This series of biographical novels follows the extraordinary, often bizarre, early life of Graham Phillips, charting his journey from troubled schoolboy to one of Britain’s most original investigators of unexplained phenomena and historical mysteries.
In the 1960s, an undiagnosed bipolar boy was dispatched to a strict military boarding school—an institution that could be brutal, surreal and, viewed through the lens of hindsight, frequently darkly comic. What followed was no conventional coming-of-age story, but a succession of improbable encounters, misadventures and discoveries that carried him through the strange cultural landscape of 1970s Britain and into the worlds of ufology, the paranormal and ancient mysteries.
Part tragedy, part comedy of terrors, and often stranger than fiction itself, these novels draw on extensive research to explore the experiences that shaped the writer and investigator Graham Phillips would become.
Below are extracts taken from this series.
Status: Currently in development.
The Paranormalist series is a work of fiction inspired by real people, places, events, folklore, and paranormal claims. Historical figures, locations, and documented incidents may appear alongside fictional characters, dialogue, interpretations, and events. While extensive research has informed the stories, the series should be regarded as fiction rather than a factual or historical account.
The Nazarite
Strange Phenomena (working title)
Book One of The Paranormalist series
Summer 1957, Warley (west of Birmingham), UK.
Graham was nearly four years old when he saw Him. The fever that had gripped him for days had yet to break, sending his temperature soaring to over one hundred and three degrees, causing his vision to pulse. Sleep was fitful and disturbing, with dreams of bizarre places and foul monsters that crawled up from cracks and hollows rent deep through the Earth.
It must have been very early in the morning as he opened his eyes to see his familiar bedroom once more, the one he would one day share for a while with his new sister, Paula. Through the pre-dawn summer’s light, he glimpsed a figure sitting at the foot of his bed. Unlike some of his nightmare monsters, it appeared solid and, for the moment, unmoving in its gaze. From the outline alone, he knew immediately that it wasn’t either of his parents. The figure’s features, limned in light both gold and silver, were instantly recognisable to him. He’d seen them depicted many times before in books, rendered exquisitely in wood and stone, and as bright, colourful rays struck through lead-lined windows in the Methodist church his mother took him to every Sunday.
With the unexpected adrenaline surge granted him by shock, the weakness in his young body momentarily lapsed. He sat up, almost disbelieving his own eyes to witness the vision of his Lord. Jesus of Nazareth was still nineteen years away from appearing on television, but as an adult, he would recall vividly how the man who now sat in front of him was a dead ringer for Robert Powell.
“Oh my God! It’s the Nazarene!” he exclaimed in a high-pitched squeal of amazement.
The figure slowly turned away from overseeing the semi-detached house that Graham’s parents owned, past the row of trees lining the back of the gardens, to Warley Woods beyond, where scouts used to hold their demonstrations. His eyes lowered to stare directly into Graham’s excited eyes with piercing acuity. The face, His face, Graham immediately corrected himself, glowed with beneficence, projecting an aura of peace and harmony into the dull room. From His mouth, rich tones, the timbre of honey, carried forth.
“It’s the Nazarite, actually,” Jesus admonished him, His voice a condescending mix of mild contempt and weary disdain. With that single statement of supreme importance, He resumed His sentinel watch over the back garden.
The memory of this event remained with Graham for the rest of his life. He hadn’t told his parents when he saw them the next day. His father would have dismissed it as a childish fantasy; his mother, however, was far more unpredictable. She would have seized on it all too eagerly. It was the first time he could ever recall hiding something from her.
When pressed by adult friends about what had occurred immediately after this messianic visitation, all Graham could recall was feeling exhausted, lying back down and falling asleep. Maybe if circumstances in his family life had been more normal, he’d have grown up a believer like many people he’d known around the area. He’d be just another regular run-of-the-mill, church-going type with a sensible job, a normal wife, two-point-four standard-issue kids and the typical set of problems confronting a nuclear family in the Midlands in the late 1970s.
Unknown to all, however, Graham’s mother, Eunice, was showing signs of bipolar disorder. Few talked openly about mental illness back then, let alone recognised the symptoms. Even though the term wouldn’t exist for another twenty years, as Graham got older, the diagnoses of Eunice’s condition by a whole slew of doctors ranged from mania and depression to paranoia and melancholia. By the time she had finally been diagnosed correctly and provided with some form of treatment, she had been self-medicating with religion for years. Nothing in Graham’s life would ever be normal again.
Unpublished work. No reproduction without permission.