Don’t Go There: A Tour of the World’s Most Sinister Spots starts with a brilliant premise: It’s a travel book built entirely around places you should avoid. But like anyone schooled in the art of reverse psychology knows, the fastest way to get someone interested in something is to tell them to stay away from it. Take author J.W. Ocker’s warning in the book’s introduction: “These places need to be avoided because they are laced, latitude and longitude, with weird forces that seem to cause strange deaths, mysterious disappearances, and inexplicable, reality-shaking phenomena.” I almost started packing my bags before I finished reading the sentence. The book is divided into sections by landscape features: The first section deals in forests (Fearsome Forests), the second in bodies of water (Wretched Waters) and so on. Each section begins with eerie drawings reminiscent of Stephen Gammell’s illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The entry on Lake Lanier, a human-made lake in northwestern Georgia that was allegedly built atop some 20 cemeteries, in addition to a large segment of the Trail of Tears, says the recreational area has claimed the lives of anywhere from 200 to 500 people since its creation in the 1950s. Ocker’s horror-writing chops work perfectly here, as he injects a kind of gallows humor throughout. A graphic breaks down key things to know about each locale. For example, the southeastern Alaskan town Thomas Bay lists both “madness” and “Charlie Sheen” among its most infamous elements. (In 2013, the actor traveled there in search of the cryptid Kushtaka. When he was unsuccessful, he told TMZ that “it stayed hidden like a sissy.”) Don’t Go There is a fun addition to the libraries of people with a sense of wanderlust or love for the macabre.