The Feminine Macabre Volume II: A Woman's Journal of All Things Strange & Unusual
ASIN : B09DMTQXX1
Paperback : 427 pages
ISBN-13 : 979-8545654529
With foreword by psychic, occultist, singer, and author, Michelle Belanger, Volume II features the work of Emily Wayland, Zo Jacobi, Amy L. Bennett, and more!
Return to the world of The Feminine Macabre in Volume II of the all-female paranormal journal. Explore essays written by women from all over the world, highlighting their research and theories on witchcraft, hauntings, folklore, dark history, tarot, cryptids, and more.
With a foreword by Michelle Belanger, Volume II features the writing talents of Hannah Ahboo, Tiffiny Rose Allen, Chris Amandier, Gina Armstrong, Al Becker, Amy L. Bennett, Stephanie Bingham, Sarah Blake, Ashley Casseday, Kate Cherrell, Mallory Cywinski, Erica Gibson Delight, Deanna Erskine, Liana Gaffney, Kenzie Gleason, Claire Goodchild, Charlotte Grace, Jen Hall, Kristin Harris, Amanda Hellewell-King, Zo Jacobi, Heddy Johannesen, Lorien Jones, Melissa Lathrop, Donna Malmborg, Marianne McCarthy, Drea Mora, Morgan Moran, Victoria Mundae, Hilary Opiel, Roxanne Rhoads, Vanessa Rowan, Nicole St. Germain, Krista Schwimmer, Sarah Stream, Aoife Sutton, Victoria Vancek, Tamora L. Vang, Emily Wayland, Karen J. Weyant, Cherise Williams, and Amanda R. Woomer.
Tagline: What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life.
Book Description:
What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life. Guided by curiosity, compassion, and a truly strange sense of humor, this particular morbid life is detailed through a death-positive collection of 45 confessional essays. Along the way, author Loren Rhoads takes prom pictures in a cemetery, spends a couple of days in a cadaver lab, eats bugs, survives the AIDS epidemic, chases ghosts, and publishes a little magazine called Morbid Curiosity.
Originally written for zines from Cyber-Psychos AOD to Zine World and online magazines from Gothic.Net to Scoutie Girl, these emotionally charged essays showcase the morbid curiosity and dark humor that transformed Rhoads into a leading voice of the curious and creepy.
I had a lot of preconceptions when it came
to handling corpses. I’d imagined myself standing before a wall of stainless-steel
freezer drawers like at the Mortuary College in San Francisco. In my
imagination, the cadavers were draped with crisp white sheets. The bodies would
be antiseptic. I expected them to be frozen. I thought everything would be as
clean and neat as a television morgue.
The cadavers would be male, of course. I
thought I could depersonalize a dead man more easily; I might empathize too
much with a woman as the scalpel in my hand sliced her flesh.
Tom quickly rearranged my expectations.
“Three of the four cadavers here are female,” he said. “I usually start people
out with the women, since they’re the most taken apart. That’s a little easier
for people to deal with.”
The bodies weren’t kept in refrigeration
units. Instead, they were already waiting in the front of the classroom, lying
in long stainless-steel bins with wheeled legs and a hinged two-piece top. When
Tom folded the top open, clear fluid spilled onto the floor.
“Condensation?” I hoped.
“And some preservative,” he answered. When
the worst of the runoff had stopped, he let the top hang down and opened the
other side.
I was amazed we’d been in the room with the
bodies all along. One of my memories still clear from ninth grade dissection
was the horrible, headache-inducing smell of formaldehyde. I was glad preservative
technology had improved.
A length of muslin floated atop the
brownish red liquid. Blood, I thought immediately, and recoiled. Too thin for
blood, it looked more like beef broth. Pools of oil slicked the surface.
“See that handle there? You can help me by
turning it.” Tom moved to the far end of the tank.
There should have been scary music playing
as we cranked the cadavers out of the fluid. As the bodies slowly rose, the
muslin took on their outlines. Through the shroud, I saw bared teeth and the
flensed musculature of jaw. Two corpses lay head to feet. The skin had clearly been
flayed from their muscles.
If Tom had made them twitch, I would have
leapt out of my own skin.
He pulled on some heavy turquoise rubber
gloves and folded the muslin so it shrouded both faces and one entire body. The
other lay revealed. Her skin had been stripped away. She had no breasts. The
muscle fibers of her chest were very directional and clear, the raw color of a
New York strip steak. Some of the muscles on her arms had been removed to show
the bones and tendons beneath. Her fingertips still had nails and skin. The
skin was the color of dried blood.
About the Author:
Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, a space opera trilogy, and a duet about a succubus and her angel. She is also the editor of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual and Tales for the Camp Fire: An Anthology Benefiting Wildfire Relief. This Morbid Life, her 15th book, is the first in the No Rest for the Morbid Series. Book 2, Jet Lag and Other Blessings, will be out in 2022.
Even if you don't know much about Lizzie Borden you've probably heard the rhyme. It is catchy but inaccurate.
On the morning of August 4, 1892 sometime between 9:00 AM and 11:10 AM, Abby and Andrew Borden were the victims of violent ax murders in the small town of Fall River, Massachusetts.
The police thought Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, was the one who wielded the ax.
Lizzie's stepmother, Abby, was brutally hit 18 times with an ax, and Andrew, Lizzie's dad, was hit 11 times.
Lizzie stood trial but she was acquitted.
If she didn't kill them who did?
Take the tour and you'll hear quite a bit about the murders, evidence, and other family members. The evidence presented on the tour might have you pointing fingers at someone other than Lizzie.
To this day the murder of Lizzie's father and stepmother is one of the most well-known unsolved murders of all time. There are many theories that have been made into books and movies- some fictionalizing the story others stay somewhat true to the original timeline.
We'll never know what really happened.
The house, now a Bed and Breakfast, is Fall River's most haunted location.
So it was the first stop on our haunted road trip.
We hit Fall River on our way into Salem. Fall River is a beautiful though quiet seaside town. We were there on a Sunday and pretty much everything was closed other than the Lizzie Borden House and a Subway.
No ghosts were encountered on the tour but it was interesting to hear the history and see the house. We got to see graphic crime scene photos from the murder and see the places where everything happened and hear a little about the hauntings that occur in the house.
