Away with the fairies

There have been plenty of books in recent years in which apparently sane hacks go off in search of loonies to poke fun at. While The Heretics looks at first as if it fits neatly into the genre, there turns out to be rather more to it than that. Not that the book doesn’t come richly stocked with people who hold what my mother used to call very unreliable opinions.

They include a regressive hypnotherapist called Vered who once treated someone who believed they’d been a twig in a previous life, and an NHS-funded expert on satanic rituals who insists that satanists regularly stitch babies inside the bellies of dying animals so that they can be ‘reborn’ to Satan. Apparently the satanists — when peckish — also snack on foetuses. ‘Raw or cooked?’ Storr asks her. ‘The foetuses are raw’, she tells him solemnly.

But however keen the provocation, Storr goes easy on the scorn.