A horror novel about a young man's descent into mental illness, told from the point-of-view of his hallucinatory demon.

The unnamed narrator of The Plight House receives a letter: his childhood friend Fiona has committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. As children, he and Fiona had constructed a dark and violent fantasy world, an imaginary network of laboratories where they performed experiments upon their neighbours, families and friends. Now, aware that Fiona had used a document from their shared world as her suicide note, the narrator becomes obsessed with the possibility that he unknowingly held the key to preventing her death. Invoking the half-forgotten methods of his childhood, he begins to compose a test. Intimate and unrestrained, the test is designed to drive from Fiona all trace of the self-destructive impulse. But by devoting himself to a project that can never bring about its desired effect, the narrator has opened the door to a new frontier of grief. And as he pushes the test yet further into realms of decadence and fever, he precipitates a crisis in his own deeply troubled life. Part love letter, part elegy, The Plight House chronicles one man's obsessive attempt to resurrect the image of a lost friend.

In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus weilds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

Talkin' 'Bout A Revolution Is The Most Comprehensive Guide Yet to the fascinating relationship between American music, culture, and politics. Music expert Dick Weissman dares to take on this massive topic and presents it with ease. From the early days of the U. S. to the twenty-first century, Weissman draws upon and explains a vast amount of music, including songs by and about Native Americans, African Americans, women, and Latinos and spanning pop, punk, folk, "music of hate," music of war, and beyond. Unprecedented in its approach, this book offers a multidisciplinary discussion that is broad and diverse, and illuminates how social events impact music as well as how music impacts social events.

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

“An unnerving and surreal meditation on the demons that haunt us and on the nature(s) of evil. Compelling and unsettling” (Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World). Thomas hears voices, and the worst of these voices belongs to a demon called Dinn. In a series of increasingly horrific rants, the demon reframes Thomas’s declining mental health as a part of a secret training program, an occult procedure designed to cultivate the demons of tomorrow. In the distorted world depicted by Dinn, gateways to hell lie behind every door. Friends and family are the enemy. And the only way for Thomas to survive his training is to dedicate himself to the demon’s prescribed rituals of loneliness, ill health, and pain. Equal parts ferocious and seductive, Mutilation Song is a boundary-shattering horror novel that uses a hallucinatory narrator to explore the extremes of mental illness. “A fabulous nightmare of hypnotic logorrhea, strewn with visions worthy of a Clive Barker on acid.” —Nicolas Winter, Just a Word “Mutilation Song is without question a poison, but it is also a kind of scripture . . . You’re gonna love this one.” —Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything “Jason Hrivnak, who, with The Plight House, made a masterful entry into the literature of malaise, now gives us this new Song added to hell, this poetical call to damnation.” —Alain Nicolas, L’Humanité “Dazzling and suffocating, this violent plunge into the demonism of schizophrenia opens an entire world-in-a-book, a labyrinth of shifting voices, of truths to be deciphered . . . A truly great novel.” —La viduité

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Death Metal is among the most despised forms of violently themed entertainment. Many politicians, conservative groups and typical Americans attribute youth violence and the destruction of social values to such entertainment. The usual assumptions about the Death Metal scene and its fans have rarely been challenged. This book investigates the demographic trends, attitudes, philosophical beliefs, ethical systems, and behavioral patterns within the scene, seeking to situate death metal in the larger social order. The Death Metal community proves to be a useful microcosm for much of American subculture and lends insight into the psychological and social functions of many forbidden or illicit entertainment forms. The author's analysis, rich in interviews with rock stars, radio hosts, and average adolescent fans, provides a key to comprehending deviant tendencies in modern American culture.

This title concerns the different ways in which people use their bodies for self-expression: tattooing, piercing, self-mutilation, which serve both individual and cultural needs.