The Beyond is Part of the Here Now

The Beyond is Part of the Here Now is a spiritual memoir built from a series of lived episodes, each one presented as a personal testimony rather than an argument. June Raleigh structures the book as a chain of encounters that begin in childhood and move across decades, from seeing Santa’s sleigh over military housing in Japan to visions of Jesus, ghosts of relatives, unexplained time loss, UFO sightings, angelic rescues, and visits from the dead. What gives the book its shape is the author’s steady belief that earthly life and a larger unseen reality are constantly brushing against each other. She says early on, “I’m not trying to define, merely to present what has already transpired,” and that statement becomes the book’s method.

What makes the book readable is the way Raleigh roots extraordinary events in ordinary details. She’s not floating in abstraction for long. She’s building snowmen, bartending in Los Angeles, fencing in tournaments, driving through California, grieving her father, rescuing a kitten, and trying to make sense of the strange things that interrupt everyday life. That groundedness matters because it turns the book into more than a catalog of paranormal stories. It becomes a life story in which work, family, sports, faith, and danger all sit on the same level as visions and apparitions. The result feels conversational and direct, like listening to someone who has been carrying these memories for years and has finally decided to set them down in one place.

The strongest through line in the book is that love is the force that ties the visible world to the invisible one. Raleigh returns to that idea again and again, especially in chapters about Dave, her father, and Opie the cat. Those sections give the memoir its emotional center. The supernatural isn’t treated as spectacle so much as continuation. Loss doesn’t end connection. It changes its form. That’s why one of the most revealing lines in the book is also one of its simplest: “God is alive.” In Raleigh’s telling, that conviction reaches into grief, memory, loyalty, and even the small tenderness of being found again by a beloved animal.

The book also has an interesting tonal mix. Part of it reads like devotional writing, part of it like old Hollywood memoir, part of it like a family record, and part of it like frontier ghost lore. Raleigh can move from scripture and metaphysics to Frank Sinatra’s preferred drink, from a near abduction in Los Angeles to a cowboy ghost in Wyoming, without sounding like she thinks these belong to separate worlds. For her, they don’t. That blend gives the book its personality. It’s sincere, sometimes startlingly blunt, and often most compelling when it’s simply reporting what happened and moving on. Even the reflections at the end stay true to that impulse, widening from autobiography into a broader meditation on existence, human choice, and the fate of the earth.

What stayed with me most is that The Beyond is Part of the Here Now is a book of witness. It asks to be read as a record of one woman’s experiences and the meaning she’s drawn from them over time. Whether she’s describing a cloud ring, a glowing visitor, or a late-night voice that sends her back to a lost cat, Raleigh writes with the same basic aim: to tell the story clearly and let the reader sit with it. That gives the book a distinctive kind of intimacy. It’s less interested in proving than in sharing, less interested in performance than in testimony. By the end, it feels like a memoir about how a person builds a life around the conviction that the world is fuller, stranger, and more connected than it first appears.

Pages: 62 | ASIN: B07QQCQ4WX

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The Literary Titan is an organization of professional editors, writers, and professors that have a passion for the written word. We review fiction and non-fiction books in many different genres, as well as conduct author interviews, and recognize talented authors with our Literary Book Award. We are privileged to work with so many creative authors around the globe.

Posted on March 30, 2026, in Book Reviews, Five Stars and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

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