Geoff Holder is the author of more than a dozen books on everything mysterious, paranormal, strange, gothic and grotesque. His books are an authoritative mix of extensive historical study combined with diligent field research. They are often geographically-based, with titles such as The Guide to Mysterious Glasgow and The Guide to the Mysterious Lake District.
Holder is primarily interested in ‘forteana’ – the world of the odd, the curious, the wondrous, the allegedly paranormal – and its fractious and informing relationship with the so-called mundane world. What do people do when they have too much undirected time on their hands? They do weird stuff, from collecting strange objects to inventing religions. The natural world is also full of marvels and curiosities; while most monsters live in our heads, some are real. Did folk magic, curses and witchcraft ever work? And what is going on when people encounter aliens, demons, fairies, ghosts or the Blessed Virgin Mary?
The subject matter of Holder’s books is necessarily wide-ranging, taking in art history, cryptozoology, religion, anthropology, folklore, architecture, meteorology, literature, mythology, placenames, parapsychology and social history. The works also reference popular culture such as films, TV, comics and novels (The Guide to Mysterious Arran, for example, managed to get in Star Trek, Thunderbirds and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Archaeology, inevitably, features large in his books, with a particular emphasis on stone circles and other prehistoric ritual and funerary sites, culminating in 101 Things To Do With A Stone Circle.
A Welshman, Geoff Holder was educated at the University of Stirling and still lives in Scotland. In a previous career, he was a television and video producer and wrote and produced the 2004 STV series Scotland The Mysterious Country.
