A Season of Madness takes readers to cultural hinterlands where Carnival is strange, marvelous, and even a bit frightening. Where Spring is welcomed by clowns carrying inflated pig bladders and sheepskin monsters walk the land with clubs covered in hedgehog spines and plows are dragged over cobblestone streets by villagers in masks painted with blood. Folk horror fans take heart as the old world beckons with the coming of Spring!

Readers will learn about regional and local celebrations’ origins, history, and quirkiness from ancient Rome to modern Bulgaria. A Season of Madness explores the interconnectivity of pagan beliefs throughout Europe and how those beliefs and traditions evolved over time and through the Christian conquest.

A Season of Madness is sumptuously illustrated with over one hundred historical and modern images and illustrations in this deluxe paperback edition.

Ridenour’s first book, Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil (2018) is considered by critics the definitive authority on pagan winter celebrations. Aside from his books and podcast, Ridenour is a sought-after expert and lecturer.

From the original release: On highly-detailed canvases that are packed to the margins with strange symbols, bleeding body parts, Bible verses, and nightmare genitalia, Joe Coleman paints the wondrous carnival of his psychotic universe. His work is even blessed by a blurb from Charles Manson: “His art is something else. Praise! Praise! Praise! He’s a caveman in a space ship.” 

This is an artist no horror fan can afford to miss: He does serial killers, sideshow freaks, deranged sex, evil doctors, and religious iconography like no one else on Earth. This is a superb introduction to Coleman’s world and work, with a biographical article, photos, 32 color plates, and numerous illustrations. Warning: Disturbing!

Twenty-six years later, Joe Coleman is recognized as a genius lauded by critics and collectors throughout the world.

The publication of Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook proves there is no such thing as the “good old days.”

Jack Huddleston, a bona fide detective with the Los Angeles police department, collected together a scrapbook of oddities and gruesome moments from his years working for the force. Huddleston’s scrapbook spans Southern California in its noir heyday, circa 1925–1945, the time when the Black Dahlia killer and Winnie Ruth Judd were perpetrating their savage crimes.

Assembled into book form by editor and designer Sean Tejaratchi courtesy of collector and filmmaker Nick Bougas, Death Scenes is divided into several sections: “Odditorium and The Living”; “Accidents and Accidental Deaths”; “Suicides”; “Homicides”; and “The Morgue.” Katherine Dunn, whose book Geek Love (Knopf) earned critical acclaim and bestseller status, provides a cogent introduction, tracing the history of the man behind the scrapbook, meditating on the meaning behind the mayhem and madness.

“If you’ve ever wanted to gaze on crime-scene snaps… then this terrifying, near unbearable compilation is the book for you. Already an underground bestseller, the paradox is that Death Scenes is not so much a reflection of what a violent society it is, as what a safe one. For only in a society like ours, in which death is hidden away, would a book like this be so genuinely shocking.” — GQ Magazine

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A tour de force of darkness, Encyclopaedia of Hell is an “invasion manual” for Earth written by Lord Satan for his invading hordes of Demons, complete with hundreds of unpleasant illustrations, diagrams and a comprehensive and utterly repulsive Dictionary of Earth Terms.

Since the customs and mores of humanity are alien and inconceivable to demons, Satan wrote this strangely poetic military handbook for the enlightenment and edification of his Demon Armies. A masterpiece expressing Satan’s hatred for humanity and himself, the Encyclopedia includes “Techniques of Stalking and Eating Humans”; “Methods of Canning Human Pus”; and “Dicing and Slicing Orphaned Children.”

Why the invasion? During the last century in particular, Hell has become seriously overcrowded. Satan needs more land mass for the damned; and to use the human livestock to feed his hungry demon invaders.

Since this book is the 666th commemorative edition eons after the Invasion was successful, this Encyclopedia contains special commemorative material. (more…)

James Flora’s fantastically illustrated books captivated kids throughout the 1960s and 70s, so much so that secondhand copies sell for exorbitant sums. Grandpa’s Ghost Stories has been the most sought-after of his children’s books, and Feral House is pleased to announce the first reprint since its original publication in 1978.

These ghoulish and amusing stories and wildly inventive illustrations will keep readers shivering. Perhaps better known for his brilliant and madcap illustrations that graced the covers of hundreds of jazz and classical record albums in the 1940s and 50s, Jim Flora also wrote and illustrated seventeen popular books for children. In this book, Grandpa comforts his grandson during a fierce thunderstorm by telling him stories about far scarier things, including a hungry werewolf and an evil witch who turns boys into spiders. The illustrations bring the tall tales to life with Flora’s incomparable humor and wit. Grandpa’s Ghost Stories is a spooky (and silly) delight for all ages.

This edition includes an introduction by writer, WFMU radio personality and cultural historian Irwin Chusid, who has published several books of Flora’s artworks and illustrations, and also runs JimFlora.com.

James Flora’s final children’s book picks up where Grandpa’s Ghost Stories left off; Grandpa is telling another hair-raising tale—and this time it’s about how Santa Claus saved him and grandma from becoming Christmas dinner for three horrible, no-good witches.

When Grandpa was a boy, the most terrible thing happened to him the day before Christmas. While taking a shortcut through the woods, he met three fearsome witches. One, with sharp teeth and hair like an unmowed lawn, pointed her finger at him, squealed “Sha-zam!” and turned him into a snake.  The second witch, who didn’t have any feet, turned him into a turkey buzzard. And the third witch-tall and warty-screamed, “Ta-pooty!” and changed him into a pig. What happens next? A twisty tale of pure imagination.

James Flora’s tall tales, including the Feral House release of Grandpa’s Ghost Stories, with his ingenious illustrations, are favorites of children and adults.  Grandpa’s adventures are perfect for adventurous readers and their parents.

James Flora is best known for his wild jazz, and classical album covers for Columbia Records (the late 1940s) and RCA Victor (1950s). He authored and illustrated 17 popular children’s books and flourished for decades as a magazine illustrator. Few realize, however, that Flora (1914-1998) was also a prolific fine artist with a devilish sense of humor and a flair for juxtaposing playfulness, absurdity, and violence.

***Also available: Grandpa’s Ghost Stories***

“There was never an artist who came close to capturing horror and dread like Lee Brown Coye. He was master of the weird and grotesque illustration. Coye’s sketches had the shape of nightmares.”
—Robert Weinberg, TheWeird Tales Story

“It was my belief that a good drawing was a good drawing, whether it was in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum or in a pulp magazine.”
— Lee Brown Coye

Pulp Macabre showcases Lee Brown Coye’s little-known but spectacular pulp era featuring 100 images. No other artist working in mid-century pulp fiction created work as twisted as Lee Brown Coye. His eerie cover art and illustrations graced many Arkham House books, most notably those by H.P. Lovecraft.

By the 1970s, after surviving a life-threatening illness, Coye would outdo himself, creating lurid illustrations exclusive to rare privately published books and fanzines. With nearly one hundred gloriously rendered Coye-penned images, Pulp Macabre showcases Coye’s final and darkest era, containing some of the most passionately ghoulish artwork ever made.

Pulp Macabre is co-published by Feral House and Sacred Bones of Brooklyn, NY.

From elements of medieval witchcraft reworked in 18th-century folk Catholicism, the Krampus has risen to embody a new countercultural holiday.

Once the mythic bogeyman of European Catholic childhoods and long presented as the opposite of Santa Claus, Krampus is a growing presence in American culture. With the appearance of the demonic Christmas character Krampus in contemporary Hollywood movies, television shows, advertisements, and greeting cards, medieval folklore Krampus-related events and parades in North America and Europe, Krampus is a growing phenomenon.

Though the Krampus figure is now familiar, not much can be found about its history and meaning, thus calling for a book like Al Ridenour’s The Krampus: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. With Krampus’s wild, graphic history, Feral House has hired the awarded designer Sean Tejaratchi to take on Ridenour’s book about this ever-so-curious figure.
Al Ridenour has lectured on Krampus at the Goethe Institutes in Los Angeles. He became somewhat of an internet phenomenon himself due to the hilarious hijinks he coordinated with the controversial Cacophony Societies.

Eerie Publications’ horror magazines brought blood and bad taste to America’s newsstands from 1965 through 1975. Ultra-gory covers and bottom-of-the-barrel production values lent an air of danger to every issue, daring you to look at (and purchase) them.

The Weird World of Eerie Publications introduces the reader to Myron Fass, the gun-toting megalomaniac publisher who, with tyranny and glee, made a career of fishing pocketbook change from young readers with the most insidious sort of exploitation. You’ll also meet Carl Burgos, who, as editor of Eerie Publications, ground his axe against the entire comics industry. Slumming comic art greats and unknown hacks were both employed by Eerie to plagiarize the more inspired work of pre-Code comic art of the 1950s.

Somehow these lowbrow abominations influenced a generation of artists who proudly blame career choices (and mental problems) on Eerie Publications. One of them, Stephen R. Bissette (Swamp Thing, Taboo, Tyrant), provides the introduction for this volume.

Here’s the sordid background behind this mysterious comics publisher, featuring astonishingly red reproductions of many covers and the most spectacularly creepy art. Watch the trailer below: