Hysteria

by Stephanie Wytovich
  • $13.95 Paperback
    ISBN: 978-1-935738-49-7

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stokerawardnom-lg~Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Best Poetry Collection~

Asylums once used to confine those deemed mentally unfit linger, forgotten behind trees or urban development, beautiful yet desolate in their decay. Within them festers something far more unnerving than unlit corners or unexplained noises: the case files left to moulder out of sight, out of conscience. Stephanie M. Wytovich forces your hands upon these crumbling, warped binders and exposes your mind to every taboo misfortune experienced by the outcast, exiled, misbegotten monsters and victims who have walked among us. The poetry contained in Hysteria performs internal body modification on its readers in an unrelenting fashion, employing broad-spectrum brutality treatment that spans the physical to the societal, as noted in Stoker Award winner Michael A. Arnzen’s incisive introduction.

 

What They’re Saying About Hysteria

“Her poems are blisteringly honest, razor sharp vivisections of life and all its tortures and trials as seen through the eyes of a young poet, one who has witnessed the darkness firsthand. They catalog a series of events or experiences both spiritual and visceral, violent and sensual and often difficult to look at directly.”—Shane Douglas Keene, Shotgun Logic

“Horror and poetry don’t often come together in a collection as entertaining and disturbing as Stephanie M. Wytovich’s Hysteria. By turns, this is a wild romp through a cast of unhinged minds: serial killers, violated corpses, mental patients, betrayed lovers, and suicidal lunatics play out their darkest fantasies in Wytovich’s demented verse.”—Sunni K. Brock, Nameless Magazine

“Unique and original, her poems are dark, and some are disturbingly loving (what a cool pair of words: disturbingly loving), and they are crazy, and they are diabolical, and they are out there. But . . . bottom line? They are great, mostly. Great.” —Brady Allen, author of Back Roads and Frontal Lobes

“I was reminded of Silent Hill, Session 9, and One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest as I read Stephanie Wytovich’s debut collection of horror poetry. Her unique and eerily real take on psychological terror had me absorbing pieces of this book in small doses, which is how I think all good poetry should be consumed.”—Heidi Ruby Miller, author of Greenshift and Ambasadora

“Wytovich hopscotches from one lyrical surrealist vignette to the next, deftly covering an impressively wide array of aesthetic grounds ranging from classic gothic dread and gore-festooned splatterpunk to heart-rending imagined confessionals and pitch black humor.”—Fangoria.com

Wytovich “…unabashedly, unapologetically haunts readers with gut-wrenching stories and tight imagery of everything horrific—from vicious revenge murder to scary stalking to disturbing mental illness to heartbreaking disease…”
—Sally Deskins, Sein und Werden

“Wytovich is nothing short of stupefying in her mastery of blunt impact verse. Even those jaded to the violent extremes of despair and rage in contemporary dark literature will find Wytovich piercing deep into the dark and unmapped vulnerabilities of her readers. Hysteria is a devastating debut.”
—John Edward Lawson, author of The Troublesome Amputee and SuiPsalms