"Perhaps the World's Only Fortean Travel Writer"
October 14, 2008
There is probably no more thoughtful commentator on all matters fortean these days than Jerome Clark. Yes, he has some nice things to say in the latest issue of Fate magazine about Nick Redfern’s latest book, There’s Something in the Woods. “Part of Something‘s appeal is its can-you-top-this quality,” writes Clark, who finds more genuinely curious the reports Redfern collects “from persons who, to all appearances of sound mind and unforked tongue, speak of encounters with a range of incredibly peculiar creatures…everything from phantom peacocks to giant snakes with feet to flying humanoids to living pteranodons… Something certainly makes for entertaining reading, while occasioning at times some deeper refections on the reader’s part.” Including some from Jerome Clark, who ends the review with these insightful words: “I doubt firmly that the sorts of esoteric beasts Redfern’s witnesses describe exist as hidden, uncatalogued wildlife alongside us in consensus reality, but they are present in some shadowy approximation, to be encountered in profoundly anomalous states of consciousness. In frustrating truth, the answers that we who are open to such things seek are well beyond current knowledge. In the meantime, ridicule is a very poor substitute for understanding.”