Download or read book The Late Great Creature written by Brock Brower and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lost classic . . . the history of a horror-film star and a treatise on human frailty . . . is back to be savored and marveled at anew” (James Ellroy, New York Times–bestselling author of the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy). Simon Moro, a sixty-eight-year-old star, is making his last picture, a low-budget remake of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Moro, infuriated by the bland horror movies of his day, sees his own career—even as it ends—as an ongoing effort to wallop the public with an overwhelming moral shock. And he succeeds when an elaborate publicity stunt turns into a gruesome and grand personal statement. As Moro’s life reels toward its macabre end, it also reels backward through lies and evasions to show its surprising beginning. Underneath his Frankensteinian exaggeration, Moro has a vivid and humane story to tell, even as the coffins break open and dark, erotic secrets are revealed. Brock Brower has taken the horror film in all its gory glory to create a book that recycles pop material into literature, creating a Dickensian tale of America. “A wonderful book . . . Like a circus with several brilliant performances going on at the same time . . . A real breaking through. I don’t think anybody ever again will be able to dabble politely in mixing ‘real life’ and fiction.” —Joan Didion, New York Times–bestselling author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem “The way the book skewers society’s obsession with celebrity culture is even more valid today than when it was written, proving that great art stands the test of time.” —Forbes “A cult novel that amounts to a loving satiric tribute to cinema schlockmeister Roger Corman.” —New York Post

Download or read book Remarkable Creatures written by Tracy Chevalier and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling novelist, a stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever. On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: "the eye" to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms, and landslips, her challenges only grow when she falls in love with an impossible man. Mary soon finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth, a middle-class spinster who shares her passion for scouring the beaches. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy, but ultimately turns out to be their greatest asset. From the author of At the Edge of the Orchard and Girl With a Pearl Earring comes this incredible story of two remarkable women and their voyage of discovery.

Download or read book Malorie written by Josh Malerman and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the “fast-paced, frightening” (The New York Times Book Review) sequel to Bird Box, the inspiration for the record-breaking Netflix film starring Sandra Bullock, bestselling author Josh Malerman brings unseen horrors to life. NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD • “Malorie is even more of a psychological thriller than Bird Box, and all the scarier for it.”—The Wall Street Journal Twelve years after Malorie and her children rowed up the river to safety, a blindfold is still the only thing that stands between sanity and madness. One glimpse of the creatures that stalk the world will drive a person to unspeakable violence. There remains no explanation. No solution. All Malorie can do is survive—and impart her fierce will to do so on her children. Don’t get lazy, she tells them. Don’t take off your blindfold. AND DON’T LOOK. But then comes what feels like impossible news. And with it, the first time Malorie has allowed herself to hope. Someone very dear to her, someone she believed dead, may be alive. Malorie has already lost so much: her sister, a house full of people who meant everything, and any chance at an ordinary life. But getting her life back means returning to a world full of unknowable horrors—and risking the lives of her children again. Because the creatures are not the only thing Malorie fears: There are the people who claim to have caught and experimented on the creatures. Murmerings of monstrous inventions and dangerous new ideas. And rumors that the creatures themselves have changed into something even more frightening. Malorie has a harrowing choice to make: to live by the rules of survival that have served her so well, or to venture into the darkness and reach for hope once more.

Download or read book Monsters of Men written by Patrick Ness and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the riveting conclusion to the acclaimed dystopian series, a boy and girl caught in the chaos of war face devastating choices that will decide the fate of a world. As a world-ending war surges around them, Todd and Viola face monstrous decisions. The indigenous Spackle, thinking and acting as one, have mobilized to avenge their murdered people. Ruthless human leaders prepare to defend their factions at all costs, even as a convoy of new settlers approaches. And as the ceaseless Noise lays all thoughts bare, the projected will of the few threatens to overwhelm the desperate desire of the many. The consequences of each action, each word, are unspeakably vast: To follow a tyrant or a terrorist? To save the life of the one you love most, or thousands of strangers? To believe in redemption, or assume it is lost? Becoming adults amid the turmoil, Todd and Viola question all they have known, racing through horror and outrage toward a shocking finale.

Download or read book The Cellar written by Richard Laymon and published by Beast House. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably Laymon's most celebrated--and most infamous--novel, The Cellar is the first book in his Beast House Chronicles. Only the bravest tourists dare to venture inside the sealed-up Beast House, long rumored to be haunted. But the creature that lives in the cellar is no ghost, and it's hungry

Download or read book The Creature Department written by Robert Paul Weston and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stunning. . . . a bit like if you took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Monsters Inc. and shoved them in a TARDIS."—Buzzfeed It’s a tentacled, inventive, gooey, world in there. . . . Elliot Von Doppler and his friend Leslie think nothing ever happens in Bickleburgh, except inside the gleaming headquarters of DENKi-3000—the world’s eighth-largest electronics factory. Beneath the glass towers and glittering skywalks, there's a rambling old mansion from which all the company’s amazing inventions spring forth. And no one except Uncle Archie knows what’s behind the second-to-last door at the end of the hall. Until Elliot and Leslie are invited to take a glimpse inside. They find stooped, troll-like creatures with jutting jaws and broken teeth. Tiny winged things that sparkle as they fly. And huge, hulking, hairy nonhumans (with horns). It is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. But when Chuck Brickweather threatens to shut down the DENKi-3000 factory if a new product isn’t presented soon, the creatures know they are in danger. And when Uncle Archie vanishes, it’s up to Elliot, Leslie, and every one of the unusual, er, “employees” to create an invention so astonishing it will save the Creature Department.

Download or read book The Creature of Habit written by Jennifer E. Smith and published by Random House Studio. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delightful picture book about a creature of habit whose routine suddenly gets disrupted by the unexpected arrival of a new friend. A perfect story for little readers learning social emotional skills that explores the joy of trying something new! A very big creature with big teeth, big eyes, and very big feet lives on the island of Habit. Every day the creature happily does the exact same things in the exact same order. That is, until a small boat carrying a very small creature with small teeth, small eyes, and very, very small feet arrives on the island. The big creature is excited to share his routine, but the small creature has ideas of his own. The little creature does something different every day--it's madness to the big creature! Can these two creatures learn to understand each other? Is the island big enough for both of them? Colorful and captivating, this is a story about learning with and from your friends.

Download or read book The Sun Dog written by Stephen King and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s novella The Sun Dog, published in his award-winning 1990 story collection Four Past Midnight, now available for the first time as a standalone publication. The dog is loose again. It is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It’s coming for you. Kevin Delavan wants only one thing for his fifteenth birthday: a Polaroid Sun 660. There’s something wrong with his gift, though. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, vicious dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town’s sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it. But the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn’t exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment.

Download or read book Antkind written by Charlie Kaufman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • “A dyspeptic satire that owes much to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon . . . propelled by Kaufman’s deep imagination, considerable writing ability and bull’s-eye wit."—The Washington Post “An astonishing creation . . . riotously funny . . . an exceptionally good [book].”—The New York Times Book Review • “Kaufman is a master of language . . . a sight to behold.”—NPR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND MEN’S HEALTH B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film made by an enigmatic outsider—a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made—a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete—B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être. A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.

Download or read book The Ritual written by Adam Nevill and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A horror debut by one of Britain's most celebrated up-and-coming writers, in which four friends get lost in a forest in Sweden, to find their lives are in mortal peril... as something evil lurks.

Download or read book Tender Is the Flesh written by Agustina Bazterrica and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

Download or read book Late Migrations written by Margaret Renkl and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: “Has the makings of an American classic.” —Ann Patchett Growing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver. And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.” Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut. “Magnificent . . . Readers will savor each page and the many gems of wisdom they contain.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Download or read book The Great and Secret Show written by Clive Barker and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 1990 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman.

Download or read book Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History written by Stephen Jay Gould and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1990-09-17 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] extraordinary book. . . . Mr. Gould is an exceptional combination of scientist and science writer. . . . He is thus exceptionally well placed to tell these stories, and he tells them with fervor and intelligence."—James Gleick, New York Times Book Review High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.

Download or read book The Rings of Saturn written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."

Download or read book Creatures of Light and Darkness written by Roger Zelazny and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two gods, two houses, one quest, and the eternal war between life and death To save his kingdom, Anubis, Lord of the Dead, sends forth his servant on a mission of vengeance. At the same time, from The House of Life, Osiris sends forth his son, Horus, on the same mission to destroy utterly and forever The Prince Who Was a Thousand. But neither of these superhuman warriors is prepared for the strange and harrowing world of mortal life, and The Thing That Cries in the Night may well destroy not only their worlds, but all mankind. As Zelazny did with the Hindu pantheon in the legendary, groundbreaking classic Lord of Light, the master storyteller here breathes new life into the Egyptian gods with another dazzling tale of mythology and imagination.

Download or read book The Book of Eels written by Patrik Svensson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize National Bestseller Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book One of TIME’s 100 Must Read Books of the Year One of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Nonfiction Books of the Year One of Smithsonian Magazine’s 10 Best Science Books of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year A New York Times Editor’s Choice Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even today, in an age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. They remain a mystery. Drawing on a breadth of research about eels in literature, history, and modern marine biology, as well as his own experience fishing for eels with his father, Patrik Svensson crafts a mesmerizing portrait of an unusual, utterly misunderstood, and completely captivating animal. In The Book of Eels, we meet renowned historical thinkers, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to Rachel Carson, for whom the eel was a singular obsession. And we meet the scientists who spearheaded the search for the eel’s point of origin, including Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt, who led research efforts in the early twentieth century, catching thousands upon thousands of eels, in the hopes of proving their birthing grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Blending memoir and nature writing at its best, Svensson’s journey to understand the eel becomes an exploration of the human condition that delves into overarching issues about our roots and destiny, both as humans and as animals, and, ultimately, how to handle the biggest question of all: death. The result is a gripping and slippery narrative that will surprise and enchant.