Best Books of the Halloween Season #1 – The Penguin Book of the Undead
Here at Dread Central we strive to keep you informed about the best horror has to offer – be it movies, TV shows, video games, collectibles, artwork, and/or books. When it comes to the latter category, it can be a bit overwhelming to keep track of everything new that’s coming out, which is why we’re kicking off today our “Best Books of the Halloween Season” feature that will run continuously throughout the month.
Starting things off for us is The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (available now from Penguin Classics), edited by Scott G. Bruce. It explores the history of our fascination with zombies and other restless souls.
Synopsis:
The dead live again in this haunting compendium of ghostly visitations through the ages.
Since ancient times, accounts of supernatural activity have mystified us. Ghost stories as we know them did not develop until the late nineteenth century, but the restless dead haunted the premodern imagination in many forms, as recorded in historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters. The Penguin Book of the Undead teems with roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by packs of barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, evil spirits emerging from burning carcasses in the form of crows, and zombies with pestilential breath.
Spanning from the Hebrew scriptures to the Roman Empire, the Scandinavian sagas to medieval Europe, the Protestant Reformation to the Renaissance, this beguiling array of accounts charts our relationship with spirits and apparitions, wraiths and demons over fifteen hundred years, showing the evolution in our thinking about the ability of dead souls to return to the realm of the living—and to warn us about what awaits us in the afterlife.
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