Our Blog

THE SECRET LIVES OF THE U.S. PRESIDENTS by Cormac O'Brien ($3.99)

KINDLE / NOOK / KOBO / IBOOKS

Your high school history teachers never gave you a book like this one! Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents features outrageous and uncensored profiles of the men in the White House-complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright wacko facts. You’ll discover that:

In most honest form, I recall to you an academic list, which I have fastidiously discovered through Plutonian nightmares that have defiled my fleeting knowledge of the earthly truths I once knew, of the six scariest words I have accounted in my life. Few have endured this maldictonox that was borne to pass under my visage.

Sepulcher

I wake up in a graveyard. This sometimes happens. I spy an abstruse structure through the curtain of fog, and I come upon Your Humble Narrator's first abominable word.

A sepulcher is an innocent childhood-ghost-story word that we probably know well from Edgar Allen Bro's "Annabel Lee." If you're not familiar with the word (or you don't have a familiar spirit that follows you, unlike me), a sepulcher is a room intended for a dead body to lie in for a vast amount of time. 

Homes for the dead are generally odd to consider (despite our fascination with burials). However, if someone offers a sepulcher for rent on Craigslist, I'll probably take it pro-rated from the cadaver-in-residence. Just have to worry about that whole eternal lease thing.

Eviscerate

Adversely, this is a word I do NOT like to see in Craigslist posts.

With its provided, lighthearted connotation, my pocket Oxford Dictionary, dampened and moldy, defines eviscerate as "[depriving] something of its essential contents." 

By essential contents, we actually mean internal organs, right?

Correct.

Even grimmer is Oxford's own lovely example: "[T]he goat had been skinned and neatly eviscerated." 

At least the goat was disemboweled in a neat fashion. That's always good. 

In a rare and spectral jitter, I drop the pocket Oxford into a river of screaming souls (?) and wander to find a train to take to get to the goat sacrifice.

I didn't mention the goat sacrifice before?

Well now I'm mentioning it.

Truncheon

En route to the train, I become lost on a stone road in a sprawling forest (Hell's Kitchen, go figure). The sun taunts me: it's nearly dark, but not quite. The crimson dusk draws to its apex on the tree line, curdled blood—when a bear jumps out with a truncheon in its right paw. More terrifying than the bear is the truncheon.

What the heck is a truncheon? It sounds awful.

That's because it is. It's quite awful. It's a baton meant to cause blunt damage to an intended victim. One might simply call it a baton, or a billy club, but if a bear wants you utterly under its terror-spell, it will say, "This is my truncheon. There are many like it, but this one is mine."

Arachnivorous

I rush to a local deli and ask for a quarter pound of headcheese. It's that time of year, right? As I wait for my order, I see a shifty character in the corner with a paper bag in his hands.

"What've you got there?" I ask, somehow immune to the day's happenings.

"My darlings," he says, grinning.

Two things happen in that moment:

One, I see that this guy has a beautiful smile.

Two, I see that there are dozens of black legs wriggling between his teeth.

This man is arachnivorous. He eats spiders. He eats spiders.

He eats spiders.

Onychotillomania

While watching this man kill his darlings (HA!), my own neuroses take over and I begin to compulsively pick at my fingernails. That's because I'm an onychotillomaniac. I swear, it's not the fascination with the broken nails…or the tearing cuticles…or the fear of an impending truncheon-bear hallucination—just my craze and interaction with the penultimate word on this list.

Later IN THE night—

I arrive at the goat sacrifice with my familiar spirit, daydreaming about my new sepulcher pad. Monks of darker arts emerge from behind the groaning oaks (with truncheons?!) and a nice little goat is led to the altar. I pick at my hanging pinky nail. I slap a spider on my neck and accidentally snack on it. 

Then the ritual begins. Something seems odd when one of the unholy acolytes begins chanting about tax season. Then two more start chanting. Then four. Then all 17. They pull down their habits to reveal their white dress shirts, their 1099's, their tax return transcripts—

Could it be? Could all of the outerdimensional prophecies have come to fiscal fruition in his hellish manifest of utter demonology? 

Before my realization suffocates my sanity, a banner unfurls from the altar, hosting what I believe to be the scariest word of all:

AUDIT.

The archmonk of taxation lay the goat on the altar. The others continue to chant.

AUDIT.

He asks about the goat's personal expenses. Then the goat's at-home office expenses.

AUDIT.

Then about any back taxes the goat might like to disclose. It bleats in panic.

AUDIT.

The fiduciary horror! I fall to the ground in numbing awe. In my last moments of consciousness, the quadruped victim bleats in rhythm with the umbrage of the demoniacal tax monks, suffering a fury of withheld employee tax deposit penalties.

I wake hours later, the acolytes having disappeared from the desecrated woods. I happen to view a large spider crawling from me, snickering, having picked through my pockets and pulling out my iPhone 6. My mind already ensnared, I give no attention to the Apple-hip spider but instead wonder if I had properly filled out my W-2.

Ah! what abysmal aberrations I have suffered to view in this world!

—

Alex Grover (@AlexPGrover) writes in New York. He sometimes ventures to the gates of delirium, mistaking The Cranberries lyrics for Lovecraftian lore.

Photo via Biography.com

A long time ago, before the internet gave us pictures of cats in pumpkins to celebrate Halloween, people liked to gather together and tell scary stories. Even before Halloween as we know it became an official holiday the end of the harvest, the shortening of the days, the impending winter, and the chill in the air sent people rushing to huddle around a fire eager to scare each other witless. It wasn’t just about the fun of seeing who could be the last man standing, there was also a bond that was built that would be needed for the bleak months ahead. This was the case long before master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe was even in short pants (which probably caught fire, given his luck), but after his works started to gain popularity there was a whole new batch of horrors for people to soil themselves to!

Poe’s works were visceral, unapologetic, gruesome, and psychological. He pioneered the “singular effect,” which basically meant if your aim is to write a scary story every single thing you put to paper should be for the sole purpose of making your reader curl into a fetal position and cry. Poe’s works are almost always from a first person perspective, meaning you jump into a person’s brain every time you read one and it seems like they’re always begging you personally to back them up. 

It also makes them the perfect works to read out loud in the storytelling tradition. For the audience, they get to see a performance rather than a reading, and for the reader, well, who doesn’t love the excuse to go a little mad from time to time?

In a world of graphic visual violence we often forget how terrifying just sound can be (until we hear something at the window while we’re trying to sleep and remember we live on the 10th floor). This Halloween, instead of just opting for another slasher-movie fest, or eating your weight’s worth in snickers, why not gather a group of friends together, dim the lights, and have a ghost story party? Special Guest star: Edgar Allan Poe. Plus 1: Terror.

Here are my top recommendations of Poe works to accomplish your singular effect of scary fun! Happy Halloween!

Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to…read?!? This year, instead of giving books to your Halloween visitors (because those get heavy!), fill your neighbor childrens' plastic pumpkins with one of these sweet book-inspired confections.

Being a werewolf is no walk in the park. How do you handle changing at the full moon every month? How do you prepare? Thankfully, The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook: Paranormal Edition has this totally covered. A good thing, too, or who knows what would happen.