Kuklos looks at a diranged killer, a killer who hears voices commanding him to do Gods work and eliminate bad people within the community, this well liked individual manipulates five of his students in order to carry out what he believes is Gods commands. As the killings multiply so does the fear within the small New England community intensifies until the final and explosive ending.
Four entertaining short stories that show you that anything can happen to a person when in the right place at an unfortunate time. The Tooth Fairy brings an unpleasant surprise to an egotistical, overbearing and selfish company manager. The Helping Hand Company reorganizes an unfaithful and incompetent business owner’s company and life. The Devil Coin is found long after Confucius’ time and inflicts a historical disaster on a metropolitan city. The Handy Man shows a person had better shape up before he is no longer able to change his life or his actions. Something may happen to keep him from doing anything later in life. The author is a retired insurance agent and adjunct professor of Sociology, Psychology, Speech, and Marriage and Family at a local Junior College in Wichita, Kansas.
During and after the great depression they were traded for food, sex, shelter, and power. Twenty of the seemingly ordinary nickles carved with dark representations of world evils and imbued with magical powers that transformed the deliciously macabre bits of lost art into carriers of death, destruction, and ill luck. Where these coins go, so does his will. Each coin is imbued with his malice and a desire for destruction. With each life ruined... the Carver's life goes on. Seventeen stories tell the tale of the Carver's legacy: coins designed for beauty morphed into catalysts of pain.
A biblical betrayal drives this trilogy from the World Fantasy Award–winning author, “a singular American fabulist” (William Gibson, author of Neuromancer). The price of immortality . . . Two thousand years ago, there lived a man who sold some valuable information for a fee of thirty silver coins. His name was Judas Iscariot, and he is no longer with us. The coins, however, still exist—and still hold an elusive power over all who claim them . . . Like Andrew Vanbergen, whose attempts at innkeeping bring in stranger business than he ever expected. And Aunt Naomi, whose most prized family heirloom is a silver spoon—with a curiously ancient-looking engraving. And especially old Mr. Pennyman, who is only five silver coins short of immortality . . . “The Last Coin should confirm Blaylock’s position as a trendsetter, breaking new ground rather than just exploring the old.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Against a lyric vision of the Southern California coast, cosmic conspiracy theories bump heads in a gleeful farce to produce another strange and wonderful book from the idiosyncratic author of Homunculus and Land of Dreams.” —Publishers Weekly “Weird and wonderful touches abound; Blaylock makes good use of his coastal setting, extracting his own brand of magic from familiar places and familiar things. While Biblical conspiracies and revisionist scriptures are all the rage now, Blaylock got the jump on the current crop by several years.” —SFF Chronicles
This volume deals with the way in which money is symbolically represented in a range of different cultures, from South and South-east Asia, Africa and South America. It is also concerned with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges as against exchanges of other kinds. The essays cast radical doubt on many Western assumptions about money: that it is the acid which corrodes community, depersonalises human relationships, and reduces differences of quality to those of mere quantity; that it is the instrument of man's freedom, and so on. Rather than supporting the proposition that money produces easily specifiable changes in world view, the emphasis here is on the way in which existing world views and economic systems give rise to particular ways of representing money. But this highly relativistic conclusion is qualified once we shift the focus from money to the system of exchange as a whole. One rather general pattern that then begins to emerge is of two separate but related transactional orders, the majority of systems making some ideological space for relatively impersonal, competitive and individual acquisitive activity. This implies that even in a non-monetary economy these features are likely to exist within a certain sphere of activity, and that it is therefore misleading to attribute them to money. By so doing, a contrast within cultures is turned into a contrast between cultures, thereby reinforcing the notion that money itself has the power to transform the nature of social relationships.
