He careened through the country, offering money for spirit contacts he couldn't duplicate by admitted magical chicanery. It was a heyday not only for Houdini but for the spirit-callers and there was an equally famous protagonist who thought the spirits could indeed be contacted, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A photo at the front records a meeting between Houdini and Doyle and Houdini gives Doyle his own chapter. There's an earlier chapter on Daniel Dunglas Home, the English engineer of spectacular paranormal effects. Houdini raises hell with spiritualists who were giving their (usually paying) clients a vision of heavens to come, and shares the methods used to practice "fake" and sensational spiritualism. Houdini was nothing if not unrelenting. As a taste of things to come, he ends his introduction with the words: "Up to the present time everything that I have investigated has been the result of deluded brains."

    Containing over 150 cartoons that stretch across the length of Wilson's ouevre, Gravediggers' Party is a pumpkin-stuffing collection of the weird and the wild, the strange and the supernatural, appreciated by only the most discerning ghoul. (You know who you are.)

    It argues that such narratives are objects for historical analysis, due to their implication in specific ideologies, whilst also focusing on the recurrence over time of themes of physical and psychological disintegration, spectrality and monstrosity. Central to the book's argument is the proposition that fear is a ubiquitous phenomenon, capable of awakening consciousness even as it appears to paralyze it.