Books published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

It's the final day of the season for the annual Punktown Fair and excitement is high. For the couple in charge, Del and Sophi Kahn, it's a bittersweet day of transition. Little do they realize the trials they will face and how severely this one day will test their relationship. In fact, closing day seems to be a catalyst for many Punktown residents; drawing them in, stirring them up and letting them loose on each other.This roller coaster tale builds to a peak of expectation then plummets, twisting and turning, a breathtaking juggernaut to the final pages with plenty of screams and giggles along the way.

Annotation: A Dirge for the Temporal, Darren Speegle's second collection of fiction, bursts with sensations. A Dirge lingers on the dark mystery of the supernatural, creates the giddy feeling of fear mixed with excitement, that only comes from partial revelations, things half-glimpsed and misty. Like H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe, Speegle's stories belong to the twilight hour, just after the glorious reds and golds of sunset have slipped away giving warning that total darkness is quickly approaching.

The publishing world has just received its bill of health, and the prognosis isn't pretty. Literary marauders are rising up from the hazardous material bins labeled Horror, Surrealism, and Science Fiction. Here the pen is not merely mightier than the sword; it is a plague heralding the apocalypse for convention, writing a dirge for complacency. The stories herein explore illness in all its forms: physical, mental, and societal. These sick stories are horrendous, hilarious, and stupefying dissections of creative minds on the scalpel's edge.

If you enjoy the show Mind Hunter-Taking as his text Georges Bataille's insight that "only at the extremes is there freedom," critically acclaimed "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe documents Bataille's aperçu with 15 bone-chilling illustrations. Manson, Starkweather, Speck, Son of Sam, the Night Stalker, Aileen Wuornos, the Unabomber, Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, Kevorkian and Kissinger are not merely present and accounted for, they are rendered into a "reality TV" that you've never seen before.Widely praised as a virtuoso stylist, Jaffe employs a number of narrative stratagems, such as letters, monologues, interviews and "unsituated dialogues" to torque the flattened, cartoon-like serial killers into a potently unnerving third dimension.As in False Positive, Straight Razor, Eros Anti-Eros and Sex for the Millennium, Jaffe's "docufictions" are at the same time lucid, intricate, gruesome, infinitely sad, and hilarious. At the end we are left with a profoundly incisive commentary on America's insatiable consumption of extremity, conveniently masked as moral condemnation."As in previous works by Jaffe, 15 Serial Killers looks at serial killers through a unique point of view that resists glamorization, and it is effective at reaching deeply into the hic et nuc of the situation…one cannot but admire Jaffe's courage (and gall) in using these notorious figures as the inspiration for "docufiction." The potential of 'docufiction' is philosophically and narratologically rich."-American Book Review"Certain parts of the book had me wondering if he was actually there, hanging out with the killers, sharing a six-pack with them, and watching the way they tore their victims apart. 15 Serial Killers is a flashback into America's horrid past, delightfully written so the reader can relate to the fifteen psychopaths Jaffe describes, and sometimes becomes."-Stephanie Simpson-Woods, The Midwest Book Review

As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda.Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and "unsituated" dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower-in the cause of peace.

This anthology from the fringe examines our culture's obsession with taboos and the added temptation that forbidden pleasures bring. Warnings of danger and peril only heighten our desire for those things we have been told are bad, wrong and have been warned against doing.Postmodernists and surrealists come together in these pages with renegade horror and sci-fiction authors to re-envision what is "acceptable." By turns humorous and horrific then shocking and alluring, the authors dissect those very impulses we deny in our everyday lives.While navigating the minefield of gender relations and plotting explorations into the landscape of the other, this volume is all-inclusive in scope. It allows for every lifestyle and viewpoint, nomatter how unlikely or bizarre. This literary experiment on human desire opens up many possibilities including the chance that the ultimate disaster might very well prove to be the mostcompelling temptation.