Now that a false king has usurped the throne by dark and magical means, the kingdoms are in chaos. Champions wage war for gain and not for honor. Armies fight for one more foot of bloody land. And while humans destroy each other daily, the creatures of the Shadow gather for the final assault: a frenzy of ghouls, trolls, vampires, and men who are no longer men. Only the true king can stop the slaughter, but he is a prisoner of the Shadow, and he will never be the same again.

Were it not for the awesome power of the Hasturs, the creatures contained by the dark border would overrun mankind. As humans reeled from the constant onslaught only to rebound, the darkness searched for another path to victory. It stole a princeling and raised him in Shadow, teaching him what no human had ever learned. It taught him how to command the living and the dead, how to usurp his brother's throne through magic, and how to turn the humans against themselves. And then it sent him home.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel, The Force, and The Border In Savages, Don Winslow introduced Ben and Chon, twenty-something best friends who risk everything to save the girl they both love, O. Among the most celebrated literary thrillers, Savages was a Top 10 Book of the Year selection by Janet Maslin in The New York Times and Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly. Now, in this high-octane prequel to Savages, Winslow reaches back in time to tell the story of how Ben, Chon, and O became the people they are. Spanning from 1960s Southern California to the recent past, The Kings of Cool is a breathtak­ingly original saga of family in all its forms—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers. As the trio at the center of the book does battle with a cabal of drug dealers and crooked cops, they come to learn that their future is inextricably linked with their parents’ history. A series of breakneck twists and turns puts the two generations on a collision course, culminating in a stunning showdown that will force Ben, Chon, and O to choose between their real families and their loyalty to one another.

Ever since women in the West first started publishing works of fiction, they have written about a heroine who must wander from one place to another as she searches for a way to live the life she wants to live, a life through which she can express her true self creatively in the world. Yet while many have written about the “heroine’s journey,” most of those authors base their models of this journey on Joseph Campbell’s model of the Heroic Quest story or on old myths and tales written down by men, not on the stories that women tell. In Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story, cultural mythologist Jody Gentian Bower looks at novels by women—and some men—as well as biographies of women that tell the story of the Aletis, the wandering heroine. She finds a similar pattern in works spanning the centuries, from Lady Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare in the 1600s to Sue Monk Kidd, Suzanne Collins, and Philip Pullman in the current century, including works by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Alice Walker, to name just a few. She also discusses myths and folk tales that follow the same pattern. Dr. Bower argues that the Aletis represents an archetypal character that has to date received surprisingly little scholarly recognition despite her central role in many of the greatest works of Western fiction. Using an engaging, down-to-earth writing style, Dr. Bower outlines the stages and cast of characters of the Aletis story with many examples from the literature. She discusses how the Aletis story differs from the hero’s quest, how it has changed over the centuries as women gained more independence, and what heroines of novels and movies might be like in the future. She gives examples from the lives of real women and scatters stories that illustrate many of her points throughout the book. In the end, she concludes, authors of the Aletis story use their imagination to give us characters who serve as role models for how a woman can live a full and free life.

After surviving the Hunt on the Red Moon, Dane should have been happy to return to civilization, and, for a while, he was. But then he got bored. So when their proto-saurian friend Aratak asked Dane and Rianna to accompany him on a mission to a primitive world, where their fighting skills would be needed for the party's survival, Dane jumped at the chance. He should have remembered the old saying: Be careful what you wish for....