A new feminist horror set in a maternity home in the 1970s from Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How To Sell A Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group

In this new edition Charles Alva Hoyt updates his research and offers fresh interpretations of the fascinating history of witches. Among his "Second Thoughts" are cautious examinations of the possible implications of the space-time continuum of Einstein's special theory of relativity and the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics to the observed phenomena of witchcraft. Hoyt, a descendant of Susanna Martin who was hanged as a witch for walking through a Salem rain without getting her feet wet, carefully sketches the background and history of this least understood of supernatural phenomena as it has evolved from antiquity to the present. He identifies seven distinct schools of witchcraft--orthodox, skeptic, anthropological, psychological, pharmacological, transcendental, and occult--and thoroughly analyzes each of them. He explores witchcraft's increased influence resulting from the New Testament's personification of evil as Satan. Especially enlightening are the ways that the nonwitch world has perceived and treated witches. Witches were often victims at the lower end of the social order, scapegoats for the misfortunes of neighbors, town officials, and family members. Many of them suffered decapitation, hanging, burning and torture, dismemberment, and removal of skin with red-hot pincers for their alleged witchcraft. Dietrich Flade, Rector of the University of Trier, for example, was burned on 18 September 1589 after having been "mercifully and Christianly strangled." He had been found guilty of causing "plagues of hailstones and snails."

A tormented and humiliated mixed-race Australian man reaches his breaking point and takes terrifying revenge on his abusers in this critically acclaimed novel based on actual events In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal customs, adopts the white man’s religion, marries a white woman, and seeks a life of honest labor in a world Aborigines are normally barred from entering. But he will always be seen as less than human by the employers who cheat and exploit him, the fellow workers who deride him, and the wife who betrays him—and a man can only take so much. Driven by hopelessness, rage, and despair, Jimmie commits a series of savage and terrible acts of vengeance and becomes something he never thought he’d be: a murderer, a fugitive, and, ultimately, a legend. Based on shocking real-life events, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a powerful tale of racism, identity, intolerance, and murder from the celebrated bestselling author of Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally. This magnificent historical novel remains a stunning, provocative, and profoundly affecting reading experience.

This timely study breaks new ground in exploring how recent film and television horror texts articulate a female rite of passage, updating the cautionary concerns found in fairy tales of the past, particularly in warning against predatory men, treacherous females and unhappy family situations.