Search results for ""author richard sugg""

The real vampires were not suave, polished, cultivated or rich. They looked like ordinary dead peasants usually shabby, and often fat. Some of them never drank blood. Others ate apples, nuts, grapes, or green beans. Yet for those who believed in them, vampires were terrifying. So terrifying that they prompted live burials, nervous breakdown, hysterical paralysis and speechlessness. During a real vampire panic, an overworked, underfed community was so terrified that it found the energy to dig up eleven graves, and the wood to burn eleven corpses. Real vampires were so terrifying that the energy of fear they produced actually caused poltergeist attacks. In several cases, they were so terrifying that they quite literally scared people to death.This book shows us how vampires looked and felt to those in their midst, in worlds where the soul lingered in the house of death for three days, and the dead watched their own funerals from open coffins. It also uses modern medical, scientific and

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How dangerous were fairies? In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from fallen angels, and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on well into the twentieth century. In literature and art fairies often retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through the dark glamour of Keats, to the improbably erotic poem `Goblin Market’ or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the amoral otherness of the fairies ran side-by-side with the newly delicate or feminized creations of the Victorian world. In the past thirty years the enduring link between fairies and nature has been robustly exploited by eco-warriors and conservationists, from Ireland to Iceland. This book, now available in paperback, tells the story of the many fairy terrors that lay behind Titania or Tinkerbell.

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