Overview

A groundbreaking guide that teaches writers how to harness the terrifying power of mass hysteria in their fiction. Drawing from historical outbreaks like the Salem Witch Trials and the Dancing Plague of 1518, this book reveals the mechanics behind collective madness and shows writers how to weaponise these patterns on the page. Written in an innovative poetic form that mirrors the fractured nature of panic itself, this guide explores how fear spreads through communities, how rational people become irrational together, and how modern life, with its digital networks, isolated spaces, and constant anxiety, has created the perfect conditions for hysteria to flourish. From crafting environments that breed paranoia to writing the visceral symptoms of shared delusion, from exploiting childhood fears to showing how technology amplifies terror, this book provides writers with the tools to make their readers question the stability of their own reality. Each chapter builds toward the ultimate horror: the realisation that the line between sanity and madness is thinner than we pretend, and that civilization is always one shared delusion away from chaos. Perfect for writers of horror, dark fantasy, and weird fiction who want to create stories that spread through readers' minds like the very contagion they describe. Because the most effective horror doesn't just scare; it reveals what was always scary about being human.

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9780648403692

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Monica Carroll is an award-winning Australian poet, fiction writer, and arts practitioner whose work spans horror, weird fiction, and experimental literature. Winner of the Robert N. Stephenson Award (2024), the Dorothy Porter Crime in Verse Award (2007), and the Katherine Sussanah Pritchard Short Story Award (2006), Carroll has published extensively in literary journals, anthologies, and small presses. Her recent works include poetry collections, artist books, and the collaborative project ""Spirit Level: Strange Tools & Story"" with Dark Cave Press. A former Donald Horne Cultural Creative Fellow, she brings her expertise in poetic form and psychological horror to this groundbreaking guide for writers.

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