the first science-fiction novel I read, not counting Doctor Who books based on television shows.

Of course, Fred Hoyle was primarily a scientist, and one who now seems best known for having duffed up Stephen Hawking around the back of the bike sheds on occasions when the latter failed to cough up his dinner money, although the psychological underpinning of the battering was probably something to do with Hawking's theories supplanting Hoyle's steady state model of the universe. Hoyle seems to have been somewhat discredited in recent years, which is a shame as I still think the steady state is a nice idea and not entirely without merit, although some of the stuff he cooked up with that Chandra Wickramasinghe was obviously complete bollocks.

Anyway, I kept an eye open and thus made purchase of two cowritten novels - The Andromeda Breakthrough with John Elliott, and Seven Steps to the Sun with his offspring, Geoffrey Hoyle. They're pretty much unreadable, hard science diluted with a load of crap which I suspect some editor may have suggested would help sell the books - Ian Flemingisms and unconvincing references to the manly pursuit of smoking a pipe whilst making lurve to a beautiful woman. In spite of this, my search continued and has at last been rewarded.

Hard science-fiction is sort of the Paul Weller of science-fiction literature, I suppose - plenty of clenching and suggestions of commitment and less of the prancing around in dresses or talking about feelings; or page after page of top scientists having conversations about different kinds of proton, if you prefer - the kind of thing by which Isaac Asimov made his name. That said, in hard science-fiction terms, Asimov reads like one of Michael Moorcock's more inscrutably peculiar efforts compared to The Black Cloud.

The story is fairly simple - a massive cloud of dark gas approaches the solar system and comes to rest, blocking out the sun. The Earth freezes, everything begins to die, and it looks as though we're fucked until the point at which a group of plucky scientists realise that the cloud is intelligent and that communication is possible, and I won't spoil the rest. Most of this is told in a fashion which I would describe as plodding were I a less patient man, alternating passages reading more like essays than fiction, and droning conversations about protons and temperature differentials amongst numerous tweedy scientists, with the occasional light-hearted cricketing reference just to break it up a bit. It should be terrible, but the reader is quickly accustomed to this somewhat stilted style because that which is discussed, if not quite gripping, is certainly interesting.

Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.

Charles Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn't believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because here we fucking go!!!

Seriously, in spite of itself, there's something in the tone and pacing of The Black Cloud which holds it all together. Despite the tweedier qualities, the somewhat predictable subtext of how everything would be better if we let scientists run the show, the suggestion of worldly experience which doesn't go much beyond handing in end of term papers and then enjoying a jolly old spot of cricket, despite all of its crankier qualities, The Black Cloud is an impressively solid novel, and - much to my surprise - one that has been worth every second of the wait. I suppose this is because, rather than having someone else come along to strip in details which might appeal to those who didn't actually want to read a science-fiction novel in the first place, Hoyle writes to his own strengths. There are some wonderful engrossing passages, not least the thoroughly convincing speculation on how intelligent life might develop within a cloud of interstellar gas, and even a few amusing steady state gags incorporated into discussion of the anthropic principal and even religion - one in the eye for the exploding-universe boys, as Hoyle puts it. The sobriety of the narrative lends the events of the story a greater and more chilling weight than one might experience were the tale to be told in more poetic terms. This shit could actually happen.

So Dawkins was right - The Black Cloud really is a classic.

The Locksley Exploit

Philip Purser-Hallard The Locksley Exploit (2015)
Philip Purser-Hallard is the best kept secret in British genre writing, runs a claim from the British Fantasy Society on the cover, further qualified by a quote from Andrew Hickey identifying the lad as one of the two or three best science-fiction and fantasy writers in the world today. Regardless of Andrew being a possibly less than impartial source on the grounds that he sort of knows the author, I would say he makes a fair assessment; although it should be kept in mind that my own word probably isn't worth tuppence either, as I sort of know both of them, at least as internet presences and people with whom I have had occasion to work in a creative capacity.

Anyway, yes much as I love yer Charles Stross and yer Neal Stephenson and all those other more financially conspicuous chaps, not a one of them has written anything which I would rate quite so highly as certain works by Philip Purser-Hallard or - seeing as we're here - Simon Bucher-Jones, in the event of anyone being interested; and here's more reason as to why.

The Locksley Exploit is the second part of the Devices trilogy and sequel to The Pendragon Protocol which came out last year. The Devices trilogy seems a fairly simple idea on the surface of it, but the more the narrative progresses, the more it becomes apparent just how much work has gone into this thing - as characterised by the fact of it all unfolding at an entirely natural and seemingly effortless pace - the mark of a true master of his art, namely that he makes it look easy. The story takes place in a very familiar contemporary England policed from way behind the scenes by the Round Table, the Knights of Arthurian legend expressed in the words and deeds of their modern day hosts. Except the whole premise is much closer to a believable, modern and even realist narrative than its constituent parts might suggest. This isn't about possession, reincarnation, or the contemporary puppets of mysterious, ancient forces so much as it is about contemporary western society and the schism by which it appears to be slowly destroying itself. Even the major players in The Locksley Exploit appear to understand exactly what is going on here.

'The myth of the Round Table has shaped so many of the ways we think about being British,' he says. 'The awe we hold our monarch in, as if she'd been appointed by God himself. The way we defer to the royal family, the bishops, the lords, even so-called captains of industry, as if they were the heroic figures Arthur surrounded himself with. The way we as a nation trust to authority, prefer not to stick our necks out, refuse to rock the boat. Even our national anthem isn't about the p-people, but about the person reigning over us. And that makes a kind of sense if your King was once a paragon among men, and might be again one day. But the Circle aren't paragons. Men is all they are.'

The schism is represented by conflicting legends, the Arthurian in contrast with the more egalitarian avatars of Robin Hood and his pals. The Locksley Exploit draws upon a formidable body of mythology in providing support for its peculiarly familiar world, English myth going way back, the kind which once scared the life out of me as a child, seeming to be all scowling wooden faces and rural witch trials. As such the novel reads almost like a textbook in places; which works well, I hasten to add, and makes for a satisfying and stimulating read. What this all adds up to is a reflection of a society pulling itself apart through the conflicting tides of its own disunity, and a disunity wrought largely by abstract ideas, much as the Devices are themselves abstractions.

We - the Circle and the Chapel and the British Beasts; the Gormund Boys and Sons of Gore and Paladins and Frontiersmen; all our equivalents in every culture and all our predecessors back through the millennia, since, perhaps, the dawn of human consciousness - are suffering, he'd say, from a massive and pandemic mental illness. We've convinced first ourselves and one another, then our children and descendants, and now at last our entire civilisation, that the voices we hear in our heads are those of the heroes of old, when in fact they're just that; voices in our heads.

It's interesting that such words should be written by an author of - unless I'm getting my wires crossed here, and apologies if this is so - formerly Christian faith. For some it may read as a variation on Dawkins' somewhat overstated calls for reason, or specifically that which he and his followers define as reason - eschewing all which might be deemed a byproduct of the imagination. Without getting into an entire side issue, the main problem with most versions of the Dawkins argument is the presupposing of there being a single answer for each question, and a single answer working equally well for all people under all possible circumstances: either you agree with me or you're wrong. Whilst this sort of reasoning keeps everything nice and simple, particularly for those seeking some flag under which to march, it isn't very helpful in achieving any sort of understanding of human society as a whole, because that understanding will almost inevitably be a variation on fuck 'em because they're too stupid to live, which is neither helpful nor interesting.

So, to finally swing around in the general direction of the point, it seems significant that a writer with a fairly profound understanding of the mechanism of faith should produce a novel conveying such an astute understanding of where we've been going wrong all this time; and considering where we appear to be heading, we really do need astute understandings, as opposed to people who think pissing off Muslims in the name of free speech represents some sort of blow struck in the name of their beloved reason.

So in answer to a question I didn't actually ask, namely what The Locksley Exploit is about, it's sort of about everything.

Getting back down to earth, or at least to the level of me sat in bed reading this thing for most of the last week, my only criticism would be that I found myself beginning to lose track of certain characters amongst the cast of thousands, who they were, and what had happened to them in The Pendragon Protocol. However, I've a feeling this may just have been me, and it didn't really impinge upon my general enjoyment. The first person present tense narrative of Alan a'Dale, dipping occasionally into archaeological, mythological, or psychogeographical asides, remains lively and engaging for the duration, never really descending into anything you could describe as routine or workmanlike; and it works so well as to carry the reader along regardless of the occasional lost strand, confident of it all making sense and adding up at the end, as indeed it does. The Locksley Exploit seems maybe not so startling as was The Pendragon Protocol, but it maintains the standard, and I'll be sure to re-read both before tackling the final part of the Devices trilogy, because I'm fairly sure that it will be worth the effort on the strength of the first two.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Francis Wheen How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004)
Here's another existing at something of a tangent to my usual, but it's one of those books which could make for a slightly better world if everyone were to read it and take at least some of what is said on board. I suppose How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World might be regarded as a companion piece to Carl Sagan's excellent The Demon-Haunted World in so much as it's an extended essay on why believing any old bollocks on the grounds of it being either comforting or else relayed to you by a smiling man in a nice suit is maybe not such a great idea. I'd say it might also be regarded as a companion piece to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but although I remember enjoying that one up to a point, I've subsequently found it difficult to distinguish between my memories of the book and the disappointing evolution of Dawkins into a sort of atheist Richard Littlejohn.

Anyway, Wheen's focus is on culture, politics, society, economics and so on, roughly applying Sagan's genial sense of clarity to the world around us and examining the consequences of twatty thinking. Homeopathy, structuralism, and certain new age conceits all come in for a hugely entertaining kicking, and all building towards a thorough examination of why those who don't actually understand society or how the universe operates - looking at you and Cherie marinating in your Mexican shit bath, Tony Bliar - shouldn't be left in charge of any part of it because they invariably fuck it up for the rest of us; as they have done; as can be discerned by simply looking out of a window. Happily, Wheen seems to accept that as a planet we have to work with what we have right here and now, and that no amount of evangelical ranting, raving, or name calling is going to sterilise thousands of years of ingrained culture; as Dawkins seems to believe each time he demands we cut out all the religion and start being more sensible like what he is, apparently never really quite understanding why some might consider him poorly informed in certain respects.

I've never really understood economics or the mechanism of capitalism and debt, at least not beyond a fairly vague and left-leaning hunch of it all being a massive planet-sized nest-feathering exercise, but Wheen explains it all very well, and in terms that I found not only comprehensible but fascinating in a horrible watching a car crash sort of way; and it's reassuring to learn that my hunch seems to have been pretty much on the money. Doubtless there are plenty of amoral shitbags out there quite capable of launching a testy rebuttal whilst providing mathematical proof of shareholders being more important than outdated ideas of democracy, and how those kids actually enjoy making our cheap running shoes for us, but from my purely subjective viewpoint, I don't see how it would be possible to finish this book whilst retaining the sort of warped political mentality it challenges with such eloquence, unless you're just plain fucking stupid, or evil, or both.

The Ultimates

Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch & Andrew Currie
The Ultimates volume one (2002)
I'm confused. For some reason I was under an impression of this having been the gritty version of Marvel's Avengers which inspired The Authority by Warren Ellis and prompted Alan Moore to apologise for that whole violent, unhappy superheroes with herpes and criminal convictions trope resulting from the entire comics industry having missed the point of Watchmen; but the dates all seem to be in the wrong order, so I have no idea which came first, who inspired what, or whose fault it is.

Well anyway, if nothing else, it's fairly clear that The Ultimates was a significant influence on Marvel's big screen version of the Avengers, a film I very much enjoyed as it happens, although  enjoyed without necessarily wanting to rush out and see it again. The Ultimates, I guess taking cues from The Authority, re-imagined Marvel's Avengers from the ground up, and being sprung forth from the biro of Mark Millar, it's well told, brilliantly observed, and undeniably cinematic - partially helped by great art, of course. The marginally more fanciful elements of the mythology are revised to aid suspension of disbelief, so the Hulk no longer results from Banner's exposure to transforming radiation, and we learn that basic biology prevents Giant Man from growing taller than sixty feet, this being the limit beyond which his bones would no longer be able to support his body. I'm sure Richard Dawkins would still find something to moan about, but you have to make a few allowances, otherwise you're just left with a story about a guy called Marty who sells shrimp from the back of his van.

As a comic book, it's impressive and kind of fascinating, but is let down by the fact of most of its characters being horrible tossers, presumably for the sake of Alan Moore patented gritty realism, without much in the way of wit to redeem them - which is why the film worked better, I thought. Additionally, the scene in which Hank Pym beats up his wife, and the rampaging Hulk's apparent intention to rape some former girlfriend cast an extraordinarily unpleasant tone over the whole endeavour, and enough so as to ensure that I probably won't be bothering to pick up further volumes. I've defended Mark Millar's gratuitous use of shock on previous occasions because for the most part I tend to think he gets it just right and has thus generally been able to justify a few readers throwing up over their comic collections, but this is horribly misjudged, and is probably exactly what his critics have been talking about all along.

Despite everything this book has going for it - yuck!

A War of Witches

Timothy J. Knab A War of Witches (1993)
A slight shift in emphasis here, A War of Witches being anthropology written as autobiography rather than fiction as such. Back in 2006 when Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox imprint, I recall suggesting on some forum or other that Knab's book might be deemed to inhabit some of the same territory and might thus be of interest to those missing their not particularly regular dose of Factiony goodness; which I still stand by, particularly as A War of Witches had a considerable influence on my own more recent contribution to the mythos with Against Nature.

Timothy J. Knab is, as I understand it, a reasonably big name in the vague field falling somewhere between the anthropology and ethnography of Mesoamerica, and during the 1970s he spent time living amongst the indigenous people of rural Puebla, some miles east of the Valley of Mexico. To be specific, as he relates the tale he does a great deal more than just have a bit of a holiday in someone else's lack of facilities, making close friends with numerous Nahua families and himself becoming a curandero - which seems like pretty good going for a white guy living in a place with limited access to electricity and where it isn't even a given that your neighbour will speak Spanish.

As D.H. Lawrence observed in Apocalypse, written in 1931: In the lowest stratum of society religion remains pretty much the same, throughout the ages, and so it is in Knab's Sierra de Puebla where the pre-Hispanic religion remains pretty much unchanged despite the garnish of a few obscure saints - so obscure as to be unknown outside the region. In other words, whilst the cathedrals of indigenous Mexican faith may have been bulldozed five hundred years ago, there are still places where they never got the memo.

What makes this account potentially so fascinating to those who may not be familiar with the culture for which it gives vivid account, is that it approaches the supernatural Nahua world on its own terms - getting right in there without the lab coat or attendant rationale which would reduce the subject to a sterile itinerary of quaint rural customs; and happily, neither does Knab adopt any approach in common with the new-age types who might mistakenly imagine themselves somehow attuned to the Nahua way of life. Rather, he lets the people and their beliefs speak for themselves, and in terms which no-one should find impenetrable or unfamiliar.

In learning the curandero's art and uncovering the genuinely terrifying history of witchcraft in the Sierra de Puebla, Knab recovers such detail of obscure potions, rites performed in certain caves, methods of killing foes without detection, and dream interpretation as to force the conclusion that calling this stuff mumbo jumbo is missing the point, because it's absolutely real for those involved. There are plenty of great books full of names and dates with regard to indigenous Mexican history, but this one attempts to tell you what it actually felt like as Knab spends afternoons idly sipping coffee or cane alcohol with scary old people who make veiled references to witchcraft murders, what the things under the ground want, and a recent crucifixion that no-one likes to talk about for obvious reasons.

Whilst I have a lot of time for Dicky Dawkins, and tend to agree with his attitude to that which is lazily termed spirituality, A War of Witches highlights the flaw in his somewhat reductionist view of religion. It would be easy to dismiss that which Knab encountered as a combination of suggestion and sleight of hand, except such dismissal presupposes certain conditions which aren't entirely applicable and that there is nothing to be learnt here - which is far from the case. Of all the books I've absorbed on this subject, A War of Witches is one of the most illuminating and makes for genuinely gripping reading.