The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

The Book of the Damned (1919) by Charles Fort: Charles Fort is an important figure in both paranormal circles and in the science-fiction and horror genres. Financially able to not work, Fort decided to work at compiling strange stories from journals and newspapers and historical accounts during lengthy days spent in New York's public libraries. The result was what sometimes reads like The Book of Lists: Early 20th-Century Paranormal Edition.

Buried under a mountain of metaphysical gobbledygook is a fairly simple thesis: things are not what the experts tell us! The 'Damned' of the title are any 'facts' either excluded from theories of the way things work or explained away as being explicable.

Unfortunately, Fort's writing is often tedious at its best and almost incomprehensible at its worse. The book falls into a fairly consistent tripartite pattern:

1) Metaphysical and philosophical theories that slide rapidly into endlessly repeated Fortean platitudes.

2) Lists of hundreds of items, most of which could profitably be moved to an appendix because once you've read about ten things that were reported as falling from the sky, the list of another 700 things that fell from the sky gets pretty boring.

3) Rinse. Repeat.

What saves the material is Fort's almost throwaway gift for specific science-fictional speculation. These speculations are the stuff that many stories can and have been made of. Do alien spaceships jettison spent fuel into Earth's atmosphere? Is Earth's atmosphere partially covered by a gelatinous dome? Does Earth occasionally pass through the debris fields left by ancient space freighters? See, that's great stuff!

Fort tries to pass himself off as a bold iconoclast. However, while he has oodles of derision reserved for scientists, he seems to accept that stories from newspapers and journals of the 19th century and earlier are for the most part reliable. 

Another problem is that Fort perplexingly begins this, his first of four forays into the paranormal, with perhaps the most boring of topics -- weird stuff that purportedly fell from the sky. About 200 pages of it. This rapidly loses its interest long before the 200 or so pages Fort devotes to it is over. Frogs, fish, red rain, black rain, slag, cannonballs, thunderstones, rocks... on and on and on. You can almost taste the boredom -- and Fort's desire to get all that research he did into the book.

This is an important book when it comes to various genres. But if you read it, you will skim long sections. There's only so many strange rains of the 19th century one can find interesting. Recommended.