Download or read book The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works written by Giorgio De Maria and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A disturbing, unsettling novel . . . if it had been published in English soon after its first appearance in Italian (1968), the name of Giorgio De Maria would be well-known, his novels and stories mentioned in the context of J.G. Ballard, Anna Kavan, Shirley Jackson or Robert Aickman."—Lisa Tuttle, Nebula Award winner and author of Gabriel, Windhaven, and The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross. Before an untimely mental breakdown cut short his two-decade career, Giorgio De Maria distinguished himself as one of Italy's most unique and eccentric weird fiction masters. With a background in the post-war literary culture of Turin -- Italy's urbane but eerie "city of black magic" -- De Maria drew inspiration from the Turinese underbelly of occultism, secret societies and radical politics. His writing coincided with the decade of terrorist violence known to Italians as the Years of Lead; the outcome was a weird fiction suffused with panic, rage, trauma, paranoia and meditations on antisocial hubris. In 1978, he told an interviewer: "...I think that the dimension of the fantastic, as much as this may seem paradoxical, is the most fitting one to express a reality as complex as ours today." De Maria's debut novel, The Transgressionists (1968) portrays a cell of malicious telepaths who meet in the cafés and jazz clubs of 1960s Turin to plot world domination. After experiencing the worst of their power, an embittered office clerk resolves to join them and prove himself worthy to share in their villainy. He cultivates twisted mindfulness techniques to awaken his inner sociopath. He fights off predatory phantoms that seem maddeningly drawn to him. He prepares for the dangerous "Great Leap" which will make him into a fully-fledged Transgressionist. But could his megalomania strain relations with his fiancee? Will he sacrifice love in his quest for omnipotence? The other works in this volume are no less surreal and startling. The Secret Death of Joseph Dzhugashvili (1976) gives us a nightmarish fantasy Soviet Union, where a dissident poet finds himself trapped in a psychological experiment conducted by Stalin himself. In "The End of Everydayism," a group of futuristic artists begin using corpses as a medium -- with violent, unforeseen results. The antihero of "General Trebisonda" is a possibly insane commander who prepares for a war crime in an eerily deserted fortress. Available in English for the first time, this collection contains two novellas, two short stories and a dystopian teleplay, The Appeal, which the post-cyberpunk novelist Andrea Vaccaro has lauded as "worthy of the best episodes of Black Mirror." Meanwhile, an introduction by translator Ramon Glazov offers a detailed account of De Maria's background, creative context and thoroughly unusual life.
Download or read book The Twenty Days of Turin A Novel written by Giorgio De Maria and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of the Year Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city’s occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what’s shared can never be unshared. An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever. Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria’s place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely.
Download or read book Spontaneous Human Combustion written by Richard Thomas and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2022 BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINEE A TOR NIGHTFIRE MOST EXCITING HORROR BOOK OF 2022 "In range alone, Richard Thomas is boundless. He is Lovecraft. He is Bradbury. He is Gaiman." —Chuck Palahniuk With a Foreword by Brian Evenson In this new collection, Richard Thomas has crafted fourteen stories that push the boundaries of dark fiction in an intoxicating, piercing blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Equally provocative and profound, each story is masterfully woven with transgressive themes that burrow beneath the skin. A poker game yields a strange prize that haunts one man, his game of chance now turned into a life-or-death coin flip. A set of twins find they have mysterious new powers when an asteroid crashes in a field near their house, and the decisions they make create an uneasy balance. A fantasy world is filled with one man’s desire to feel whole again, finally finding love, only to have the shocking truth of his life exposed in an appalling twist. A father and son work slave labor in a brave new world run by aliens and mount a rebellion that may end up freeing them all. A clown takes off his make-up in a gloomy basement to reveal something more horrifying under the white, tacky skin. Powerful and haunting, Thomas’ transportive collection dares you to examine what lies in the darkest, most twisted corners of human existence and not be transformed by what you find.
Download or read book The Thing Itself written by Adam Roberts and published by Gollancz. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adam Roberts turns his attention to answering the Fermi Paradox with a taut and claustrophobic tale that echoes John Carpenters' The Thing. Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant. As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. The come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.
Download or read book Little Bird written by Tiffany Meuret and published by Black Spot Books. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The skeletons in the closet have nothing on the one in your backyard. Freshly divorced and grieving the death of her father, Josie Lauer has caged herself inside her home. To cope with her losses, Josie follows a strict daily routine of work, playing with her dog, and trying to remember to eat a decent meal—and ending each night by drinking copious amounts of vodka. In other words, she is not coping at all. Everything changes when Josie wakes to find a small shrub has sprouted in her backyard the morning after yet another bender. Within hours, the vine-like plant is running amok—and it's brought company: a busybody new neighbor who insists on thrusting herself into Josie's life, and a talking skeleton called Skelly that has perched itself in Josie's backyard on a throne made of vines. As the strangely sentient plant continues to grow and twist its tendrils inside Josie's suddenly complicated life, Josie begins to realize there's a reason Skelly has chosen to appear. All Josie has to do is figure out what that reason is—and she has only a few days to do it, or else she might find herself on the wrong side of catastrophe.
Download or read book The Doloriad written by Missouri Williams and published by MCD x FSG Originals. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[The Doloriad] just might be what your rotten little heart deserves." —J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by i-D, Cosmopolitan, Thrillist, Lit Reactor, and Lit Hub, and one of Nylon's March 2022 Books to Add to Your Reading List Macabre, provocative, depraved, and unforgettable, The Doloriad marks the debut of Missouri Williams, a terrifyingly original new voice In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a deserted city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over again, though her children are not so certain. Together the family scavenges supplies and attempts to cultivate the poisoned earth. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. When Dolores returns the next day, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of the Matriarch’s fragile order, and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken. Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, and at times striking with the power of physical force, Missouri Williams’s debut novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, and often hilarious, The Doloriad stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life.
Download or read book The Shapeless Unease written by Samantha Harvey and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons.” —Kirkus Reviews In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (Telegraph). “Captures the essence of fractious emotions—anxiety, fear, grief, rage—in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.” —Sarah Waters, New York Times–bestselling author “Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about—well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive . . . The big surprise is that this book about ‘shapeless unease’ is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life.” —Daily Mail “What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild . . . easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.” —Max Porter, award-winning author of Lanny
Download or read book His Name was Death written by Rafael Bernal and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before in English, this legendary precursor to eco-fiction turns the coming insect apocalypse on its head A Wall Street Journal Best Science Fiction Book of 2021 A bitter drunk forsakes civilization and takes to the Mexican jungle, trapping animals, selling their pelts to buy liquor for colossal benders, and slowly rotting away in his fetid hut. His neighbors, a clan of the Lacodón tribe of Chiapas, however, see something more in him than he does himself (dubbing him Wise Owl): when he falls deathly ill, a shaman named Black Ant saves his life—and, almost by chance, in driving out his fever, she exorcises the demon of alcoholism as well. Slowly recovering, weak in his hammock, our antihero discovers a curious thing about the mosquitoes’ buzzing, “which to human ears seemed so irritating and pointless.” Perhaps, in fact, it constituted a language he might learn—and with the help of a flute and a homemade dictionary—even speak. Slowly, he masters Mosquil, with astonishing consequences… Will he harness the mosquitoes’ global might? And will his new powers enable him to take over the world that’s rejected him? A book far ahead of its time, His Name Was Death looks down the double-barreled shotgun of ecological disaster and colonial exploitation—and cackles a graveyard laugh.
Download or read book Darkest Hours written by Mike Thorn and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the covers of Darkest Hours, you will find academics in distress; humans abusing monsters; demons terrorizing people; ghostly reminiscences; resurrected trauma; and occult filmmaking. Ranging from satirical to dreadful, these sixteen stories share a distinct voice: urgent, sardonic, and brutal. This expanded edition includes a new foreword by Sadie Hartmann (Mother Horror) and author notes for every story describing Thorn's process, influences, and more. This updated release also features seventeen of Thorn's essays on horror cinema, which cover films by Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, Rob Zombie, M. Night Shyamalan, Wes Craven, and Dario Argento, among others. "A collection of horror stories that are not only scary, but also intelligent, thoughtful, and carefully planned." - iHorror "The element of surprise is a tribute to Thorn's ingenuity; the assuredness of his prose is due to his extensive knowledge of the horror genre. Perfectly paced from the first sentence, these stories grab you by the collar with the urgency of mortal danger. Highly recommended." - S.P. Miskowski, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Strange is the Night
Download or read book The Archive of Alternate Endings written by Lindsey Drager and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracking the evolution of Hansel and Gretel at seventy-five-year intervals that correspond with earth's visits by Halley's Comet, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold. In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg's sister uses the tale as a surrogate for sharing a family secret only her brother believes. In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can't come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy. Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire's Here and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.
Download or read book The Blue Girl written by Laurie Foos and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blue girl lives in the woods, eating secrets baked into moon pies, and shaking up a small lakeside town.
Download or read book Minor Mage written by T. Kingfisher and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oliver was a very minor mage. His familiar reminded him of this several times a day. He only knew three spells, and one of them was to control his allergy to armadillo dander. He was a very minor mage. Unfortunately, he was all they had.
Download or read book We Can Never Leave This Place written by Eric LaRocca and published by Trepidatio Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We Can Never Leave This Place is the apocalyptic 21st century Grimm's fairy tale you need in your life. Eric LaRocca plucks images directly from the muck and mire of our id and fashions them into something grotesquely beautiful.” ~ Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club “We Can Never Leave This Place is a bleak and tender, monstrous and visceral fable of family and loss, and the courage it takes to confront them both.” ~ Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher “When you’re given a gift, something else gets taken away.” A precocious young girl with an unusual imagination is sent on an odyssey into the depths of depravity. After her father dies violently, young Mara is surprised to find her mother welcoming a new guest into their home, claiming that he will protect them from the world of devastation and destruction outside their door. A grotesque and thrilling dark fantasy, We Can Never Leave This Place is a harrowing portrait of inherited grief and familial trauma.
Download or read book Ghost Eaters written by Clay McLeod Chapman and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A Gothic-punk graveyard tale about what haunts history and what haunts the human soul. An addicting read that draws you into its descent from the first page.”—Chuck Wendig, New York Times best-selling author of The Book of Accidents One of Vulture's Best Horror Novels of 2022, this terrifying supernatural page-turner will make you think twice about opening doors to the unknown. Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab—again—she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart. Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.” But the drug has unfathomable side effects—and once you take it, you can never go back.
Download or read book All the White Spaces written by Ally Wilkes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Bram Stoker Award nominee “Some of the best survival horror we’ve read in years, with a uniquely menacing adversary at its heart.” —Vulture, The Best Horror Novels of 2022 “Epic.” —Esquire, The 22 Best Horror Books of 2022 Something deadly and mysterious stalks the members of an isolated polar expedition in this haunting and spellbinding historical horror novel, perfect for fans of Dan Simmons’s The Terror and Alma Katsu’s The Hunger. In the wake of the First World War, Jonathan Morgan stows away on an Antarctic expedition, determined to find his rightful place in the world of men. Aboard the expeditionary ship of his hero, the world-famous explorer James “Australis” Randall, Jonathan may live as his true self—and true gender—and have the adventures he has always been denied. But not all is smooth sailing: the war casts its long shadow over them all, and grief, guilt, and mistrust skulk among the explorers. When disaster strikes in Antarctica’s frozen Weddell Sea, the men must take to the land and overwinter somewhere which immediately seems both eerie and wrong; a place not marked on any of their part-drawn maps of the vast white continent. Now completely isolated, Randall’s expedition has no ability to contact the outside world. And no one is coming to rescue them. In the freezing darkness of the Polar night, where the aurora creeps across the sky, something terrible has been waiting to lure them out into its deadly landscape… As the harsh Antarctic winter descends, this supernatural force will prey on their deepest desires and deepest fears to pick them off one by one. It is up to Jonathan to overcome his own ghosts before he and the expedition are utterly destroyed.
Download or read book The Fervor written by Alma Katsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of the celebrated literary horror novels The Hunger and The Deep turns her psychological and supernatural eye on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II. 1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko's husband's enlistment as an air force pilot in the Pacific months prior, Meiko and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. It didn’t matter that Aiko was American-born: They were Japanese, and therefore considered a threat by the American government. Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. What starts as a minor cold quickly becomes spontaneous fits of violence and aggression, even death. And when a disconcerting team of doctors arrive, nearly more threatening than the illness itself, Meiko and her daughter team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate, and it becomes clear to them that something more sinister is afoot, a demon from the stories of Meiko’s childhood, hell-bent on infiltrating their already strange world. Inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon, The Fervor explores the horrors of the supernatural beyond just the threat of the occult. With a keen and prescient eye, Katsu crafts a terrifying story about the danger of demonization, a mysterious contagion, and the search to stop its spread before it's too late. A sharp account of too-recent history, it's a deep excavation of how we decide who gets to be human when being human matters most.
Download or read book The Pallbearers Club written by Paul Tremblay and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.” – Washington Post “Uncertainty is Tremblay’s stock-in-trade. Over the last decade, he has grown from hot new thing to horror icon without compromising on his uniquely inexplicable nightmares.” – Esquire “[A] deliciously confusing thriller.” – Weekend Edition (NPR) A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song. What if the coolest girl you’ve ever met decided to be your friend? Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses. Okay, that part was a little weird. So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things – terrifying things – that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right? Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts. Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unusual and disconcerting relationship.
