“Humans are violent creatures,” behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner writes in Morbidly Curious . “However we aren’t just violent; sometimes we are gruesomely violent.” True to its title and language, Morbidly Curious is not short on some of humanity’s worst habits and unhappiest doings. It has the unseen threats of ghosts and disease , the visceral terrors of serial killers and torturers, the uncertainties of dreams, and the mysteries of centuries-old corpses. Scrivner wants to show us at our worst, yet he does so with a prose that practically smiles. It is somewhere in between the easy synthesis of the BBC documentary and the disarming warmth of the cool teacher. Even as the horror is fresh on every page. Because, for Scrivner, to be on familiar terms with our worst is also to

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