Gothic Tourism is one of several books published as part of the ‘Palgrave Gothic’ series, aimed not only at academics but a more general readership. Here, author Emma McEvoy examines everything from waxwork museums to ghost walks to ask what Gothic tourism is and how Gothic works as a touristic …
I discovered the paperback novels of Jack W. Thomas, an author whose work is well overdue for reappraisal, only a few years ago and purely by chance, while I was scrounging through the shelves of a local Goodwill store, the elderly Jewish woman with the bright blue dress and blinding …
I first encountered the name H. H. Holmes courtesy of a book entitled The Torture Doctor: The Only True Account Of The Greatest Criminal The Police Have Ever Handled by David Franke (published in 1975 by Hawthorne, New York). The book was on sale at a book collector’s fair, which …
When the Comics Magazine Association of America established the Comics Code in 1954, not only was salacious, suggestive, violent and horrific content banished from comic books but an entire industry was decimated. This self regulating body, which operated under political and commercial interests, came into effect following the widespread panic …
Yale University Press’s assemblage of an Anthology of Rap is the latest milestone in literature’s lethargic admittance of hip hop into its fusty purlieus. Absurdly, considering that it is now cruising (and in reasonable fettle) into its fourth decade, one can still credibly pronounce certain obvious facts about this maligned …
“I made it a rule, an absolute rule for all of the films that no women were allowed on the crew except for make-up. The technical crew: cameraman, gaffer, grip and sound—I never hired a woman. I don’t like women.” (Roberta Findlay) There is a continuing, undeniably voyeuristic fascination with …
When I was a kid I was given a pile of American comics. I kept them for some time and read them avidly but in growing up, I got rid of all but a small handful something I learned to regret rather quickly. Included in those few copies that I …
Why is this the most hated man in American? The Al Goldstein Story has it all… SLEAZE! TWISTED INDEFENSIBLE HUMOUR! SCATHING BLISTERING ATTACKS ON INNOCENT PEOPLE! A TOUR THROUGH THE KINKY DARK CORNERS OF POPULAR CULTURE! SHOCKING PHOTOS! GUEST APPEARENCES BY ALL-AMERICAN ECCENTRICS LIKE GRAMPA MUNSTER, MYRON FASS and LARRY …
‘He was a saint to a “family” of potheads. And he led them on a freaked-out sex-and-blood bath that picked up where the brutal Sharon Tate killings left off.’ As it does with just about any moment when pop-culture meets sudden tragedy, one of the aspects of the 1969 Tate/LaBianca …
Dead: A Celebration of Mortality contains 52 short essays to coincide with the Saatchi Gallery’s 2015 exhibition of the same name. Charles Saatchi is no stranger to controversy, from the furore surrounding 1997’s ‘Sensation’—an exhibition including Marcus Harvey’s notorious portrait of Myra Hindley—to 2001’s ‘I Am A Camera’, which attracted …