Nick Redfern will be promoting his latest book, There’s Something in the Woods, all over the radio and at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic in the new year:

KRFE 580AM Radio – Jan. 11, 2009

Shadow Talk Paranormal Radio – Jan. 21, 2009

Dimension X – January 31, 2009

Encounters Paranormal Radio – Mar. 29, 2009

White Noise Paranormal Radio – April 10, 2009

Beyond Reality Conference, New Hampshire – April 24-27, 2009

Lights Out Radio – May 18, 2009

Haunted America Conference, Decatur, Illinois – June 19-20, 2009

Mysteries of the Universe Conference, Kansas City – July 16-18, 2009

Weird Weekend, England – August 14, 15 & 16, 2009

Weird ’09, Warminster, England – August 28 & 29, 2009

And on Jan. 16, he’ll be in Houston being interviewed for an episode of the History Channel’s UFO Hunters, where he’ll put on a different hat for his appearance as “Nick Redfern, author of On the Trail of the Saucer Spies.”

Yes, yes, it’s coming, and here’s the cover to prove it. There has been a tremendous amount of interest in The Secrets of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club & the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story by Dennis Crenshaw in collaboration with Pete Navarro even before we officially announced that we were going to publish this book (thanks to Jim Moseley who spilled the beans early). We won’t have it out by the end of the year, as we had hoped, but it should be out early next year. 

The next issue of our journal, The Anomalist, Number 14, will be called Electricity of the Mind. It’s being guest edited by Ian Simmons and will be out in the first part of next year.

Also in production is the biggest book we have ever published (and probably ever will publish), Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew, a definitive, half-a-million-word opus that is guaranteed to startle, inform, and entertain all at once. Step aside Charles Mackay.

Also on tap is Astrology Off the Beaten Track by Dr. Suzel Fuzeau-Braesch. It’s our first astrology book and it contains what we believe to be groundbreaking studies on animals.

In the Spring of 2009 we will be issuing Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us by Jason Offutt, as well as a reprint of Brad Steiger’s Our Shared World of the Supernatural, which we are re-titling Beyond Shadow World, the third volume in this series. 

And what’s a new year without a new Nick Redfern book? Coming is Sci-Fi Secrets: On the Edge of the Paranormal, the third volume in Nick’s “Secrets” series. 

That’s just the beginning, of course.  Oh, and Happy Holidays, everyone!

The reviews are in for Otherworldly Affaires: Haunted Lovers, Phantom Spouses, and Sexual Molesters from the Shadow World, and they’ve got us grinning from ear to ear. Linda Godfrey, the author of many books, including Hunting the American Werewolf, had this to say about our latest Brad Steiger reprint: “Although the Bible says that in the afterlife, people do not marry nor are they given in marriage, Brad Steiger’s Otherworldly Affaires shows that they may still be thinking about marriage, sex, and past relationships. And acting upon those thoughts. Or at least, it appears that something from the other side is doing so. How else to explain the many true tales of bereaved men and women haunted by former lovers…not to mention oddities such as a woman impregnated by a departed husband or a glowing image of the Virgin Mary sent to protect a young girl’s innocence? It’s a peek into an area of phantom lore not examined in most ghost collections, accompanied where appropriate by Steiger’s level-headed, psychology-based explanations.”

Brad Steiger’s second volume of tales from the Shadow World (the first was Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings from the Darkside) also drew praise from Joshua P. Warren, the author of How To Hunt Ghosts: “Brad Steiger’s Otherworldly Affaires is a controversial tome, instantly engaging. His seasoned storytelling gripped me from page one. I know how difficult it is to probe this subject, and Steiger has produced another classic. It’s truly incomparable, delving into love and sex on all dimensions, including with visitors from space. But be warned: some of the descriptions were graphic, and even disturbing. It’s by far the best book on this subject I have ever seen or read.”

Finally, we have more than a few good words from Micah A. Hanks of The Gralien Report: “Have you ever been married to a ghost? Have you ever parented a ‘spirit child’? Or perhaps you’ve been visited in the dark of night by some strange presence—with whom shortly thereafter you may have found yourself in the throes of passion! Time and time again, average folks in their day-to-day lives have described such strange phenomenon, and it certainly doesn’t always involve favorable circumstances; several individuals have even claimed to have been accosted by ‘spirit molesters’ from the Shadow World. To date, no collection of such accounts better presents the argument that the powers of love and sexual desire can—and do—extend beyond the physical realm than Brad Steiger’s latest work, Otherworldly Affaires… reading this book will change one’s perspectives of love, sex, marriage, the afterlife, as well as the notion of spirit and ghostly activity. But above all, it is also a damned good read…”

And to top it all off, Otherworldly Affaires has just placed first in Haunted America Tours’ list of “The Ten Most Haunted Paranormal Books of 2008.” Thank you!

By the way, Brad Steiger will be discussing the book on “Coast to Coast”, Saturday night Oct. 25, 2008, and on “Rense,” Friday, October 31, 2008. But if you miss those two appearance, don’t worry – he’ll be making many more radio appearances during the months of November and December.

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.”

Here’s a roundup of recent accolades. In his review of Worlds Before Our Own, Bob Rickard at Fortean Times notes that author Brad Steiger’s “influence on forteana equals John Keel’s on ufology.” He then goes on to say: “From the prodigious Anomalist stable comes another breeze from the past..[the book’s] thesis is that before conventional ‘prehistory,’ there could have been a large, possibly global, and culturally advanced civilization…This is a refreshing glimpse of original sources unfiltered through the likes of von Daniken, Charroux, Tomas and more modern writers.” The tagline reads: “An inspiring and ground-breaking blast from the past.” Brad told us he was quite touched by Bob’s review. So were we.

Next comes Bill Chalker’s review of An Alien Who’s Who from The Ufologist Magazine, published in Australia. Bill’s lack of fascination with the contactee realm clearly tempers his opinion of the book: “The UFO saga has spawned what must be the most bizarre Who’s Who in history. We have the prolific watcher and commentator on the historical, cultural, and psychological facets of UFO culture, Martin Kottmeyer to thank for [this book]….[It’s] an intriguing testament as to why the aliens of contactee tales inspire little confidence, and the why normally nameless abducting aliens seem more substantive. A matter of debate, I suspect, and Kottmeyer’s guide book may provide a helpful calibration point. It is from that perspective that his book is a welcome contribution.”

And last, but certainly not least, John Carlson of The Paranomalists reviews Extreme Expeditions. “The book is a firsthand account of Adam Davies’s experiences taken directly from his travel diaries while visiting various remote–and often dangerous–areas of the globe, pursuing his dream of finding and scientifically documenting the existence of so-called ‘legendary’ creatures (known as cryptids, for those who are unfamiliar). Besides being an enormously entertaining and frequently riotously funny read, Extreme Expeditions is, I felt, a very moving account of a man that is motivated by both a fascination for these creatures and a deep concern for their safety and preservation…I came away from reading his book with deep respect for the man’s sense of purpose and sheer determination.”

Otherworldly Affaries: Haunted Lovers, Phantom Spouses, and Sexual Molesters from the Shadow World is Volume 2 of Brad Steiger’s remarkable Shadow World series. (Volume 1, Shadow World, appeared last year, and Volume 3, Beyond Shadow World, will appear next year). This work was originally entitled Haunted Lovers but we chose to change the title and provide a subtitle because this work encompasses so much more than that. The accounts in this book include apparitions of lovers seen at their moment of death, jealous lovers who have sought vengeance from beyond the grave, sexual molesters from the other world, warnings and advice from lovers who have passed over, passionate liaisons between psychic mediums and their contacts, seducers from UFOs, and other extraordinary tales of supernatural love and desire. It’s worth noting that Brad regards this work, which was certainly ahead of its time, as one of his best books on the paranormal. By the way “affaires” is not misspelled; the extra “e” at the end of the word helps to distinguish “business affairs” from “love affaires.”

Fatima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science is now getting the attention of reviewers and the results are very positive indeed. Malcolm Robinson, of Strange Phenomena Investigations (SPI) in the U.K. writes: “This book is different, very different; it’s not your normal one author who has penned this work, no siree.  This book has been written by a number of ‘different authors’ each of whom bring to bear their own take on what happened back in the Portuguese village of Fatima back in 1917… This book is a marvelous potpouri of theory, speculation, fact, and wonder…” And Bob Rickard, who praised the two previous volumes in the trilogy, Heavenly Lights and Celestial Secrets, likes Fatima Revisited as well. He writes in the latest issue of Fortean Times, “To anyone interested in anomalous events that bridge the objective and subjective worlds” this book is “essential reading….Fatima Revisited is a multidisciplinary collaboration [that shows] that quality studies of paranormal phenomena are being published.” Where? At Anomalist Books, of course!

The Tujunga Canyon Contacts tells the true stories of five young women “abductees” who lived in and near Tujunga Canyon, northeast of Los Angeles, and who were all linked by more or less intimate personal relationships. The abductions and related events, which took place over a period of more than two decades, were first investigated by UFO researcher Ann Druffel for five full years, and later by Druffel and parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo together. Many of the abduction details first revealed in the Tujunga Canyon case have been confirmed in the hundreds of cases that followed it. First published during the peak of the 20th century’s UFO abduction epidemic, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts shows an openness of mind about what abductions could be that would be largely absent from abduction works that followed it. This edition of the classic work contains the two new chapters prepared for the updated version of the book. During this updating of the story, Druffel first realized that abduction scenarios can be fended off by strong-willed, confident experiencers, since three of the five young women intuitively discovered, and used, various “resistance techniques” to fend off, and eventually end, the harrowing attacks.

I’ve had the pleasure of editing several books by Nick Redfern since he moved to the United States in the summer of 2001. One of the books I edited while I was the editor-in-chief of Paraview Pocket Books was Nick’s Three Men Seeking Monsters. That book not only stirred up a lot of interest by film producers, but marked the beginning of a series of further books all recounting his adventures in pursuit of monsters. I did not have the pleasure of working on the second volume, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter, which was published by New Page Book, but I’m back at the helm with his latest book in the series, There’s Something in the Woods: A Transatlantic Hunt for Monsters and the Mysterious. What’s in the woods, you ask? Bigfoot, for one. And Phantom black dogs. Werewolves, too. And giant mystery birds. Then toss in some haunted woods, spooky cemeteries, crop circles, and crashed UFOs, and you’ve got Nick Redfern’s latest road trip across two continents for all things cryptozoological or otherwise mysterious. In this latest volume Redfern defies all the laws of self-preservation and offers himself as bait in the face of the unknown – to learn, if indeed, There’s Something in the Woods. Enjoy.

Some people are wondering if An Alien Who’s Who is a put-on. It’s not, but we’ll be the first to admit that what it presents –summaries of human contact with named extraterrestrial aliens – is hard to swallow. How should one process this kind of material? As it happens, author Michael Prescott recently tackled the subject of unbearable strangenesson his excellent blog. He wasn’t referring to this book in particular, but to all the stories of bizarre, unexplainable phenomena out there, which he finds “a bit unsettling.” He suggests three ways of understanding this material, “none of which is very palatable,” he admits. But it seems to us that these are the only choices we have, particularly when coming to grips with the material in An Alien Who’s Who by Martin Kottmeyer. Says Prescott: “The first possibility is that these weird claims are true, in which case reality is bafflingly and perhaps frighteningly strange. The second possibility is that these claims are false, in which case there is a great horde of otherwise normal people who believe things that are, in fact, crazy. This, too, is rather bewildering and scary; it means the human race is largely insane; psychosis is rampant; we are surrounded by nuts, and may be nuts ourselves. Then there is the third possibility, the one I personally find most likely – namely, that some of these things are true, and some are not, and a great many occupy a wide swath of gray area, an ambiguous borderland where the labels ‘true’ and ‘false’ are not easily applied. And this is, in some ways, the most disturbing prospect of all, because it suggests that we can never be quite sure what is real and what isn’t. We can make educated guesses, we can say that one case seems valid and another seems bogus, but we can’t really know and we could be quite wrong.”