Danny Robins, Into the Uncanny (BBC Books/Penguin, 2023), 352pp.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Danny Robins, the force behind The Battersea Poltergeist and the Uncanny podcast (and much else) is the man who made the paranormal interesting again. Indeed, he is one of the key figures who is setting the tone for popular exploration of the paranormal in this decade: instinctively sceptical, but open; wanting to believe, but above all respectful of the experiences of others. It is the attitude of mind that the presenter of one of my favourite podcasts, Wide Atlantic Weird, calls ‘critical but not cynical’; and Danny is certainly not the first to cultivate such an attitude. The sceptical blogger Hayley Stevens, whose scepticism is balanced by an unwavering insistence that people do indeed experience weird things, is one of the people who blazed this trail and set the tone. And others are now following it – like Sian Eleri, whose recent BBC series Paranormal adopted just such a sceptical-but-respectful approach.

The reason for Danny Robins’s success is, in part, because he is a first-rate storyteller (this book can leave the reader in no doubt of that); but he has also managed the seemingly impossible and got us to look afresh at one of the oldest chestnuts there is: ‘Do ghosts exist?’ The paranormal (or at least pop culture’s presentation of it) had become boring in the 1990s and 2000s because, as Danny himself argues, it was always presented at one of two extremes. Experts predominated at both ends: paranormal ‘experts’ with the scent of charlatanry and sceptical experts with the scent of cynicism, and a hint of cruelty. The result was that ‘Team Believer’ came across as irredeemably credulous while ‘Team Sceptic’ came across as nasty. It was tempting to switch off from the whole circus.

Danny Robins is not a self-styled expert in anything, which is refreshing to begin with. But he is clearly expert at getting other people to tell their stories about the strange experiences they have had. And he has a definite knack for finding ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell. He somehow captures and bottles the primal magic and shock of hearing someone who you know is sincere (and probably telling the truth as they see it) recount a deeply weird experience to you, in person. As anyone who has ever had such a conversation will tell you, it is almost as strange to have someone plausibly recount a weird experience in good faith as to undergo the experience itself. What do we do with such conversations and confessions? What do we do with such experiences?

Into the Uncanny is a book that is at once deeply personal (indeed, at times autobiographical) and intelligently reflective on major conceptual issues. Not everything works; I’m afraid even Danny can’t make Ouija Boards interesting again, and some of the attempts to inject humour into the narrative felt a little forced. But at the heart of the book is the problem of ‘anomalistics’ (although Danny steers clear of such jargon). As Danny explains, science is based on the repeatability of an experiment; and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; but what if something extraordinary happens only once, and there are only a handful of witnesses? Anomalous phenomena (or Forteana, to give them another name) compel us to confront the gap between the value we place on science and our actual perception of reality. If something has happened to you, if you have witnessed it with your own eyes, even if it is something seemingly impossible, you will believe it even if no-one else does. To trust the evidence of our own eyes is not to go against science; but it is to recognise the limitations of the scientific method when dealing with one-off or very rare events. Paranormal events are, on this interpretation, a sort of ‘Wow! signal’ – immensely interesting, but unrepeatable and usually untestable – lying beyond the scope of science to investigate them, but not for that reason necessarily beyond the bounds of reality.

Yet, as Danny observes, being witness to an anomalous event places an almost unbearable psychological burden on individuals in a society where the prevailing wisdom is that we should either be able to explain everything that happens – or it didn’t happen. But what if we are simultaneously convinced that it happened, and that it is inexplicable? It is here, perhaps, that our society lags behind others in which alternative modes of perception and states of consciousness are recognised and valued. Danny dives surprisingly far into some deep waters, yet he generally strikes the right balance between entertainment and speculation, perhaps because his fundamentally humane approach to his subject holds it all together. He advocates the idea that his engagement with both believers and sceptics about the reality of the paranormal models a new kind of ‘good disagreement’ – although, in the end, Danny veers towards suggesting that a kind of agnosticism or quantum uncertainty about unexplained phenomena is perhaps the best attitude from which to appreciate them. And it is certainly true that paranormal investigations by uncritical believers and cynical sceptics are equally dull; not only is Danny good at being the uncynical sceptic, but it may be that uncynical scepticism is the only way to make the paranormal interesting.

I certainly was not expecting the Venerable English College in Rome – a place I know well – to be a starring character in the book, and indeed for people I know personally to make an appearance; so that gave this book an added significance for me. But overall, I am forced to agree with Dan Schreiber’s assessment of Danny’s book that it is possibly the best book about the paranormal he has ever read. I certainly cannot remember ever enjoying a nonfiction book on the subject as much as this one, or indeed finding it as thought-provoking as this. Into the Uncanny is surely the British paranormal book of the decade: the defining script of the distinctive character of 2020s woo.