Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder and the Supernatural Adrenaline Horror Book Review

Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder and the Supernatural contains the best writing about the things that scare us the most: murder, ghosts, insanity-and our own vulnerability. Like the other books in the Adrenaline series—including Epic: Stories of Survival from the World’s Highest Peaks and Blood: Stories of Life and Death from the Civil War—Dark examines its subject through the eyes of the world’s most gifted writers. Here they bring us face-to-face with evil in all of its forms, from serial murder to alien abduction. Dark features real-life accounts of hauntings and other visitations, as well as selections from fiction masters such as Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe and Flannery O’Connor.   

Harris, creator of Hannibal Lector, introduces us to a madman who wants to bite off your lips, tie you to a wheelchair and light you on fire. Cabin fever drives hotel caretaker Jack Torrence to filicidal insanity in Stephen King’s The Shining. Patrick McGrath describes the world’s worst mother. Flannery O’Connor offers a vision of hell on a country road. 

Like all Adrenaline titles, Dark features only the best writing on its subject—the most frightening stories from fiction and real life. They will scare you: You will feel the malice of murderers, the cold evil of the undead, and the unreasoning hatred of the insane, as well as the suffering of their victims. But these stories offer enlightenment as well: Writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost and Paul Bowles explore the terrain where compassion overlaps with its opposite. Ultimately, Dark is a book about literature’s greatest theme: the struggle between good and evil.