BOOK OF THE DAMNED (The Garland Library of Science Fiction)

A procession of the damned, Fort says as he begins this book. By damned, he means excluded. . . . "We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. "Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. "Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile. "A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety." Folks with an abiding interest in Charles Fort and things Fortean should check out www.forteans.com, homepage of the International Fortean Organization.