When the world is breaking all someone wants is safety. A virus that had once been contained has returned, and soon no place will be left untouched. But when eighteen-year-old Cheyenne wakes up in Elysian Fields-a subdivision cut off from the world and its monster-creating virus-she is thrilled to have a chance at survival. At first, Elysian Fields-with its beautiful houses and manicured lawns-is perfect. Teo Richardson, the older man who stole her heart, built it so they could be together. But when Teo tells Cheyenne there are tests that she and seven other couples must pass to be worthy of salvation, Cheyenne begins to question the perfection of his world. The people they were before are gone. Cheyenne is now Persephone, and each couple has been re-named to reflect the most tragic romances ever told. Teo dresses them up, tells them when to move and how to act, and in order to pass the test, they must play along. Play it right, then they'll be safe. But play it wrong, they'll die.

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Joss Whedon's work presents various representations of home spaces that give depth to his stories and storytelling. Through the spaceship in Firefly, a farmhouse in Avengers: Age of Ultron or Whedon's own house in Much Ado About Nothing, his work collectively offers audiences the opportunity to question the ways we relate to and inhabit homes. Focusing on his television series, films and comics, this collection of new essays explores the diversity of home spaces in Whedon's many 'verses, and the complexity these spaces afford the narratives, characters, objects and relationships within them.

Welcome to the Night Asylum! Come on in -- join the madness, but don't stay after dark.From New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning author, Douglas Clegg, comes 18 tales of horror and suspense in this 2nd edition, revised version. "Clegg's stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby, " -- Dean Koontz, NY Times Bestselling author of The Husband, Watchers and Forever Odd. Enter the Night Asylum to meet: Mysterious children surrounded by houseflies; a strange woman in a small town stalked by a preacher; boys trying to survive a terrifying boot camp; fraternity brothers who find a deeper brotherhood during a wintry Hell Week; a boy named Charlie, who may have more up his sleeve than meets the eye; a cop named Paul who discovers a tenement that opens the door into a place nightmares -- or heaven; Nix -- a patient in an asylum -- who holds the key to the secret geometry of night itself...and more. Night Asylum Table of Contents: "Where Flies Are Born" "Becoming Men" "The Skin of the World" "People Who Love Life" "Fries With That?" "The Machinery of Night" "The Wicked" "265 and Heaven" "Ice Palace" "Why My Doll is Evil" "The Five" "Subway Turnstile" "Belinda in the Pool" "The American" "The Stain" "A Madness of Starlings" "The Wolf" "The Dark Game" Look for other books by Douglas Clegg The Children’s Hour Goat Dance Purity Dark of the Eye The Words Wild Things Nightmare House Bad Karma Red Angel Night Cage Mischief The Infinite The Abandoned The Necromancer Isis The Hour Before Dark You Come When I Call You Naomi The Nightmare Chronicles The Machinery of Night Breeder The Attraction Praise for Douglas Clegg's Fiction "Douglas Clegg knows exactly what scares us, and he knows just how to twist those fears into hair-raising chills..." - Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series. "Clegg is the best horror writer of the post-Stephen King generation." — Bentley Little, author of The Policy "Clegg delivers!" — John Saul, bestselling author of Faces of Fear and The Devil's Labyrinth. "A master of the genre. Absolutely thrilling! Douglas Clegg is the future of dark fantasy." — Sherrilyn Kenyon New York Times bestselling author of the Dark-Hunters. "Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction." — Peter Straub author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl and the New York Times Bestseller Black House (with Stephen King) "Clegg is one of the best!" — Richard Laymon "Douglas Clegg is a weaver of nightmares!" — Robert R. McCammon author of The Queen of Bedlam and Speaks The Nightbird.

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about – and reshape – the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics’ multimodality – its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics – opens understanding of the limits of law’s rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic ‘beyond’. This mask of knowing remains haunted – by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives – an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

The films, television shows, and graphic novel series that comprise the Whedonverse continually show that there is a high price to be paid for love, rebellion, heroism, anger, death, betrayal, friendship, and saving the world. This collection of essays reveals the ways in which the Whedonverse treats the trauma of ordinary life with similar gravitas as trauma created by the supernatural, illustrating how memories are lost, transformed, utilized, celebrated, revered, questioned, feared, and rebuffed within the storyworlds created by Joss Whedon and his collaborators. Through a variety of approaches and examinations, the essays in this book seek to understand how the themes of trauma, memory, and identity enrich one another in the Whedonverse and beyond. As the authors present different arguments and focus on various texts, the essays work to build a mosaic of the trauma found in beloved works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, and more. The book concludes with a meta-analysis that explores the allegations of various traumas made against Joss Whedon himself.

Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity is a collection of essays that focuses on disabled men who negotiate their masculinity as well as their disability. Essays include war-related disabilities, male hysteria, suicide clubs, mercy killings, and portraits of disabled men in literature and popular culture.