Overview

Charles Fort’s founding classic of the paranormal newly introduced by esoteric scholar Mitch Horowitz The Book of the Damned shot like a comet—or something unknown in the sky—across the horizon of a complacent industrial world and its new faith in orthodox science in post-World War I America. Author Charles Fort (1874-1932) curated a registry of damned data: reports that philosophical materialism had excluded, such as strange airships in an era before UFOs; unknown beasts; blood, frogs, fishes, and stones falling to earth; floating islands; meteorites containing fossils; tools dropping from the skies; fairy coffins; lights on the moon; and strange figures moving across the sun. Fort revealed how dogmas and orthodoxies once associated with religion were reemerging within triumphant science itself. Whatever authorities could not explain, they condemned, ridiculed, or ignored. But philosopher-compiler Fort illuminated enduring nether-realms that modern man, secure in his manufactured certainties, insisted did not exist. With a new introductory essay, “Philosopher of the Damned,” historian of the esoteric Mitch Horowitz situates Fort in literary history as a figure who, like Edgar Allan Poe, defined a genre—one so unclassifiable, yet omnipresent, that it bears the author’s name: Fortean. Mitch further explores how Fort’s insights into categories that physicalist science rejected presaged our own era—one of both new mysteries and new modes of insight. “Fort’s work,” he writes, “has not only endured into our age, but the outcast intellect influenced our quantum-entangled, binary-coded, multiversed conceptions of reality.”

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Born in Albany, New York, on August 6, 1874, Charles Fort made his life’s work the study of unexplained phenomena. After achieving modest success as a short story writer and novelist, he began his systematic study and cataloging of anomalous phenomena in the early 1910s. His research topics included mysterious beasts, spontaneous combustion, interplanetary visitations, poltergeists, and other phenomena written off by science. In his lifetime, Fort published four books on the unexplained and was cele¬brated in The New York Times as the “Enfant Terrible of Science,” Fort’s name was made into an adjective—Fortean—describing strange phenomena. A lasting influence on the evolution of science fiction as well as critiques of science, Fort stands as one of the most fascinating and polarizing figures in all of Ameri¬can culture. He died on May 3, 1932, in New York. One of today’s most acclaimed voices of esoterica, mysticism, and the occult, Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian whose books include Occult America, The Miracle Club, Daydream Believer, Modern Occultism, Happy Warriors, and Practical Magick. A former vice president at Penguin Random House, Mitch has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Time, and The Wall Street Journal. A frequent presence in national media, Mitch hosts Discovery/HBO Max’s Alien Encounters; plays himself in Shudder’s V/H/S/Beyond, a 2025 Critics Choice Award nominee for Best Movie Made for Television; and hosts SpectreVision’s podcast Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real. His work is censored in China.

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