A few years ago I achieved minor internet infamy by writing about how to kill someone by anal impalement. It was an ancient form of execution used by the Hittites and Persians.
Soho Press have picked up the original post as part of their own blog. So if you missed it the first time, then here is the step-by-step guide.
6 comments:
And thank you so much, Gary, for this little historical tidbit. *shudder* But it reminded me: didn't somebody in one of Shakespeare's plays go the same way?
Hi Anne.
Not that I know of. Are you thinking of Titus Andronicus? A girl is raped and her hands and tongue cut off. The rapists are subsequently killed by the lady's dad and their flesh baked in a pie to be eaten by their mother. Later on, one of the conspirators is buried to his neck in sand and starved to death.
Other than that, it's not very violent.
I love how you can just rattle off gruesome tidbits about death and dismemberment. I'm sure it makes for great conversation at cocktail parties!
I just killed off one of my favorite characters with a bout of typhoid fever, but I did a round of impalement once. Unfortunately, the spike missed so it was a rather drawn-out affair. Yick.
We'll just have to hope no one I know ever dies in an exotic and gruesome fashion. I would probably be the police's number one suspect.
annebingham, you probably mean Edward II, supposedly killed both ironically (he had rather an unhealthy-for-his-reign friendship with Piers Gaveston - so this purported method supposedly mimicked sodomy) and in a way that would not be seen on the body when it was embalmed and put on view.
See, I thought it was the play MEDEA that had the pie with the children baked in. But I read it a long time ago and was reading a lot of Stephen King at the time, so...
Anyway, I reread the play and in that version, at least, she just killed the kids.
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