Book Description

Throughout recorded history, various parts of the world have generated reports of crimes and assaults that are, to use the language of the police, without definable perpetrators. One such instance involves the anonymous victim and even more elusive culprits of the 2020 case related herein, whose ill-fated outcome may have been influenced in part by the abstruse subject matter and unidentifiable author of a document called The Museum of Apparitions. “Although the examination of apparitions often tends to resist dialectical resolution, Peter J. Shelton’s discovery of Dr. John Doe’s texts points to a truly weird interplay of events that derives its power from an oxymoronic act in which the ineffable becomes the very site of post-apparitional intelligibility. Readers granted entrance to this eerie Wunderkammer will find themselves concomitantly entranced: the book curates a kind of readerly auto-possession, one which artfully signals the enactment of the unsayable, wherein the threshold between being and non-being, time and space, John Doe and John Dee, collapses, revealing the grotesque veracity of its own spectral nature, over and over, ad infinitum. Well worth the price of admission. But enter at your own risk.” – Liesl Ketum, Humbert Divinity School “Beneath the vaulted suspicions of all that is communicable lies this black dossier, a wraith-like codex of microbial psychiatry that dares to utter the final confession: that the greatest crime is that which appears.” – Anonymous Representative, Too Tired for Suicide