Red Hourglass

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Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, a masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators encountered in rural Oklahoma. The author serves as a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, the author abandons the role of objective observer with beguiling dark humor—collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because one is deemed "too stupid to live." Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, the essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.