Fourteen tales guaranteed to keep you riveted to your seat. A World War II rescue-extraction ventures into madness and the heart of darkness… A CIA operative desperately tries to escape from Cuba after Castro’s takeover… An American hitman in Japan finds himself bringing a gun to a swordfight… A band of criminals planning a heist from a casino get an assist from a mermaid… A long simmering western tale of vengeance unfolds in the early days of the movie industry… A brutal tale of life and death unfolds on the street of a small town in the Old West… A former boxer reluctantly recalls his past as he is thrust into an unwelcome comeback… A prescient country and western song foretells a tale of murder and revenge… A tough guy private eye battles Nazi spies for control of a superweapon… A time warp sends a group of scientists back to the Jurassic age with disastrous results… A legendary hero struggles to defeat evil in ancient Greece… A beautiful seductress has deadly plans for her troubled bodyguard… A kidnapping turns out to be far more involved than is first believed… A trip downstate immerses a Chicago cop in a sinister network of conspiracy and murder… During the days of the pulps, thrillers came in various genres, but they always delivered exciting entertainment. This collection includes a variety of stories guaranteed to keep you turning those pages. Enter a world of adventure, intrigue, and murder: a World War II mission involving headhunters and a trip into the heart of darkness; a time warp that puts a group of scientists face to face with a Tyrannosaurus Rex; some unscrupulous dealings endanger a Chicago cop in southern Illinois. Award-winning author Michael A. Black, best known for his novels, began his writing career with short stories. Many of these tales appeared in such prestigious magazines as Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Now The Thrillers collects all of these mesmerizing stories in a single volume, ranging from espionage to westerns to science fiction and a whole lot more.

The Thriller: Scripting Seat-Gripping Suspense plumbs nine-score thrillers for recurring features that build nape-prickling, heart-pounding suspense. Fodder for analysis embraces domestic and foreign fare, classic and contemporary, ranging from Ghost, Speed, Seven, Psycho, and The Silence of the Lambs to La Femme Nikita and Yogen [Premonition]. Text eschews a connecting-the-dots, painting-by-numbers approach, in belief that formulas drain the lifeblood of creativity and inevitably spawn a ho-hum product. That said, the eight factors culled from the covered films constitute useful tools in the screenwriter's arsenal. Perhaps the best groundwork for a thriller is infiltrating the ATF/FBI/IRA, or a brigade of arms-running mercenaries. Short of that, watching films and reading scripts will work wonders. In that spirit, the book debuts three feature-film scripts for critical scrutiny: mystery thriller "Stateline"; police thriller "Cashing Out"; supernatural thriller "Birthmarks."

In Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s Brian Diemert examines the first and most prolific phase of Graham Greene's career, demonstrating the close relationship between Greene's fiction and the political, economic, social, and literary contexts of the period. Situating Greene alongside other young writers who responded to the worsening political climate of the 1930s by promoting social and political reform, Diemert argues that Greene believed literature could not be divorced from its social and political milieu and saw popular forms of writing as the best way to inform a wide audience. Diemert traces Greene's adaptation of nineteenth-century romance thrillers and classical detective stories into modern political thrillers as a means of presenting serious concerns in an engaging fashion. He argues that Greene's popular thrillers were in part a reaction to the high modernism of writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, whose esoteric experiments with language were disengaged from immediate social concerns and inaccessible to a large segment of the reading public.

Accessible to general and academic readers, Gospel Thrillers interweaves close readings of key themes in a little studied fiction genre with 'real world' tensions over biblical vulnerability, evident in political and cultural debates over the Bible and in popular literature about the Bible and Christian origins.

The development of the horror genre in childrenÆs literature has been a startling phenomenon û one that has provoked strong, but mixed, reactions. Frightening Fiction provides a lucid and lively guide to that genre, ranging from analyses of such popular series as Point Horror, Goosebumps, the X Files and the Buffy Stories, to the work of individual authors such as Robert Westall, David Almond, Philip Gross and Lesley Howarth.

Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.

Recent events such as the massacres in Dunblane and Arkansas, the deaths of children in terrorist attacks, civil wars and famines, children born with AIDS, and the many abductions and murders of children - including some by children - have placed childhood death firmly in the public consciousness. But how do we understand what it means for a child to die? This book examines the way the deaths of children have been dealt with at different times and in different media. Each contributor has focused on a different way of representing the deaths of children - from superstitions about malign child ghosts through mothers' diaries to horror fiction - and more.