Five months after her sister Gloria disappeared, Kitty Seevers receives a lock of Gloria's hair in the mail. No return address. Just a cryptic message that brings Kitty to the Bamboo Lounge and into the twisted realm of ventriloquist Ronny McBane and his dummy, Piggy. Kitty descends into a haunted place where reality is frayed, where the puppetmaster and puppet seem to have reversed roles—a nightmare place where a dummy moves and speaks when his master is nowhere near him. Kitty suspects not only is there something wrong with McBane and his dummy, but a greater evil is at work as those named by the dummy are dying horrible deaths. And now she has been named by the same soul-eater that destroyed her sister.

From ghost story master Mary Downing Hahn, an assortment of eerie short stories to thrill and chill young readers

This anthology of essays, a companion to Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, Volume I, aims to explore the many types of relationships that exist between puppets, broadly speaking, and the immaterial world. The allure of the puppet goes beyond its material presence as, historically and throughout the globe, many uses of puppets and related objects have expressed and capitalized on their posited connections to other realms or ability to serve as vessels or conduits for immaterial presence. The flip side of the puppet’s troubling uncanniness is precisely the possibilities it represents for connecting to discarnate realities. Where do we see such connections in contemporary artistic work in various mediums? How do puppets open avenues for discussion in a world that seems to be increasingly polarized around religious values? How do we describe, analyze, and theorize the present moment? What new questions do puppets address for our times, and how does the puppet’s continued entanglement with these concerns trouble or comfort us? The essays in this book, from scholars and practitioners, provide a range of useful models and critical vocabularies for addressing this aspect of puppet performance, further expanding the growing understanding and appreciation of puppetry generally. This book, along with its companion volume, offers, for the first time, robust coverage of this subject from a diversity of voices, examples, and perspectives.

The Long Black Coffin is a '67 GTO. A street-eater and a life-taker. Like an open grave, it's hungry for death. Vic Tamberlyn committed suicide in it. His son Kurt asphyxiated in it. Maybe there's no connection, but Kurt's best friend, Johnny Breede, doesn't believe it. He begins seeing dark connections, convinced that beneath the skin of the Coffin there beats a black, terrible heart. But it's even worse than he can imagine. For the Long Black Coffin has a history. And that history will lead Johnny into a web of murder, insanity, and sexual perversion. He'll learn gruesome family secrets that connect a decade-old series of child abductions to a primordial evil that lives on in the car in the form of a sadistic teenage girl. A girl whose mother was human, but whose father was anything but.

It comes out of the night. It kills with animal stealth and viciousness, but with an almost human capacity for cruelty and sadism. And this time, it has left a witness. Jim Duchane watched it kill his two best friends. Now tormented by their deaths and skeptical of his own memories of that awful night, he is approached by two fringe monster hunters who are desperate to track the beast. With his help, they will hunt down a monster of Native American folklore whose very existence belies a terrible biological reality. And it may be the worse mistake Jim has ever made.

In the midst of a beautiful summer, in a perfectly American suburban middle-class neighborhood, a faraway evil is lurking, waiting to strike the unsuspecting residents. First come the flashing lights, then the heavy rains, high winds, and finally a total blackout. But that's only the beginning… When the whipping black tentacles fall from the sky and begin snatching people at random, the denizens of Piccamore Way must discover the terrifying truth of what these beings have planned for the human race.