The Oceans of Cruelty: Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse-Spirit

Praise

“The Oceans of Cruelty is a recursive spiral weaving tales from tales, combining ancient strands of horror and beauty, brutality and mercy, duty and desire. Penick’s fleet and lyrical retelling draws us back irresistibly into the shimmering abyss of our collective pre-history.” —Daniil Leiderman

“Penick offers an elegant retelling of the Vetala Panchavimshati, or 25 tales of betrayal, an eerie 11th-century Sanskrit collection … The highlight is the memorable corpse-spirit, which materializes at will like a nightmare to bedevil the king. This is worth seeking out.” —Publishers Weekly

“In these twenty-five magnificent tales from an almost unremembered time, our normal human passions appear magnified before us in splendid horror. Each is a tangly vine ensnaring and twisting the lives of ordinary people, warriors, yogis, princesses, and kings into shapes appalling and unforeseen. You might love it!” —Kidder Smith
 
“With his mesmerizing recreation of these stories of the Vetāla, Douglas Penick takes part in one of South Asian literature’s most enduring practices: to tell stories again and again, in different languages, from differing cultural and religious perspectives. With its lyrical prose, his  haunting rendition of the stories offers contemporary readers a version both personal and universal in its appeal.” —Phyllis Granoff