In the year 2025, life is decadent, and the major recreational drug is an aphrodisiac patch. When applied on a woman, it instantly brings her hormonal levels to the plateau phase, just prior to orgasm. Initially designed to assist women in the menopausal phase of life, it became legalized as an over-the-counter drug that is now sold in dispensing machines. Anyone eighteen years or older can buy the patch for ten dollars, making it widely distributed throughout the United States. A drug lord from Columbia wants to sell the drug in China, where he anticipates making billions of dollars in profits. But the ruling council there denies his request. To force a positive response and cooperation with his distribution plans, the drug lord abducts Wang, the son of the premier of China. China has three days to acquiesce to his demands, or Wang will be killed. The premier calls on the president of the United States for assistance. The president sends two enlightened people with special powers, Admiral Aaron Mullins, also known as the Pendragon, and Connie Chunxia, a special liaison on International Affairs, to rescue Wang. But he has been hidden in a Malayan jungle where dangers lurk everywhere. Just when Connie and the Pendragon think they have succeeded, the drug lord surfaces with an entirely new identity and is bent on sadistic revenge.

Merlin was heartbroken after the death of King Arthur Pendragon. This is because he felt he had failed in his quest to protect the King. He stayed in the wooden cottage for months, away from everyone, as self-punishment until Kilgharrah (the old dragon) visited him. The dragon told him about new events at Camelot. According to legend, King Arthur's spirit could not enter the spirit world because Diamair had to pay a debt owed to King Arthur. Diamair uses magical power to return Arthur as a baby. Dochraid got angry as a result of Arthur's reborn. She brought Morgana Pendragon back to life in human form like she did to Sir Lancelot. Morgana Pendragon wages endless battles after discovering that King Arthur was reborn into the Pendragon family as the baby King. Could Merlin remain the undefeated force preventing Morgana Pendragon from achieving her desires this time? Even though Morgana Pendragon failed the last time, she cannot die again this time. This is because she remains the only sorceress that has resurrected from the dead in human form. Find out what happened in many series that eventually took place.

New York Times bestselling author Simon Green introduces a new kind of hero, one who fights the good fight against some very old foes in the first novel in the Secret Histories series. The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. Actually, that's just his cover. His real name is Eddie Drood, but when your job includes a license to kick supernatural arse on a regular basis, you find your laughs where you can. For centuries, his family has been the secret guardian of Humanity, all that stands between all of you and all of the really nasty things that go bump in the night. As a Drood field agent he wore the golden torc, he killed monsters, and he protected the world. He loved his job. Right up to the point where his own family declared him rogue for no reason. Now, the only people who can help Eddie prove his innocence are the people he used to consider his enemies...

Few scholars nursed on the literary canon would dispute that knowledge of Western literature benefits readers and writers of the superhero genre. This analysis of superhero comics as Romance literature shows that the reverse is true--knowledge of the superhero romance has something to teach critics of traditional literature. Establishing the comic genre as a cousin to Arthurian myth, Spenser, and Shakespeare, it uses comics to inform readings of The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, Malory's Morte and more, while employing authors like Ben Johnson to help explain comics by Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, and Grant Morrison and characters like Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Justice League. Scholars of comics, medieval and Renaissance literature alike will find it appealing.

Starting with William Blake's lost painting The Ancient Britons, this book shows how the visionary artist and poet reworked the Matter of Britain--the corpus of legends presenting an alternative history of Britain--into his own mythology. He thus adds to a tradition of Arthurian epic begun by Layamon in the 13th century and continued by Edmund Spenser in the 16th, in which a Romano-Celtic warlord becomes an icon of the English imagination. This book shows how Britain became the promised land of a pagan goddess where mythical events are as important as those of history, and how the figure of Arthur is transformed into a British Messiah whose Christian realm is in continuous interaction with the Otherworld of Faerie, an imagined place between the spiritual and the earthly. Arthur as perceived through Blake's vision is the earthly embodiment of the fallen Albion; this exploration of the mythic underpinnings of the English sense of nationhood reveals an imaginative consciousness that links us to "human existence itself."

A rousing postscript to Lawhead's bardic Pendragon Cycle . . . Playing off snappy contemporary derring-do against the powerful shining glimpses of the historical Arthur he created, Lawhead pulls off a genuinely moving parable of good and evil.'Â Publishers Weekly It has been foretold: In the hour of Britain's greatest need, King Arthur will return to rescue his people. In Portugal, the reprobate King Edward the Ninth has died by his own hand. In England, the British monarchy teeters on the edge of total destruction. And in the Scottish Highlands, a mystical emissary named Mr. Embries-better known as "Merlin"-informs a young captain that he is next in line to the throne. For James Arthur Stuart is not the commoner he has always believed himself to be-he is Arthur, the legendary King of Summer, reborn. But the road to England's salvation is dangerous, with powerful enemies waiting in ambush. For Arthur is not the only one who has returned from the mists of legend. And Merlin's magic is not the only sorcery that has survived the centuries.

A prophecy of a golden age, a magic sword and a chosen one ... This is the legend of King Arthur ... or is it? From the manuscripts of a twelfth-century English cleric to a New York bestseller, tales of King Arthur and his court permeate our world. But where did the stories start and how much is true? Were Guinevere and Lancelot traitors? Was Merlin a wise man or magician? And was King Arthur a great and glorious king or a tragic man doomed from conception? Sara Douglass, a leading writer of fantasy, pierces the heat of this legend. A scholar and academic in medieval history, she explores the fascination, manipulation and permutations of this captivating myth that has intrigued the western world for centuries. The Betrayal of Arthur is an enchanting exploration of Arthurian legend, twentieth-century sensibilities and the medieval mind.