What is it about vampires that fascinates the human imagination? Blood Obsession closely scrutinizes theories of Sigmund Freud and Tzvetan Todorov and arrives at a model of the vampire as the perfect representative of genre for a variety of reasons - the vampire figure appeals to its audience because of an interdependency of looplike mental and narrative structures that lure both reader and writer incessantly back to the genre. At the same time, this book provides the reader with a thorough survey of literary and filmic vampires in both adult and juvenile fictions. Lastly, it blends the realms of legal and literary history by highlighting the changes the image of the serial killer, a close relative of the vampire, underwent at the end of the twentieth century. Blood Obsession is a highly enlightening study for the general reader as well as for students of film, literature, and popular culture.
"In the early morning of February 24, 1984, Janet Cannon Myers, a beautiful young mother, poet, and dancer, was found dead, lying amid an explosion on her living-room floor. There were only two men in the whole world who could possibly have committed the deed: her husband, Kerry, and one of his closest friends, Bill Fontanille." "The media blitz immediately after the murder featured stories of a badly injured, grieving husband, an all-night fight-and-hostage situation as he vainly tried to protect his family, his desperate call to the police, and charges against Bill Fontanille (the scorned lover?) for attacking Kerry Myers, almost killing his two-and-a-half-year-old son, and bludgeoning to death Kerry's wife." "But upon close examination of Kerry's and Bill's statements to the police, the prosecutor's office found a troubling coincidence: Their accounts of what happened were virtual mirror images, the stories all but identical, except that each accused the other of attacking him with either a knife or a bat immediately upon entry into the Myers house that late Thursday afternoon. Each man vowed his innocence; in fact, each man said he hadn't even seen Janet during that long evening, much less her corpse." "After four grand juries and three trials over seven years, both men were sent to prison, yet no one - including the judge and jury who convicted them and the district attorney's office that prosecuted them - has been able to determine who did what to whom and why. Perhaps until now, that is." "Through hundreds of interviews, exhaustive research in thousands of pages of documents, and exclusive access to both Kerry Myers and Bill Fontanille, Joe Bosco has done what the media, the courts, and all the family members and friends of the victim and the suspects have never been able to do - break open the sordid vault that holds so many of even the best family's secrets and lay bare all that is necessary for you to understand and then render your verdict upon what actually happened that horrific night." "Blood Will Tell is the story of a quiet New Orleans suburb whose deceptive calm is shattered by unimaginable savagery; a world where seemingly perfect marriages cover up histories of constant abuse; where close friendships are betrayed for sex; where loyalty and love are forgotten in the grip of ambition and greed. Bosco sketches indelible portraits of the victim and the accused, exposing passions and flaws that made this tragedy inevitable." "Blood Will Tell is also a riveting legal thriller, a page-turning succession of back-and-forth accusations, of judgments and reversals of court opinions. For ten years this extraordinary case has gripped New Orleans, Hollywood, and the national media. With the shattering revelations in this book, it is certain to endure as a legal phenomenon and a landmark in the U.S. criminal justice system for decades to come."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Bynum argues that Christ's blood as both object and symbol was central to late medieval art, literature, and religious life. As cult object, blood provided a focus of theological debate about the nature of matter, body, and God and an occasion for Jewish persecution; as motif, blood became a central symbol in popular devotion.
Framed around the author's experience of spiritual warfare, Silence Satan introduces readers to the two warring plans for their lives: Satan's (who kills, steals, and destroys) and God's (who gives abundant life). It then reveals the various ways Satan tries to silence and destroy this generation with wounds, accusations, lies, and deceit and how to stand strong against them.
"WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD is a harrowing and fascinating tale of apocalyptic obsession and murder. Leah Sottile leads us down every head-shaking twist and turn of the case, an expert guide to the dark tributaries of religious extremism that run closer to the American mainstream than we'd ever like to believe."―Jess Walter, American author of Ruby Ridge On the heels of the sensational murder trial and shocking verdict, WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD examines the culture of end times paranoia and a trail of mysterious deaths surrounding former beauty queen Lori Vallow and her husband, grave digger turned doomsday novelist, Chad Daybell. When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven J.J. Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow's case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find the accused Black Widow has an unusual number of bodies piling up around her. WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD tells a gripping story of extreme beliefs, snake oil prophets, and explores the question: if it feels like the world is ending, how are people supposed to act?
Blood, in Gil AnidjarÕs argument, maps the singular history of Christianity. A category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining, Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought, from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.
A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions. The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.
The Blood Books are now available in "Blood Ties" TV tie-in editions. View our TV tie-in feature page here here. An evil being has been sealed away for centuries in a sarcophagus never meant to be opened, waiting patiently for his chance to rise again. Now, brought to the Egyptology Department of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, the seals and spells that imprisoned him chipped away from his discoverers, he has reached forth to claim the minds and souls of Toronto’s unsuspecting citizens. And only three people had any sense that something was wrong…. For Henry Fitzroy, it began with terrifying images of the sun, a marker of death for a vampire. Fearing for his sanity, he turns to his sometimes-lover, private investigator Vicki Taylor, for help. As the two struggle to cope with Henry’s obsession, Vicki’s closest friend and former partner Mike Celluci, is following up on two mysterious deaths at the museum, certain that a force from beyond the grave is responsible for everything.
Our siege mentality -- Bad thoughts -- The mademoiselle and the rat man -- An emerging obsession -- The OCD family -- Cruel to be kind -- The God obsession -- Animals and other relatives -- Man hands on misery to man -- The runaway brain -- Daddy's little helper -- The helicopter view -- Long live lobotomy -- Politics and prejudice -- A new dimension -- Final thoughts.
