When a race of elegant, superintelligent dogs arrives in twenty-first-century New York, they become instant celebrities, but, unable to adjust to the modern world and confronted with an incurable disease, they construct a fantastic castle and barricade themselves inside.

How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? For the first time, here is the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent. Stretching back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema's first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through World War II's K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the "good dog" on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds--sometimes even fluffy lapdogs. With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes--the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. "Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)"--or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore."

The story of the canine has been fundamentally entwined with that of humanity since the earliest times, and this ancient and fascinating story is told in Susan McHugh’s Dog.

Almost everyone likes dogs, even those who prefer cats as pets. So it's not surprising that writers have devoted a great deal of verbiage indeed to describe their ongoing love affair with the canine breed. You'll find herein all kinds of tales focusing on dogs: science fiction stories, mysteries, horror tales, westerns, memoirs, humorous accounts, and first-person doggie narratives. There are well-known pieces by writers such as Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, Washington Irving, Saki, E. C. Tubb, John Gregory Betancourt, Robert Hood, and Jack Dann--and stories by authors who are relatively unknown today. Here are twenty-five marvelous tales of dogs and their interactions with humans, plus five bonus poems: "The Call of the Wild," by Jack London "My Friend Bobby," by Alan E. Nourse "Neb," by Robert Reginald "My Friend," by Anonymous [poem] "Kerfol," by Edith Wharton "The Monster," by S. M. Tenneshaw "Tinker," by E. Nesbit "Phantom Dogs," by Elliott O'Donnell "The Dogs of Hannoie," by E. C. Tubb "Warlock," by Gordon Stables [poem] "Spaniel and Newfoundland Dogs," by Edward Jesse "A Dog of Flanders," by Ouida "Guard Dog," by Robert Hood "Rip Van Winkle," by Washington Irving "Stories of Dog Sagacity," by W. H. G. Kingston "The Best Friend," by Meribah Philbrick Abbott [poem] "Grab a Knife and Save a Life," by Mark E. Burgess "Kazan," by James Oliver Curwood "Mercy's Reward," by Sir Edwin Arnold [poem] "Snap: The Story of a Bull-Terrier," by Ernest Thompson Seton "Dogs Questing," by John Gregory Betancourt "The Widow's Dog," by Mary Russell Mitford "The Beast of Space," by F. E. Hardart "Oil of Dog," by Ambrose Bierce "Spirit Dog," by Jack Dann "Little Doggerel," by Robert Reginald [poem] "A Pilgrim," by Robert W. Chambers "The Open Window," by Saki "Memoirs of a Yellow Dog," by O. Henry "The Sound of the Barkervilles," by Robert Reginald. And don't forget to search this ebook store for "Wildside Megapack" to see more volumes in the series, including more animal stories (like Cats), plus mysteries, adventure stories, westerns, ghost stories, science fiction -- and much, much more!

The twentieth anniversary of a postmodern classic, blending the gothic novel with bleeding-edge science fiction After a century of cruel experimentation, a haunted race of genetically and biomechanically uplifted canines are created by the followers of a mad nineteenth-century Prussian surgeon. Possessing human intelligence, speaking human language, fitted with prosthetic hands, and walking upright on their hind legs, the monster dogs are intended to be super soldiers. Rebelling against their masters, however, and plundering the isolated village where they were created, the now wealthy dogs make their way to New York, where they befriend the young NYU student Cleo Pira and—acting like Victorian aristocrats—become reluctant celebrities. Unable to reproduce, doomed to watch their race become extinct, the highly cultured dogs want no more than to live in peace and be accepted by contemporary society. Little do they suspect, however, that the real tragedy of their brief existence is only now beginning. Told through a variety of documents—diaries, newspaper clippings, articles for Vanity Fair, and even a portion of an opera libretto—Kirsten Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs uses its science-fictional premise to launch a surprisingly emotional exploration of the great themes: love, death, and the limits of compassion. A contemporary classic, this edition features a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer.

The book is a collection of essays presented during the First Global Conference of Monstrous Geography held at Manchester College, Oxford, and examines monstrous geographies, or the other frontier, a space that runs counter to the socially constructed space of culture.