Nicole Zanitos, at sixteen was killed by her father the corpse king, Argis. For one week she lay in the cold damp dirt of their familys cemetery until the emerald moon brought her back from the dead as the princess of zombies. She has spent the last two years killing and fighting off the forces of the dead and any other veil creature he might send into Seventh City. Nicole intends to use her unique gifts to do to Him what he has to her. Kill the corpse king.
After artfully arbitrating her return from the dead, Max Logan considers her experience with the afterlife a thing of the past. But Max's success as a temporary Superintendent of Spiritual Impediment was no accident, as she discovers when the permanent SSI shows up in the middle of the night to reveal that Max has a genetic predisposition to a supernatural calling. When Max's ex-husband and current boyfriend, Roger-the-Proctologist is lost in a plane crash due to an inept Reaper gone rogue, Max has no choice but to venture back into the sweet hereafter in an attempt to rescue him. Throw in a freak blizzard, a hot Grim Reaper, and the last person on Earth Max would choose to save, and Max will be lucky to escape with her own life before time runs out and she becomes a permanent resident of the Between. This is a stand-alone sequel to DEATH BENEFITS.
Set in the near future world where all bees are extinct when 5 unconnected people from varying parts of world are each stung. Their experience unites them in ways they could not have imagined.
The left-field arts journal whose very name promises more to come delivers three issues this season. There arent too many places to find intelligent, passionate, and semi-serious writing about the past, present, and future of visual culture and beyond. Dot Dot Dot, the brilliant journal edited by Stuart Bailey and Peter Bilak, is one of the few we've found. Issues 12 and 13 of this acclaimed graphic design journal are united by a thematic preoccupation with issues of distribution and dispersion. Exploring a variety of themes, including networks, schools, libraries, and the U.S. Postal Service, issue 12 collects pieces on and around these subjects, while issue 13 demonstrates them and doubles as a school magazine for the abandoned Manifesta 6 School on the island of Cyprus. Contributors to issues 12 and 13 include David Reinfurt, Ian Svenonius, Katherine Gillieson, Alex Waterman, Ryan Gander, Alice Fisher, Stuart Baile, Louis Lthi, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, John Morgan, Studio, Steve Rushton, Ryan Holmberg, Mark Owens, Seth Price, Dieter Roelstraete, Chris Evans, Rob Giampietro, Dmitri Siegel, Radim Pesko, and Will Holder. Issue 14pursues the various lines of pedagogy, cupid, and psyche. In short, each issue swallows its predecessor.
NEXT TIME YOURE DEAD, EXPECT BIG CHANGES IN THE AFTERLIFE AS THE UNDERWORLD GETS ITS FIRST FASHION MAKEOVER IN MILLENNIA For three months in late 2043 an expedition of eight people (most of them alive) entered the afterlife on a special assignment to come up with ways to improve it. They were commissioned by the Lord of Death himself, some call him Hades, and joined by a uniquely qualified spirit who knew that landscape well, the famous magus known as Merlin. It turns out hes served as the top Underworld guide to many cultures since death began, and he wrote The Tibetan Book of the Dead about how they do things there in the Bardo. Their job was to come up with ways to make death and the afterlife experience easier. Nothing there was working right anymore, nobody understood the place, people were getting lost and confused, complaints were mounting, and all this was slowing up Earths progress and the daytime life of living humans. The team included Blaise, a mysterious wisecracker who spends a lot of his timeoff-planet, mostly in the Pleiades; Edward, a sensible Boston book editor; Frederick, once a mythology professor but now a freelance Gnostic; Philomena, his wife who ascended into a Light body ten years earlier; Matthew, a reclusive meditator who consorts with Thunderbirds; Pipaluk, a very old shaman from Greenland; Tommy, teenager who died 20 years ago and now knows the Land of the Dead firsthand; and Merlin, explainer of Mysteries and everyones favorite afterlife guide. Nothing is exempt from their Bardo retrofit. No job is safe; no way of doing things is secure. Everything about the afterlife will change. Next time youre there, expect toremember more, stay awake longer, and not take all those strange spirits accosting you seriously. Who knows? You might even like it.
It's 1988 and Lily Bloom, a 65-year-old American lies dying of cancer in a London hospital. As her two daughters buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, she slides in and out of consciousness, outraged that there is so little time left and so many people still to disparage.
Melanie may be a dead teenager, but she's also an outrageously funny bad-mouthing bitch who doesn't care what you once thought about the afterlife, cause she's gonna give you the straight goods. No church crap. No science crap. No goody- two-shoes-gets-you-in crap. She's giving you the unvarnished truth as she sees it every day of her deadlife, no denial, no whitewash and no dumbing down.
