Armchair Fiction presents extra-large editions of classic horror and fantasy double novels with original illustrations. The first novel, Thorp McClusky¿s ¿Loot of the Vampire¿ is a real chiller from the pages of Weird Tales. It was a horrible crime. David Eichelman, jeweler, had been found dead in his office and a $400,000 string of pearls missing. So in stepped Police Commissioner Charles Ethredge and his ace crime fighter, Detective-Lieutenant Peters. It was their job to investigate what looked like, at least superficially, an ordinary case of murder. However, the facts in the case just didn¿t seem to add up. In all this a prime suspect appeared to be emerging, a strange foreign fellow named Count Woerz. It was up to Ethredge and Peters to determine whether Woerz was innocent or guilty, normal or abnormal, natural or supernatural¿ Jim Harmon¿s ¿The Man Who Made Maniacs¿ is the second novel. He had been killed! So why was he still alive? Jace Reid had felt the impact of the bullet. He had remembered falling face downwards into the dirt. The next thing he knew he was reading about his own death, while lying on a bed in an institute for the insane. It had started with a picture of himself making love to a girl, and a threatening phone call¿then his own startling death! The police had the body¿there could be no doubt that it was Jace Reid. But then, who was he? Carla said he was immortal and of the Un-dead. A vampire. And even in his arms she called him the Master. The Master of what? And what about those nightmares? The strangled cat? The idol? And most of all¿who were the Chosen Ones? A shocking story of horror and intrigue, set against the background of a depraved cult of sadism.

Bela Lugosi may -- as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang -- be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the profound and unconscious appeal of the undead. Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects Rickels's unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory's use of girls' blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker's Dracula, with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau's haunting Nosferatu; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as Subspecies. He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources. More than simply a compilation of vampire lore, however, The Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical arguments -- particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche -- embeddedin vampirism and gothic literature.

First Published in 1967. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this mind-bending short story from the golden age of science fiction, a hard-living hobo named Kevin O'Malley finds his squalid daily routine falling to pieces around him when a mysterious woman shows up and begins throwing around some hard-to-believe accusations about his partner in crime, a lowlife who goes by the name of Doc.

Briefly traces the history of the knife, tells how they are made, and shows hundreds of hunting, kitchen, table, and folding knives from various periods and cultures

Subaru Natsuki was just trying to get to the convenience store but wound up summoned to another world. He encounters the usual things--life-threatening situations, silver haired beauties, cat fairies--you know, normal stuff. All that would be bad enough, but he's also gained the most inconvenient magical ability of all--time travel, but he's got to die to use it. How do you repay someone who saved your life when all you can do is die?