This Way Lies Madness

 "A powerhouse of an anthology." -- Benjamin Unsworth for Gingernuts of Horror

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"Horror has had a problem with mental illness – but things are changing. This Way Lies Madness challenges the genre’s often lazy reliance on demeaning stereotypes, tired settings, and hackneyed resolutions. Forget psycho killers, creepy asylums, and the ritual expulsion of the monstrous other. This ambitious and genre-crossing collection brings together a range of authors, from luminaries such as Ramsey Campbell to rising stars of a new generation. Many of them write from lived experience. All of them use horror to bring insight into mental illness. While psychiatric jargon keeps lived experience at a distance, these stories and poems bring it close, with vivid portrayals of the borderland between sanity and madness, and the journey from one side to the other – not just the familiar descent into madness but also glimmers of recovery. We find horror in monstrous but revealing form in the supposed safety of intimate relationships, in the mundane setting of the supermarket, and lurking in the bathroom sink. This much-needed volume challenges horror to do better. It also reassures. Many of us will experience mental ill-health during our lives. This book says: as a matter of fact – and never mind Halloween – you aren’t the boogeyman."--Dr Gavin Miller, Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Glasgow