The Mothman Prophecies

"I picked this up when I was working in a science fiction bookshop twenty-five years ago. I didn’t know what it was, but I had been reading Fortean Times for several years, which is a magazine of paranormal phenomena and general weirdness. Forteana is named after a very strange man called Charles Fort who, 120 years ago, sat down in the archives of a newspaper and picked out every single strange thing that had been reported, and collected them into books. That gave rise to Forteanism. The philosophy is that you should be just as sceptical of modern science as you are of things like paranormal phenomena. Anything is possible. And The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel is very much in this tradition. On one level, it is a story about people seeing this ‘mothman’ figure in West Virginia, and coupled with these sightings there are strange warnings that people get on telephones and the like, about a bridge that is going to collapse. But that’s just the story on the surface. It’s actually a vehicle for John Keel to rant about what he thinks reality is, and that’s what caught me. It gets science fictional because he is very into aliens, alien encounters and alien abductions, and what it does to people who experience it. But the thing is, he’s not so sure that aliens come from outer space. He thinks we’re very possibly just being trolled by people who are right next to us, sort-of sideways on other frequencies. Because aliens act very much like fairies, don’t they? They show up, they take you away – instead of a mountain it’s to a UFO – and they do terrible things to you. And their logic seems to be very difficult to understand, just like fairies. The things they say and the things they do can be traced right back to fairy myths, and often UFO hotspots tend to be in the same places where people used to see fairies. He’s not sure what they’re actually doing here – it seems that a lot of the time these aliens, or fairies or cryptids or whatever, have an agenda that we cannot understand, and sometimes it seems like they’re just toying with us. They’re trolling us. I am extremely agnostic when it comes to religion, and very agnostic when it comes to reality and how it works. So for me, this is the perfect science-fiction-folklore crossover book. But I must also warn you that if you choose to read this book, which is a biographical telling about this Mothman phenomenon, you also have to put up with John Keel ranting a lot. You’re talking about bedroom invaders and sleep paralysis, right? I’m actually touching on that in the story I’m writing right now. I’ve had sleep paralysis a couple of times, complete with people staring at me, which is not great… My view of reality goes hand in hand with the stuff I write, because a lot of things I write are me having thought experiments about what could happen, either here or somewhere else. Amatka is often labelled a dystopia, but I never wrote it as a dystopia. I wrote it as a thought experiment. If you take a bunch of socialists from the 1970s and put them in an alien place, what’s going to happen to them as they try to survive, and what does that do to how they function, how they think? I collect lots of paranormal phenomena and occultism and folklore. To me, it’s so interesting to dig into, because it’s not only about what’s out there, but also who we are and how we think about the world, and how those two are not quite separate. We live inside our own subjective realities. My distinct feeling about reality is that it’s quite flexible, while other people might live in realities that are very materialistic and concrete… These things flow directly into my writing."