Like me, Roach is rather skeptical about the various claims, and so there's something of a let-down as she talks to people with feeble evidence on their side and pooh-poohs it all. Particularly so, since I'm a card-carrying skeptic and have already heard about most of these claims in all their unconvincing detail. Perhaps to try to drum up some tension, she also relies over-much on the journalistic fake-out in each chapter. She starts off and builds to an almost-climax, before dodging away to provide background and information for a long time, and then swooping back to cash in on the climax, which invariably is more like a deflating souffle than a mystic revelation.
To be more concrete, one chapter starts off almost like a Lovecraftian adventure. "I'm sitting here in the special collections department of the library at Miskatonic. There are too many watching eyes, and I hope the other scholars leave before I open the box before me. For inside, it contains a rare specimen of authentic ectoplasm... -- [10 page review of spiritualism omitted] -- finally, I open the box, and within I find a six foot length of cheesecloth that Eusapia Palladino pulled out of her vag."
That said, Roach brings a certain amount of humor to the proceedings, so it makes for a breezy read. Here she parenthetically and footnotally discusses the euphemism 'motion' for BM:
I'm trying to work out how this makes sense as a noun meaning "the product of a bowel movement." This is not Dawson's personal euphemistic misstep; the usage persists in medical writing today. ... Perhaps this is why the term "motion pictures" was replaced by "movies." Now that I see it on the page, "movie" would have been a far better BM euphemism that "motion." I'd love to chat, but I need to make a movie.
Or here, she discusses the emotional effects of infrasound: "Also, I used to feel an ineffable queerness in my chest during Sunday mass, which I put down to God looking inside me and knowing I wasn't listening. Now I'm thinking it was the organ music."
