The human mind needs monsters. In every culture and in every epoch in human history, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, imaginary beings have haunted dreams and fantasies, provoking in young and old shivers of delight, thrills of terror, and endless fascination. All known folklores brim with visions of looming and ferocious monsters, often in the role as adversaries to great heroes. But while heroes have been closely studied by mythologists, monsters have been neglected, even though they are equally important as pan-human symbols and reveal similar insights into ways the mind works. In Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, anthropologist David D. Gilmore explores what human traits monsters represent and why they are so ubiquitous in people's imaginations and share so many features across different cultures. Using colorful and absorbing evidence from virtually all times and places, Monsters is the first attempt by an anthropologist to delve into the mysterious, frightful abyss of mythical beasts and to interpret their role in the psyche and in society. After many hair-raising descriptions of monstrous beings in art, folktales, fantasy, literature, and community ritual, including such avatars as Dracula and Frankenstein, Hollywood ghouls, and extraterrestrials, Gilmore identifies many common denominators and proposes some novel interpretations. Monsters, according to Gilmore, are always enormous, man-eating, gratuitously violent, aggressive, sexually sadistic, and superhuman in power, combining our worst nightmares and our most urgent fantasies. We both abhor and worship our monsters: they are our gods as well as our demons. Gilmore argues that the immortal monster of the mind is a complex creation embodying virtually all of the inner conflicts that make us human. Far from being something alien, nonhuman, and outside us, our monsters are our deepest selves.
The Halloween carnival seemed like the perfect way to spend a Friday night, but when a group of teenagers find themselves trapped in the haunted mansion, they learn the awful truth about the carnival, and the demons that run it. Now they're trapped, fighting their way through a maze of torturous attractions where vampires, werewolves, aliens, and other monsters come to life, eager for human blood. As the body count rises, friendships are made and lost, and unlikely heroes emerge. The final showdown takes place in Hell, where the ultimate battle between good and evil will determine their fate. The Carnival of Fear - the price of admission is your soul!
This beautifully illustrated volume features work by leading writers and experts on carnival from around the world, and includes two stunning photo essays by acclaimed photographers Pablo Delano and Jeffrey Chock. Editor Milla Cozart Riggio presents a body of work that takes the reader on a fascinating journey exploring the various aspects of carnival - its traditions, its history, its music, its politics - and prefaces each section with an illuminating essay. Traditional carnival theory, based mainly on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner, has long defined carnival as inversive or subversive. The essays in this groundbreaking anthology collectively reverse that trend, offering a re-definition of 'carnival' that focuses not on the hierarchy it temporarily displaces or negates, but a one that is rooted in the actual festival event. Carnival details its new theory in terms of a carnival that is at once representative and distinctive: The Carnival of Trinidad - the most copied yet least studied major carnival in the world.
This major work offers a new interpretation of the witchcraft beliefs of European intellectuals between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, showing how these beliefs fitted rationally with other beliefs of the period and how far the nature of rationality is dependent on its historical context.
The definitive guide to all things Mardi Gras . . . past and present! From Twelfth Night to Ash Wednesday, New Orleans is transformed. Queens and fools, demons and dragons reign over the Crescent City. This vividly photographed book is a lively, comprehensive history of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Fascinating and intimate, this book seamlessly intertwines the past with the present.
SOMETHING WICKED EVIL THIS WAY COMES. There's something troubling about Professor Caligari's Traveling Carnival. Perhaps it's that no one can recall the arrival of its hard-to-miss caravan of old-style wagons, countless performers, and horse-drawn carts. Maybe it's the creepy calliope music that tirelessly beckons visitors. Let's face it, an enigma that chooses Sunnydale nearly guarantees it's up to more than wholesome family entertainment. After a visit to the carnival's Hall of Mirrors, a once-shy pair of homely sophomore twins parades the halls of Sunnydale High like diva supermodels on a runway. Intuiting the twins' abrupt personality change as more than a self-confidence boost, Buffy -- joined by Angel, Giles, and the rest of the Scoobies -- decides to investigate the suspicious carnival firsthand. But soon it's apparent that the price of admission is higher than she imagined. Those who enter the carnival's attractions exit...changed. Each of the gang soon shows extreme displays of vice. Willow is wracked with envy. Cordelia's greed consumes her. Xander unleashes his gluttony. Angel reveals a lusty new persona. And a dark anger rises in Giles. But it's Buffy's now-blinding pride that threatens to overpower her, and in the process destroy those she loves....
A Vintage Shorts Travel Selection Growing up in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat kept well clear of carnival—terrified by the stories of danger and debauchery that her uncle told her. Decades later, a grown woman and accomplished author, she returns home to find out what she’s been missing. In this selection from After the Dance, Danticat fuses her present-day observations with her own childhood memories and weaves a deeply personal reflection on the home she left behind. Through conversations with other attendees and her own deft reporting, she takes readers into the very heart of the festival. A Walk Through Carnival is as much memoir as it is travelogue; and, in these pages, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Brother, I’m Dying brings the electric spirit of carnival vividly to life. An eBook short.
Half-Gypsy, Carnival carries his dead Poppa inside him as a perpetual adviser as he works as fortune-teller and occult troubleshooter, banishing demons and succubi with a carefree confidence born only of youth. His life journey takes a distinctly different turn when he meets Maya, an alluring female vampire. This novel details a dark version of the modern world, in which demons appear unbidden and where having a talent and using it successfully can mean either life or death. GYPSY BLOOD is a fast-paced, dark, funny and terrifying novel - like nothing that you have ever read before. The whole thing rolls like an avalanche of skateboards building to a climactic battle royal e between Carnival, a two-timing lady vampire, a she-demon with a mother complex, a social-climbing blood god, the collective spirit of the city and a mercenary mariachi band in a rickshaw. This is a fantasy for those folks who HATE fantasy! "If you have got a taste for over-the-top stories in the campy mode of the EVIL DEAD movies, then this is definitely a book that you should look into." - The Goreletter "If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." - BOOKGASM "Gypsy Blood is for fans of dark fantasy who think they've seen it all. Where else are you going to find a novel that opens with life and death battle with a succubus, rolls into a vampire's palm reading session, which segues into a bathtub summoning ceremony and climaxes with a non-stop showdown between a blood demon, a city incarnate, and a mercenary band of mariachi armed with a homemade propane-powered kamikaze rickshaw and assorted armaments?" - Hellnotes "True originality is rare but you will find it every time that Steve Vernon puts his fingers on the keyboard." - Jeff Strand (author of PRESSURE)
With a riotous mix of saints and devils, street theater and dancing, and music and fireworks, Christian festivals are some of the most lively and colorful spectacles that occur in Spain and its former European and American possessions. That these folk celebrations, with roots reaching back to medieval times, remain vibrant in the high-tech culture of the twenty-first century strongly suggests that they also provide an indispensable vehicle for expressing hopes, fears, and desires that people can articulate in no other way. In this book, Max Harris explores and develops principles for understanding the folk theology underlying patronal saints' day festivals, feasts of Corpus Christi, and Carnivals through a series of vivid, first-hand accounts of these festivities throughout Spain and in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Peru, Trinidad, Bolivia, and Belgium. Paying close attention to the signs encoded in folk performances, he finds in these festivals a folk theology of social justice that—however obscured by official rhetoric, by distracting theories of archaic origin, or by the performers' own need to mask their resistance to authority—is often in articulate and complex dialogue with the power structures that surround it. This discovery sheds important new light on the meanings of religious festivals celebrated from Belgium to Peru and on the sophisticated theatrical performances they embody.