Magic Terror
7 Tales
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3.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A collection of seven exquisite tales about living, dying, and the horror that lies in between, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story
“Elegant, terrifying, provocative.”—The Washington Post Book World
Welcome to a new kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven chilling stories that explore the darkest depths of the human mind.
“Bunny Is Good Bread” takes us into the mind of a small boy trapped in grotesque circumstances to portray the creation of a serial killer in a manner that compels pity, sorrow, comprehension, and grief—as well as judgement.
“Hunger, an Introduction,” narrated by the ghost of a pompous, self-pitying murderer, evokes a profoundly beautiful vision of earthly life, one appreciated far more by the dead than the living.
The award-winning novella “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a masterpiece of black comedy, draws upon Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” to create a revenge tale in which torture is a moral art and the revenger undergoes a transforming, albeit painful, education.
The terrain of these extraordinary stories is marked by brutality, heartbreak, despair, wonder, and an unexpected humor that allows empathy to blossom within the most unlikely contexts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The war-numbed soldier who asks, "Just suppose...,that you were forced to confront extreme experience directly, without any mediation?" speaks for all of the spiritually traumatized souls who navigate the harrowingly rendered hells of these seven tales of suspense and horror. Straub (Mr. X) effortlessly plumbs the hearts and minds of a range of well-developed characters--including a reflective assassin for hire, a five-year-old victim of domestic violence, an aging black jazz musician and a pompous Wall Street financial adviser--to locate epiphanic moments when their lives careened "out of the ordinary" and into the path of deforming private tragedy. In "Ashputtle," an implied murderess blames her crimes on an emotionally deprived childhood in which she imagines herself a modern Cinderella victimized by her cruel stepsisters. "Bunny Is Good Bread," an unnerving portrait of the psychopath as a young boy, follows young Fee Bandolier as he maladjusts to an unbearably gothic home situation in which his father has beaten his mother into a coma. "Porkpie Hat" is related as an alcoholic saxophonist's confession of a childhood brush with witchcraft, murder and miscegenation that continues to inform his blues-haunted music. In several of the tales--most notably "The Haunted Village," which links to the novel Koko (1988) and stories from his previous collection, Houses Without Doors (1990)--Straub skillfully evokes the supernatural to suggest the dislocating effect of intense psychological upset. Mixing stark realism with black comedy, and reverberating with echoes of Conrad, Melville and the Brothers Grimm, these excursions to the dark side of life set a high standard for the literature of contemporary magic terror.
