FOURTH WALL PHANTOMS
Horse & Barrel (2025) - Coming April 13
What if stories were more than just stories? What if fictions came to life? What would that say about our greatest mysteries? What would that say about you?
From the author of Ecology of Souls comes a fresh perspective on fact, fiction, and the paranormal.
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Few of us ever expect to encounter flying saucers, monsters, or ghosts in our lifetime. Yet those who do inevitably face an unsettling realization: that reality is far stranger than we’ve been led to believe.
As shocking as these revelations might seem, they pale in comparison to an even more controversial phenomenon lurking in the shadows: encounters with fictional characters made real. Over the centuries, countless individuals have reported coming face-to-face with characters and creatures seemingly ripped from our collective imagination—everything from literary heroes to mythical beasts, even comic book superheroes.
What at first seems like a rarity soon reveals itself as a pervasive aspect of the paranormal writ large. UFOs mimic elements of pulp depictions. Cryptids emerge from folklore and fiction. Urban legends materialize as authentic ghostly phenomena. Evidence abounds for those willing to listen with open minds… and confront the impossible.
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.
PRAISE FOR FOURTH WALL PHANTOMS:
“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