I own Mr. Ocker's book, Poeland, and I really enjoy his humor and his deep research into his subject. (Poe, if you weren't able to guess.) Although I still liked his humor, I felt he was having to stretch to have enough cursed items to fill a book. At one point, he says there aren't that many cursed items out there. (Haunted items and cursed items are two different things.) There is a chapter on things that ought to be cursed, but aren't. Even the chapter on cursed items sold on ebay didn't garner too many examples. Maybe he should have put out a nationwide notice. "Who out there has cursed stuff?" A friend of mine's great-great grandmother survived the Chicago fire as a little girl, but her family lost everything. A lady, who also lost her house, gave her a ceramic dog to play with. The dog was pockmarked and blistered from the fire, but the child kept it and handed it down from generation to generation. Everybody in the family who owned that dog through the years had their house catch on fire. Cursed? I'd say so! There's probably a gazillion things out there in families that are believed to be cursed. Mr. Ocher should make a general shout-out for cursed stuff, then use his humor to make a book. Maybe call it Cursed America. I'd buy it. Thank you to Netgalley and Quirk Books for this digital ARC.
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