Welcome to Richard Gavin's "grotesquerie," where fear and faith converge in eerie and nightmarish tales of transcendent horror from a truly visionary writer. The highly anticipated new collection of macabre delights, that explores dark realms of the fevered, fecund mind, and visits strange landscapes and vistas. These are grim and grotesque tales of terror -- modern Mysterium Tremendums -- that open new doors of perception and reality. "Gavin's writing serves as a testament that great masters once crafted great stories .. .and as evidence that they shall do so again." -- Thomas Ligotti

Six stories, each based on three random words. 1) golf, skin, king When incest persists for many centuries, one of the results is that the chin may protrude and the arrangement of teeth may become chaotic. ... 2) sneakers, harmonica, boast Several days before attending an audition at the world’s best music academy, a destitute boy—who was called a child prodigy—was gifted a pair of white sneakers by his grandmother. ... 3) mail, fried rice, art If you send an electronic mail to the account managed by the devil, a fantastic piece of inspiration comes back in response. This rumor had existed at the Royal Art Academy for quite some time. ... 4) scalp, drum, wallet There is a way to forever honor the resonance of a human soul after its death. ... 5) tap water, scribble, backcountry In the backcountry, where not a single shabby shack stands in the one-hundred-kilometer radius, there are said to live many folks who perform strange art. ... 6) trial, fever, chin Officially, it was called a trial, but in reality, it was more like a Hanging Announcement Ceremony.

In TRUE TALES OF A FICTITIOUS SPY, a former political prisoner takes a satirical look at the Stalinist prison-camp system in Hungary through a series of mis-adventures, which he recounts with uniquely Central European irony, giving his creative nonfiction a surrealist dimension - Kafka meets Solyshenitsyn as the anti-hero. Ferenc Aladár Györgyey presents his version of Ivan Denisovich in this Hungarian gulag grotesquerie.

A provocative, raucous dark comedy about race and racism in America, now back in print after twenty-five years and with a new preface by the author. Darius James’s scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, truly hilarious, and deeply scary Negrophobia is a wild-eyed reckoning with the mutating insanity of American racism. A screenplay for the mind, a performance on the page, a work of poetry, a mad mix of genres and styles, a novel in the tradition of William S. Burroughs and Ishmael Reed that is like no other novel, Negrophobia begins with the blonde bombshell Bubbles Brazil succumbing to a voodoo spell and entering the inner darkness of her own shiny being. Here crackheads parade in the guise of Muppets, Muslims beat conga drums, Negroes have numbers for names, and H. Rap Remus demands the total and instantaneous extermination of the white race through spontaneous combustion. By the end of it all, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles herself is strangely transformed.

Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film. The book: presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to the present examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduce readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the carnivalesque. Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.

"In Japanese Grotesqueries, Nikolas Kiej'e has drawn together the paintings and sketches of a number of the artists of this period. Together, they are a gallery of horror and humor. In these pages, we meet Oiwa, the wife who is murdered but comes back as a ghost to haunt her husband; a Nukekubi, whose long neck takes its head to any corner of the house while its body stays in one place; the Kappa, or water spirits, whose heads are crowned with water; giant spiders; fearsome dragons' and assorted other weird and wonderful creatures. An introductory essay by ethnologist Terence Barrow, 'Ghosts, Ghost-Gods, & Demons of Japan, ' examines the tradition which created these ghosts and ghouls, and tells some of hte stories behind the pictures."--Cover

After the Gifted Communion stages an operation in the Imperial Capital, crown prince Takaihito proposes that Miyo and Kiyoka start living in the Imperial Palace. There, Miyo finally realizes that she’s fallen for Kiyoka, only to find that her fear of change is holding her back from expressing her feelings to him. But things reach a crossroads one night when Kiyoka comes to Miyo with a confession of his own...