Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Olivier Le Carrer brings us a fascinating history and armchair journey to the world's most dangerous and frightful places, complete with vintage maps and period illustrations in a handsome volume.

This alluring read includes 40 locations that are rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death. The locations gathered here include the dangerous Strait of Messina, home of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis; the coal town of Jharia, where the ground burns constantly with fire; Kasanka National Park in Zambia, where 8 million migrating bats darken the skies; the Nevada Triangle in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where hundreds of aircraft have disappeared; and Aokigahara Forest near show more Mount Fuji in Japan, the world's second most popular suicide location following the Golden Gate Bridge.

THIS BOOK WAS A YULE GIFT TO ME. IT SHOULD BE ON YOUR BOOKSGIVING LIST TOO.

My Review: History, a ruling passion of my reading life, contains so many byways, culs de sac, and dead ends that are fascinating that it's a wonder the "real" history ever gets told. I love the odd and unsettling details that get lost when one reads only The Big Picture. There are very few byways left unexplored by now, wouldn't you think?

You haven't read this book yet.

Start here, in India. Most US citizens have probably heard of Centralia, Pennsylvania, at some point or another...a town that sits atop a coal mine burning out of control since 1962. Now multiply that by about fifty and set it in a country where there isn't any kind or sort of centralized authority charged with keeping people safe from the consequences of profit-driven environmental rape. Oh wait...that'd be 45's Murrikuh, so sorry. Anyway, the image of Hell that is Jharia makes Centralia look like a minor dump fire.



Then let's go back in time to Timur's reign of terror. In the uniformly awful 14th century, Timur (or Tamerlane as the West knows him) was memorably more heinous than his contemporary rulers and more feared than the only slightly more virulent Black Death that killed almost 50% of the world's population. He managed directly to slay over 15 million people of the 300 million alive on Earth at the time he was busily slaughtering entire cities. This ghastly spot is the site of his mausoleum. It bore the inscription, "When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble." On 22 June 1941, a silly Soviet scientist raided his tomb; mere hours later, the Nazis began the unbelievably costly Operation Barbarossa, which cost over 5 million more lives, and led to the deaths of millions more in its wake.


The moral of this story, kiddies, is DO NOT TAKE CURSES LIGHTLY.

Unlike the unbearably silly Lutz family that bought 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, after ghastly Ronnie DeFeo slaughtered his family there the year before. They found out the hard way that there is no such thing as a deal too good to be true, lasting a whopping 28 days before bailing on this buy-of-a-lifetime Dutch Colonial in a desirable neighborhood.


Lots of publicity still attends the case, and the Lutzes have been called liars and profiteers. Amityville's just down the road from here. It's a nice village and nice people live there. I myownself get no evil vibe from it. But I wouldn't spend a night at 112 Ocean Avenue for any damn reason.

For the ghoulish giftee, this book's the best! show less

I saw this book in the bookshop and it was the perfect storm of "buy me": Gorgeous cover, a title with Cursed in it, and content focused on the unusual.

The cover is still gorgeous. Cursed didn't mean exactly what I thought it meant, though it was still very interesting. I flashed on the simplest definition: a hex conjured by really pissed off people. The author used the word in the broader context: places that seem eternally destined for strife, challenges or difficulties; an area prone to high death rates, but because of geography as opposed to the wrath of an individual or group. Still great stuff, just not quite as edgy.

The writing is good, but the editing was disappointing; in a book that was obviously so carefully put together, show more these word-order errors were jarring. The author, La Carrer is unapologetically sarcastic at times, and not for humorous effect; I got my edginess, but not in the way I was expecting. There are small touches of humor here and there, and the entry for Point Cook, Australia is hilarious; he makes it sound like the mecca for animals who are only here to kill you.

It's a quick, easy read and I learned a lot; I didn't feel like he chose run of the mill places on the map. Amityville and Gaza aren't going to be new to anyone but for me at least, most of these were almost or completely new. Kibera has almost completely squashed my desire to see the Maldives, but I'm now incredibly interested in seeing the Kasanka National Park (spoiler alert: it involves bats). show less

Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations by Olivier Le Carrer is a compelling, engaging volume that shares the history and insight into 40 different cursed locations across the world.

Le Carrer points out in the introduction that not all places are cursed in the same way. Obviously, the first meaning is close to the original meaning of the word and based on the mystical, paranormal, or supernatural. The second group of cursed places is based on natural reasons that make the area blighted and present a danger. The third category consists of places that have been rendered inhabitable by human activity. All of the 40 cursed places discussed are organized into 8 different regions. This attractive and show more entertaining atlas includes vintage maps and illustrations.
Much to my surprise and chagrin, one of the cursed places is relatively near where I currently live and is reputed to be the gateway to hell.

The contents include:

At The Heart of Old Europe
Chateau De Montsegur - Satan's Synagogue
Rocca-Sparviera - The Phantom Village
Nuremberg - The Sinister Reverberation of Marching Boots

Between the Mediterranean World and Southern Africa
The Tophet of Carthage - Children Burned for the Gods
Oumaradi - Shipwrecked by Sands
Poveglia - The Island of Death
Charybdis and Scylla - A High-Risk Cruise
Kasanka National Park - The Invasion of the Bats
Valley of the Kings - The Curse of Aten
Gaza - A Territory Adrift
Beirut - Destruction and Construction
Moriah and Golgotha - Spiritual Nightmares
Kibera - An Uncharted Cesspool

From the Barents Sea to the Indian Ocean
Zapadnaya Litsa - The Antechamber of Hell
Gulf of Aden - Hunting Ground of Pirates
Gur-Emir - The Malevolent Mausoleum
Thilafushi - The Toxic Lagoon

Around the Bay of Bengal
Jharia - Underground Inferno
Jatinga - A Plague of Birds
Sunda Strait - The Monster of Krakatoa

Between the Orient and Oceania
Houtman Abrolhos - Massacre of the Shipwrecked
Aokigahara - The Suicide Forest
Cape York - In the Land of the Killer Crocodiles
Takuu - An Atoll Living on Borrowed Time
Nauru - Blighted by Phosphate

America From Coast to Coast
Mavericks: The Big Wave - A Cold-Blooded Monster
Nevada Triangle - A Danger in the Sky
Stull, Kansas - The Forbidden Cemetery
Tonina - The Mystery of the Mayas
Adams, Tennessee - The Bell Witch Lives On
Pine Barrens - The Devil's Offspring
Amityville - the Devil's Lair

Among the Islands of the New World
Cite Soleil - All the Misfortune on Earth
Cape Horn - Sailor's Nightmare
Bermuda Triangle - Empire of Enigmas
Sable Island - A Ship Trap in the Atlantic

Beneath the Atlantic Breeze
Cumbre Vieja - Birthplace of the Tsunami
Eilean Mor - Lighthouse Mystery
Yeun Ellez - The Marsh of the Damned
Tiffauges - Castle of a Killer

Disclosure: My digital edition was courtesy of Black Dog & Leventhal for review purposes show less

I love the idea for this book: it's a travel guide to forty places you don't want to find yourself in, because for various reasons – geographic location or man-made catastrophes, literal ghosts or the phantoms of past events – they are "cursed". It will help you avoid that unscrupulous travel guide who tries to lead you astray, the introduction says. But … well, there are a couple of buts. One: But are there really very many people who would obliviously let themselves be led into Aokigahara Forest in Japan (also known as The Suicide Forest, also known as the place where Natalie Dormer is going to be haunted in The Forest) without knowing it's a bad, bad place? Or into Jharia, which from Google Images looks a whole scary awful lot show more like Mordor?

And … But it's not really an atlas. There are maps – they are the primary illustrations in a heavily illustrated book – but they are mostly, if not entirely, antique maps. They're not the only illustrations … but the rest of them are rather randomly placed sinister clip art – skulls and skeletons and so on. Some of the latter take up half a page. There isn't a photograph in the book – and if there had been, if this had been lush with photos of these places ("Wow! Jharia looks just like Mordor!" "Holy cats, look at that cloud of bats in Kasanka National Park!"), and – as the huge majority of other reviews I've seen already have said – it would have been a wonderful book. (It would also have very likely cost more than $24.99.)

But … The writing was often entertaining – but (sorry, can't help it) as another reviewer out there said, there was often very little on the places I was most fascinated by, the places that seemed to fit the cursedness of the title best, and a whole lot on places that neither interested me nor seemed to deserve to be called "cursed". It's intriguing that birds die in their thousands in Jatinga – I can see that fitting into the premise – but does Nuremberg really deserve to be called forever blighted because the Nazis made such use of it? Is Adams, Tennessee forever to be avoided because of the Bell Witch incidents in the 19th century? And so on.

As so many others said first, this was a great idea, and a beautiful book as far as it goes. But …
The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review. show less

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Although I initially received this book from Netgalley in PDF format, it quickly became clear that this was a book that was ultimately ill-served by the digital format. Audio, digital, neither one would suffice for this sort of book. This is a book that needs to be held, containing maps that need to be surveyed and admired. This is a good, hard-cover book that one can enjoy feeling the weight of in your hands. It's an experience, and while it isn't without its faults, it is definitely a book that I found both interesting and engaging once I got a copy that I could hold in my hands.

This book purports itself to be an Atlas of the world's cursed places. This show more amounts to the book presenting a selection of places cursed by either supernatural means (think the Amityville House), by being ultimately uninhabitable (the unfortunate island of Takuu), or by longstanding tradition that may not even be true (Poveglia.) For someone who isn't overly familiar with these sorts of legends it made for extremely entertaining, provocative, and informative reading.

This book could have been improved by the actual inclusion of pictures of the different places, rather than simply the maps of where they exist. At times it looked as if pictures may be included, but rather than true location shots they were simply sourced images to evoke the ideas of the places in question. I have no complaints about the writing, nor the content itself - I just would have enjoyed a longer book with more illustrations. show less

This one atlas some might hesitate to use as a travel book!
The locations mentioned are various, both mythical and actual.
There are monsters, burning ground, bats and disappearing aeroplanes!
A great read.
This digital book was given to me by the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

I recommend instead the Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, which is in the same vein.