The complete "Tales of Madness and Depravity" collection. Includes From the Pen of walter Jolly, Followers of the Stone, The Crippled House, The Disappearance of Arthur Beaumont, Of Shadows and Dreams, A Caller in the Night, and many, many more!

paperback and e-book. a collection of short horror stories by Michael McGouirk. includes gunnar hilligross, followers of the stone, of shadows and dreams, and from the pen of walter jolly

How to put a method, a structure in madness? ”Since I’d be first to cast a stone at a murderer—I am one after all—I venture on writing these truthful chronicles as a study of human suffering,” writes a serial-killer, in a story of self-discovery gone amok. JUNG’S DEMON is a book as hallucinogenic as Hunter S. Thompson and as powerful as Oscar Zeta Acosta. It is as tragic as Malcolm Lowry and occasionally as funny as David Foster Wallace. "The murders Roman L. had committed with such a ferocious, savage intensity send shivers down my spine every time I reflect on his brutally honest confessions. He writes about “sinking into the terrifying Hell of my own soul, a cold, utter darkness of the scariest, most painful insanity that peels off your skin while your brain screams, crushed by madness.” Even now as I copy his words here, I shake as I furtively look around. And I am afraid. I dread, no matter how irrationally, that I somehow might meet him or one of his scary personalities anew, and, like I was once before in Paris, again be tricked into liking him by his disarming, almost child-like smile and by his mirthful laughter that hid both the frightened child in him and the terrifying, heartless monster sneering behind. This book contains his chronicles. His harrowing descent into Hell.” Think Kafka on acid and sprinkle some humor over it; that's JUNG'S DEMON. “What if I should discover that I myself am the enemy who must be loved? What then?” Carl Gustav Jung

The heinous bloodlust of Dr. H.H. Holmes is notorious -- but only Harold Schechter's Depraved tells the complete story of the killer whose evil acts of torture and murder flourished within miles of the Chicago World's Fair. "Destined to be a true crime classic" (Flint Journal, MI), this authoritative account chronicles the methods and madness of a monster who slipped easily into a bright, affluent Midwestern suburb, where no one suspected the dapper, charming Holmes -- who alternately posed as doctor, druggist, and inventor to snare his prey -- was the architect of a labyrinthine "Castle of Horrors." Holmes admitted to twenty-seven murders by the time his madhouse of trapdoors, asphyxiation devices, body chutes, and acid vats was exposed. The seminal profile of a homegrown madman in the era of Jack the Ripper, Depraved is also a mesmerizing tale of true detection long before the age of technological wizardry.

TALES OF MADNESS, EISEGESIS, AND OTHER UNPARDONABLES

This collection chronicles the strategic uses of madness in works by black women fiction writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Moving from an over-reliance on the “madwoman” as a romanticized figure constructed in opposition to the status quo, contributors to this volume examine how black women authors use madness, trauma, mental illness, and psychopathology as a refraction of cultural contradictions, psychosocial fissures, and political tensions of the larger social systems in which their diverse literary works are set through a cultural studies approach. The volume is constructed in three sections: Revisiting the Archive, Reinscribing Its Texts: Slavery and Madness as Historical Contestation, The Contradictions of Witnessing in Conflict Zones: Trauma and Testimony, and Novel Form, Mythic Space: Syncretic Rituals as Healing Balm. The novels under review re-envision the initial trauma of slavery and imperialism, both acknowledging the impact of these events on diasporic populations and expanding the discourse beyond that framework. Through madness and healing as sites of psychic return, these novels become contemporary parables of cultural resistance.

“[A]n electric new translation . . . Each page is adorned with illustrations and photographs from other translations and adaptations of the tales, as well as a wonderfully detailed cascade of notes that illuminate the stories and their settings. . . . The most striking feature of the Arabic tales is their shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—and Seale captures the movement between them beautifully.” —Yasmine Al-Sayyad, New Yorker A magnificent and richly illustrated volume—with a groundbreaking translation framed by new commentary and hundreds of images—of the most famous story collection of all time. A cornerstone of world literature and a monument to the power of storytelling, the Arabian Nights has inspired countless authors, from Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe to Naguib Mahfouz, Clarice Lispector, and Angela Carter. Now, in this lavishly designed and illustrated edition of The Annotated Arabian Nights, the acclaimed literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and the brilliant poet and translator Yasmine Seale present a splendid new selection of tales from the Nights, featuring treasured original stories as well as later additions including “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and definitively bringing the Nights out of Victorian antiquarianism and into the twenty-first century. For centuries, readers have been haunted by the homicidal King Shahriyar, thrilled by gripping tales of Sinbad’s seafaring adventures, and held utterly, exquisitely captive by Shahrazad’s stories of passionate romances and otherworldly escapades. Yet for too long, the English-speaking world has relied on dated translations by Richard Burton, Edward Lane, and other nineteenth-century adventurers. Seale’s distinctly contemporary and lyrical translations break decisively with this masculine dynasty, finally stripping away the deliberate exoticism of Orientalist renderings while reclaiming the vitality and delight of the stories, as she works with equal skill in both Arabic and French. Included within are famous tales, from “The Story of Sinbad the Sailor” to “The Story of the Fisherman and the Jinni,” as well as lesser-known stories such as “The Story of Dalila the Crafty,” in which the cunning heroine takes readers into the everyday life of merchants and shopkeepers in a crowded metropolis, and “The Story of the Merchant and the Jinni,” an example of a ransom frame tale in which stories are exchanged to save a life. Grounded in the latest scholarship, The Annotated Arabian Nights also incorporates the Hanna Diyab stories, for centuries seen as French forgeries but now acknowledged, largely as a result of Horta’s pathbreaking research, as being firmly rooted in the Arabic narrative tradition. Horta not only takes us into the astonishing twists and turns of the stories’ evolution. He also offers comprehensive notes on just about everything readers need to know to appreciate the tales in context, and guides us through the origins of ghouls, jinn, and other supernatural elements that have always drawn in and delighted readers. Beautifully illustrated throughout with art from Europe and the Arab and Persian world, the latter often ignored in English-language editions, The Annotated Arabian Nights expands the visual dimensions of the stories, revealing how the Nights have always been—and still are—in dialogue with fine artists. With a poignant autobiographical foreword from best-selling novelist Omar El Akkad and an illuminating afterword on the Middle Eastern roots of Hanna Diyab’s tales from noted scholar Robert Irwin, Horta and Seale have created a stunning edition of the Arabian Nights that will enchant and inform both devoted and novice readers alike.

Award-winning author Dawn Kurtagich masterfully weaves a captivating tale of suspense and horror, in which Dr. Mina Murray returns to the windswept shores of Wales to help her childhood friend fight the mysterious illness that plagues her. When the lines between reality and delusion begin to blur, Mina must face off against a monstrous legacy—or be consumed herself. Beware what waits in the shadows… With one unexpected email from her estranged best friend, Lucy, Mina Murray’s carefully curated life is turned upside down. Leaving behind her psychiatric practice in London, she returns home to the windswept shores of Wales. Faced with everything she’s left behind, she soon discovers that Lucy’s symptoms mirror those of her mysterious amnesiac patient hundreds of miles away. With nothing but an untreatable sickness connecting the two women, and with Lucy’s life on the line, Mina finds herself asking questions and being drawn ever-deeper into a web of secrets, missing girls, and the powerful, nameless force at its center—one that has been haunting her for years. As terrible, ancient truths begin to reveal themselves, Mina prepares to confront her own darkest secrets, and with them, an evil beyond comprehension. Together with a group of smart, savvy women, Mina seizes one last, desperate chance to stop the cycle that began so long ago. But there are dangers to inviting the attentions of what might not be a man, but a monster…

This is the Nativity story writ large and from a historically silent perspective: Joseph's. Now, if not for the first time in the best way, he is presented as man in all respects in a singularly unique position. Never quite secure in his role he bears up under the enormous load that love has commanded him to bear and he grows under the burden. The cost of his peculiar walk with God? Home, family, near-death experience, alienation, isolation, poverty and (as he sees them) kidnapping wise men from the east. The story is written from a life whose own experiential and autobiographical substance vividly colors every page. This is the Nativity made relevant as never before and likely never again.

Evil, Madness, and Truth uses a fictional narrative to present a number of ethical issues that will challenge readers. It centres on the autobiography of Gerda, the fictional illegitimate daughter of an actual, and infamous, female Nazi concentration camp guard, never named, who was tried and executed as a war criminal. Taken from her mother when she was a few weeks old, Gerda only discovered who her mother was when she was twelve years old – this by being told by her mother’s sister, who adopted her and whom she believed was her mother. She is devasted by this news. Finding out the details of her mother’s life and crimes becomes an obsession, and what she learns has a huge impact on her psychologically, emotionally and socially. It directs the journey of her life, including an intellectual path that sets her career as a philosopher preoccupied with evil and madness. Underpinning the narrative, and informing it, is an exercise in the philosophical inquiry in how evil has been understood. The book is an unusual hybrid of fact, fiction and philosophy