Possession

Several of the stories in this collection feature examples of possession. One of the most obvious is The Mangler. This story is about a machine in a laundry that begins killing people spontaneously even though it appears that all the safety mechanisms are working. One man loses his arm because the machine comes on without anyone turning it on and refuses to go off even when all the power to the building is cut. The characters in the novel begin to believe that the machine contains the spirit of a demon that came into the machine when a young virgin cut her finger on the machine. However, the men are mistaken about how the demon came to possess the machine, resulting in their attempts to remove the demon causing it to become more powerful and to run down the street, attempting to kill these men.

Another story containing...