Nightmares in the Sky

From the Flap

He takes me to the window, small, dirty, crisscrossed with old chicken wire, and points across the street to something which seems to be a monster being born not of a living creature but of a building. Seeing this obscene thing is a shock; what is worse is seeing the people passing to and fro beneath it, intent on either plotting their day's business or planning their evening's pleasure; they pass to and fro and do not look up.

None of them look up.

I hear him say it again: We don't see them. . .but they see us.

Thus does Stephen King, the undisputed master of the modern horror tale, recall his first encounter with the nightmarish figure of a gargoyle. The sculpture, atop an otherwise nondescript New York City building, instilled within King a sense of horror that was "not precisely physical nor precisely mental." It was a sense of horror so peculiar that it prompted him to pen the text for this book of photographs by f-stop Fitzgerald. Staring into the faces in these photographs, King says, is "like having a nightmare awake."

Grotesque and repulsive, gargoyles nevertheless hold an undeniable fascination. Fitzgerald, a renowned avant-garde photographer, has captured the macabre, medieval essence of these fantastic creatures in 100 duotone and 24 full-color photographs. Gaze into the faces of these monstrosities; once you've stopped cringing and are assured they aren't going to fly off the page, you might be granted an understanding of why these imaginary beings have figured in countless nightmares down through the ages.

Nightmares in the Sky is a visually stunning book, one which would make an ideal gift for anyone interested in horror, Gothic architecture, photography, and the darker side of dreaming.