"Call me Ishmael." Thus begins one of the most famous journeys in literature-the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod and its embattled, monomaniacal Captain Ahab. Ishmael quickly learns that the Pequod's captain sails for revenge against the elusive Moby Dick, a sperm whale with a snow-white hump and mottled skin that destroyed Ahab's former vessel and left him crippled. As the Pequod sails deeper through the nights and into the sea, the divisions between...

A criminal feigns insanity and is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse.

In Regency England, penniless Kate Malvern is swept to her aunt's Elizabethan manor and showered with comforts. But despite the luxury of her new life, the atmosphere in the household is less than homely, and gradually it dawns on Kate that there are sinister reasons for her aunt's benevolence.

Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates...

Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins a betting pool, he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is understand her captor, and so gain her freedom.

For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light 'summertime' fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns...

Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself-a journey of the soul that takes him beyond his blue-collar New England town to Sicily's Mount Etna,...

Deborah, suffering from schizophrenia, struggles to overcome her illness and rejoin the real world with the help of her hospital psychiatrist.

Delirium's Muse--the mind's frightening yet fascinating ability to rationalise the irrational, to grant an escape from the ravages of reality into the more comforting cradle of delusion, where addiction is anthropomorphized, attacked, and defeated; where wellness is a product of will; where safety and sanity are but seeds to be sown in the fertile ground of fantasy. Delirium's Muse is a collection of stories of flight, of fugitives of reason who set...

Seventeen-year-old Bo has always had delusions that he can travel through time. So when his worried parents send him to a school for troubled youth, Bo assumes that he's actually attending Berkshire Academy, a school for kids who, like Bo, have 'superpowers'. At the Academy, Bo falls in love with Sofia, who helps Bo open up in a way he never has before. In turn, Bo provides comfort to Sofia, who lost her mother and two sisters at a very young age....