Welcome to Frightville... one-stop shopping for all your fears! Ben has just been invited to the birthday party of the year. The only catch is that you have to come in costume.Luckily, Ben knows just the place to buy the perfect mask -- that cool new store Frightville. It sells all sorts of spooky and one-of-a-kind items.But when Ben puts on the mask he finds at Frightville, suddenly he has the ability to see strange and ominous creatures lurking all around him. Is it his imagination, or are they real?

Homicide detectives Leo Franks and Lani Prejean race against time to stop a killer who is luring young women to grisly, horrifying deaths and discover that the murderer may be a part of a terrible conspiracy spanning decades and hundreds of victims. Original.

Cadderly the warrior-priest discovers a magical book whose secrets may help him to defeat the Chaos Curse once and for all Cadderly’s spiritual and moral wrestlings reach a crescendo upon his discovery of the mysterious Tome of Universal Harmony. While he is eager to defeat evil, his battles against the Chaos Curse have taken him far from his scholarly inventor’s life, and the magical book from his priestly order calls to him in ways he cannot fully comprehend. But adventure isn't finished with the young cleric yet. Cadderly and his friends face great danger from a sinister killer and the assassins of the Night Mask, all of whom lurk in the streets of the city of Carradoon. With the dreaded Chaos Curse still at large and new enemies at every turn, can Cadderly find both his faith and his warrior’s courage before it’s too late?

When her hometown is overtaken by a crime syndicate, the daughter of a disgraced Harper agent fights to free the local merchants from their underground overlords When Alias crosses swords with the underlings of the cunning, heartless lord of Westgate’s criminal guild—known only as the Faceless—he vows to destroy her. Accepting the challenge to rid Westgate of the maleficent Night Masks, Alias gathers old allies and new: the saurial paladin Dragonbait, the halfling Olive Ruskettle, the street performer Jamal, the sage Mintassan, and the charismatic Victor Dhostar, son of Westgate’s governing official. Yet even as Alias thwarts the nefarious efforts of the Night Masks, she becomes ever more entangled in the web woven by The Faceless—a web whose silken threads are spun from intrigue, political machinations, and murder. Masquerades is the tenth book in a series of loosely-connected novels about the Harpers.

This remarkable study explores the use of the visual and performing arts to promote nonviolence and social harmony in sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on Gelede, a popular community festival of masquerade, dance, and song, held several times a year by the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. Babatunde Lawal, an art historian and African scholar who has taught in Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States, is himself a Yoruba and has taken an active part in Gelede. He writes from the perspective of an informed participant/observer of his own culture. Lawal bases his book on extensive field research--observations and interviews--conducted over more than two decades as well as on numerous published and unpublished scholarly sources. He casts significant new light on many previously obscure aspects of Gelede, and he demonstrates a useful methodological approach to the study of non-Western art. The book systematically covers the major aspects of the Gelede spectacle, presenting its cultural background and historical origins as preface to a vivid and detailed description of an actual performance. This is followed by a discussion of the iconography and aesthetics of costume, and an examination of the sculpted images on the masks. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral and aesthetic philosophy of Gelede and its responsiveness to technological and social change. The Gelede Spectacle is illustrated in color and black-and-white with over 100 field and museum photographs, including a rare sequence on the dressing of a masquerader. It offers, in addition, more than 60 Gelede song texts, proverbs, and divination verses, each in the original Yoruba as well as in translation. Lawal's interpretations of these pieces indicate the rich complexities of metaphor and analogy inherent in the Yoruba language and art.

Since 1970, Manitoba artist Don Proch has built an astonishing body of work evoking a semi-mythical Prairie past and an unsettled and unresolved modernity. In his complex sculptures and life-size masks, Proch combines intricate draftsmanship with natural and found materials in surprising and transformative ways. Proch grew up in the farmland of north-central Manitoba. Using the rolling hills and unique parkland vistas of the Asessippi valley he creates a complex personal iconography based on prairie life, landscape, geology and history. The result is what art critic Robert Enright called “inexplicable as a miracle.” Proch first came to the Canadian art world’s attention as part of a group of radical young artists in the 1970s, intent on shaking up the art establishment. His complex installations, masks, and silkscreen prints quickly established his reputation as an innovator with a unique vision. Today he is recognized as one of the most influential visual artists to come out of western Canada, and his work can be found in major public and corporate collections including Canada’s major art galleries. Richly illustrated with more than 80 plates, the book includes rare excerpts from Proch’s notebooks that reveal his intricate working process. Surveying the course of Proch’s career, curator and art historian Patricia Bovey discusses the themes and influences behind his work and their context within the history of Canadian art.