Black Shuck Books presents REMEMBER THE DEAD AT HALLOWEEN AND CHRISTMAS, edited by British Fantasy Award winner J.A. Mains. An all-new anthology of 'lost' Victorian and Edwardian stories set or published during the two seasons where the dead like us to remember them the most... Editor Mains has spent four years researching and bringing this book to life and with a previously unknown Edith Nesbit tale, REMEMBER THE DEAD showcases the very best of early supernatural fiction and is a must for any serious lover of the genre.
Rubin provides the information, inspiration, and tools to plan and implement creative, meaningful, and memorable end-of-life rituals for people and pets.
"Daniel Randolph Deal is a Southern aristocrat, having the required bloodline, but little of the nobility. A man resistant to the folly of ethics, he prefers a selective, self-indulgent morality. He is a confessed hedonist, albeit responsibly so."--Back cover
When her husband and two daughters disappear, housewife Clare Taylor discovers that her ordinary domestic life has been built on a lie. About to turn forty, her youthful dreams of becoming an actress abandoned, there's no doubt in her mind that suburban wife and mother-of-two Clare Taylor has settled. A wild week in Chicago may have shaken things up a bit, but as she turns her key in her Madison, Wisconsin home on the eve of Hallowe'en, she knows that what happened with her ex was nothing more than a distraction, that this is where her life is. Except it's all gone. The furniture gone, the house stripped, her husband Danny, her daughters, all gone; no message; no note, nothing. Outside in the dark, searching for a sign, she steps in one: the eviscerated body of the family dog. By dawn next morning, her supposedly mortgage-free home has been foreclosed against, one of Danny's childhood friends lies dead in her backyard, and Clare is caught up in a nightmare that began with her husband on Hallowe'en night, 1976. A nightmare that reaches its terrifying climax thirty-five years later.
Kate Spencer lost her mom to cancer when she was 27. In The Dead Moms Club, she walks readers through her experience of stumbling through grief and loss, and helps them to get through it, too. This isn't a weepy, sentimental story, but rather a frank, up-front look at what it means to go through gruesome grief and come out on the other side. An empathetic read, The Dead Moms Club covers how losing her mother changed nearly everything in her life: both men and women readers who have lost parents or experienced grief of this magnitude will be comforted and consoled. Spencer even concludes each chapter with a cheeky but useful tip for readers (like the "It's None of Your Business Card" to copy and hand out to nosy strangers asking about your passed loved one).
April Claus knows being married to the real Santa makes every day feel like Christmas. But when a different holiday arrives at the North Pole, so does murder . . . For the first time ever, Christmastown is celebrating a strange new tradition—Halloween. But not everyone is willing to watch their dependable winter wonderland get overrun by carved pumpkins and costume parties. As a series of scary happenings hit Santaland, each one more intense than the last, April realizes having a role in the festivities could cost her family, friends—even her own life. April isn’t the only unlucky target. Outspoken elf Tiny Sparkletoe is found dead in the snow outside his cottage, crushed in the middle of what appears to be a monstrous footprint. With mayhem descending like reindeer on rooftops, April must stop the Halloween killer before the fate of Mrs. Claus becomes another creepy tale to tell in the dark . . . “An exceptional series launch . . . This fun, well-plotted mystery is the perfect holiday entertainment.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Religious traditions provide the stories and rituals that define the core values of church members. Yet modern life in America can make those customs seem undesirable, even impractical. As a result, many congregations refashion church traditions so they may remain powerful and salient. How do these transformations occur? How do clergy and worshipers negotiate which aspects should be preserved or discarded? Focusing on the innovations of several mainline Protestant churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, Stephen Ellingson’s The Megachurch and the Mainline provides new understandings of the transformation of spiritual traditions. For Ellingson, these particular congregations typify a new type of Lutheranism—one which combines the evangelical approaches that are embodied in the growing legion of megachurches with American society’s emphasis on pragmatism and consumerism. Here Ellingson provides vivid descriptions of congregations as they sacrifice hymns in favor of rock music and scrap traditional white robes and stoles for Hawaiian shirts, while also making readers aware of the long history of similar attempts to Americanize the Lutheran tradition. This is an important examination of a religion in flux—one that speaks to the growing popularity of evangelicalism in America.
Winner of the 2019 Broken Frontier Award for Best Book on Comics Today fans still remember and love the British girls’ comic Misty for its bold visuals and narrative complexities. Yet its unique history has drawn little critical attention. Bridging this scholarly gap, Julia Round presents a comprehensive cultural history and detailed discussion of the comic, preserving both the inception and development of this important publication as well as its stories. Misty ran for 101 issues as a stand-alone publication between 1978 and 1980 and then four more years as part of Tammy. It was a hugely successful anthology comic containing one-shot and serialized stories of supernatural horror and fantasy aimed at girls and young women and featuring work by writers and artists who dominated British comics such as Pat Mills, Malcolm Shaw, and John Armstrong, as well as celebrated European artists. To this day, Misty remains notable for its daring and sophisticated stories, strong female characters, innovative page layouts, and big visuals. In the first book on this topic, Round closely analyzes Misty’s content, including its creation and production, its cultural and historical context, key influences, and the comic itself. Largely based on Round’s own archival research, the study also draws on interviews with many of the key creators involved in this comic, including Pat Mills, Wilf Prigmore, and its art editorial team Jack Cunningham and Ted Andrews, who have never previously spoken about their work. Richly illustrated with previously unpublished photos, scripts, and letters, this book uses Misty as a lens to explore the use of Gothic themes and symbols in girls’ comics and other media. It surveys existing work on childhood and Gothic and offers a working definition of Gothic for Girls, a subgenre which challenges and instructs readers in a number of ways.
