The Penguin Book of Demons

Three thousand years of encounters with malevolent beings that have invaded our waking lives and our nightmares

A Penguin Classic

For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate—otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation, and moral decline. Drawing from three thousand years of religious traditions and world literature, The Penguin Book of Demons follows these supernatural creatures—and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them—through accounts across cultures and continents, the daimones of ancient Greece and Rome; the Nephilim, the giant, biblical half-humans who stalked the earth before the Great Flood; corrupted angels, condemned to eternity in Hell; the sickness-spreading fairy folk of Celtic mythology; the djinn of Islamic Arabia; the female, child-eating gelloudes of Byzantium; the seductive incubi and succubi of northern Europe; the animal spirits of early modern China; and the cannibalistic wendigo of Native American folklore. From demonic possession to black magic, these accounts give life to a spellbinding, skin-crawling history of the paranormal.