Crazy Time: A Bizarre Battle with Darkness and the Divine is a literary horror novel, a dark, surreal, contemporary supernatural fantasy that offers scares and suspense but seeks to terrify more on the level of concept, filling your head with thoughts and images that don’t fit right and perhaps shouldn’t even be. Bright, independent Lily Henshaw rides home with her friends Kris, Eric, and Mia after an evening of celebration and ends up in a nightmare. Two men in a pickup truck stalk them on the road, reminding them of urban legends in ways that only amplify the growing tension. The truck sideswipes them, and they pull over—where the two men subdue them with a gun and a tire iron. One of the men announces that it's "crazy time," and a game of violence and murder begins. Lily barely escapes with her life. Months later, she is still traumatized, and her religious coworker Vince's attempt to comfort her with claims that everything happens for a reason only leads to a panic attack. Her boss and the owner of the printing company where they work, Burt—who has always had feelings for her but has never acted on them—offers more solace, but he also shows her posters ordered by MFS, a corporation with offices at the nearby 1500 Spring Street skyscraper, posters that feature disturbing, apocalyptic Biblical images coupled with bizarre motivational taglines. Lily is agnostic, Burt is an atheist, and they're both amused... and a little creeped out. The small levity Lily finds vanishes when her family calls to tell her that her brother David has killed himself, apparently part of a "cluster suicide" phenomenon that she and David had heard about on the news at a recent family gathering. While she mourns, Lily can't get the apocalyptic posters out of her head. Soon she gets a new, much larger dose of religious creepiness when a swarm of locusts invades her apartment. Unsure about whether the affliction is real, she calls Burt for help and waits for him outside. During the wait, a man attacks her. She fights him off but is on the ground bleeding when Burt and other witnesses arrive. The other witnesses, seeing Burt, a black man, and Lily, an injured white woman, assume Burt is to blame and have him arrested. Lily testifies to Burt's innocence, but he nevertheless spends a night in jail, where a cellmate kills himself, part of another suicide cluster. Meanwhile, Lily has a vision of Kris, Eric, and Mia sounding less like themselves than like Biblical prophets, warning her about opposing God. The experience sparks an idea: Lily begins to believe that she might be cursed, and in high Biblical fashion, the curse is affecting people around her, too, especially Burt, whose business is destroyed by a break-in, leaving Lily and Burt jobless. Lily adopts "curse logic" and looks for answers. Burt, though skeptical, joins her. They visit an "extreme" psychic. Lily has an interview with a Satanist. While searching for answers, tragedies and traumas keep piling up: Lily's family suffers more losses, Lily and Burt witness a murder in Lily's bedroom as well as a suicide on the street, and Lily experiences further financial catastrophe. Lily concludes that her curse is reminiscent of the Book of Job. God, if He exists, is out to get her, and unlike the pious Job, she decides that she's out to get God, too. Her Satanist advisor points her toward a freelancer in the world of dark deeds, Tobias Centurion, who performs a ritual that indicates Lily and Burt will find answers at 1500 Spring Street, in the MFS corporation. Armed with nothing but portents and vague advice, Lily and Burt approach the skyscraper intending to face off with God's corporate cronies and possibly God Himself.

Eighteenth-century critics believed Gothic fiction would inspire deviant sexuality, instill heretical beliefs, and encourage antisocial violence--this book puts these beliefs to the test. After examining the assumptions behind critics' fears, it considers nineteenth-century concerns about sexual deviance, showing how Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray, and other works helped construct homosexuality as a pathological, dangerous phenomenon. It then turns to television and film, particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer and David DeCoteau's direct-to-video movies, to trace Gothicized sexuality's lasting impact. Moving to heretical beliefs, Gothic Realities surveys ghost stories from Dickens's A Christmas Carol to Poltergeist, articulating the relationships between fiction and the "real" supernatural. Finally, it considers connections between Gothic horror and real-world violence, especially the tragedies at Columbine and Virginia Tech.

Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror, as well as his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. While considerations of Argento's films often describe them as irrational nightmares, L. Andrew Cooper uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, Cooper places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock. Analyzing individual images and sequences as well as larger narrative structures, he reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.

Leaping at Thorns arranges eighteen of L. Andrew Cooper's experimental short horror stories into a triptych of themes-complicity, entrapment, and conspiracy-elements that run throughout the collection. The stories span from the emotionally-centered to the unthinkably horrific; from psychosexual grossness to absurd violence; from dark extremes to brain-and-tongue twister. These standalone stories add important details to the fictional world and grand scheme of Dr. Allen Fincher, who also lurks in the background of Cooper's novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines.

When Megan met Carter Anderson at Harvard, their college romance took a mystical turn thanks to The Alchemy of Will. This book by Dr. Allen Fincher gave them the power to do almost anything, but with disastrous results. Years later, their six-year-old daughter, Caitlin, is dying a slow death from bone cancer. Dr. Fincher's book offers them a cure: they can save the life of their first-born by sacrificing the life of their second. But Megan and Carter don't have a second-born... yet. Only half-convinced, Megan, confined to their New York apartment, begins nine months of hell, and she and Carter enter a spiral that consumes more lives than they could have ever conceived. Ranging from domestic terror to all-out supernatural horror that flecks the American east coast with mangled bodies, Descending Lines takes a gut-wrenching question--how far would you go to save your child?--and turns it into a fast-paced journey to places where even nightmares fear to tread. Descending Lines: The only way out is down.

THE GREAT SONNET PLOT OF ANTON TICK presents one hundred sonnets in varying styles in which the speaker sits stranded on his sofa, a victim of both television doldrums and Irv, an alien anxiety-monster. Cara Carani, a flying superhero, would help him and others fight their Irvs, but Anton Tick, a scheming villain, captures the speaker and perpetrates a series of Irv-ous horrors that would spread throughout American culture. Combining introspection with narrative, the sonnets reflect on contemporary and classical media as Cara and Anton do battle for both the speaker's future and the future of the world, futures in jeopardy while Anton's Plot brings millions under his power.

Leaping at Thorns: Fifteen Impalements Penned by Andrew Cooper arranges 15 of L. Andrew Cooper's experimental short horror stories into a "triptych" of themes--complicity, entrapment, and conspiracy--elements that run throughout the collection. The stories span from the emotionally-centered and violence-mild "Last Move," about a mother and son whose cross-country move might be complicated by a haunted U-Move truck, to the almost unthinkably horrific "Charlie Mirren and His Mother," also about a mother and son, but their lives take a turn that might be traumatic for readers as well. While "Worm Would" offers a psychosexual fantasia on the sheer grossness that is a flatworm, "Tapestry" uses absurd, sometimes comic violence to take Jessica, the young professional protagonist, into a political nightmare. The absurd reaches dark extremes in "Lachrymosa," a story of almost pure hallucination, and stretches back toward the comic in the brain-and-tongue-twister "Heart on a Stick." The 'conspiracy' panel of the triptych, from "The Fate of Doctor Fincher" to "The Special One," is a series of standalone stories that each adds important details to the fictional world and grand scheme of Dr. Allen Fincher, who also lurks in the background of Cooper's novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines.

After university authorities observe a gruesome experiment that psychologist Dr. Stanley Burrows performs on rats, an experiment during which one of his graduate student assistants is injured, Dr. Burrows and his only loyal assistant, Edward Pine, accept exile from the academic world and embrace new supporters who want them to do different sorts of experiments on human subjects. Dr. Burrows has limitless resources to develop innovative processes for behavioral conditioning that achieve extreme outcomes. He programs his subjects with violence so they will commit violence. Spurred by conclusions drawn from the thinking of radical behaviorist B.F. Skinner, he will use his subjects to demonstrate not only the bloody extremes for which he can program a "human" but also a new understanding of "the human" susceptible to programming.

The Middle Reaches, Cycle Two: A Rift in Time and Space introduces Bobby Lightfoot, a boy lost in The Middle Reaches and tormented by a fiend called The Man in the Grinning Mask. Heather, Bobby's former babysitter, and her friend Janet are lured into The Middle Reaches by Max, a charming young man with secrets. Stalked by psychopaths as well as the region's many other monsters, these travelers follow paths that cross Cycle One's, and they go farther and deeper into the darkness of The Middle Reaches and places beyond the Gate.

THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR CUTS BACK Welcome to a macabre cinema for the imagination, to screenings of twisted tales projected not on a movie screen but on the page. In Reel Dark you'll find stories and poems by authors ranging from new voices to bestsellers to Bram Stoker Award finalists. From the battle for recognition between a child actress and a vengeful, long-forgotten film star in "Whatever Happened to Peggy...Who?" to a madman controlling a student a la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in "Caligarisme," to a hapless Dreamist, whose talent propels him into a nightmare of jealousy and revenge in "The Dreamist," the authors have created worlds filled with madness, twisted desires, and broken dreams. The genres inside include suspense, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. You'll meet a lone deputy whose pursuit of justice harkens back to the wild West (complete with a gunfight), a director who literally puts himself into his film, a young woman haunted by a mysterious stranger who warns her of her impending demise, and an aging actress who may have been a little too good at playing her roles. In a world where the lines between reality and fantasy blur, where film frames flicker at 24 frames per second, we catch a glimpse of strangers' dreams and nightmares. As David Lynch puts it, "This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top." As Karen Head writes in her poem responding to Lynch, "In the movies / everything is illusion." But in a world with cameras everywhere, how do you know whether you're in a movie?"