Prairie Fox Reads

  Dark Archives : The Bodies Hidden Inside Books A book bound in human skin sounds like an object invented for Gothic fiction: a forbidden volume locked in a cabinet, surrounded by rumors of murder, magic, and madness. Yet anthropodermic books are real. They survive in libraries, museums, medical collections, and private institutions, sometimes catalogued openly and sometimes hidden behind vague descriptions or institutional silence. In Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin , Megan Rosenbloom examines these unsettling objects with the combined instincts of a librarian, journalist, historian, and scientific investigator. Her subject is anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in human skin—but her deeper concerns are consent, power, medical authority, institutional responsibility, and the treatment of human remains. The result is macabre without being sensationalistic. Rosenbloom understands the morbid fas...

  Haunted by History: A Review of Ghostland In Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places , Colin Dickey travels across the United States exploring houses, hotels, prisons, hospitals, cemeteries, and entire communities associated with supernatural activity. His real subject, however, is not whether ghosts exist. It is why certain stories survive, why particular places become haunted in the popular imagination, and what those legends reveal about American history. Dickey treats ghost stories as cultural evidence. A haunting may preserve memories that official histories minimize, but it may also distort the past, replacing complicated lives with sensational tales of madness, murder, and revenge. Some legends give forgotten people a symbolic presence; others exploit tragedy while erasing the identities of those who suffered. In either case, the stories disclose the anxieties of the living more reliably than they establish the existence of the dead. Combining travel writing, arch...