Chasing the Dark:
A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity
by Ben Machell (Grand Central Publishing)
This book is brave enough to answer the question that dare not be asked aloud: is the afterlife more boring than Brighton?
This is a biography of Anthony Cornell. Cornell was a sailor during the Second World War who got a promotion for insulting a superior’s capabilities, a town councilman who rejected running for higher office on the basis that he only got along well with his political opponents, and probably a spy or otherwise consultant to the British intelligence apparatus in some manner. The story that sticks out to me of his life is his fictional character-like capability to find the human effects on the natural landscape, figuring out where towns used to be or finding historical artifacts in a sort of drive-by capacity.
This book focuses on his life’s work, which was working for the Society for Psychical Research, along with several adjacent entities. The Society is focused on research into proving the existence of the paranormal. But this is a different sort of organization than some others. The Society dates back to the 1880s, and had an emphasis on field research (i.e. where scientists are most vulnerable to getting conned) even as it was becoming unfashionable, under the premise that it was important to meet the potential supernatural with a home field advantage, accepting that it might have an effect.
As such, the book is something of a stand in for the whole history of parapsychology and the scientific reception of the paranormal. The book’s structure is clever in that way. It focuses on individual cases of Cornell’s with a discussion of how those cases fit into the context of the sorts of cases that happen, along with how those things have ‘fads’ and trends to them.
Cornell seems to be the ideal sort of person to be doing this sort of thing. Born a staunch unbeliever, then having an experience that caused him to question that disbelief, he acts like a skeptic while thinking like a believer. This is someone who frequently disproves a paranormal event, to the extent of solving things himself with placebos. He was also focused on the problem of the mechanism of how the event was taking place being critical to an actual scientific understanding, instead of Line go Boo. And yet, with all of this, he remained a popular and sought out investigator.
This book is the only sensible book on the paranormal that I have encountered, to the point that my usual complaints about anti-science do not apply. You can talk Cornell’s work as a waste of blood and treasure, but as the book does point out in its historical sections, the initial premises that developed into the Ghost Hunter Industrial Complex are no more obviously wrong than other theses, and the manner in which that the “perpetrators” are not con artists – or not always, at any rate – but complexly or even unconsciously motivated deeply frustrates the hard Rationalist takes.
The only weakness in the text here is that the case study format is sometimes too much. Not all of subjects here are worth being the frame. But the brisk pace of the book means that if one fails to hold your attention, the next one is pretty quick to come.
Overall, good book on an truly remarkable and mundane character in a difficult topic dealt with sincerity and hope.
My thanks to the author, Ben Machell, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 