Over time, Fort’s readings expanded from what was known to what was not, from the lawed to the lawless. He kept uncovering anomalies, reports of raining frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky. These fascinated him, and he started taking notes on them too, worrying over their meaning. Setting aside fiction, Fort now concerned himself with the nature of existence. “I see this all as a travail”, he said, “of emerging more or less a metaphysician from a story writer.”13 He arranged the tens of thousands of notes hoarded about his apartment according to some thirteen hundred categories. Compelled “orthogenetically”, he turned in November 1915 to synthesizing his notes, his thoughts on the anomalous.

…

In December 1916, he decided on his next project, “a study of—occult things you know—things that have been called souls or spirits.”21 Its composition, though, proved difficult. At the end of each day, after hours at the library, he could not bring himself to write. He wasn’t sure how to apply “the kind of brains I have” to the subject. “Mine is a coarse and more cynical mind than those that have heretofore examined such phenomena, also it has some other qualities and a different attitude toward what is called the scientific method.”22 He thought of this book as “Z”.

Over the next several years, Fort transformed the manuscript into The Book of the Damned. Beyond breaking the alphabetic naming convention, he presented his material in a new fashion. The bulk of the book comprises the strange reports he’d gathered, particularly stories of things that fell from the sky, interwoven with attacks on Euclidean geometry, Darwinian evolution, Newtonian mechanics, geology. Though superficially confusing, a mass of disparate mysteries, there is an underlying argument, Fort’s eccentric theorizing not absent, just less prominent. The Book of the Damned advanced Fort’s monism. His quarrel with science centers on its failure to recognize the universe’s wholeness. Scientists mutilate reality, cut it into pieces, some called truth, others damned as false. Christianity, in days past, had used the same process to create its own regime of Truth — a Religious Dominant now superseded by an equally incomplete Scientific Dominant. “Demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all mythological characters; But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly believed in as if they had been proved.”23 In rescuing the excluded, damned facts, Fort aimed to demonstrate the continuity of existence, to complete the puzzle by providing the missing pieces. He hoped to initiate a new Dominant, one that recognized the universal continuum.