Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, February 2025
Dark Spirits
Monsters, Demons and Devils
By Richard Estep
Published by Visible Ink Press
Distributed by Publishers Group West
March 11, 2025
Price: $19.95
256 pages, 100 B/W Photos and Illustrations, Bibliography, Index
6″ × 9″ Trade Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-57859-847-2
Library Hardback ISBN: 978-1-57859-874-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57859-875-5
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Richard Estep has been a rather prolific author and written some twenty books, most of them in the field of paranormal nonfiction. He’s penned books like Serial Killers: The Minds, Methods, and Mayhem of History's Most Notorious Murderers and The Serial Killer Next Door: The Double Lives of Notorious Murderers. As already noted, he’s written many paranormal nonfiction titles, such as The Horrors of Fox Hollow Farm: Unraveling the History & Hauntings of a Serial Killer’s Home and he’s a regular columnist for Haunted Magazine. He has also written for the Journal of Emergency Medical Services. Richard appears regularly on the TV shows Haunted Case Files, Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal 911, and Paranormal Night Shift. British by birth, Richard now makes his home a few miles north of Denver, Colorado, where he serves as a paramedic and lives with his wife and a menagerie of adopted animals.
Dark Spirits covers a full spectrum of high strange accounts from all over the world. A good number of them are downright nightmarish. The book promises to deliver authenticated tales of “monsters, aliens, and a panoply of weird phenomena,” and it indeed delivers. From the Loch Ness Monster to tales of vampires of Transylvania and England, to alien abductions, as in the cases of Betty and Barney Hil and Travis Walton, to demonic possession, black-eyed kids, Shadow People, doppelgangers, The Hopkinsville Goblins, the notorious Men in Black, the Beast of Bray Road, Skinwalker Ranch, ghostly hitchhikers, and much, much more.
Though best to be read in the light of day, Dark Spirits is nonetheless both entertaining and educational. That is if you want to peak behind the curtain of Oz and are the least bit curious about eyewitness accounts of the deep weird zones of the unexplained.
