While meeting victims of poltergeists, spending evenings at haunted inns, and talking with exorcists and druids, Storr keeps his criticisms subtle and maintains an almost wide-eyed naiveté into the subject matter. Then in a very fast pace, the book gets a bit more weight as we go along and he begins to learn his way around. The book does start out very superficial, in that Storr hasn't done any research before getting in the car with a demonologist from Pennsylvania, and about to investigate a haunting. Now what Storr understands (and what makes his book infinitely more readable than 'Spook') is that he doesn't have to make any jokes for it to be funny. How could anyone be so involved in this kind of stuff when there's little to no hard evidence? So Roach takes to making dumb jokes about the people she's involved with, which is basically shooting fish in a barrel. I think this takes researchers like Storr and Roach by surprise when they go to write a book of this nature. Though there have always been ghost story anecdotes in over hundreds of years of human history, there continues to be an absolute lack of any tangible evidence to back it up. Trust me, there is more dust than there are actual energy orbs… The biggest issue with paranormal studies is proof. It's one thing to not have a decent explanation for odd orb-like shapes that occasionally show up in photography it's a quantum leap (of the religious kind) to think they represent spirits of dead people at all times. Most paranormal investigators do label me a skeptic, but I'm quite open to the possibility of a world beyond our own.

He lets the people and situations speak for themselves. While Storr's tone in his writing suggests his own feelings and theories, you never feel like he's shoving his ideas down your throat. Starting as a passing interest, he meets with everyone from self-proclaimed 'Druids' and 'witches' to reality TV investigators to psychologists and skeptics, to exorcists, to just local ghost hunters. Storr is a terrific narrator who had no real connection to anything supernatural-related before writing this book. What I enjoy most about this book is the writing by the author, Will Storr. What this book offers is a terrific insider’s look into the world of supernatural investigation and the people and experiences involved in it. There's no hard proof, no drawn conclusions by the author, and no sense of credibility that plagues so many books on this subject. In fact your enjoyment of this book will rely mostly on your cynicism and what you don't know about the world of ghosts and demons. the Supernatural” is not a book for any self-proclaimed experts or investigators of the supernatural.

Spook by mary roach summary