Book Recommendations

Aggeliki, the books on poisons and codes makes one wonder if you might not actually be involved in clandestine operations. :rolleyes:
 
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1814-1889)

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Table of Contents

1. Money Mania--The Mississippi Scheme
2. The South Sea Bubble
3. The Tulipomania
4. The Alchymists
5. Modern Prophecies
6. Fortune-Telling
7. The Magnetisers
8. Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard
9. The Crusades
10. The Witch Mania
11. The Slow Poisoners
12. Haunted Houses
13. Popular Follies of Great Cities
14. Popular Admiration of Great Thieves
15. Duels and Ordeals
16. Relics

* For those interested, the book is available for free pdf download here: http://manybooks.net/titles/mackaych2451824518-8.html
 
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Review
Frightfully well-done survey of modern horror, eclipsing Stephen King's seminal Danse Macabre (1981) for clarity of writing, if not personableness or depth of idea, and Walter Kendrick's The Thrill of Fear (1991) for cultural savvy. Where Kendrick found horror literature, film, etc., to be primarily a way of coping with fear of death, Skal (Hollywood Gothic, 1991, etc.) stands with King in discerning within the genre responses to myriad contemporary social ills, from economic stagnation to AIDS. Skal opens with a striking symbol of the symbiosis of horror and societal unease: Diane Arbus, photographer of outcasts and misfits, sitting in a darkened Manhattan theater in 1961 watching a rare screening of Tod Browning's notorious horror masterpiece, Freaks. A rundown of Browning's life and of the nearly parallel career of Brain Stoker's Dracula and its many offshoots follows (some of the Dracula material is cribbed from Hollywood Gothic), culminating in the watershed year 1931, when Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Freaks burst onto the screen, defining American horror (like King and unlike Kendrick, Skal avoids extensive discussion of premodern horror). While Skal's text is intensely (sometimes forcibly) idea-driven (he finds the 1931 films, for instance, revolving "around fantasies of 'alternative' forms of reproduction," responses to the "dust bowl sterility and economic emasculation" of the time), he never forgets that horror is foremost a mass entertainment, and he enlivens his narrative with a wealth of enjoyable anecdote and fact (e.g., that Bela Lugosi, who spoke almost no English, learned his lines phonetically) as he covers every aspect of contemporary horror - from EC comic books, Aurora plastic models, and Stephen King to oddball TV horror hosts and the impact of latex makeup. Skal's love and respect for the genre shine through this impeccably researched, lively chronicle: a top-drawer choice for horror fans. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
This provocative book uncovers the surprising links between horror entertainment, and the great social crisis of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop analogue to surrealism and other artistic movements.
 
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Synopsis
An entertaining illustrated romp through the history of "exploitation films" covers a wide range of films designed to poke viewers in their most sensitive places, with essays on tweny seminal films, including Mudhoney, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Crash. Original..
 
Hugh Walpole, The Second Century of Creepy Stories

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Wilkie Collins - Mad Monkton
John Metcalfe - Mortmain
Anonymous - The Dead Bride
J. S. Le Fanu - Carmilla
Bartimeus - The Green Door
Hugh Walpole - Tarnhelm
Ambrose Bierce - A Watcher by the Dead
Walter De La Mare -The Trumpet
Ralph Strauss - The Most Maddening Story In The World
Arthur Machen - Change
Algernon Blackwood - Keeping His Promise
Ex-Private X - The Oak Saplings
M.R. James - Mr. Humphreys And His Inheritance
Oliver Onions - The Beckoning Fair One
Guy de Maupassant - The Horla
F. Marion Crawford - The Upper Berth
Hector Bolitho - The House In Half Moon Street
T. O. Beachcroft - The Inn In the Estuary
Marjorie Bowen - The Crown Derby Plate
Henry James - The Turn Of The Screw
Margaret Irwin - Monsieur Seeks a Wife
Ann Bridge - The Accident
Martin Armstrong - Mrs. Vaudrey’s Journey
A.M. Burrage - Browdean Farm
M. Joyce - Perchance to Dream
Shane Leslie - The Drummer of Gordonmuir
Rupert Croft-Cooke - Banquo’s Chair

Hugh Lamb, writing in Steve Jones & Kim Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books (Xanadu, 1988), says of this one: “Simply the best anthology ever assembled; I’ve held this view for over thirty years”.
 
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“The Throne of Bones,” Brian McNaughton

Pros: Vivid characters; fascinating world; droll sense of humor
Cons: Frequent mild confusions
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

First published 7/11/2001
Previously published on Epinions.com

I enjoyed Brian McNaughton’s “The Throne of Bones,” a World Fantasy Award winner and collection of gruesome short stories. All of them are about some combination of death, murder, necromancy, necrophilia, sex, and of course, ghouls.

McNaughton’s world is a complex one with its own social structures and societies, worthy of any good fantasy novelist’s creation. The fact that so many people in it are necromancers - and ghouls stalk the catacombs - are part of what make it horror as well as fantasy. And it is definitely not fantasy/horror for children, or even teenagers. Ghouls are misshapen once-human monsters who feed on the dead (the longer the corpse has been dead, the better) and quench their insatiable sexual appetites on each other and any humans they can get their hands on. (Yes, Ghouls do have particularly large, umm, attributes.) They can absorb the memories of the dead, and sometimes even take on their appearance. The sex and violence aren’t implied, or even remotely off-screen; this is a very visceral book (often literally).

Characterization

One of the things I like best about McNaughton’s writing is his characters–they are all insanely flawed and disturbed. You might almost-not-quite like or sympathize with some of them, but that’s about it; yet somehow it doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the book. The characters have quirks and weird habits in abundance, and it’s hard not to find them utterly fascinating. Besides, these are short stories, not a novel, so you aren’t asked to stay in one point of view character long enough to become too uncomfortable with him.

Although these are short stories, they all do take place in the same world. One long one, the title story, unfolds in bits and pieces like a mini-novel. The point of view character of one story will return as a secondary character (or even rumor) in another story, allowing us to see some of the characters through many different sets of eyes - a wonderful and beautifully understated trick.

McNaughton also has a particularly droll sense of humor that pokes frequent fun at his own characters and plots, but not in a self-conscious sort of way. It simply informs his work, seeping into the language of the stories. It makes the humor of other books seem clumsy by comparison. Perhaps this is another reason why the not-entirely-likable characters fail to be problematic - you’re too busy laughing at them to be bothered by them:

I stamped down the stairs, wondering where I could borrow a sword before presenting myself at Weymael’s palace to demand the return of my skeleton. Halfway across the quadrangle it occurred to me that my righteous outrage was compromised: I had, after all, stolen his skull. Worse, I had lost it. A moment’s reflection persuaded me that this was not the sort of argument one should start with a necromancer.

Yet make no mistake, these are terrible people who do awful things, even the good ones. Although I paint this as an amusing, quirky and fun book, it is not for the faint of heart.

Those Pesky Confusions

It’s a shame, then, that I have a complaint to level at the book. It is frequently, in many small ways, confusing - on a couple of levels.

One sort of confusion is actually a sort of a neat stylistic thing, and I’m okay with that one. The wording will often obscure part of what is happening so that it can be more of a surprise a paragraph or two later. It’s a neat verbal gimmick that I think very few authors could pull off well. I liked it; others might not.

The other is the sheer volume of names, cities, locations, old stories, and so on. I think either McNaughton should have simplified just a little, or taken the same amount of information and turned it into a book twice as long. It’s hard to keep the various things straight, and to connect something in one story with something two stories back, even though you know you should remember it.

McNaughton’s style is vaguely reminiscent of authors such as Lovecraft and Ligotti. He doesn’t particularly sound like them, it’s just that there’s this certain sort of quirky wordiness that they all share to varying degrees, and which some readers love and others abhor.

There is one good thing about the level of complexity in this book, however: you’d never mistake it for some of the more formulaic writing out there. Nor does it rely on “twist” endings that you can see from a mile away; it is truly unusual writing.

All in all this is a wonderful book. It’s great for the horror fan with a jaundiced eye, or the fantasy reader who’s gotten too cynical for the typical fantasy novel. It’s like taking a fantasy novel and looking at it backwards, in a warped and twisted mirror, over the charnel scent of rotting meat.
 
The Mind According to Shakespeare: Psychoanalysis in the Bard's Writing (Hardcover) by http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/s...index=books&field-author=Marvin Bennett Krims



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Reviews:

“Marvin Krims has lucidly and unpretentiously combined deep psychoanalytic experience with love of language to create new understandings of Shakespeare's imaginative capacity. This book has a steady, cumulative power expanding our appreciation of Shakespearean genius. The Mind According to Shakespeare is a delight to read.”–Murray M. Schwartz Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing Emerson College

“By looking at Shakespeare's characters as real people, Marvin Krims has written a stunning series of essays that combine the clinical experience of a distinguished psychoanalyst with the sagacity of a wise literary critic. This is a book that will reward any reader interested in Shakespeare or simply in human nature or their own inner selves.”–Norman N. Holland Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Professor of English University of Florida
 
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CROSSED
by Garth Ennis (writer) & Jacen Burrows (art)

This is a brand new comic book series. Only issue #0 and #1 have been released so far, #2 hopefully coming to us soon!
Crossed is one of the best & most radical zombie stories around not only in comic books, but in any media, and we all know there is a lot of them around these days! (The Walking Dead, a nice comic book series too, feels like a picknic compared to Crossed.)
The zombies are not slow & stupid mutants. They are no "living dead" at all. They are just human people going completly insane, rejoicing in blood lust and sadism.

In an interview with CBR News Garth Ennis tells us the origin of Crossed:
The writer had been staying with some friends, and dreamed that their house was surrounded by zombies. “I was watching the action unfold from afar while being involved in it, in that weird way that dreams have where you can observe and participate at the same time,” Ennis said. “Then I realized that the crowd outside weren't zombies at all, they were simply people who'd turned evil-- deeply, irrevocably evil-- and were looking forward to indulging all manner of foul intentions as soon as they got their hands on their intended victims. The looks on their faces said it all, a sense of cruel yet delighted anticipation.”

​
The tag lines of the series are:

"There is nothing left but survival"
"There are no heroes"
"There is no help"
"There is no hope"
"No one is coming to save you"

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Now, doesn't that remind us a bit of Ligotti...?

Avatar Press is a small and independent comic book publisher. It gives no restraints at all to the creators and deserves our love & support for that.

More info:
Avatar Press CROSSED
Comic Book Resources > CBR News: Double-Crossed: Ennis Burrows talk “Crossedâ€
en.wikipedia.org

Garth Ennis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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"Horror Classics" is an anthology of great fiction adapted in comics form for readers of all ages. This tenth volume of the "Graphic Classics" series presents stories by eleven of the original creators of the horror genre, including H.P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep," Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy," and W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw." It features Saki, Balzac, Jack London, Olive Schreiner, Bret Harte, Howard Garis, Fitz-James O'Brien and Clark Ashton Smith. It is provided with art by Michael Manning, Richard Jenkins, Gabrielle Bell, Ryan Inzana and nine more great illustrators.
 
Ligeia said:
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Review
Frightfully well-done survey of modern horror, eclipsing Stephen King's seminal Danse Macabre (1981) for clarity of writing, if not personableness or depth of idea, and Walter Kendrick's The Thrill of Fear (1991) for cultural savvy. Where Kendrick found horror literature, film, etc., to be primarily a way of coping with fear of death, Skal (Hollywood Gothic, 1991, etc.) stands with King in discerning within the genre responses to myriad contemporary social ills, from economic stagnation to AIDS. Skal opens with a striking symbol of the symbiosis of horror and societal unease: Diane Arbus, photographer of outcasts and misfits, sitting in a darkened Manhattan theater in 1961 watching a rare screening of Tod Browning's notorious horror masterpiece, Freaks. A rundown of Browning's life and of the nearly parallel career of Brain Stoker's Dracula and its many offshoots follows (some of the Dracula material is cribbed from Hollywood Gothic), culminating in the watershed year 1931, when Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Freaks burst onto the screen, defining American horror (like King and unlike Kendrick, Skal avoids extensive discussion of premodern horror). While Skal's text is intensely (sometimes forcibly) idea-driven (he finds the 1931 films, for instance, revolving "around fantasies of 'alternative' forms of reproduction," responses to the "dust bowl sterility and economic emasculation" of the time), he never forgets that horror is foremost a mass entertainment, and he enlivens his narrative with a wealth of enjoyable anecdote and fact (e.g., that Bela Lugosi, who spoke almost no English, learned his lines phonetically) as he covers every aspect of contemporary horror - from EC comic books, Aurora plastic models, and Stephen King to oddball TV horror hosts and the impact of latex makeup. Skal's love and respect for the genre shine through this impeccably researched, lively chronicle: a top-drawer choice for horror fans. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
This provocative book uncovers the surprising links between horror entertainment, and the great social crisis of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop analogue to surrealism and other artistic movements.
Click to expand...


The Monster Show was actually one of the text books that I had for my History of the American Horror Film class when I was in College.
 
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Offers a collection of scary tales and poems, along with instructions for doing magic tricks, spooky recipes, and information on magical spells, things that are said to be cursed, old superstitions, and other traditional lore.
 
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Think the circus is a safe and fun place? Think again. If you didn’t already have an aversion to clowns, Will Elliott’s debut novel, The Pilo Family Circus, may make you think again.
Meet Jamie, a twenty something bloke living in Brisbane in a share house. Working a dead end job, dreaming of the woman he wants to bed, his entire life set up as a calculated move to woo her.
Sounds pretty ordinary, right? The clowns of the Pilo Family Circus are about to turn his life upside-down. And inside-out, while they’re at it.
A chance encounter with two of the clowns leads Jamie into hell. His house is trashed, his housemates threatened, and worse, he is given thirty hours to pass his audition. He manages to pass, and is drawn into the parallel world occupied by the Pilo Family Circus.
This circus is like nothing else you have ever experienced. The freaks are real, the clowns are psychotic and here, the you can truly become someone else. When Jamie dons the clown’s face paint, JJ the clown is born. JJ is every dark thing that had ever lived within Jamie, and he seems intent on destroying what is left of Jamie’s life.
This book is as vivid as the accoutrements of the clowns, scenes splashed with intense detail and shocking colours. Violence weaves a thread through the scenes, culminating in a spectacle worthy of the best of King and Lovecraft.
The only thing that lets this book down is the sparsity of the language – but this, also lends to the book’s particular atmosphere. There’s no need for floral language in a tale such as this. It is brutal, confronting and at times, darkly funny.
The Pilo Family Circus is the inaugural winner of the ABC Fiction award, and has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for best horror novel. It is available from all good bookstores.
 
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"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

http://www.wbenjamin.org/passageways.html
 
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