A review of Judd Winick’s book The Big Book of Barry Ween, Boy Genius.

Don’t for a moment think of this book as a book for children. It’s easy to make that mistake with graphic novels. This is definitely a story for grown-ups, even though the protagonist is a 10-year-old boy.

Barry Ween has an IQ upwards of 350 and spends his every waking hour thinking like a madman. Also, he has some bizarre adventures, including adventures with his hormonal sidekick Jeremy, and several others. Do you like stories that take place in the Old West? How about stories with giant gorillas? Dinosaurs? Aliens? Secret government think-tanks? All that and more are here for you to enjoy.

And special note: Barry swears in a way that will blow your mind, so you better wear a helmet. I laugh like a maniac every time I read this book.

I think you will, too!

This month’s book review is Murderous Love, edited by Laura Eliabeth.

It’s a dark and violent anthology of tales by eight different authors: Piper CJ, Nenia Campbell, Kristen Coar, Maggie Hoopis, Lauren Cate Leake, Rachel Pendley, E.V. Sauvage, and Ava Smiddy. I read it as I was on vacation, so it got to sit out with me by a nice pool and keep people from bothering me by sporting a cover that clearly said “No, not this time.”

I initially read it because I loved the hook: eight stories by eight women, of viscous revenge. That enough piqued my interest. As I read through the stories, I agree, they are damn ferocious. But I don’t want to miss the mark on this – in all the stories, the villains 100% get their comeuppance in ways that feel completely justified and appropriate.

So that’s awesome.

The thing that caught me by surprise, however, was just how spicy some of the stories were. Okay, in my defense, I probably could have looked up the authors to get a better sense of what they wrote. But, to be honest, it still felt fine. I mean, this isn’t a book I’ll be asking my mother if she wants to read after me, but (shrug) as long as you are aware that the chili has hot spots, you won’t be shocked.

There are content warnings inside the front of it. Depending on how you might feel about content warnings, I could say read them or ignore them, but I might suggest keeping an eye on them if you have sore spots, because when I say some of these stories are ferocious, I am not kidding. Best be prepared.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

A review of Eliot O’Donnell’s book Werwolves.

As a child, I discovered I enjoyed creature features, and – bless her heart – my mother often indulged me in that. Somehow, somewhere, she found this book and got it for me. At the time, I devoured it (well, in retrospect, that’s on-brand for me), but over time kinda forgot about it. I lost many of my books in a Massive Mold Infestation when I was a teenager, and my guess is that it was one of the casualties.

Recently, I remembered, and hunted the book down. Oh joy!

It was every bit as enjoyable and weird as it was the first day I read it.

O’Donnell’s style of writing feels very much like a Kolchak-style exploration of the hidden world of werewolves, including stories of werewolves and other lycanthropes from many cultures. Back when I read this, I was also reading tons of books about other cryptids, alien astronauts, pyramid power, etc. (we all were, admit it, haha) It all fit together very nicely. Nowadays, this style might feel a bit dated, but the overall presentation still fits together perfectly.

Now, I’ll go you one further… this book was first published in 1912! It’s been reprinted so many times, and every time I encounter a reprint, it still feels like I am in some forgotten corner of an ancient library, reading a book I should never have been allowed to see.

If you want to pick up any of the neat reproductions, by all means do so! You can also find it at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26629

A review of Richard Brautigan’s book The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western.

I’ve very much enjoyed Richard Brautigan’s work since I was introduced to it in the mid ‘80’s. I haven’t read everything, but what I have read has stuck in my head and constantly wormed around. He’s mostly known for his poetry, and his poetry is remarkable, and I think his poetic sense of rhythm works so very well when it comes to writing novels. He keeps a poetic rhythm in his prose and that makes it so much fun to read.

The Hawkline Monster is a gothic western, so expect a western and also expect some monstrous shenanigans.

The story follows two hired killers, Cameron and Greer. A mysterious woman contacts them, asking for help. The three of them make the long journey to eastern Oregon (I think it was eastern Oregon, though I might be mis-remembering), encountering a few situations that are definitely “western” flavored. Had I read this description initially, I might have thought it would be a bit dull, but Brautigan draws it all out on the page in a way that is utterly real and – like I mentioned earlier – sticks with you.

Once they arrive at the Hawkline Mansion sitting in the middle of a field of snow and ice, surrounded by the baking hot Oregon desert, then things get even weirder.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but to be completely clear, there is a monster and it is definitely messing with everybody’s heads. And it ends in a very satisfactory way (which I definitely to not want to spoil here!).

I’ve read this book several times and it’s always great. I’ve also read this book aloud at least twice to people, and… usually… it’s well-received. Reading Richard Brautigan aloud is a genuine treat. I mentioned his rhythm earlier and when you read it aloud, the rhythm feels even better.

Please give it a try!

A review of Matt Youngmark’s book series The Arabella Grimsbro Collection.

Youngmark definitely has his voice down and the feel for his main character Arabella Grimsbro. As she moves through her adventures, you can feel her sense of impatience and frustration, and as deeper “tricks” are revealed, her surprise comes through clear as a bell.

In these books, Arabella finds herself drawn to a peculiar store in the mall. It seems to be a bit like a book store in the form of a VR experience or something like it, but once the mechanism is out of the way, Arabella finds herself hurled into several already-in-play adventures.

Her first adventure is in the land of Oz, and a young woman with a grumpy attitude and a punchy temper does much better there than one might expect.

Her next adventure is on the distant planet Barsoom, where she joins the Tharks and other Martians.

Her third adventure is aboard the submarine Nautilus, both shipping with Captain Nemo and his crew, but also trying desperately to find her way out of this sequence of adventures and back home.

The collection also includes a short adventure in the worlds of Sherlock Holmes, for those of us so inclined.

As a character, Arabella offers us an insight to each of these settings that is atypical to the settings. While she’s angry and confused and sometimes abrasive, at her core, she believes in a kind of justice and kindness, albeit of her own flavor.

Also, she swears. Much more than you might think. In fact, her swearing is enumerated in the introductions. It’s that awesome.

I hope you check it out if you have a chance.

A review of Carrie Lacina’s book Hoof (Sera the Well-Adjusted Serial Killer).

Okay, so this was fun, and fun to read. And REALLY interesting.

Structurewise, I appreciated the short chapters. That keeps you coming back to the narrative.

I also appreciate that the main character, Sera, is not… super professional. We can’t all be Bret Easton Ellis, and Lacina’s created a character that kinda hurtles her way like she’s in a ragtag pinball game. Luck plays a factor with her, for the better and for the worst. Think of Sera as a character with a lot of HEART, but the best she understands as far as experience goes is… cloud-shaped drawings.

This luck also included a surprising amount of animal intelligence. About this I shall say no more, so that it may come as a joy to you as well, when you read it.

As others have said, I’m glad it came to a satisfying conclusion.

A review of Orrin Grey’s book How to See Ghosts & Other Figments.

I think short story collections are one of the most interesting views into an author’s heart and soul. A short story can be nearly anything the author wants. It can be any shape or form. It can address any topic. There are no minimum number of words, there is no pre-established structure. A short story can be a single brilliant spike of emotion, or a muddled mass of human misery, or something even more bizarre.

Orrin Grey’s collection How to See Ghosts & Other Figments embodies that concept perfectly. In this book are eighteen stories, and each one feels like the polished facet of an insane jewel, constructed in such a way that no facet is identical in shape to another, yet the jewel’s existence cannot be denied.

In the stories, one feels a longing and obsession with old movies, old plays, old stagecraft, and wizardry. There is the sense that no matter how normal life might seem, around certain corners, in certain trunks, and behind certain curtains lie creatures and people and realities and assumptions that are so outside of the expected, that to face them directly might shatter a sane person’s mind.

Each story also includes an afterward by Grey, exploring the genesis of the story. Although these afterwards feel a teensy bit like a magician showing you the strings and pulleys of each trick, it’s also good because it feels more human. These aren’t simply stories from some otherworldly pen dipped into the ink of stars, but a person who also struggles to connect needs and passions into a single art form.

Kudos also to the cover artist, Nick Gucker who — in my opinion — embodied the multi-faceted nature of the book with a painting depicting a crazy pulsing castle of unbelievable shape and depth, filled with hints of the horrors within. I think this is a great reflection of the entire book.

I paced myself with How to See Ghosts & Other Figments one story a day, as I did other things, and I think this is a genuinely lovely way to experience this book. It is important to include the weird and wonderful in each of your days, if you want to survive reality.

A review of Kasey Kubica’s book Woebegone.

Woebegone opens with a heart-wrenching scene of great tragedy. Be aware there there are no emotional punches pulled.

On the narrative level, the story drives toward solving the mystery of that tragedy, as well as many other tragic and horrifying events, all connected.

But when I fully digest Woebegone, it becomes something deeply sobering. It becomes a cautionary tale, and an eyes-open reckoning of the destructive effects of tragedy on people and on community.

The events of the opening tragedy never leave the characters. It leaves an open wound in each character, and they all try different ways to close that wound, to heal it. Even the community around them tries to cope. And yet, the wounds remain raw — not only those wounds wrought by the opening tragedy, but older wounds hidden in their past. Points of view shift and swivel, and even when characters fully dissociate, they crash back into their realities.

Unaddressed grief, pain, and tragedy produce a setting and story where we’re brought to the edge of what’s unfaceable, and then pushed over that edge, learning the cost of refusal.

Kasey Kubica’s novel shares a trait with many classic novels — a seemingly simple read with a steel core of unflinching humanity within.

A review of K. L. Young’s book The Secret Language of Spiders.

The Secret Language of Spiders is a title so fantastic, I had to pinch dozens of people to be sure it was real. It is quite real, as my alleged parole officer keeps insisting.

In a small, dark, dying, and twisted town, horrible things scuttle about in the darkness, and horrible voices whisper insistently from beneath cold soul-sucking water. Faith and love are tested in unforeseen ways, and we learn that isolation and despair lead to the heart’s darkest horrors.

The engine in this novel starts right away, and revs up continuously throughout, until its mind-destroying, multi-legged climax. It’s terrific page-turning terror, lovingly hidden beneath a haunting cover!

Young’s setting is every little town left behind by the mad rush of society and poisoned in the center, and his characters are every real and hurting person abandoned in that same rush. Some still crave relevance and some have accepted their baffling fates in a shell of a town whose core has finally started a collapse into itself. And, as with the dark parts of life, there’s even a touch of humor here and there.

Watch for more work by K. L. Young, and brace your mind for when it hits!

A review of Bestiary of Blood, edited by Jamal Hodge

Let’s start off right away with the structure – Bestiary of Blood is a book outrageous in breadth and scope. Tons of established and tons of upcoming authors, all hand-picked by the editor Jamal Hodge, to fit his theme of Modern Fables and Dark Tales.

The stories are further subdivided into categories and subcategories, which might sound a little dry on the surface, but is instead a reflection of the wide variety of stories inside. Some are best in daylight, some by night, and some during the unknown bands of gray between. Some reflect beginnings, some reflect ends, and others reflect even stranger stages. For me, it all worked. My li’l inner organizer brain loved it.

But the stories themselves…

Wow.

So many authors, and each brings a new and dangerous voice to play in this sandbox, each bringing their own interpretation not only of the theme, but of the animal they’re writing of. Because these are fables, each is told from the place of an animal – or animal-like creature.

Some of the stories are traditional fables. Some of the stories are cautionary tales. Some of the stories offer insights only available from such a creature. Some are stories of people encountering and affected by creatures. Some are so outrageously bizarre that it’s hard to tell what Universe they’re from.

The picture is so big that approaching it intellectually isn’t the right way to do this. Approach it emotionally.

This book is an emotional ride through the nerve fibers of many different animals, and on each part of the ride, you’re gonna feel it, right down to your roots.

Get this book (you can find it on Amazon). Share this book. Feel it.

You won’t regret it.

A review of Samuel R. Delaney’s book Dhalgren.

I have read this book many times in my life.

The first time I read this book, I was about sixteen years old and even at that early an age (for this sort of book, that is a fairly early age), the imagery haunted me.

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A review of Bruce Taylor’s book Edward: Dancing on the Edge of Infinity.

There are two aspects to Edward: Dancing on the Edge of Infinity. They are very different aspects, but I love both.

First, the story. From birth to death, Edward is followed throughout his life, in each major moment, and major place. Where he makes decisions, where he regrets, where he tries to reach out beyond his grasp. Sometimes we are watching him from above, and sometimes we’re right there in his skin, next to his soul.

This is beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time.

Bruce Taylor brings a great voice to this story. I’m a fan of Vonnegut’s absurdist view of humanity’s position in the Universe, and I love reading a thread of that in this book. I’m a fan of Disch’s sad keening for broken dreams, and I love reading a thread of that here, too. But Taylor’s not simply walking a path previously walked — these are only touchstones of familiarity. Taylor’s voice is different. Soft at times, hard at times, unforgiving at times, but not once does he lose track of the fact that we all struggle toward a better us, that we’re all deeply scarred, but still struggling to be better. Even despair feels hopeful.

That aspect alone makes me love this book.

Then there’s a technical aspect.

Most of us have written papers in one or more word processors and used the footnotes feature. Automatically formatted footnotes are great.

For people who like to push technology, this is a challenge.

I may be totally off, but in my mind’s eye, Taylor sat down and faced off against his computer and declared a State of War thusly: “If you think you can footnote anything, then it is on, my digital friend!”

I don’t know how many footnotes are in Edward: Dancing on the Edge of infinity. Hundreds, perhaps.

But wait — these aren’t ordinary footnotes. No, no!

Taylor has woven a completely different narrative in the footnotes — one that weaves itself independently throughout the principle story of Edward’s life, as well as billowing in maniacal directions all of its own.

This is extremely clever. Extremely. I haven’t seen a meta-narrative designed this well since I read Anthony’s Tarot series, and this book’s take on it is much more entertaining.

That aspect alone makes me love this book.

Two books in one, clever, beautiful, heartbreaking at times, and a genuine pleasure to read.

Please check it out!

Bruce’s book can be found on Amazon.

A review of J. T. O’Connor and J. Walt Layne’s book The Coming Of T’Loal.

O’Connor and Layne remind us that some of the trickiest bits of Lovecraftian horror aren’t the monsters or the rubber suits or the excess use of liquid latex on set.

One of the hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror is the cosmic aspect, the sense that human beings (and indeed, all of Earth) are simply grains of sand in the whirlwind combats between gods.

One of the other hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror is the sense that there is no recovery. There is no savior. In fact, most of the time, by the time we hear of the thing, it’s already done and the world is already doomed.

O’Connor and Layne hit both of those nails directly on the bobbing gibbering head with their short novel The Coming of T’Loal.

The novel takes the form of personal chronicles of three different people, each exploring what seems to be harmless history at first, but which quickly unravels into the darkest terror. As their chronicles unfold, they are all drawn toward each other, to play their parts in a cosmic climax that saves Earth — for now!

O’Connor and Layne’s book can be found on Amazon.

A review of Noel Figart’s book At the Foot of the Throne.

I enjoyed At the Foot of the Throne.

That might seem a somewhat simple statement to make, but please let me clarify.

My reading tends toward technical stuff, and science fiction. I read very little fantasy. By and large, I find fantasy annoying, for a variety of reasons.

At the Foot of the Throne hits all the highlights, though. I liked it.

1. It tells a story that is essentially fantasy without delving into mysticism and wizardy. No flying children. No witches. There are jerks, sure, and they do jerky things in the name of their religion, but there’s no actual magic. Kinda like real life.

2. It tells a story about the political connections and plays between two neighboring kingdoms in a straightforward fashion, without depending on a complex map in the front of the book, or a complex family tree in an appendix, or knowledge from the author’s previous 73 books to understand all the nuances between characters and their three-times-removed descendants. You don’t have to know a darn thing to read this book and to understand the way things work in this world — it’s all in that book.

3. It tells the story of a king and his people where the king and his people are ordinary. Sure, they’re royal in name, but they screw up just as much as anyone else, and they speak in ordinary language (I think there was not one occurrence of archaic language in it, which is a huge plus in any book!).

4. It tells the story of a woman who survives the destruction of her village and home, and who moves upward based on her own unique skills (the same skills which indirectly led to her survival when the rest of her village perished).

The book contains a lot of sensibilities that are modern. I think that might turn some folks off, folks who think that because someone else lived in a time before iPads, that they must be stupid. Authors who don’t treat people as real people drive me nuts, and Figart treats her characters as if they’re real people. Real people with real problems and real ways of dealing with a world that is small enough to grasp and real enough to believe.

That’s pretty neat, all told.

Noel’s book can be found on Amazon.

A review of Jonathan Moon’s book Stories to Poke Your Eyes Out.

Sometimes I read a collection of short stories and it feels like a roller coaster ride that I’ve been on before. I know the twists and turns, and I can anticipate each one. I have a great time. When I’m done, I feel lighter in my feet.

Not this time.

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A review of Lawrence Wright’s book Remembering Satan, A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family.

I lived in Olympia during the “capture”, interrogation, and conviction of Paul Ingram. I was working at the Cooper Point Journal with another fellow, Chris Bader, who was writing a regular column then called “Weird Washington” about various supernatural and unexplained events in and around Washington. Imagine our amazement when right under our noses, there seemed to be this hugely secret Satanic ritual abuse cult!

As the case moved along, however, Chris devoted his entire column, week after week, to the new developments. It quickly and appallingly became apparent that Thurston County seemed to be either fabricating this whole thing out of whole cloth, or encouraging Paul Ingram to fabricate it out of whole cloth. I would read transcripts of the “interviews”. They were astonishing. At one point, Ingram’s “interviewer” basically promised the man his own fancy car if he would just sign the confession!

Remembering Satan digs deeply into this warped, freaky retarded case, this throwback to the Inquisition, and this demonstration that only the thinnest veil stands between “modern man” and “monkey-scared-of-the-dark”. Or maybe it reveals just how ugly people can be when they combine fear with power. Or maybe all of that plus more. Regardless, it pretty convincingly reports what most everybody who had half a brain realized all along — that this was absolute complete bogosity personified and paraded around as if it were real “news”, when in fact the only real “news” is that it went on longer than about, oh, three hours and a beer! The local newspaper (which won’t be named to confound search engines), reported each piece of the confession and the “crime” in successively more salacious detail, in the kind of hungry slavering tones normally reserved for drunken half-naked celebrities. Last I heard, the Ingram case was supposedly the only case in the history of the United States of “Ritual Satanic Abuse” with even so much as a shred of evidence. Yet, all the evidence turned out to hinge on Ingram’s coerced confessions (which were shown by the Prosecution’s own erstwhile advisor Dr. Richard Ofshe to be almost certainly confabulated), combined with the discovery of a single old cow bone on what was supposed to be a mass grave of aborted babies.

What I want to know is this: Where are those goddamn meddling kids and their goddamn dog and mystery van when you desperately need ’em?!

In April of 2003, Ingram was released from prison. It would be nice if it was because someone somewhere grew a brain, but that was not the case. The same local newspaper that oozed pustulance at the lurid tales of Ritual Satanic Abuse (or “bullshit”) made nary a peep when they announced his release, instead referring to his confession that he had sexually abused his daughters (they have to refer to his confession, since there’s no actual “evidence”). I think they should practice what they preach.

Here, read some more about this at The Ingram Organization.

A review of Barry Glassner’s book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Well, this is the message our media keeps shoving down our throats, according to claims by Glassner.

In The Culture of Fear, he spins through a lot of different scenarios that we, as Americans, have been trained to fear. For each one, he drags out statistics and a point of view that reduces the boogyman to what it ought to be: an example of ordinary life, a standard deviation, blown out of proportion.

In particular, this becomes an issue because once someone has been reduced to fear, then they are much more easily manipulated.

As with so many other books, this is a concerned and cautionary tale of not allowing ourselves to be tweaked into being afraid.

A review of Carl Sagan’s book Billions & Billions.

An amazing book. This is a smaller book than his previous book The Demon-Haunted World, but no less powerful. Sagan makes a case and pleads for the sanity and safety of the human race.

While his previous book possessed a certain manic drive, this one is, by contrast, a more somber approach. This may be because Dr. Sagan knew, as he was writing it, that he was dying. Perhaps this knowledge was the instrument that most dramatically changed his writing voice, because it is changed. The message is just as strong, though: it’s up to us to save ourselves. No ultra-wise alien, no omnipotent god, no outside force is going to save us. If we’re going to take the next step, whatever that step might be, we’re going to have to take it ourselves.

We can’t see where we’re going, perhaps, but we have to go there.

It’s a beautiful book, a peaceful book, and a fitting final work.

A review of Ursula K. LeGuin’s book Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences.

Definitely one of the most lyrical books I’ve ever read. LeGuin’s stories and poems evoke an image of the rangy Coyote of the North American Indian mythos as a jeans-wearing, swearin’, spittin’ woman who’s seen too much of the world to take it too seriously, but can’t refuse a temptation.

Each story is a gem and I cannot recommend this book enough.

Difficult to find, but worth the hunt.

A review of Malcolm Godwin’s book The Lucid Dreamer.

The first time I ever heard about lucid dreaming was an article in The National Enquirer (back when it was still fun to read) and you know how factual that can be. Fortunately, I recovered.

In a lucid dream, the sleeper is conscious of the fact that they are dreaming and furthermore can take steps and maneuver the dream any which way they wish. Godwin uses the dreaming state as an analogy for the state of existence, quoting from a number of “enlightened” people who have all declared at one time or another that the path to enlightenment begins when one realizes that existence is a dream.

There are some hokey spots, though:

“[Heisenberg] believed that this uncertainty arose because of the unavoidable disturbance of the object by the very process of measurement. Since those days, this idea has grown, and consequent experiments suggest that consciousness actually does appear to change the state of matter.”

Whoa. Was that a jump? You tell me. Nevertheless, this book is really terrific if you want to understand the nature of dreaming and particularly lucid dreaming better.

Safety note: One of the downsides I discovered while training myself to lucid-dream is that I got a little untethered as far as what was real and what was a dream. This is great if you are dreaming. This is not so great if you are driving.

A review of Walter M. Miller’s book A Canticle for Leibowitz.

High school students are supposed to read Canticle for many of their humanities classes, but they rarely do and those who have seemed to have been unaffected by it. Of course, maybe it’s the gas-pumpers I grew up with, I dunno’.

The book takes place in three stages.

The first stage is a bit after a planet-devastating nuclear war. Knowledge and writing have been forbidden in a vicious anti-intellectual pogrom (curious — do read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and try to convince me that Canticle isn’t a potential result of what’s described in Sagan’s book) the effects of which have just barely avoided small groups of monks engaged in the preservation of as much knowledge of the past as possible.

The second stage reveals a new culture of man, rising up from the wreckage of Earth with the knowledge that the monks, after a fashion, re-released. There are hints of the old jealousies and sins of Man, but there’s hope, too.

The third stage of Canticle reveals that no matter how much Man learns, the future only contains self-destruction and immolation. There is just a hint that something other than Man, that something purer than Man will now make its attempt on the Earth, but Man, as a race, is pretty much gone.

That a sequel to Canticle exists is, to me, most astonishing. Where do you go after the destruction of the entire human race? Ah well, I’ll just have to read the damn thing…

A review of Jan Harold Brunvald’s book The Big Book of Urban Legends.

Piranha Press publishes these Big Books pretty regularly, and somehow, this one is just perfect for the subject matter.

Hundreds of one-page stories, each one a different “Urban Legend”. In case you’re not familiar with the concept of an Urban Legend, just remember when you were a kid and the neighbor kid told you about a guy his brother knew who actually microwaved a poodle and it exploded! There’s your basic Urban Legend.

Lots of fun and invariably untrue (or at least not proved true). Each story is told in comic book format, by a different writer/artist team, so each one, in addition to being a story of singular perversity, possesses its own special flavor.

Very cool book, and it’ll stick in your brain.

I could tell you my favorites, but they’re all really great.

A review of Rick Geary’s The Borden Tragedy.

Rick Geary is probably my favorite comics artist and I can’t imagine anyone taking such a weird and horrific story of the Borden Tragedy and making it as whimsical and weird as he does.

The artwork is simply perfect for the story, as well as clean and crisp to read.

Geary examines carefully many of the facts surrounding the double murder, including leads that proved false and inconsistencies in nearly every person’s story.

I learned more from this book than I ever learned watching a made-for-TV version (not to denigrate all made-for-TV movies, just this one).

A review of Bernardo T. Arriaza’s book Beyond Death — The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile.

For thousands of years before the Egyptians mummified their dead, a small tribe of fishermen on the Arica coast of Chile mummified their corpses, using very elaborate methods.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Chinchorros mummified everybody — men, women, children, even fetuses in pregnant mothers who had died. It was an incredible amount of energy for a race which was just a few steps out of the Stone Age.

The book contains lots of unearthed details about the lives and deaths of the Chinchorros, as well as a few reflections on death rituals of other, neighboring peoples. It also contains lots of color photographs which will frighten people if they tend to look over your shoulder while you read on the bus. Just look at ’em grinning and say “Planning an early dinner tonight.” That’ll teach the nosy bastards.

I’m still wondering why they did it, though I have my own theories.