Joshua Cutchin, the Enfant Terrible of the modern Paranormal scene—and one of my best friends in the field—is once again scheduled to release yet another mind-bending, paradigm-changing, page-turner book: Fourth Wall Phantoms.
This is the kind of book I’d been expecting from Josh, after many years of discussing with him the sort of stories that fascinate the both of us, but that are often dismissed by mainstream researchers because they’re just too weird, even for people who take ghosts, UFOs or Bigfoot for granted—encounters between authors and artists with fiction characters in real life. The sort of anecdote usually regarded as a tall tale devised to entertain friends during dinner parties, or a drug-induced hallucination.
But what if they are factual? What, then, does that say about the nature of reality? Might that imply that we ourselves are characters in a developing work of meta-fiction, as Jeffrey Kripal first suggested in his seminal Mutants and Mystics? And could that realization help us alter the narrative in some capacity? These are the sort of questions I’m expecting Josh to tackle head on, and I am certain his answers will not leave me disappointed.
In Fourth Wall Phantoms, acclaimed paranormal author Joshua Cutchin dares to explore one of the few remaining taboos of High Strangeness: the permeable “fourth wall” separating fiction from reality. Through a mixture of both celebrated cases and rare or never-before-published accounts, Cutchin invites readers to venture beyond the page in a search for truth in the unlikeliest of places: the crossroads of the paranormal, the imaginary, and the real.
“The story in which fiction becomes fact saved Joshua Cutchin’s life. It can save yours, too. That’s because it is you. This was once called ‘myth,’ by which our intellectual ancestors did not mean untruth but something like, ‘This is really weird.’ I laughed a lot reading this book, giggling in recognition and realization. This is really weird, even more so because it is so.”
– Jeffrey J. Kripal, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
“Joshua Cutchin writes the sort of books I’ve been waiting my entire life for. In Fourth Wall Phantoms, Joshua is not comfortable with staying on shore, but buoys himself in very strange waters and urges us to look down into their depths with him. What we see is something which raises enormous questions about not only anomalous experiences but that of the creative act in every capacity that it is evoked. This is an extremely important work; the ramifications within Fourth Wall Phantoms cut across every aspect of the Paranormal, the Supernatural and especially the Occult. It is time to give long overdue attention to what the creative among us have always suspected, and quite a few of them already know—that our fictions are alive, real, and interact with us constantly.”
– Douglas Batchelor, host of What Magic Is This? Podcast
[Source: joshuacutchin.com]
Fourth Wall Phantoms will be available for purchase on April 13th, 2025.
