I picked up Be More Bird: Life Lessons from a Hawk by Candida Meyrick on a whim, which is often how the best books seem to find us. It was sitting there on one of those little promotional displays in the bookshop, and because I’ve always had a particular fondness for birds of prey, I added it to my pile as a last-minute impulse purchase.

I’m so glad I did.

I loved this book. Genuinely, deeply loved it. It’s beautiful - not in a polished, superficial sense, but in the way it quietly unfolds its thoughts about illness, identity, freedom, family, fear, and the strange ways our lives can be reshaped by paying attention to another living creature. Bird, Meyrick’s hawk, is at the heart of the story, but this isn’t simply a book about falconry or nature writing. It’s about what Bird came to mean to her, and what Meyrick discovered through loving, observing, hunting, and living alongside her.

The book traces Meyrick’s rethinking of her life after a cancer diagnosis, her experience of Bird joining her family during lockdown, and the lessons she came to take from that relationship. I thought the Guardian review was rather harsh, criticising it as a sort of self-help book that misses the mark, but that wasn’t my reading of it at all. To me, this isn’t really a self-help manual in the usual sense. It doesn’t feel like Meyrick is trying to hand down a neat set of universal life lessons for the rest of us to obediently apply.

Instead, it feels much more honest than that.

This is Meyrick’s story about the lessons she took from Bird. That’s what makes it work. It’s personal rather than prescriptive, reflective rather than preachy. The book is less “here is how to live” and more “this is what this extraordinary creature helped me to see about my own life.” That distinction matters, and I think it’s where some reviews have perhaps missed the point. Not every reflective book has to present itself as a blueprint. Sometimes it is enough, and more than enough, for a writer to say: this is what happened to me, and this is what I learned from it.

One quote right near the end of the book really stopped me in my tracks:

“We’re all wearing disguises, more or less, but some are chosen - beautiful costumes designed to manifest new intention. Others are just unwanted, hand-me-downs: someone else’s life you’ve been wearing for far too long.”

That hit me hard.

As someone who has only recently emerged back into the world after a career break of almost a year because of neurodivergent burnout, I felt that one in my chest. Sometimes a sentence arrives at exactly the right moment, and this one did. It captures something I think many people will recognise: the exhausting experience of living in shapes that don’t fit you, of carrying ways of being that were never really yours, of realising that survival and authenticity are not always the same thing.

That, for me, is where Be More Bird really shines. It isn’t trying to be a tidy, marketable handbook for personal transformation. It’s much more intimate and more human than that. It’s about recovery, attention, companionship, and the small but profound shifts that can happen when your life is interrupted and you’re forced to ask yourself whether the way you’ve been living is actually the way you want to go on.

This is a lovely, thoughtful, moving book, best read slow - I’m honestly delighted that I picked it up on impulse, and I’m going to make an effort to be more Bird.

I have a terrible habit of reading 75% of a book and then picking up the next one. So, this weekend when I saw E Jay Gilbert delivery a (really, really good) talk at the London Fortean Society’s Haunted Landscapes conference at Conway Hall, I picked her book back up and tucked back into the remaining pages. The lecture, on underground folklore - from the phenomena of the Kennington Loop on the Northern line to subterranean devils, Tommyknockers, fairies and beyond - was the talk I enjoyed the most that day: funny, thoughtful, and happily willing to slide between ghosts, folk belief, and the uncanny things that lurk under our feet.

Gilbert’s book, Haunted: The Ghost Stories and Folklore of the British Isles, does exactly the same thing on the page. Haunted takes you through some of the most enduring ghost stories of the British Isles and asking what they reveal about the people and places that keep telling them. Gilbert has spent years collecting supernatural stories around her home in a village near Newcastle, and uses those as a jumping-off point to explore a wider landscape of British ghost lore, from familiar White Ladies to local, half-forgotten ghouls and oddities.

If you’re expecting a straight “here is a haunted place, here is its story, next” gazetteer, that’s not what this is. What you get instead is a three-way weave of academia (Gilbert is a linguist and researcher, and it shows in the way she teases out language, patterns, and contexts), mixed with personal reflections and storytelling. It feels like sitting with someone who’s spent a long time listening to other people talk about ghosts, and has thought very carefully about what’s really going on underneath.

Now, I know some ghost researchers get sniffy when ghosts are put alongside other bits of folklore – fairies, devils, monsters and so on… but personally, I think that’s nonsense. I write about ghosts and still have a folklore section and a monsters section on my site for a reason: if you’re genuinely interested in ghostlore, you’re inevitably going to be brushing up against wider folklore, urban legends, religious belief, local customs and myth. If you insist on ghosts and only ghosts, your field of view gets very narrow, very quickly.

Haunted absolutely refuses to stay in that narrow lane, and I mean that as a compliment. Gilbert is just as interested in the social and linguistic archaeology of underground fear, the way fairy lore bleeds into mine folklore and railway folklore, and why certain figures (like black dogs, banshees, and white ladies) crop up again and again in different guises. The Kennington Loop ghosts on the Underground, for example, sit quite comfortably in the same imaginative space as fairies under hills or devils under churches. Gilbert leans into that continuity rather than pretending each category is its own sealed box, and the book is stronger for it.

One of the things I appreciated most is that she treats informants and storytellers with respect. There’s no sneering at gullible believers, but there’s also no wide-eyed insistence that every tale must be literally true. That mix will appeal to both believers and non-believers, the curious and the skeptical – which is, explicitly, who the book is aimed at. As a sceptical paranormal researcher myself, I found the approach very familiar - not “is this real?” but “what does it mean that this story is being told this way, now, by these people?”

It’s not a catalogue of evidence, nor is it trying to settle any arguments about whether ghosts are real. Instead, Haunted presents a smart, humane look at what ghost stories do for us – how they move through communities, hitch rides on trains and rumours, and keep resurfacing in new guises, long after the original teller is gone. As someone who spends a lot of time in the overlap between ghost stories, folklore, and critical thinking, I came away from this book feeling like I’d just had a long, generous conversation with a fellow ghost geek. And I’ll take that over a stack of cheap jump-scare anecdotes any day.

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Give it a chance and An Illustrated History of Ghosts will take you on a spooky journey around the world - but not the kind you’re used to. This isn’t a collection of ghost stories so much as a beautifully designed reference book you can dip in and out of. It sits somewhere between a coffee-table book and an accessible, well-researched guide to ghosts, hauntings, and our relationship with death.

Instead of chasing jump scares, you’re lurking in the darker corners of history, exploring different societies’ relationships with death and whatever might come after it… ghosts. This illustrated study of ghosts and hauntings digs into our long-standing fascination with death and the dead in a way that spans time and cultures. From Spiritualism to exorcisms, ghost towns, time slips and (boo hiss) even skeptics, An Illustrated History of Ghosts leaves no haunted stone unturned (which, as M. R. James warned us, is not always wise).

The book is organised thematically rather than chronologically, with each section focusing on a different theme. You move through self-contained chunks - séances here, exorcisms there, a detour into time slips - each paired with Adam Allsuch Boardman’s distinctive illustrations, which are eerie, charming, and utterly captivating.

Crucially, the information throughout is both engaging and factually accurate - a rare and welcome combination in paranormal publishing. It’s a genuinely absorbing book that’s also accessible, making it suitable for curious younger readers as well as grown-up ghost geeks who want something solid to get their teeth into.

If you’re looking for in-depth case studies or a heavy critical takedown of specific ghost hunters, this isn’t that book; it’s a wide-angle introduction to how ghosts and hauntings appear across cultures and history, not a forensic sceptical investigation. Personally, I think it fills its chosen niche very well.

One tiny detail I adore: at the back, just before the glossary, there’s an illustrated guide to People of Ghostlore and, if you look closely, there’s a tiny little me. I am, apparently, a person of ghostlore, and I’m very flattered.

Tiny illustrated ego boost aside, this is one of the few ghost books I’d happily recommend to both believers and non-believers alike.

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Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity has firmly earned a spot on my top books list. It’s a thoughtful, compassionate tour of how different cultures care for their dead, and it landed at a time in my life when I desperately needed that perspective.

My mum died unexpectedly in September 2017. Like a lot of people, I found myself navigating hospital corridors, funeral arrangements, and the surreal quiet that follows a sudden death. I visited her in the chapel of rest on my own, not really knowing what to expect, and came away with memories that were powerful but also deeply unsettling. For a long time, those images were what I thought of first when I thought about her.

Months later, I picked up From Here to Eternity. In it, Caitlin Doughty travels to communities around the world - from the US to Mexico, Japan, Indonesia and beyond - to see the many different ways people live with and care for their dead. Each chapter focuses on a particular place or practice, combining reportage, history, and personal reflection in a way that’s surprisingly gentle, often funny, and never voyeuristic.

What I love about this book is that it quietly challenges the very narrow script many of us in the West are given about death: keep it hidden, keep it clinical, keep it quick. Doughty shows that there are other options - families who keep their loved ones at home after death, communities who stay physically close to the body, rituals that acknowledge what a dead body actually is without flinching or pretending it’s something else. Rather than feeling morbid, these stories come across as deeply human and, in many cases, very comforting.

Reading about those practices helped me reframe my own experience. I began to see that what I’d found so disturbing about seeing my mum after she died wasn’t that her body had changed - that part is entirely natural - but that I’d been given almost no cultural language or support for handling it. From Here to Eternity didn’t magically fix my grief (no book can do that), but it did help me understand that there was nothing “wrong” or shameful about what I’d seen, or how I felt. That realisation took away a chunk of the fear and allowed me to find something gentler in those memories.

As a death-positive advocate and funeral director, Doughty is open about her own views, but she doesn’t preach. She’s curious rather than judgemental, and the book balances big questions - about capitalism, environmental impact, and who gets to control what happens to our bodies - with very grounded, specific stories. The tone is accessible and conversational, so even if you’re not usually someone who reads non-fiction about death, it’s easy to follow.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to planning your own funeral, this isn’t that. It’s more of a wide-angle look at what’s possible, and an invitation to think about what you might want for yourself and the people you love. I’d particularly recommend it to anyone who’s bereaved, anyone who’s anxious about death, or anyone who suspects that the way we currently do things in the UK and US might not be the only way - or the best way.

For me, From Here to Eternity did what a lot of books about grief tried and failed to do: it made death feel less like a taboo subject and more like something I’m allowed to look at directly. It helped me reconnect with my long-standing interest in death, folklore, and funerary culture, without feeling ghoulish or strange for caring about it.

And if I do come back as a ghost one day, this book has convinced me that Mexico would probably be the place to haunt. Seems a ghost would be welcome there.

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I bought Ghosts of the Tsunami just days before my mum died and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t pick it up again for a long time. When I finally did, I found it to be an extraordinary and devastating book that I’d still thoroughly recommend - with the caveat that it’s a very heavy read.

I was aware of the ghost stories linked to the areas affected by the tsunami of 2011 - particularly the testimonies from taxi drivers who picked up passengers heading for now-ruined towns, only for them to vanish mid-journey – but I’d never really considered in detail the wider cultural impact of the 2011 tsunami on how people in Japan relate to their dead.

In this book, Richard Lloyd Parry writes that “the tsunami did appalling violence to the religion of the ancestors.” It didn’t just wash away homes, schools and villages; it also destroyed household altars, memorial tablets, and family shrines. Cemeteries were shattered, and the bones of those buried there were scattered. Survivors were left not only with the unsettled dead of the tsunami itself, but with the sense that their long-honoured ancestors had been disturbed too.

One priest explains to Parry that, in a disaster, where you or I might grab our important documents, pets, or laptop, many people in Japan will rescue the memorial tablets of their ancestors first - that’s how central they are. He goes on to say that some people almost certainly died in the waters because they ran back towards danger to save those tablets instead of evacuating. That detail stopped me in my tracks. The tsunami didn’t only kill the living; it also, in a very real sense for those communities, harmed the spirits of the dead.

Ultimately, Ghosts of the Tsunami is less about proving or disproving the existence of ghosts and more about how people make sense of unimaginable loss. The ghost stories – including reports of hauntings and possessions after the disaster – are woven into a wider exploration of grief, faith, and the social fabric of the affected towns. It’s a deeply humane, often heartbreaking piece of reportage.

It’s not an easy book to read, and I’d be cautious about recommending it to anyone in very raw grief. But if you’re interested in how culture, belief, and catastrophe intertwine, and in what it means to live with both the living and the dead after a disaster, it’s an incredibly powerful and important book.

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Abominable Science! by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero is one of those rare books that quietly makes the world a better place. It’s the book I wish had been around when I first fell for monsters and mystery beasts - a smart, generous, and genuinely fun tour through some of cryptozoology’s biggest names.

This isn’t a sneering takedown. It’s a carefully researched, well-referenced examination of famous cryptids - from Nessie to Bigfoot and beyond - that combines good storytelling with proper critical thinking. Loxton and Prothero lay out the history, the claims, the evidence (or lack of it), and the cultural context, and then show you how to assess it all for yourself. One of the things I love most is that you don’t have to take their word for anything: the references are extensive, so you can follow the trail as deeply as you like.

That approach feels especially important in a landscape where skeptical inquiry is still often sidelined in paranormal media. Turn on the TV and you’ll still find shows cheerfully promoting unconventional or pseudo-scientific “methods” in the hunt for monsters, with dramatic narration taking priority over accuracy. Abominable Science! is a much-needed counterbalance: it shows that you can be fascinated by strange creatures and legends without abandoning rigour or reality.

This makes it a bit of a rarity - a book that I’d recommend equally to self-identifying skeptics, curious cryptozoologists, and monster hunters who want to understand the stories they love in more depth. It doesn’t assume you’re an expert; the explanations are accessible and engaging, so you can come to it with nothing more than a passing interest in weird creatures and still get a lot out of it.

If you’re heavily committed to the literal existence of certain cryptids, this book probably won’t convert you on its own. That’s not really its job. What it does do, brilliantly, is model how to think about extraordinary claims: how myths grow, how hoaxes happen, how eyewitness testimony can mislead us, and how folklore, psychology, and honest mistakes all play their part.

When I first went to Loch Ness as a teenager, I was utterly captivated by the idea of the monster. If Abominable Science! had existed back then, it wouldn’t have ruined the magic for me – it would have deepened it. The same way the Loch Ness Centre & Exhibition manages to both debunk and delight, this book shows that understanding the science, history and culture behind legendary monsters doesn’t make them boring. It simply replaces flimsy “evidence” with the far more enduring wonder of how stories, landscapes and human perception fit together.

In my opinion, Abominable Science! is a modern classic of skeptical writing on monsters, and a wonderful resource for future generations of ghost geeks, cryptid fans and critical thinkers alike.

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Roger Clarke’s A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof is one of those books that doesn’t quite fit into a neat category. It’s not a debunking manual or a believer’s manifesto, and it’s not trying to be a pop-science explanation of ghosts either. It’s essentially a long wander through five centuries of people seeing, reporting, arguing about, and profiteering from ghosts.

Clarke writes as someone who has been quietly obsessed with ghosts since childhood, and that’s very obvious in the tone. The book opens with personal memories of the haunted house he grew up in and his early brush with the Society for Psychical Research. That thread of slightly geeky enthusiasm runs right through. He clearly loves this material, and he’s good at telling a story: each chapter feels like being sat down and told, “Right, let me tell you about this haunting.”

The structure is loosely chronological but also a bit taxonomic. Rather than simply marching through the centuries, Clarke groups hauntings by type and cultural moment. We get the famous poltergeists, the Victorian apparitions, the noisy mediums, the frauds, the almost-certainly-frauds, and the cases that never really resolve one way or another. Classic stories like the Cock Lane ghost, Borley Rectory, and Hinton Ampner all make an appearance, often with more historical detail than you usually see in TV documentaries or popular ghost books.

What I liked most is that in A Natural History of Ghosts, Clarke is really writing about people more than he’s writing about ghosts. Mediums, clergy, magicians, aristocrats, servants, grieving parents, bored journalists – everyone is in here. You get a strong sense of how ghosts change shape depending on who is telling the story and what they need from it. Sometimes they’re weapons in religious arguments, sometimes tools of social control or ways of talking about grief, and sometimes they’re just good theatre.

Clarke also has an eye for how class and respectability shape haunting narratives. A maid reporting a ghost in a country house gets handled very differently to the vicar seeing something, or the local squire having a strange experience. The book is at its best when it’s quietly pointing this out and letting you join the dots - who gets believed, who gets dismissed, and who manages to turn a haunting into a career.

One thing worth saying, especially if you’re coming to this from a more skeptical angle, is that Clarke doesn’t really set out to solve anything. There are nods towards fraud, misperception, and suggestion, and he’s not credulous, but he’s also not interested in spending chapters on psychology experiments or brain science. He’s a historian and storyteller first and if you want a tour through the cultural history of ghosts, this is a wonderful read.

Each chapter is essentially a mini-case study and I enjoyed being along for the ride, but readers who prefer a very tight, thesis-driven structure might get a bit impatient. For me, though, this was part of its charm. Clarke isn’t trying to cover everything; he’s trying to show how certain hauntings and ideas about ghosts evolved, got recycled, and still echo in the way we talk about haunted houses today. If you’ve watched a lot of paranormal TV or read older ghost literature, you’ll recognise the bones of a lot of modern stories in here.

Ultimately, A Natural History of Ghosts is delightful. I have bought three copies as mine get borrowed. Readers of this blog are sure to enjoy this book.

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It’s been a long time since a book about ghosts gave me the same gut-level excitement I used to feel heading out on ghost investigations with my research team, but Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife by Greg Taylor came very close. At its best, it reminded me of the buzz I got reading Mary Roach’s Six Feet Over or Will Storr’s Will Storr vs the Supernatural: that feeling of watching someone follow their genuine curiosity into strange territory.

Taylor’s book explores a range of research and claims related to life after death – from historical investigations to modern studies – and presents them in a very readable, narrative style. What really struck me is that it leans heavily on the kind of serious research that has underpinned paranormal discussion for decades, rather than the flashy pop-paranormal fluff you see on TV. His section on deathbed visitations, in particular, genuinely moved me. The stories he shares are powerful, and the joy and comfort they bring to the people who experience them is hard to ignore. In many ways, that’s what ghost stories often are: ways of making sense of love, loss and the hope of reunion.

That said, there are parts of the book that didn’t quite land for me. In some sections, especially around mediumship research, I felt we were being asked to accept conclusions that didn’t follow a fully logical route. Taylor discusses the work of Dr Julie Beischel, who openly says her experiments aren’t designed to satisfy sceptics so much as to create the ‘right conditions’ for communication. She describes blinding mediums to sitters while still assuming that a sitter’s deceased loved one (“discarnate”) can and will communicate, and puts emphasis on particularly striking “hits” in readings – those so-called “dazzle shots” – as meaningful evidence.

For me, this is where alarm bells start to ring. Focusing on the impressive hits while giving less weight to the misses is a form of cherry-picking that I recognise all too well from my own believer days. It’s exactly how I used to treat my ghost-hunting experiences: highlight the weird bits, quietly forget the boring failures, and then treat that edited version as proof.

The same goes for deathbed visitations. They are fascinating, profound experiences and absolutely worth studying, but I think it’s a leap to treat them as straightforward evidence of survival after death. There are so many psychological, neurological and cultural factors that could play a role that I don’t think we’re in any position to rule those out and jump straight to “therefore: afterlife”.

Where the book really does succeed, though, is in treating this material as part of a larger historical and cultural story. You don’t have to believe in an afterlife to find these cases and traditions interesting, and on that level I think Taylor does a good job. I’m not keen on sceptics who dismiss the book outright without reading it simply because of the author’s beliefs; I don’t share his conclusions, but I do think the material is worth engaging with.

Overall, I’d recommend Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife to anyone who’s genuinely interested in paranormal research and ghosts, with one important caveat: read it with your critical faculties switched firmly on. Take the time to look up the studies mentioned, examine the methods, and reach your own conclusions. For me, one of the strongest signs that this is a worthwhile book is that it’s added several more titles to my “to read” pile – and anything that sends you off exploring further is doing something right.

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Where the Ghosts Walk: The Gazetteer of Haunted Britain is a testament to the sheer amount of work carried out by Peter Underwood, one of the longest-serving paranormal researchers of the 20th century. It’s an extensive, lovingly compiled guide to haunted locations across Britain, and an absolute pleasure to read.

I grew up in a house full of ghost folklore books – a side effect of having a mum who was always interested in the paranormal, which is exactly where I inherited my own fascination from. Over the years I’ve read plenty of regional ghost guides, especially those focused on Wiltshire and the West Country, plus the odd volume covering the wider UK. Very few of them come close to Where the Ghosts Walk.

This is the book I’d put into the hands of anyone with a serious interest in ghosts and ghost lore. The level of detail is wonderful. It’s one of those books you intend to dip into for five minutes and then suddenly you’re three chapters deep because you’ve been pulled along by one story after another. The photographs, many taken by Underwood himself, complement the text beautifully and add a personal touch – there’s something very charming about seeing him in the grounds of the places he writes about.

What really sets this book apart from a lot of other ghost collections is the sense of care. So many paranormal folklore books feel a bit lazy, as though the author has simply rehashed other people’s accounts without much thought. Here, it’s obvious that Underwood respects the stories he’s sharing. Even if you remain firmly sceptical about the existence of ghosts, you get a strong sense that these tales mattered to the people who told them – and that matters in itself.

Of course, stories are not evidence of ghosts, and this book doesn’t pretend otherwise. But I’ve always felt that ghost folklore has a huge role to play in understanding the paranormal, not as proof of hauntings, but as a window into how people interpret strange experiences, local history and landscape. On that level, Where the Ghosts Walk is incredibly rich: the sheer number of accounts, and the variety of places and themes they cover, make it a valuable resource as well as a very enjoyable read.

For me, this book brought back the feeling I had as a teenage ghost hunter, poring over old case stories and plotting trips to ruined houses and creepy lanes. If you’ve ever found delight in a good old-fashioned ghost story, or you’re interested in how haunted Britain looks through the eyes of one of its most dedicated chroniclers, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Where the Ghosts Walk.

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There’s no doubting the passion Lee Brickley has for the paranormal legacy of Cannock Chase. That much comes through very clearly in UFOs, Werewolves & The Pig-Man – Exposing England’s Strangest Location, Cannock Chase. The question, for me, is what that passion costs the book in terms of balance and critical thinking.

Cannock Chase, in Staffordshire, is a place many paranormal enthusiasts will recognise. I’ve been interested in it since I was a teenager, particularly the modern werewolf reports, so I was genuinely excited to see a whole book dedicated to its mysteries. Brickley starts with some of the area’s stranger historical highlights and then breaks the phenomena into themed chapters: alien encounters, wild beasts, the Pig-Man legend, ghostly goings-on, and alleged secret military activity.

On paper, that structure has a lot of potential. In practice, my initial excitement faded pretty quickly. The main issue is that the narrative is often let down by biased framing and some fairly dramatic leaps of logic.

From early on, Brickley suggests that the oddities of Cannock Chase might be due to an inter-dimensional portal, and that a series of animal mutilations with no identified culprit could be the work of alien visitors. These are presented as possibilities rather than throwaway speculation, but there isn’t much in the way of robust argument to support them – it reads more like enthusiastic conjecture than considered analysis.

There are similar issues elsewhere. Rather than asking whether werewolves are likely to exist at all, for instance, Brickley focuses on whether they might manifest in daylight. He also places heavy weight on eyewitness testimony, at one point pointing out that people claiming monster encounters have passed polygraph tests, as though that settles the question. It doesn’t. Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and even honest witnesses can be completely mistaken about what they saw.

It’s clear that Brickley really wants Cannock Chase to be home to paranormal entities. That comes through in his trust of witness accounts and in moments like his attempt to communicate with a phantom via Ouija board. I understand the instinct – as a paranormal researcher myself, I know how easy it is to empathise with people who report strange experiences. But empathy doesn’t turn an anecdote into solid evidence, and memory is far more fallible than many people realise.

That said, there are positives here. The accounts collected in the book are genuinely interesting, and some of the reported experiences are properly unsettling. Even with my sceptical hat on, I found myself creeped out at times. If you’re already fascinated by the weirder side of Cannock Chase, this is a fun, fast read that gathers a lot of stories in one place.

Where it falls short, in my view, is as a piece of critical paranormal writing. The book often feels as though it’s trying hard to convince you that Cannock Chase must be special and that the strangest explanations are the most plausible. I actually think the area is worthy of attention anyway – its folklore, reported phenomena and history are rich enough without portals and aliens being pushed to the front.

In the end, UFOs, Werewolves & The Pig-Man made me want to visit Cannock Chase and dig deeper, but it also left me wishing for a more structured, critically engaged take on the same material. I’d be interested to see Brickley tackle future work with a tighter narrative and a bit more methodological caution.

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2020 Update: so many people have bought this book after reading my review and told me they absolutely loved it, so it’s really worth buying Extra Sensory!

Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind by Wiltshire-based science and sci-fi author Brian Clegg was an absolute joy to read. I was asked to review it and went in cautiously: I was told it took a “balanced skeptical view” of psi phenomena, but I half-expected it to slide into either full-on debunking or wide-eyed credulity. It does neither – and that’s exactly what makes it so valuable.

Rather than lazily dismissing things like ESP, telepathy, remote viewing or telekinesis as impossible, Clegg rolls up his sleeves and digs into the actual evidence and experiments behind the claims. He walks the reader through the history of scientific attempts to test psychic powers – from J. B. Rhine and Ganzfeld experiments through to Abner Shimony and Daryl Bem’s much-discussed work – and looks carefully at what those studies really show (and where they fall down). Along the way he also touches on the role magicians can and do play in testing paranormal claims, and reminds us that humans already have more than five perfectly normal senses without needing to invoke anything supernatural.

What impressed me most is the tone. There are very few books that manage a genuinely balanced, informed and fair-yet-reasoned approach to psi, but Extra Sensory comes very close. Clegg lays out methods, results, and criticisms clearly enough that I often found myself spotting flaws before I reached his analysis. When he concludes that positive results are usually down to poor controls, flexible statistics, or cherry-picking, it feels earned rather than dismissive. At the same time, he’s very clear that past failures aren’t a reason to stop testing these claims altogether – a nuance that many sceptics skip over.

Early in the book, Clegg also explores whether, if abilities like telepathy or remote viewing existed, they might conceivably have roots in quantum mechanics. I’ll admit I initially winced at the word “quantum”, expecting it to be the usual woo-flavoured hand-waving. Instead, Clegg carefully separates genuine physics from the way psychics misuse the term, and makes some thoughtful, grounded points. I finished those chapters feeling better equipped to challenge “quantum” claims, not more irritated by them (even if I did find the physics sections a bit heavy going at times).

I’d recommend Extra Sensory to anyone with a passing interest in telekinesis, ESP, remote viewing, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and other alleged powers of the mind – especially if you’re familiar with the work of people like James Randi or Derren Brown and want a broader overview of the science around these topics. It doesn’t go into the depth that some specialist texts on individual researchers do, but as an accessible, big-picture guide to a complicated field, it hits a very sweet spot: clear, engaging, and neither vague nor sneering.

In short, it’s a wonderful book that I think will be enjoyed by readers who know either a lot or a little about extra-sensory claims… but you probably knew I was going to say that.

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Just six years before reading Will Storr’s The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, you could have found me in the dark with my ghost-hunting team, eyes closed, “raising energy” so spirits could move a table. Earlier this year, the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, D. J. Grothe, referred to me as one of the “workhorses of skepticism” doing actual investigations of paranormal claims.

I mention this because my journey from believer to sceptic is exactly the kind of transformation Will Storr is interested in. I’m not the sort of sceptic who’s content to say “ghosts break the laws of physics, therefore they don’t exist” and leave it there. I know what it’s like to be absolutely sure I’m right, then have to admit I was spectacularly wrong. That experience makes me sympathetic to people who believe strange things – I know how easy it is to build a whole identity on top of a faulty story.

That theme runs right through The Heretics. Storr sets out to understand not just what people believe – whether it’s homeopathy, ESP, Holocaust denial or Satanic ritual abuse – but why they believe it, and how they navigate a world that often sees them as foolish or dangerous. Along the way he speaks to a wide range of “heretics” and to scientists, psychologists and philosophers who study bias, memory and belief. The result is a book that’s often funny, sometimes uncomfortable, and occasionally quite moving.

Storr has taken some flak for the way he does this. A Guardian review criticised him for giving too much sympathetic space to people like David Irving, homeopaths, and Rupert Sheldrake, and for not hitting hard enough on the harm unscientific ideas can cause. I understand that concern, but I think it slightly misses the point of what Storr is doing.

At one stage, he admits that when he attends a sceptics’ conference he finds himself disliking the audience, without really knowing why. As someone who once sat on stage with Chris French at those events – and who used to be mocked by sceptics when I still believed in “psychic energy” – I recognised that feeling. When you’ve spent time listening to people with fringe beliefs, you’re very aware of how easily they’re dismissed as stupid. That makes you more wary of joining in with the pile-on.

Storr’s empathy doesn’t mean he buys into bad ideas. What he shows, very effectively, is how people can slide into self-validating loops where coincidence becomes proof and doubt is treated as an enemy. A therapist calmly explaining how Satanic cults eat babies sounds absurd from the outside, but Storr lets us see how, from her point of view, every new anecdote becomes another “confirmation”. Likewise, the voice-hearer who detunes a radio to receive “spy messages” is a chillingly familiar example of pattern-finding gone wild. When he demonstrates this for Storr and a random broadcast appears to line up perfectly with his fears, you can feel how convincing that would be from the inside.

It reminded me very sharply of the hours I used to spend listening to ghost-hunting recordings, straining to hear voices of the dead in the fuzz. When you’re desperate for validation, you will find it – even when it isn’t really there.

One of the strengths of The Heretics is that it doesn’t pretend this vulnerability to bias only applies to believers. Storr talks to neuroscientists and psychologists about how everyone – including sceptics – is prone to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and narrative loyalty. People arrive at their scepticism through different routes, and that shapes how they engage with others. Someone who has never believed in ghosts is less likely to be patient with ghost believers than someone who has been there, for example. The book doesn’t let sceptics off the hook for arrogance or poor communication, either. The “Ghosts don’t exist, move on” approach might feel satisfying, but it rarely changes minds.

Toward the end of the book, Storr reflects on the need for humility – the idea that however right we feel, we might still be wrong, and that we are all, in some sense, creatures of illusion made out of stories. That line has stayed with me more than almost anything else in the book, because it captures what I’ve learned in my own shift from believer to sceptic: that certainty is seductive, and letting go of it hurts, but it’s also where genuine honesty lives.

There is a section that will likely make fans of James Randi uncomfortable; Storr digs into some of Randi’s less appealing comments and contradictions. I think it’s important to say that one person’s flaws don’t invalidate an entire movement, but they do remind us that no one – however clever or principled – is immune to bias.

I loved The Heretics. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in why people believe weird things, but also to sceptics who are curious about how they themselves might be perceived. Read it, and read it again. Take notes. Follow up the studies and stories. And maybe sit with the possibility that, as right as you might feel, you could still be wrong about something important – and that this doesn’t make you weak. It just makes you human.

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When I found out that Dom Joly had written a book about his adventures as a monster hunter, I knew immediately I had to read it – I just wasn’t sure what I was signing up for. Would it make a cheap mockery of cryptozoology? Was Joly secretly a wide-eyed believer who accepts anything as evidence? I genuinely didn’t know.

The book, Scary Monsters & Super Creeps, turns out to be neither of those things. It’s essentially a comic travelogue with monsters: Joly wanders the world chasing famous cryptids – Yeti, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster and more – and reports back in his usual dry, slightly chaotic style. There are no groundbreaking discoveries in its pages, and there are a few factual slips (poor Adrian Shine is renamed “Adrian Shiner”), so anyone looking for serious cryptozoological research won’t find it here. But as a funny, enthusiastic account of one man indulging his childhood fascinations, it really works.

Joly has been a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke since childhood, and that genuine affection for weird stories shines through. As he documents his trips as a “professional monster hunter” – a tongue-in-cheek title he trots out to impress people he meets – it quickly becomes clear he doesn’t have the deep background in cryptozoology that a researcher might. He’s occasionally impressed by “evidence” or anecdotes that seasoned monster-nerds would find hard to get excited about. But honestly, that’s part of the charm: you don’t have to be an expert to be interested in strange creatures, and this book leans into that.

There are moments that are properly laugh-out-loud funny. Without spoiling anything, there’s a skinny-dipping scene that made me cry with laughter on a packed train, to the point where I ended up reading it aloud to a stranger because I’d completely lost composure. That’s not something most cryptozoology books can claim.

If you want rigorous analysis, tight referencing and a skeptical deep dive, this isn’t the book for you. Think of it instead as hanging out with an excitable friend who’s decided to blow their budget on monster-hunting trips and then tell you what happened over a pint. It’s light, entertaining, occasionally daft, and powered by genuine curiosity.

It’s good to stay curious and to chase your strange little dreams; in this case, Joly’s dreams happen to be monsters, and chase them he does. Does he actually find the Yeti, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster? You’ll have to read it yourself to find out – but the fun is really in the trying.

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