What do you think?
Rate this book
Fourth Wall Phantoms: Reflections on the Paranormal, Narrative, and Fictions Becoming Fact
Few of us ever expect to encounter flying saucers, monsters, or ghosts in our lifetime. Yet those who do inevitably face an unsettling 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 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 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 the crossroads of the paranormal, the imaginary, and the real.
“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.”
- Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think 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
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 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 the crossroads of the paranormal, the imaginary, and the real.
“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.”
- Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think 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
- GenresNonfiction
794 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 1, 2025
32 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2025
An intermittently interesting book with much to think on (if only critically) that is basically the definition of "broad and shallow" in its scholarship.
Covers a wide range of thinkers and ideas not in any great depth and with risk of flattening perspectives into a mystic whole. In general I actually resonate with the authors general position, having often wondered myself if instances of the "paranormal" are not intrusions of the literally "impossible" into the world of the "possible". As matter must have its dark opposite in anti-matter could there be an anti-real which occasionally slips through? It's a fun thought which I'm prepared to go along with.
However I am deeply skeptical of the ideological frame. While the author is no doubt well intentioned his efforts to rehabilitate the likes of Campbell and Jung are questionable and more importantly just passe at this well-trod stage of Fortean lit. Leaning on these rote 101 level thinkers whose obfuscatory guru-ism and textual reductionism have been thoroughly dissected by mainstream academia over the past three decades is a big reason why the field of paranormal research remains largely auto-didactic and not taken seriously. However much authors like Cutchin may complain about a domineering cult of scientism the fact remains that by relying on outdated and entry-level theorists like Campbell and Jung uncritically, while failing to even once address the sturdy history of critique launched against these authors, demonstrates a foundational lack of context or understanding about the fields he's talking about.
By his own admission the author fails to engage with swathes of relevant literature (Derrida and Baudrillard entirely absent) that he does not feel confident about, leaving the chosen sources feeling basically arbitrary. At times feels like a cargo cult built around collected vestiges from existing fields of narratology, folkloristics, postmodernism etc. without any of the relevant context.
This is furthered by the seemingly arbitrary hodge-podge of academic sources Cutchin draws on as sources. For example an entire chapter is given to a blow-by-blow rehash of Vladimir Propp's story forms. The question is begged: Why? Why return us back to one of the most primal sources of modern folkloristics in such detail? Why is there no follow through to show how the field has developed and where Propps ideas stand in the modern context? Why is there no similar outline of Dundes, Ellis or Degh's work, for instance? Any of these three authors (or preferably, as would be expected of any postgrad assignment, all of them) would be essential to informing Cutchins thesis and where it stands in the folkloristics canon. Unfortunately the impression is made of an author swimming in unfamiliar waters. The excitement with which he relates Propp's thought resembles an undergrad hearing about for the first time, and there is only the most tenuous link drawn between it and the supposed real-life occurrence of supernatural phenomena. This kind of pick-and-mix referencing is ever-present in the book and fails to instill confidence into the strength of the authors research. I am using the Propp chapter as an example because I personally studied in folkloristics so this chapters weird gaps and shaky premise were particularly obvious, making it hard to take the chapters on religious practice and quantum physics seriously, as I feel like someone with training in either area would probably have the same reaction to those.
To take another example of the limited scope of research on display as well as the lack of a reliable editor, at one point Cutchin announces "We have to talk about Nick Land" and thus begins a sub-chapter about Lands famous 'hyperstition' theory. Yet, bizarrely, what follows is actually barely three pages long and does not cite Lands actual writing but second-hand sources talking about Land. Obviously this isn't enough room to tackle Lands thought and its context but the content itself, however brief, shows such a minimal understanding that I am convinced it is drawn entirely from hearing other people talk about it. I have no idea why this was included in the final text - it conveys hardly even the barest outline sketch of a major and well-known theorists thought and does not inform the rest of the book at all. It only serves to alert readers already familiar with Land to the present authors unfamiliarity, a baffling decision. This could easily have been cut and a trustworthy editor would have excised this straight away.
By far the most disappointing part of this book is the absence of case studies. While at the start we are treated to a taster of various examples of fictional incursions into reality there are whole chapters in the middle with no spooky stories at all, just meandering paragraphs on entry level philosophy takes. Unlike Cutchins earlier source book of Bigfoot sightings, 'Where the Footprints End', which is cover-to-cover anecdotes this book has very little actual stories of paranormal events and most of them are just the old classics, not many deepcuts one would expect from the author. The entire back half of the book is just pure theoretical talk with hardly any case studies to break it up. There is no reason for the book to be so long as it tends to repeat the same points and should have been edited down by half. Worse still, outside of those brief examples near the start a lot of the case studies given don't really explicitly involve any actual breakdown of the fiction/non-fiction boundary but are just instances where Cutchin points out similarities between a claimed sighting and something which he once read in a sci-fi book. Like there are lots of examples where someone saw a cryptid or ghost or ghoul or whatever and described it as "looking like [insert random fictional character here]" but a lot of these seem like the witness is just trying to draw a comparison with somthing we'd be familiar with from pop culture, they aren't saying it actually *was* Yoda or Crash Bandicoot. This is part of an emphasis throughout on "synchronicity" which I always find tedious, boring pattern-finding exercises where every time a generic white guy name like "Watson" crops up it's significant somehow.
This leads to my biggest problem with the book overall - Cutchin regularly mistakes the map for the territory. For example in the chapter on Propp, Cutchin starts identifying aspects of Propps story model which could be applied to the general structure of "real-life" paranormal encounters. But he seems to miss entirely that the whole field of folklorists which Propps work is so foundational to is about *how* people structure real life linguistically - of course you will notice overlap between the map (the story) and the territory (the real) because that's literally what story-form is. Because his reference point for all this remains the magical supplemental world of Jungs archetypes he misunderstands work like Propps as providing insight into how this magical world literally functions rather than recognizing it as the mechanics, linguistic and social by which stories are formed and told. This is almost certainly why he didn't follow the field any further with relevant authors like Dundes or Degh because it would have become clear from these that the schema for breaking down folk story forms is not a supernatural description of the way the universe actually works but a practical means for tracing how humans make sense of and convey meaning about the world in particular cultural contexts. Again I feel compelled to reiterate that I actually resonate with Cutchins overall hypothesis about the porosity of real-unreal categories but that the way he goes about it just isn't convincing and demonstrates actual confusion about the subjects he's dealing with.
Throughout the book and on a couple podcasts promoting it he said that he needed to step back at a certain book because the process of writing it was distorting his perception of where fact/reality begin and end, but reading it I never had that feeling myself, just that the author was employing woolly association-making in lieu of systematic thought and then confusing himself by it.
My other big criticism of the book is the colloquial chummy first person style of the writing. It is written in a very conversational tone with lots of jokes and bracketed asides and references to memes and so on. Cutchin comes across like a thoughtful and appealingly self-critical guy who points out his own biases and limitations in a way which softened me to the books less than academic appraisal of certain key themes. However there is pervasive and ultimately irredeemable vernacular of what can only be termed clinical Redditism -"Yikes. Just... fuckin' yikes"; "I mean, he wrote a book-maybe the best book-on flying freaking saucers, for cryin' out loud" - which, when coupled with a reference pool of predominantly Star Wars and superheroes made me feel less charitable overall.
Covers a wide range of thinkers and ideas not in any great depth and with risk of flattening perspectives into a mystic whole. In general I actually resonate with the authors general position, having often wondered myself if instances of the "paranormal" are not intrusions of the literally "impossible" into the world of the "possible". As matter must have its dark opposite in anti-matter could there be an anti-real which occasionally slips through? It's a fun thought which I'm prepared to go along with.
However I am deeply skeptical of the ideological frame. While the author is no doubt well intentioned his efforts to rehabilitate the likes of Campbell and Jung are questionable and more importantly just passe at this well-trod stage of Fortean lit. Leaning on these rote 101 level thinkers whose obfuscatory guru-ism and textual reductionism have been thoroughly dissected by mainstream academia over the past three decades is a big reason why the field of paranormal research remains largely auto-didactic and not taken seriously. However much authors like Cutchin may complain about a domineering cult of scientism the fact remains that by relying on outdated and entry-level theorists like Campbell and Jung uncritically, while failing to even once address the sturdy history of critique launched against these authors, demonstrates a foundational lack of context or understanding about the fields he's talking about.
By his own admission the author fails to engage with swathes of relevant literature (Derrida and Baudrillard entirely absent) that he does not feel confident about, leaving the chosen sources feeling basically arbitrary. At times feels like a cargo cult built around collected vestiges from existing fields of narratology, folkloristics, postmodernism etc. without any of the relevant context.
This is furthered by the seemingly arbitrary hodge-podge of academic sources Cutchin draws on as sources. For example an entire chapter is given to a blow-by-blow rehash of Vladimir Propp's story forms. The question is begged: Why? Why return us back to one of the most primal sources of modern folkloristics in such detail? Why is there no follow through to show how the field has developed and where Propps ideas stand in the modern context? Why is there no similar outline of Dundes, Ellis or Degh's work, for instance? Any of these three authors (or preferably, as would be expected of any postgrad assignment, all of them) would be essential to informing Cutchins thesis and where it stands in the folkloristics canon. Unfortunately the impression is made of an author swimming in unfamiliar waters. The excitement with which he relates Propp's thought resembles an undergrad hearing about for the first time, and there is only the most tenuous link drawn between it and the supposed real-life occurrence of supernatural phenomena. This kind of pick-and-mix referencing is ever-present in the book and fails to instill confidence into the strength of the authors research. I am using the Propp chapter as an example because I personally studied in folkloristics so this chapters weird gaps and shaky premise were particularly obvious, making it hard to take the chapters on religious practice and quantum physics seriously, as I feel like someone with training in either area would probably have the same reaction to those.
To take another example of the limited scope of research on display as well as the lack of a reliable editor, at one point Cutchin announces "We have to talk about Nick Land" and thus begins a sub-chapter about Lands famous 'hyperstition' theory. Yet, bizarrely, what follows is actually barely three pages long and does not cite Lands actual writing but second-hand sources talking about Land. Obviously this isn't enough room to tackle Lands thought and its context but the content itself, however brief, shows such a minimal understanding that I am convinced it is drawn entirely from hearing other people talk about it. I have no idea why this was included in the final text - it conveys hardly even the barest outline sketch of a major and well-known theorists thought and does not inform the rest of the book at all. It only serves to alert readers already familiar with Land to the present authors unfamiliarity, a baffling decision. This could easily have been cut and a trustworthy editor would have excised this straight away.
By far the most disappointing part of this book is the absence of case studies. While at the start we are treated to a taster of various examples of fictional incursions into reality there are whole chapters in the middle with no spooky stories at all, just meandering paragraphs on entry level philosophy takes. Unlike Cutchins earlier source book of Bigfoot sightings, 'Where the Footprints End', which is cover-to-cover anecdotes this book has very little actual stories of paranormal events and most of them are just the old classics, not many deepcuts one would expect from the author. The entire back half of the book is just pure theoretical talk with hardly any case studies to break it up. There is no reason for the book to be so long as it tends to repeat the same points and should have been edited down by half. Worse still, outside of those brief examples near the start a lot of the case studies given don't really explicitly involve any actual breakdown of the fiction/non-fiction boundary but are just instances where Cutchin points out similarities between a claimed sighting and something which he once read in a sci-fi book. Like there are lots of examples where someone saw a cryptid or ghost or ghoul or whatever and described it as "looking like [insert random fictional character here]" but a lot of these seem like the witness is just trying to draw a comparison with somthing we'd be familiar with from pop culture, they aren't saying it actually *was* Yoda or Crash Bandicoot. This is part of an emphasis throughout on "synchronicity" which I always find tedious, boring pattern-finding exercises where every time a generic white guy name like "Watson" crops up it's significant somehow.
This leads to my biggest problem with the book overall - Cutchin regularly mistakes the map for the territory. For example in the chapter on Propp, Cutchin starts identifying aspects of Propps story model which could be applied to the general structure of "real-life" paranormal encounters. But he seems to miss entirely that the whole field of folklorists which Propps work is so foundational to is about *how* people structure real life linguistically - of course you will notice overlap between the map (the story) and the territory (the real) because that's literally what story-form is. Because his reference point for all this remains the magical supplemental world of Jungs archetypes he misunderstands work like Propps as providing insight into how this magical world literally functions rather than recognizing it as the mechanics, linguistic and social by which stories are formed and told. This is almost certainly why he didn't follow the field any further with relevant authors like Dundes or Degh because it would have become clear from these that the schema for breaking down folk story forms is not a supernatural description of the way the universe actually works but a practical means for tracing how humans make sense of and convey meaning about the world in particular cultural contexts. Again I feel compelled to reiterate that I actually resonate with Cutchins overall hypothesis about the porosity of real-unreal categories but that the way he goes about it just isn't convincing and demonstrates actual confusion about the subjects he's dealing with.
Throughout the book and on a couple podcasts promoting it he said that he needed to step back at a certain book because the process of writing it was distorting his perception of where fact/reality begin and end, but reading it I never had that feeling myself, just that the author was employing woolly association-making in lieu of systematic thought and then confusing himself by it.
My other big criticism of the book is the colloquial chummy first person style of the writing. It is written in a very conversational tone with lots of jokes and bracketed asides and references to memes and so on. Cutchin comes across like a thoughtful and appealingly self-critical guy who points out his own biases and limitations in a way which softened me to the books less than academic appraisal of certain key themes. However there is pervasive and ultimately irredeemable vernacular of what can only be termed clinical Redditism -"Yikes. Just... fuckin' yikes"; "I mean, he wrote a book-maybe the best book-on flying freaking saucers, for cryin' out loud" - which, when coupled with a reference pool of predominantly Star Wars and superheroes made me feel less charitable overall.
July 18, 2025
This book covers some subjects that've been of interest to me for a while. Very eloquent. Also, the first mention of metalepsis I've encountered in years. Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews