★ From abandoned prisons to haunted hotels, from nuclear ruins to an island of dolls, a Marine officer's dark travel diary takes you to more than 50 real places around the world that will send chills down your spine. Every location has a real tragedy behind it, unexplained paranormal activity, or a history so heavy it takes your breath away. Fear here is not imagined, it's something you can almost touch.
★ A dark beauty guidebook, finding a different kind of beauty in places that make you shudder. This is not just a "haunted house map" or a collection of scary stories. It's a blend of true crime, travel writing, history, and psychology. It invites readers to look at "fear" from a wider angle, as just the shadow side of our world, where light hasn't quite reached yet.

Who doesn't enjoy a good horror story? It's probably in our DNA – feeling fear triggers an adrenaline rush that makes us feel alive and powerfully attracts us… as long as we know we are actually safe.

Each of the more than fifty cursed places in this book is a single dose of that irrational fear we feel towards abandoned buildings, haunted houses, places where terrible crimes were committed, those that maintain an oppressive and unsettling atmosphere, inhabited by spectres and ghosts, shadows or inexplicable paranormal phenomena.

Beauty can also be found in the most spine-chilling places: beautiful castles and palaces hide secrets that should not be revealed, richly decorated tombs carry curses, and natural landscapes like caves, forests or islands have buried sinister mysteries that might keep you awake at night after learning about them.

This unique journey begins in America – places like the Stanley Hotel, which inspired Stephen King's famous novel The Shining and its film adaptation; the bewitched town of Salem; the impregnable Alcatraz prison; the terrifying Island of the Dolls; the gloomy Ushuaia prison; and the ill-fated Amityville house, among others.

Some of the European locations are equally chilling: Auschwitz concentration camp, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, or the Zugarramurdi caves – they need no adjectives to describe the evil and cruelty associated with them. Of course, there are castles hiding dungeons where the screams of the tortured can still be heard, villages destroyed by bombs, and cemeteries where spectres haunt visitors.

Finally, the journey reaches Africa, Asia and Oceania – a ghost town in the middle of the Namibian desert, Japan's "Suicide Forest," or Port Arthur prison, where the suffering of the convicts still lingers in the bare walls that remain standing.

Joaquín Luis Zamora Parra (born 1975 in Murcia) began studying Physics but interrupted his studies to join the Naval Military Academy, where he trained as a Marine Corps officer. His profession has often involved him in drafting documents, regulations and reports, among which the Naval Police Manual stands out, the seed of his later career as a writer, which began with The Butterfly Effect, also published by Libsa.
Both his profession and his passion for motorcycling have given him a life of travel, and on all those journeys, a good book was always his essential companion, especially history, essays and novels. All these passions – science, travel, reading and writing – are poured into this fascinating book.