Like a combination of Cold Comfort Farm and Psycho, Gillian White's brilliant new novel begins very quietly, almost romantically, then builds inexorably to nearly unbearable suspense.It's about an attractive, fortyish widow, very lively but deeply wounded in her psyche, who inherits her brother's cottage in a remote part of rural Devon. Georgie is a London social worker in flight from unwanted tabloid celebrity when a child who is part of her caseload is killed. The little girl's father has been under suspicion of abusing the child, and Georgie is accused by the press of having ignored all the warning signs and abandoned the little girl to her father's cruel, and finally fatal, beating. An inquiry exonerates Georgie, but the press doesn't forgive her, and she can't forgive herself, so when she inherits her brother's cottage, she is happy to go there and sort things out.Georgie settles in and takes stock of her neighbors. Chad Cramer, a small-time thief and poacher, has appropriated most of her brother's belongings and lives with Donna, a witless but somehow disturbing waif, who is clearly in terror of Chad; the Buckpits, dairy farmers, a ferocious, brooding gorgon of a mother and two hulking, brutish sons; and Nancy and George Horsefield, a well-to-do married couple whose brightly expensive lifestyle seems to conceal some hidden tragedy, for Mrs. H. is clearly crazy, and Mr. H., though he cares for her, is strangely on edge....For a while, Georgie gets by restoring the cottage to something approaching livability and cleaning up the garden shed, in which something strange has clearly been going on, and her life seems almost idyllic.Then a darker note is heard. Georgie sees a mysterious and threatening stranger, who runs away when Georgie approaches; Chad Cramer turns nasty; Donna begins to cling to Georgie; Mrs. Buckpit is openly hostile; and Georgie continues to be haunted by the child who was under her care and died, and by the thought of the child's father in prison now. As the summer ends, the countryside begins to turn savage and threatening, and now real terror creeps in. Georgie's beloved dog is stolen, her attempt at painting is livened up with splashes of blood, an intruder stares into her cottage at night with a baleful eye...Finally, step by step, the horror increases to Psycho level as a snowstorm isolates the village and cuts Georgie off from the world -- leaving her at the mercy of a killer whose identity she can't even guess as the ax descends on her...

The canon of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost writers of dark and atmospheric fiction and poetry, offers readers haunted shores teeming with various erudite men brooding in the waning light over their feelings for unobtainable women. Yet, whether the tales or verses are grotesque or sinister, Poe's narrators are Outsiders, dealing with emotions that so many LGBT individuals feel: isolation and abandonment as well as loneliness and lost love. In the Shirley Jackson Award nominated Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, editor Steve Berman has assembled a range of tales that queer the prose and poetry of the Poe, the man himself, as well as dark and eerie stories about reading Poe's work.

In this journal Boatswain’s Mate James Morrison recounts the Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty’s 1787 voyage and the ensuing mutiny, providing an invaluable resource for naval historians and an enthralling tale for the general reader.

Pre-Conquest attitudes towards the dying and the dead have major implications for every aspect of culture, society and religion of the Anglo-Saxon period; but death-bed and funerary practices have been comparatively and unjustly neglected by historical scholarship. In her wide-ranging analysis, Dr Thompson examines such practices in the context of confessional and penitential literature, wills, poetry, chronicles and homilies, to show that complex and ambiguous ideas about death were current at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. Her study also takes in grave monuments, showing in particular how the Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture of the ninth to the eleventh centuries may indicate not only the status, but also the religious and cultural alignment of those who commissioned and made them. Victoria Thompson is Lecturer in the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. .

A fun and sizzling paranormal romance featuring a succubus, a vampire, and a fallen angel. Jackie Brighton woke up in a dumpster this morning, and her day has only gotten weirder. Her sex drive is insatiable, and apparently she had her first one night stand ever...with a fallen angel. All she remembers is gorgeous Noah’s oddly hypnotic blue eyes...and then a dark stranger whose bite transformed her into an immortal siren with a sexy itch. With help from Noah, Jackie begins to adapt to her new lifestyle until she accidentally sends Noah into the deadly clutches of the vampire queen and lands herself in a fierce battle for an ancient halo with the queen’s wickedly hot right-hand man. Who just happens to be the vampire who originally bit her. How’s a girl supposed to save the world when the enemy’s so hard to resist?

"In this collection eighteen scholars offer various readings on British literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Although the period covered ranges from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the essays are tied together by a common interest in one of three topics: poetic personae, dramatic production, and the influence of social context upon authors or dramatists. Common to these topics is the crucial point of contact between an artist and society that prompts the literary imagination to respond either with the creation of a new character or with the demonstration of change in an old one."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved