A deadly conspiracy. A race against time. When Jake Crowley rescues Rose Black from assailants on the streets of London, the two find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could cost them their lives. People are dying, and all the victims have one thing in common with Rose: a birthmark in the shape of an eagle. From beneath the streets of London, to castle dungeons, to the heart of Christendom and beyond, Jake and Rose must race to stay alive as they seek to unlock the secrets of the Blood Codex. Praise for David Wood and Alan Baxter “Blood Codex is a genuine up all night got to see what happens next thriller that grabs you from the first page and doesn't let go until the last.” Steven Savile “Rip roaring action from start to finish. Wit and humor throughout. Just one question - how soon until the next one? Because I can't wait.” Graham Brown “A page-turning yarn. Indiana Jones better watch his back!”Jeremy Robinson “A a story that thrills and makes one think beyond the boundaries of mere fiction and enter the world of 'why not'?” David Lynn Golemon, “A twisty tale of adventure and intrigue that never lets up and never lets go!” Robert Masello “A fast-paced storyline that holds the reader right from the start,. and a no-nonsense story-telling approach that lets the unfolding action speak for itself.” Van Ikin “With mysterious rituals, macabre rites and superb supernatural action scenes, Wood and Baxter deliver a fast-paced horror thriller.” J.F.Penn “Wood and Baxter have taken on the classic black magic/cult conspiracy subgenre, chucked in a toxic mix of weirdness, creepshow chills and action, and created a tale that reads like a latter-day Hammer Horror thriller. Nice, dark fun.” Robert Hood

Honorable Mention, 2021 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section In the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project titled General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and bound in three lavishly illustrated volumes, the codex is a remarkable product of cultural exchange in the early Americas. In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript’s bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the “three texts” of the codex—the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists’ models and the manuscript’s reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.

A SAMPLER OF ALAN BAXTER'S DARK FICTION Horror, crime, and dark fantasy. Four complete stories and the opening chapters of six longer books from Alan Baxter's extensive back catalogue. Featuring one full novella ("Out On A Rim" from The Gulp), three entire short stories ("Crow Shine" from Crow Shine, "Simulacrum of Hope" from Served Cold, and "The Normandy Curse"), plus the opening chapters of six longer books: Devouring Dark, Hidden City, Bound, Manifest Recall, Primordial, and Blood Codex. "Alan Baxter is Australia's master of literary darkness." – This Is Horror "Alan Baxter can take horror from gonzo to heartbreaking in an instant. Good stuff… Alan Baxter can write like a m***********." – Gail Simone, best-selling author of DC's Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and more "Alan Baxter is an accomplished storyteller who ably evokes magic and menace." – Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase "Baxter delivers the horror goods." – Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World "Alan Baxter is one of the best horror writers in the business." – Kealan Patrick Burke, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Turtle Boy, Kin, and Sour Candy "Step into the ring with Alan Baxter, I dare you. He writes with the grace, precision, and swift brutality of a prizefighter." – Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and The Pandora Room "Alan Baxter's thrillers have complete anatomy—muscles, brains, guts, and heart." – World Fantasy Award-nominated author, Anna Tambour "Alan Baxter delivers a heady mix of magic, monsters and bloody fights to the death. Nobody does kick-ass brutality like Baxter." – Greig Beck, Internationally bestselling author "Alan Baxter's fiction is dark, disturbing, hard-hitting and heart-breakingly honest. He reflects on worlds known and unknown with compassion, and demonstrates an almost second-sight into human behaviour." — Kaaron Warren, Shirley Jackson Award-winner and author of The Grief Hole "…fantastic storytelling in the vein of Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore, but with a merciless black streak…" – Spooktapes "…if Stephen King and Jim Butcher ever had a love child then it would be Alan Baxter." – Smash Dragons "Alan's work is reminiscent of that of Clive Barker and Jim C. Hines, but with a unique flavour all of its own.” – Angela Slatter, World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Aurealis Award winner “Baxter draws you along a knife’s edge of tension from the first page to the last, leaving your heart thumping and sweat on your brow.” – Midwest Book Review

In the aftermath of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico, Spanish friars and authorities partnered with indigenous rulers and savants to gather detailed information on Aztec history, religious beliefs, and culture. The pictorial books they created served the Spanish as aids to evangelization and governance, but their content came from the native intellectuals, painters, and writers who helped to create them. Examining the nine major surviving texts, preeminent Latin American art historian Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how indigenous artists and writers documented their ancestral culture. Analyzing the texts as one distinct corpus, Boone shows how they combined European and indigenous traditions of documentation and considers questions of motive, authorship, and audience. For Spanish authorities, she shows, the books revealed Aztec ideology and practice, while for the indigenous community, they preserved venerated ways of pictorial expression as well as rhetorical and linguistic features of ancient discourses. The first comparative analysis of these encyclopedias, Descendants of Aztec Pictography analyzes how the painted compilations embraced artistic traditions from both sides of the Atlantic.

In this extraordinary fantasy epic, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files leads readers into a world where the fate of the realm rests on the shoulders of a boy with no power to call his own... For a thousand years, the people of Alera have united against the aggressive and threatening races that inhabit the world, using their unique bond with the furies—elementals of earth, air, fire, water, wood, and metal. But in the remote Calderon Valley, the boy Tavi struggles with his lack of furycrafting. At fifteen, he has no wind fury to help him fly, no fire fury to light his lamps. Yet as the Alerans’ most savage enemy—the Marat horde—return to the Valley, Tavi’s courage and resourcefulness will be a power greater than any fury, one that could turn the tides of war...

Why should you read the KOSMOAUTIKON Epic Cycle? 1) KOSMOAUTIKON has information of the long count of the Human Condition. No other work of American literature observes the ancient origins of the human genome. No other poem projects the force of the strong poet into a Space faring civilization. 2) KOSMOAUTIKON does not repeat any modernist clichés. Modernism can only detect modernism. Modern literature can only regurgitate modernist linguistic codices – a fascination with disease, medical mythos, and the omnipotence of laboratory science. KOSMOAUTIKON accuses the madness of this modernist experiment. Instead, KOSMOAUTIKON detects the astral position of the human mind. A story is told that places man in a position of power in relation to the universe. Modernism makes treats men and parasites. In story Theory man is the center of all things, since only the human has a terra- forming mind. 3) KOSMOAUTIKON creates a new linguistic codex to project a new advance in the human Genome. A new linguistic structure must always prepare the way for any human advance. “I had to remove your planet – and then your bones.” 4) KOSMOAUTIKON tells the story of Rogue males. Who are our rogue males? Alexander, Christ, Cesar, Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Henry VIII, Edward De Vere (Shake-speare), Beethoven, Francis bacon, Oscar Wilde (etc.). Western civilization has been made by rogue males. No other modern text would even dare to discuss the power of the rogue male. Modernism seeks to inoculate, medicate, or incarcerate the rogue male – early. Yet there will be rogues makes again – and they will change the human genome. This is the story of KOSMOAUTIKON Five. 5) There is no other document that contains future speech. No Western person can be educated without first reading KOSMOAUTIKON. Most googled favorite lines from KOSMOAUTIKON: 1) We had to remove your planet – then your bones. 2) Observe my second sweat condense the juice loving bark, my song recovered stitch all numbered kiss close fit . . . 3) . . . then fix my sleep at that beam all-speeding from glow emitting north, my eye abreast a lover's shard of light. 4) The caldron planet still beaconed red 5)...You will not miss the globular element of your fire-burned ancestors. 6) When you could not yourself believe. I made you diamond tablets of belief. When you yourself could not detect the sky, I wrote the sun for you each day new. When you by yourself were congealed as frost, I dipped your brittle mouth still blue and flaked. When you could not lift your hands yourself to count, I raised your arm to rage against the beats of breath.