A procession of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march.

You'll read them--or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizzare and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.

A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.

The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.

--Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

Fort was interested in the theories and ideas that he felt science discarded too easily. It was not that he felt the ideas held any validity, necessarily. Fort felt that the fringes didn't get as much respect as they should. In his book, Fort digs up deceased ideas, long-forgotten theories, and parades them for an audience, making them dance dramatically.

A Fortean story, for this editor, can work on a couple of levels. In the easiest way, it can deal with the unusual, macabre, or weird phenomena that would have or did capture Fort's interest. Examples include strange objects such as blood, or flower petals falling from the sky. Or, more difficult to accomplish, there is the idea that the story can be a sort of Fortean phenomena itself. They straddle the lines, or piss on them altogether. These are stories that, through their damned status, deserve a second look, even if the look involves a few jeers.

We don't want the previous statement to be interpreted as an invitation for the writers of the Net to send us every rejected story in their trunk. We strongly prefer stories of the first nature, because like all humans, we prefer things that don't defy categorization. But, don't be surprised if you come across the occasional story within our pages that makes you question your sanity, or ours. We like doing that. It's a personality quirk.

-Jeremy Tolbert