Delirium's Muse
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Delirium's Muse—the mind's frightening yet fascinating ability to rationalise the irrational, to grant an escape from the ravages of reality into the more comforting cradle of delusion, where addiction is anthropomorphized, attacked, and defeated; where wellness is a product of will; where safety and sanity are but seeds to be sown in the fertile ground of fantasy. Delirium's Muse is a collection of stories of flight, of fugitives of reason who set out on a fugue from the torments of truth into the more hospitable terrain of madness.
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The five unsettling stories in this collection of macabre fiction from Wertenberg (Stories to Tell Your Children (Assuming You Are a Very Bad Parent)) all feature characters whose disturbed psyches shape their experiences. In "What Happened to Melissa," an adolescent boy's increasingly outrageous pranks suggest an unspoken trauma in his past. A battered wife in "And Then Came the Slugs" imagines that the fatal affliction she wishes on her abusive husband is mirrored by a horrifying entity that shares their house. "Table for One" concerns a hypochondriac who, under the ministrations of a holistic healer, achieves a state of spiritual and psychological well-being—but with grisly physical side effects. Some of Wertenberg's characters maintain a guise of sanity as they wrestle with their slipping grip on reality while others engage their delusions in spectacularly vivid fashion, among them the recovering addict in "I Touched a Demon on the Cheek," who anthropomorphizes his addiction for a visceral fight to the finish. Wertenberg's tales will make even the most devoted horror fans flinch.
