Upon the 100th anniversary of the most terrifying stretch of shark attacks in American history--a wave said to have been the inspiration for Jaws--comes a reissue of the classic Lyons Press account and investigation. In July 1916, a time when World War I loomed over America and New York City was in the midst of a deadly polio epidemic, the tri-state area sought relief at the Jersey shore. The Atlantic’s refreshing waters proved to be utterly inhospitable, however. In just twelve days, four swimmers were violently and fatally mauled in separate shark attacks, and a fifth swimmer escaped an attack within inches of his life. In this thoroughly researched account, Dr. Richard Fernicola, the leading expert on the attacks, presents a riveting portrait, investigation, and scientific analysis of the terrifying days against the colorful backdrop of America in 1916 in Twelve Days of Terror.
Describes how, in the summer of 1916, a lone great white shark headed for the New Jersey shoreline and a farming community eleven miles inland, attacking five people and igniting the most extensive shark hunt in history.
A detailed account of over one hundred shark-related incidents on the coast of the Carolinas from a shark-bite investigator Powerful and mysterious, sharks inspire both fascination and fear. Worldwide, oceans are home to some five-hundred species, and of those, fifty-six are known to reside in or pass through the waters off the coast of both North and South Carolina. At any given time, waders, swimmers, and surfers enjoying these waters are frequently within just one-hundred feet of a shark. While it's unnerving to know that sharks often swim just below the surface in the shallows, W. Clay Creswell, a shark-bite investigator for the Shark Research Institute's Global Shark Attack File, explains that attacks on humans are extremely rare. In 2019 the International Shark Attack File confirmed sixty-four unprovoked attacks on humans, including three in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. While acknowledging that they pose real dangers to humans, Creswell believes the fear of sharks is greatly exaggerated. During his sixteen-year association with the Shark Research Institute, he has investigated more than one hundred shark-related incidents and has maintained a database of all shark–human encounters along the Carolina coastlines back to 1817. Creswell uses this data to expose the truth and history of this often-sensationalized topic. Beyond the statistics related to attacks in the Carolina waters, Sharks in the Shallows offers a history of shark–human interactions and an introduction to the world of shark attacks. Creswell details the conditions that increase a person's chances of an encounter, profiles the three species most often involved in attacks, and reveals the months and time of day with the highest probability of an encounter. With a better understanding of sharks' responses to their environment, and what motivates them to attack humans, he hopes people will develop a greater appreciation of the invaluable role sharks play in our marine environment.
Felix Allsey is a travel writer with a keen eye for the paranormal, and he’s carved out a unique, if only slightly lucrative, niche for himself in nonfiction; he writes travelogues of the country’s most haunted places, after haunting them himself. When he convinces the owner of the infamous Rotterdam Mansion to let him stay on the premises for 13 nights, he believes he’s finally found the location that will bring him a bestseller. As with his other gigs, he sets rules for himself: no leaving the house for any reason, refrain from outside contact, and sleep during the day. When Thomas Ruth, Felix's oldest friend and fellow horror film obsessive, joins him on the project, the two dance around a recent and unspeakably painful rough-patch in their friendship, but eventually fall into their old rhythms of dark humor and movie trivia. That’s when things start going wrong: screams from upstairs, figures in the thresholds, and more than what should be in any basement. Felix realizes the book he’s writing, and his very state of mind, is tilting from nonfiction into all out horror, and the shocking climax answers a question that’s been staring these men in the face all along: In Rotter House, who’s haunting who?
Kurt Eichenwald—New York Times bestselling author of Conspiracy of Fools and The Informant— recounts the first 500 days after 9/11 in a comprehensive, compelling page-turner as gripping as any thriller. In 500 Days, master chronicler Kurt Eichenwald lays bare the harrowing decisions, deceptions, and delusions of the eighteen months that changed the world forever, as leaders raced to protect their citizens in the wake of 9/11. Eichenwald’s gripping, immediate style and trueto- life dialogue puts readers at the heart of these historic events, from the Oval Office to Number 10 Downing Street, from Guantanamo Bay to the depths of CIA headquarters, from the al-Qaeda training camps to the torture chambers of Egypt and Syria. He reveals previously undisclosed information from the terror wars, including never before reported details about warrantless wiretapping, the anthrax attacks and investigations, and conflicts between Washington and London. With his signature fast-paced narrative style, Eichenwald— whose book, The Informant, was called “one of the best nonfiction books of the decade” by The New York Times Book Review—exposes a world of secrets and lies that has remained hidden for far too long.
A journalist's obsession brings her to a remote island off the California coast, home to the world's most mysterious and fearsome predators--and the strange band of surfer-scientists who follow them Susan Casey was in her living room when she first saw the great white sharks of the Farallon Islands, their dark fins swirling around a small motorboat in a documentary. These sharks were the alphas among alphas, some longer than twenty feet, and there were too many to count; even more incredible, this congregation was taking place just twenty-seven miles off the coast of San Francisco. In a matter of months, Casey was being hoisted out of the early-winter swells on a crane, up a cliff face to the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island-dubbed by sailors in the 1850s the "devil's teeth." There she joined Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle, the two biologists who bunk down during shark season each fall in the island's one habitable building, a haunted, 135-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Two days later, she got her first glimpse of the famous, terrifying jaws up close and she was instantly hooked; her fascination soon yielded to obsession-and an invitation to return for a full season. But as Casey readied herself for the eight-week stint, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands that have banished every campaign for civilization in the past two hundred years. The Devil's Teeth is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a story of crossing the boundary between society and an untamed place where humans are neither wanted nor needed.
An NPR Best Book of the Year Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. Inevitably drawn into the city’s occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what’s shared can never be unshared. An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever. Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria’s place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely.
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author, a revealing account of the events surrounding the day that the Japanese military launched a sneak attack on U.S. forces stationed in Pearl Harbor. Includes evidence that top U.S. officials knew about the attack but remained silent for political reasons and the conspiracy afterward to hide the facts. Photographs.
