Whisperers On Sale Soon

I haven’t published any serious non-fiction for more than a decade, but that’s about to change on June 13 when Overlook Hardbacks in New York bring out Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World in the U.S. with a U.K. edition due from Duckworth in London in November. It’s a book I’ve been writing on and off for forty years, presenting what I genuinely believe to be a wholly new and different view of human history.

The seed was sown in the early 1970s while I was researching a book on occult practice in Nazi Germany. One of the things I discovered then was that Heinrich Himmler held seances in the crypt of Quedlinburg Cathedral to seek the advice of the Medieval king Heinrich the Fowler on political matters.

This struck me as chilling. Himmler was head of the SS and Gestapo and the man ultimately in charge of the so-called ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ a programme of industrialised murder that cost 6 million lives. Could the Reichfuhrer really have based his life and death decisions on the whisperings of  a spirit?

He could and he did and he wasn’t the only one. Over the years I gradually unearthed more and more evidence that throughout the course of human history, politicians and popes, messiahs and kings, world leaders of every political and religious persuasion have been guided by voices from the Beyond. Which means that your life and mine have been indirectly influenced by entities we know nothing about and may not even believe in.

Once you reach that conclusion, an obvious question presents itself. What exactly are the Whisperers? There are many answers. Psychologists usually insist they are nothing more than unconscious contents — fantasies and wish-fulfilments — erupting into consciousness as pseudo-personalities. Spiritualists claim they are spirits of the dead. The religiously-minded see them as God, gods, angels or other sacred entities. None of these notions is particularly satisfactory, so I set out to investigate the question for myself.

The result was an intellectual journey with a completely unexpected ending.

It’s all in the book, folks. You can pre-order your copy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.