Madness! Horror! The unbroken Reign of Chaos and Old Night! There are no words for the scene that followed, save perhaps those incoherent ejaculations that burst from the lips of The Dead upon whom the Last Judgment has been passed after the sounding of the brazen trumpet. Dimly I recall a room convulsed; -- I seemed to see pig-faced editors hurling themselves in terror toward the door; -- I observed a death-sliver moon racing through blasted clouds; -- I heard inhuman screams mingling with the wild neighing of horses, the breaking of beer steins and the squealing of the aforementioned pulchritudinous waitresses (although it is possible that these sounds were in fact only a song downloaded from Napster being played in the next cubicle).

When at length some semblance of sensibility had returned to my corporeal frame, I found myself lying alone under the table, a copy of "Buried Alive" thrust into my nerveless hand. Save for the deadly drip-drip-drip of a spilled quart of Meisterbrau, all was silence and dread.

And these horrors were but as a simulacrum, a faint imagining, of the more refined terrors that awaited me when, impelled by I know not what malignant force, I opened the airless and decaying pages of Monsignor Bondeson's putrescent treatise (Norton, $24.95 at a fine bookstore near you). Long and deeply have I read in the damned books of many ages -- the Comte de Thierrot's disquieting meditation "Couleurs et Spectaculaires de la Cité Mort"; Avezedos' hideous prolegomena "De Reribum Horribilis Monstrum"; George W. Bush's unspeakable "A Charge to Keep" -- but in none of these corrupt and eldritch tomes are such nightmares to be found. As I plunged deeper into its malignant pages I seemed to see a leering face, pushing up from the depths of Earth, growing ever nearer; -- to feel clammy hands, covered and clotted with gore, grasping me about my nether torso with an inhuman strength; -- to hear a creeping voice, croaking hollowly, whispering forever in my most secret ear "They have walled me up alive within the tomb!" When I had finished, I thrust the volume from me with a shudder; -- but 'twas too late. The grinning daemon of Terror held dominion over my soul. And there his dark Sovereignty shall hold sway -- Forevermore!

A good book reviewer should be prepared, and I took the liberty of writing the above passage before reading "Buried Alive." At the time, it seemed a pretty safe bet that Jan Bondeson's opus would drive me, if not to a laudanum- and gin-drenched stupor in the Baltimore demimonde, at least to teeth-chattering depths of terror. Certainly, the reaction of my esteemed colleague Laura Miller seemed to vouch for the hair-raising properties of Bondeson's subject. Normally Ms. Miller is the stoutest-hearted of editors (witness her obsessive, Ahab-like pursuit of the dread giant squid), but when informed that I was going to review "Buried Alive," she screamed "I won't edit that!" over the speaker phone -- upon which the line went ominously dead. To judge by the book's lurid and not altogether accurate subtitle, the publishers of "Buried Alive" believe that many people through the ages have shared -- and still share -- Ms. Miller's strong feelings. And why not? It's hard to deny that finding oneself in an airless wooden box six feet underground, listening to the wriggling approach of what Poe called "Conqueror Worm," would be one of the worst possible ways to end one's existence in this sublunary sphere.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"