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Gods: Charles Fort's Book of the Damned (1919)

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned. “For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”. Joshua Blu Buhs recounts Fort’s early life, unfinished manuscripts (“X”, “Y”), and the philosophical monism that informed his research.

He’d been unable to write a second novel and, now liberated from the need to sell short stories, he spent his days in the library, endlessly digressing through the study of “all the arts and sciences”, wearing out “eyesight and pencils and breeches” as he took notes on everything from evolution to calculus. From “X”, he moved on to “Y”, financial security allowing for productivity — days spent at the library, evenings devoted to shuffling notes, writing, before Annie served a simple, hearty meal, the night capped with a stroll, the movies, a late snack of cheese and beer. “Demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all mythological characters; But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly believed in as if they had been proved.” In rescuing the excluded, damned facts, Fort aimed to demonstrate the continuity of existence, to complete the puzzle by providing the missing pieces.

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