Ross Jeffery is an author who is garnering quite a name for himself in the sub-genre of grief horror.
After the heartrending The Devil’s Pocketbook, I wondered if he would be able to go one better in this new release. After reading, it’s easy to say he has.
The protagonist, Henry, and his friend—who he in fact got to know in their grief counselling group—are mourning different losses, using at times difficult, nihilistic humour to get themselves through one more day at a time. When a new member arrives offering a way for Henry to find out if his missing daughter is really dead, things go into a tailspin which doesn’t let up until the absolutely shocking end.
By turns horrific, hilarious, and deeply affecting, this was a fantastic read.
From Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, Ross Jeffery, comes a new horror novel focused on a father's journey to find his missing daughter.
Henry's daughter was fourteen when she went missing and he's been burying pieces of her ever since. Each totem Henry places in the ground is a memento mori of his daughter's life that he's desperate to forget. Surviving with the guilt of his possible role in her disappearance, and more than likely her death, Henry is unable to move forward.
All is not lost though, when a stranger appears at Henry's grief counselling group with a dark and…
I’m a philosopher with a voracious appetite for literature. I inhabit a world of abstract ideas but always return to fiction because it vividly portrays the real-world consequences of our beliefs and reminds us that ideas also move us irrationally: they’re comforting or disturbing, audacious or dull, seductive or repellant. I prefer world literature because it plants us in new times and places, helping us, like philosophy, see beyond our blinders. Deprived of the assumptions that prop up our everyday arrogance, we can clear a mental and emotional path to what we’ve ignored or covered up, as well as rediscover and reaffirm shared values, arrived at from new directions.
Like Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, this graphic novel fuses Camus’s Sisyphus with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” as a test of character: would you live your life over again for eternity?
Sukezo fails the test miserably. He’s a talented cartoonist, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so he shuffles through half-hearted money-making schemes (including an aptly Sisyphean rock-selling venture), succeeding only at making himself, his wife, and his young child miserable and increasingly hateful towards themselves and each other.
Sukezo becomes the bad Nietzsche of popular misconception. If only success and esteem count, better to be nothing at all: a pseudo-Buddhism of disappointed, not transcended, ego. He could be beautifully and happily useless, like Zhuangzi’s tree that’s never cut down. But mistaking power for talent, he cuts himself down instead.
A Japanese manga legend's autobiographical graphic novel about a struggling artist and the first full-length work by the great Yoshiharu Tsuge available in the English language.
Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of comics' most celebrated and influential artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man Without Talent, his first book ever to be translated into English, is an unforgiving self-portrait of frustration. Swearing off cartooning as a profession, Tsuge takes on a series of unconventional jobs -- used camera salesman, ferryman, and stone collector -- hoping to find success among the hucksters, speculators, and deadbeats…
Since I was young, I’ve suffered from Major Depressive Disorder, coupled with chronic pain that surfaced when I was in middle school. Being in constant pain—mental and physical—obviously drains the spirit. I found no hope whatsoever in phrases such as, “It gets better.” When you have chronic pain, that statement means nothing, because you know it won’t. These books, however, offered me something that I hadn’t encountered before: someone acknowledging that, although it may never get better, there is still something for me here, whatever form it takes. These books do not shame depressives, they console (and even commiserate) with them, and I hope you find them as fulfilling as I have.
Similar to Cioran, Ligotti has a profoundly dark worldview, but not one that is unearned.
Ligotti’s own experiences with anhedonia and despair seep through his writing. I cannot get enough of it. Through his prose, he creates his own world wherein doom is assured and life seems like a poorly written, performed, and directed play that is in profoundly bad taste.
It may seem like work like this would depress you, but for me, it gives me a sense of understanding. Someone out there, even if it’s just Ligotti’s characters, has felt that gloom.
Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H. P. Lovecraft. His work is noted by critics for its display of an exceptionally grotesque imagination and accomplished prose style. In his stories, Ligotti has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. The horror stories collected in Teatro Grottesco feature tormented individuals who play out their doom…
I'm a professor of rhetoric at the University of Houston – Downtown. In addition to my academic research, I write political and cultural commentary for a variety of right-of-center online publications. Much of my own work focuses on how individuals come to be persuaded about who they are. I argue that much of the frustration people feel when searching for their authentic identity is due to the fact that the existence of the hidden ‘true self’ is an illusion. The quest for authenticity is never complete. The good news, though, is that you can put an end to the suffering… only if you’re willing to give up the fevered pursuit of the “true self.”
If you want to learn about the history of the concept of authenticity and how it is understood in the western world, this is probably the best book to read (after my book, of course!). Charles Taylor is one of the most prominent living philosophers of selfhood, and this book (topping out at only a little over 100 pages) is an easy-to-read digestion of the ideas that he elaborated in his much-longer book Sources of the Self. Taylor is ambivalent about whether personal authenticity is a good or a bad thing in our era. He recognizes the harms imposed by some of the debased forms that it takes in modern society, but Taylor also tries to articulate an ethics that could rehabilitate authenticity in a way that affirms the dignity of and respect for each individual. I don’t like the fence-sitting, but this remains required reading.
Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity's challenges.
"The great merit of Taylor's brief, non-technical, powerful book...is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against…
My twenty novels tend to focus on characters who face great challenges, and I have a particular appreciation for beautiful prose. I don’t read for distraction or entertainment, but to be enlightened, moved, and made more compassionate about different kinds of people in different environments.
I speak Russian and spent several years working in the former USSR on cultural exchange exhibitions. I majored in Russian Language and Literature at Brown and have a Master’s in those subjects, also from Brown, and I love Turgenev even more than I love his great contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
In this short novel, Turgenev speaks to political differences across generations, something pertinent to the American political scene now and to the tension between activism and domestic life.
As a novelist, I’m also blown away by his ability to put so much into a very short piece of fiction. It’s helpful, but not essential, to have a bit of knowledge about pre-Revolutionary Russia, but like his masterful Sportsman’s Sketches, he is a genius at bringing characters, both real and imagined, to life.
Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons explores the ageless conflict between generations through a period in Russian history when a new generation of revolutionary intellectuals threatened the state. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by Peter Carson, with an introduction by Rosamund Bartlett and an afterword by Tatyana Tolstaya.
Returning home after years away at university, Arkady is proud to introduce his clever friend Bazarov to his father and uncle. But their guest soon stirs up unrest on the quiet country estate - his outspoken nihilist views and his scathing criticisms of the older men expose the growing…
Being an Iraq War veteran and former Army officer, I cringe at the prevailing Hollywood cliché that stereotypes everyone that served in Iraq as Special Forces with crazy PTSD or being some broken human being. It’s apparent that popular movies and books on this war were produced without any veteran input, usually done by authors completely unfamiliar with the military and this region. I wrote my book Dodgebombto insert reality into the narrative—that most servicemembers were regular men and women who expertly fought jihadists, rebuilt this country, and tried to instill democratic self-determination while reconciling impossible political and strategic goals that muddled completing the job.
A gut-wrenching true account about a U.S. Army soldier’s horrific wounding and recovery, The Glass Factory entails the unfathomable physical and emotional costs on veterans and their families in the Iraq War. This book was an authentic Iraq War story to me because it showed the casualty evacuation and horribly painful rehabilitation process often ignored by more vainglorious authors. However, instead of dwelling on victimhood and hurt, the author’s journey has an uplifting message of overcoming hardship and growth as a human being and citizen.
In 2006, Sgt. Braxton McCoy (Ret.) was severely wounded by a suicide bomber in Ramadi, Iraq, and later told he may never walk again. After nearly a decade of physical therapy and rehabilitation Braxton has not only regained the majority of his strength, but he has now climbed mountains and competed in endurance races. This book follows his story from the day he was wounded through his nearly decade long rehabilitation. Along the way he finds himself trying to adapt to the world with a mind and body he no longer understands. Braxton battles not just physical and mental trauma,…
My abiding interest is in how people find meaning in their lives in a post-church, secular world, and what happens when they fail. I have concluded that life needs to be seen as an arc leading to significant end; it needs to be experienced as a coherent story. The vital role of culture here is in providing archetypal stories, usually from a long time ago, but ones constantly retold and brought up to date, which provides background shapes to identify with, armatures as it were. I've explored these challenges in a series of books: Ego and Soul, The Western Dreaming, The Existential Jesus, and soon to appear, The Saviour Syndrome.
Nietzsche was the master diagnostician of the challenge of living in a secular world, once God was dead. The Birth of Tragedydevelops a powerful theory of culture, its necessity for human wellbeing, and how it works.
The basic assumption is that human life is lived on the surface, driven by a substratum of demonic instincts, nightmare fears, and a barbaric will to lust and sadism. Culture’s task is to transform these unconscious drives into harmonious and beautiful images that capture the mind and give an orderly direction to how humans conduct their lives.
But for culture to have that commanding power it needs to be founded on a fixed and primordial sacred site. Without that, the modern problems rise: nihilism, rancour, and depression.
"The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism" by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (translated by William A. Haussmann). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
At university, I studied Classical Studies, which leans heavily into archaeology. As I went on more site visits, I became much more aware of the worlds and lives which exist below our feet. Later, when working as a teacher in Poland, I had the chance to visit one of Europe’s deepest active coal mines. The experience surprised me in so many ways, not least the oppressive heat and the darkness—something you feel you can almost touch. From that moment onward—especially as a horror writer—I’ve found myself wondering about the nightmares lurking below our world, as well as above, and beyond.
Like with Tim Curran’s The Underdewlling, above, Eyes in the Dust leans into the cosmic with its approach to what’s below our feet.
A giant borehole has been dug in an unnamed, developing world country revealing an inexplicable anomaly. Our story, though, focuses on a single individual’s perspective. Cortland—the archetypal faceless manager—comes face to face with the nihilistic reality of what lurks miles beneath the soil, and the horror is almost too much to bear.
a DUNHAMS MANOR PRESS EXCLUSIVE from the author of THE SPECTACLE OF THE VOID. The world has moved on and left Cortland behind. His career as an academic has fizzled out, his fiancé is dead, and he remains haunted by the notion that it’s his fault. When a consulting firm contacts him with the opportunity of a lifetime—two months off the grid studying slime molds at the bottom of an ancient impact crater—he has no choice but to accept. He soon learns, however, that the crater holds dark secrets, that death itself is not an exit, but rather a welcoming…
I have loved horror since my early teens, when I first discovered The Rats and Lair and other horror stories by James Herbert. The thing I like about horror, in particular, is that there are no holds barred, no censorship, as to what can be written. I grew up on movies like The Exorcist, Friday the 13th, Jaws, Alien, The Thing, etc., but horror writing takes you deeper and gives a more visceral experience than anything any film can do.
This was one of the hardest books to "get into," but a friend of mine told me to stick with it because the rewards of getting through the first quarter would be so great. I'm glad I did. It is an astounding piece of work, quite different from anything I've ever read before or since, and remains one of my top five books.
The tangents the book takes, and the blasé attributes of the leading character are superbly crafted. It was suggested it was "unfilmable," and there's one scene in particular I thought they'd never get away with, but if you look at the movie version carefully, it's in there.
While Dune, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (1980s), and other SF staples laid the foundation for my love of SFF, I was also reading about the universe from a young age. Along came Star Trek: The Next Generation in the ‘90s and the stage was set. Completing Bachelor’s Degrees in Ancient History & Archaeology; Religions & Theology; and a PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Studies copper-fastened my passion for the ancient world and the history of religion, and along with reading historical fiction and fantasy, everything merged into the almost allegorical universe you’ll find in Kiranis. Lovers of all the above will find something here.
This is my bible, the book I’ve read more times than any other. It’s three books in one—Wolf in Shadow, The Last Guardian, and Bloodstone. There’s clearly some direct inspiration here in relation to the mystical power source that keeps cropping up (no spoilers). Some things just get in your head and reintroduce themselves when you least expect it. Jon Shannow is my favourite literary creation, Gemmell my favourite author. Overall, heroic and epic fantasy has had the most influence on my writing style, but I’ve merged it with contemporary language and the vision of large-scale sci-fi. I learned a lot from reading Gemmell, and The Jerusalem Man’s post-apocalyptic setting sees the sharp-shooting anti-hero face darkly religious demagogues, mutated creatures, and insidious megalomaniacs. Shannow is a troubled soul trying to be good in a world of relentless evil, but Gemmell’s writing is sharper, less…
Jon Shannow is a brigand killer who seeks the lost city of Jerusalem, centuries after the fall. This omnibus features 'Wolf in Shadow', 'Last Guardian' and 'Bloodstone'.
