Norman the Possessed Doll Is Back...and Revenge Is His Only Desire At the end of the paranormal bestseller Norman, investigator Stephen Lancaster gave the haunted doll his own room, which seemed to make him quiet and content—until now. This terrifying sequel reveals that a spirit like Norman can never truly be at rest, and he's determined to put Stephen and his family through hell. Norman 2 chronicles the doll's latest horrifying attacks on the Lancasters. On Christmas Eve, Norman sets his room and himself on fire. Soon after, he starts a fire in the barn. He even severely injures Stephen's dog. When the attacks become much worse, Stephen is forced to accept that something must be done to stop Norman...permanently. Find out how it all ends in this unputdownable book. Includes a foreword by the late Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of Haunted by the Things You Love.
When the doll was handed to me, I said he looked like hell. The woman who sold him to me replied that something coming from hell was bound to look like it. From the very first day paranormal investigator Stephen Lancaster brought him home, Norman the Doll raised hell. He caused sudden infestations of rats and spiders. He frightened dogs and put children in trances. He even moved on his own in video surveillance footage. That was just the beginning. Norman takes you on a chilling journey into Stephen's life with a doll that has held the spirit of an unborn child for over fifty years—a haunted doll that still lives in Stephen's house. What began as a curious find at an antique store soon escalated to a supernatural nightmare that could only be eased by locking Norman away in his own room. Praise: "Dedicated readers of horror and internet creepypasta stories will thrill to the mounting evil and the ersatz solution Lancaster and his wife devise to appease Norman. A must-read for fans of the Chucky and Annabelle movies."—Booklist
Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress -- and the United States -- to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call &"asymmetric polarization," with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no &"silver bullet"; reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.
Rockwell was both an optimist and a humanist. The driving force in his work lay in his abiding faith in the goodness of human nature. He was incapable of being mean. Even when he poked fun at his subjects, he did so without derision. He was equally incapable of violence. Given these traits, and adding to this his apolitical nature, it is remarkable that Rockwell's images created during World War II somehow captured the spirit of a nation at war in a way that no other body of work managed to accomplish.
