Drawing on various altered states of consciousness he underwent, films and novels on the undead, psychiatric case studies and mystical reports, the author tackles many of the certainly dubious but also dubiously certain characteristics of the undeath state, for example: over-turns that undo the dead's turn to answer an interpellation; doubles; frequent unworldly freezings still, ones that reveal the occasional worldly immobilization of the living as merely motion-less-ness, i.e. a variety of movement; the implicit indefinite fall of/in the cadaver; the turning of the metaphorical into the literal; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (e.g., the lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?" While the author's first book, Distracted, was written for the living, (Vampires) was written about and for those who are "mortals to death" (the title of a special issue the author edited for the journal Discourse). It thus belongs—somewhat edgily as the author qualifies the validity of guidebooks for the dead—on the same shelf as the Bardo Thödol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

    Here they meet and entwine in a "blood curdling delight" for the curious and the hungry. An indispensable reference you will pick up time and again for blood recipes and obscure vampire lore. Enter into the world of Dark Dreams and Blood Puddings as you explore the mysteries of the Undead and cooking!

    His close reading of the individual texts leads to illuminating intertextual parallels, drawn through an archetypal perspective, which creates coherence among the many recurring image-patterns and motifs.The haunting is an incursion into the male ego's dominion: the female demon is seen as a usurper or intruder; she inhabits and insidiously attempts to exert her influence, to feminize the male. These demands include the impelling need to acknowledge male femininity, or androgyny. Ignoring this drive, which Andriano views as instinctual and archetypal, often results in what the Romantics called nympholepsy, and what Carl Jung called anima-possession.Although the notion that men need to acknowledge their own femininity is not new, the realization that doing so involves coming to terms not only with Eros (in its widest sense) but also with Thanatos has never been sufficiently emphasized, except perhaps by the post-Jungian James Hillman, by whose work Andriano is especially influenced. This book clearly and succinctly demonstrates that fear of the inner feminine prevents a man from ever fully maturing; his anima remains that of a child (he can only view women as girls or mothers), and he never comes to know, much less to love, the dark side of his soul, his own lady of darkness.

    The stuff of horror novels? No--these vampires are right out of ancient history books: Osiris, Cybele, Dionysus, Hercules, Quetzalcoatl, Krishna and more.