Stories from The Messengers — a companion book

cover art in progress

The Messengers has been available for over a month. I wanted to let readers know that there is a follow up in the works, a companion book to be titled Stories from The Messengers. 

I have been collecting these strange owl stories for the last few years, and some of them were just too long to put in the initial volume. It would be unfair to the people who’ve experienced these baffling life events to edit down their stories. These longer accounts have a complexity that require that they be told completely. The Messengers is just shy of 400 pages, and it would have been irresponsible to cram a bunch of long complex stories into an already long book. 

Anne Strieber, the late wife of author Whitley Strieber, had a simple way of evaluating the truth of a UFO report. She said, if it’s not weird, I don’t trust it. This was her BS detector, and I think its valid.

Within these longer stories is a confusing collision of overlapping experiences. A mess of twists and turns, and all of them weird. Things feel mixed up with threads running off everywhere in a tangled knot of implausibility. Synchronicity spills over the edges like an unattended sink. For me, this kind of chaos is a sign to trust the event as legitimate. The more complicated the interwoven details, the more valid it seems. This all becomes a shaky form of proof that something truly paranormal is unfolding. 

I’ve been referring to this frenetic pattern as the paradox syndrome. A paradox is an attempt at sound reasoning, but the conclusion appears unacceptable. A syndrome is a group of related or coinciding things, events, and actions. I don’t understand why it works this way, but all the messy threads must tie into some core event, and the challenge is not to get lost in the mayhem. And when there is an owl tied to one of these threads, I pay very close attention.

This next book will read like a collection of short stories with this paradox syndrome as its central theme. A lot of it is already written (although unpolished) so it is a matter of cleaning it up for publication. There is no set date on the companion book, but it’s on my desk now, my mission for the short term.

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