The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, edited by Scott G. Bruce, taps into stories, religious texts, and personal letters / accounts from various peoples and periods throughout history concerning the supernatural. Dive into the obsession humans have with the spirit world when Bruce's book is released on September 27th by Penguin Classics.
"Ghost stories, as we commonly conceive of them, did not come into being until the late 19th century, when the Victorians popularized the idea of the haunting: a soul reaching from the beyond to expose secrets, avenge an untimely death, or otherwise meddle in the realm of the living to mysterious or malevolent ends. But ghosts have been fixtures of our collective imagination as potent cultural forces since pre-modern times.
Spanning from the Hebrew scriptures to the Roman Empire, the Scandinavian sagas to medieval Europe, the Protestant Reformation to the Renaissance, THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE UNDEAD mines historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters to chart our relationship with the spirit world over fifteen hundred years, showing the evolution in our thinking about the afterlife and the supernatural, as well as the consistencies.
Roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, zombies with pestilential breath—the descriptions found in THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE UNDEAD have persisted in the popular imagination to this day. The accounts in this expertly curated volume connect us to our ancient ancestors through stories that ask the most universal, intimately human question of all: What happens after we die?
SCOTT G. BRUCE (editor) is an expert on medieval monasticism, a professor of medieval history, and the director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He put himself through college working as a gravedigger."
To learn more about The Penguin Book of the Undead, visit:
Tamika hails from North Beach, Maryland, a tiny town inches from the Chesapeake Bay.She knew she wanted to be an actor after reciting a soliloquy by Sojourner Truth in front of her entire fifth grade class. Since then, she's appeared in over 20 film and television projects. In addition to acting, Tamika is the Indie Spotlight manager for Daily Dead, where she brings readers news on independent horror projects every weekend.
The first horror film Tamika watched was Child's Play. Being eight years old at the time, she remembers being so scared when Chucky came to life that she projectile vomited. It's tough for her to choose only one movie as her favorite horror film, so she picked two: Nosferatu and The Stepford Wives (1975).
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