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By no means as bad as the title threatens, this book explores the ostensible anomalous experiences of children, at least as seen by adults. The idea of children being psychic clearly relates to ideas of them being unsocialised and hence 'primitive' and 'instinctive' beings and thus, like those great ghost detectors domestic pets, are bridges between the worlds of habitat and wild nature. The incidents related are flashlight glimpses of this wildness and deep imagination by the adult world. Children's parents tend either to see it as their task to exorcise this wild imagination by means of formulae such as 'don't make things up·, or to see in them evidence of transcendental realities.
As we have seen, external adults can easily be persuaded to view such narratives as dramatic events in an external reality, and in terms of contemporary fears. The universal human fear of the unshared horror which we must bear alone in a hostile world, makes us willing to accept almost anything which can be shown to be 'out there' but can be captured and incarcerated in Strangeways or Wright-Patterson.
- Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 40, 1991
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