But whoever struck first, trying to take each other's lives is simply what they do.

    But my fate was far more terrible than an arranged marriage when my family became prisoners to one of the most fearsome and powerful vampires of all time, Count Vlad Dracula. Imprisoned in the decrepit castle in the Carpathian Mountains, my new life as a Bride of Dracula was filled with bloody feasts, cruel beatings, and sexual depravity. There was no hope of escape It was only when he took me to the picturesque city of Buda on the Danube River and I met a handsome, mysterious vampire in the darkened city streets, did I dare hope to find love and freedom.

    How do you dress with morbid flair when going to a job interview? Is there such a thing as growing too old to be a Goth? How do you explain to your grandma that it's not just a phase?Jillian Venters, a.k.a. "the Lady of the Manners," knows how to be strange and unusual without sacrificing politeness and etiquette. In Gothic Charm School, she offers the quintessential guide to dark decorum for all those who have ever searched for beauty in dark, unexpected places, embraced their individuality, and reveled in decadence . . . and for families and friends who just don't understand.

    their doctors."It was the dog who found me."Such is the stark confession launching the harrowing scene that begins The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls as Emilie Autumn, a young musician on the verge of a bright career, attempts suicide by overdosing on the antipsychotics prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder. Upon being discovered, Emilie is revived and immediately incarcerated in a maximum-security psych ward, despite her protestations that she is not crazy, and can provide valid reasons for her actions if someone would only listen.Treated as a criminal, heavily medicated, and stripped of all freedoms, Emilie is denied communication with the outside world, and falls prey to the unwelcome attentions of Dr. Sharp, head of the hospital's psychiatry department. As Dr. Sharp grows more predatory by the day, Emilie begins a secret diary to document her terrifying experience, and to maintain her sanity in this environment that could surely drive anyone mad. But when Emilie opens her notebook to find a desperate letter from a young woman imprisoned within an insane asylum in Victorian England, and bearing her own name and description, a portal to another world is blasted wide open.As these letters from the past continue to appear, Emilie escapes further into this mysterious alternate reality where sisterhoods are formed, romance between female inmates blossoms, striped wallpaper writhes with ghosts, and highly intellectual rats speak the Queen's English.But is it real? Or is Emilie truly as mad as she is constantly told she is?The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls blurs harsh reality and magical historical fantasy whilst issuing a scathing critique of society's treatment of women and the mental health care industry's treatment of its patients, showing in the process that little has changed throughout the ages.Welcome to the Asylum. Are you committed?

    With roots in the punk-rock art scene of Santa Cruz skate culture and an early appeal to European trend spotters, the iconic image of Emily and her philosophy of devout individualism have become deeply rooted in global culture.The Art of Emily Volume One is the first-ever collection of images showing the wide and inspired range of artistic styles and mediums that have been used to create the world of Emily the Strange. From skateboard stickers to custom rock-and-roll album art, large-scale psychedelic paintings, and insanely intricate Mongolian paper cutting, the fantastic and artful imaginings of Rob Reger, Buzz Parker, and a staggeringly talented array of collaborators will give insight and inspiration to any Emily fan.

    Her early-twentieth-century writings continue to inspire writers and activists today. This collection includes selections from both her fiction and nonfiction work. In addition to the title story, there are seven short stories collected here that combine humor, anger, and startling vision to suggest how women's "place" in society should be changed to benefit all. The nonfiction selections are from Gilman's The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture and her masterpiece, Women And Economics, which was translated into seven languages and established her international reputation as a theorist. Also included in a delightful excerpt from Gilman's utopian novel, Herland, an acidly funny tale about three American male explorers who stumble into an all-female society and begin their odyssey by insisting, "This is a civilized country . . . there must be men." Gilman's analyses of economic and women's issues are as incisive and relevant today as they were upon their original publication. This volume is an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover a powerful American writer.Content: Introduction Stories. The yellow wallpaper The unexpected The giant wistaria An extinct angel The rocking-chair Deserted An unnatural mother Three Thanksgivings The Cottagette When I was a witch An honest woman Turned Making a Change Mrs. Elder's Idea Their house Bee Wise Fulfilment If I were a man Mr. Peeble's heart Mrs. Merrill's duties. Selections from the author's autobiography. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

    FULL COLOR PHOTOS & ILLUSTRATIONS! The (infamous) e-book *Little Sins* is now in proper book form! Once thought out of print - the first electronic collection of printed poems and illustrations has been transmutated into pages and ink! Includes tour poetry, color illustrations, tour photos and private collections, and much more! This is truly a collectors edition.

    Dark, stormy, and delicious, once it sinks its teeth into you there’s no escape. Vampires! Whether imagined by Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, they are part of the human lexicon and as old as blood itself. They are your neighbors, your friends, and they are always lurking. Now Otto Penzler—editor of the bestselling Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps—has compiled the darkest, the scariest, and by far the most evil collection of vampire stories ever. With over eighty stories, including the works of Stephen King and D. H. Lawrence, alongside Lord Byron and Tanith Lee, not to mention Edgar Allan Poe and Harlan Ellison, The Vampire Archives will drive a stake through the heart of any other collection out there. Other contributors include: Arthur Conan Doyle • Ray Bradbury • Ambrose Bierce • H. P. Lovecraft • Harlan Ellison • Roger Zelazny • Robert Bloch • Clive Barker

    Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst the swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.'Thus Bram Stoker, one of the greatest exponents of the supernatural narrative, describes the demonic subject of his chilling masterpiece Dracula, a truly iconic and unsettling tale of vampirism.Dracula's Guest & Other Stories: Edited and Introduced by David Stuart Davies.The above is followed with a rich collection of Stoker's macabre tales including Dracula's Guest (which was omitted from the final version of Dracula); a devilishly dangerous haunted room in The Judge's House; a fatalistic tragedy in The Burial of the Rats; a terror of revenge from beyond the grave in The Secret of Growing Gold, and a surprising twist in the tail in The Gypsy's Prophecy. Other strange and frightening episodes provide a feast of terror for those readers who like to be unnerved as well as entertained.

    Sierra and illustrator Meritxell Ribas reanimate Mary Shelley's classic tale. Traumatized by the death of his mother, young Victor Frankenstein vows to discover the secrets of life and death. He assembles a monster from parts of corpses and uses electricity to bring it to life. Horrified by what he has done, Frankenstein abandons the creature, who is met by fear, rejection, and violence wherever he goes. He learns to loathe himself and his creator and sets out to destroy everyone Frankenstein loves. This book includes safe 'PG' text and illustrations.

    The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In The Tell Tale Heart, a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.

    Defining the Japanese Lolita style, this title caters to fans of two separate but related fashions: Gothic and - to a greater extent - Lolita.

    Rock Candy is the artist’s first retrospective and fully spotlights her talent, whimsy and wit in a deluxe package certain to catapult her to the forefront of the Pop Surrealism movement.Hiemstra’s paintings and illustrations are united by a meticulous attention to craft that gives life to her dark, lush, fairytale landscapes where inanimate objects come to life and frolic with anthropomorphs of all types. She incorporates mixed media, found objects, typography, and a variety of influences ranging from fireworks packaging to Japanese woodblock prints.Rock Candy presents Hiemstra’s entire life and career under one cover. In addition to over 100 gorgeous reproductions of her paintings and illustrations, Rock Candy includes photographs and reproductions of her studio, her influences, her family and much more. The book also includes an introduction by Kirsten Anderson, author of Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art and proprietor of the Roq La Rue Gallery (Seattle, WA), as well as an interview with Hiemstra, statements about the works by the artist, and many other surprises that are certain to make Hiemstra a household name amongst fans of Pop Surrealism.

    Also included is information on the materials used by each artist, how-to draw and illustrate guidelines, and a glossary of terms for drawing lifelike Gothic Lolita manga and anime characters.

    Weathering HeightsThis is the retelling of the classic in its original form and verbiage but with a twist, the characters are gay, fall in love and mingle in the most extraordinary way that adults do, they have sex.This book takes great liberties with the original and yet, here we have an entirely new and compelling story of what might have been, what it might have been like to be gay and in love in the 1800’s.If you are easily offended, or simply offended by gay sex, or relationships, nudity, or illustrations of males having sex, then do not purchase this book.This is however, my unedited Proof, you will find errors.

    It is accessible yet thorough. Eduard Prokosch (1876-1938) was the Sterling Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale University. He had previously taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bryn Mawr College and New York University. Professor Prokosch died in an automobile accident while this book was in galley proof.

    Book by Ronald Kelly

    The book begins with Simon Snootle, a meager young man who lived most of his life at the bottom of a cistern with neighborhood cats. He is not aware of any tragedy of the situation, but rather makes the best of it, knowing that eventually more things will fall in as he did.

    Examining how themes and trends associated with early gothic novels were diffused in many different genres throughout the Victorian period—including the ghost story, the detective story, and the adventure story—History of the Gothic pays particular attention to how the gothic attempted to resolve the psychological and theological problems introduced with the modernization and secularization of British society, as well as the relationship between the child and horror.

    Works by gothic authors such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley, as well as traditions like the Female Gothic, are examined against the backdrop of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political and cultural developments, culminating in a detailed and accessible exploration of the gothic’s major motifs and themes.

    But when the unfortunate Harker finds himself held prisoner in the count’s remote castle, he must use all his faculties to escape. With the help of Professor Van Helsing, can he prevent the evil that has been unleashed from destroying his world? Illuminated in all its gothic majesty through the vivid artwork of Anne Yvonne Gilbert, this rich new edition is adapted for younger readers but retains the mystery and shocking twists of Bram Stoker’s classic.

    This book also teaches you how to make your very own custom power spells, potions and much more. It tells how to: create charms and potions that work; and create spells and curses, or work with the numerous samples provided for beginners.

    Mead's comprehensive survey of the literature attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus.About Author:George Robert Stowe Mead (Nuneaton, 22 March 1863–28 September 1933) was an author, editor, translator, and an influential member of the Theosophical Society as well as the founder of the Quest Society.

    The contributors revisit key Gothic themes - gender, race, the body, monstrosity, metaphor, motherhood and nationality - to open up new critical directions.

    . . cacodaemoniacal . . . lucubration . . . Have you ever wondered about the meaning of these and other esoteric words used by Lovecraft and his colleagues? In this immense dictionary, the product of years of scholarship and research, Dan Clore not only defines thousands of words found in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and others, but supplies their derivation and, most impressively, provides parallel usages of the words from centuries of English usage, citing authors ranging from Cotton Mather to Henry Kuttner, from Edmund Spenser to Samuel R. Delany. This is a volume that scholars of English usage, enthusiasts of fantasy and horror literature, and readers who love the beauty of the English language will find richly rewarding . . . either to read from beginning to end or to dip into as the mood strikes them. Dan Clore is a free-lance writer and scholar who has published articles in Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction and numerous other journals and critical anthologies. His fiction is collected in The Unspeakable and Others, first published in 2001.

    A lucid intervention in current debates about identity and difference, this book uses the concept of Otherness to look again at both Gothic fiction and Postcolonialism.

    'Marjorie Bowen' is a nom de plume of the British Author Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long (1885-1952). Sally Benson in The New Yorker (1965) describes her work under the pseudonym 'Joseph Shearing' - "[she] is a painstaking researcher, a superb writer, a careful technician, and a master of horror. There is no one else quite like [her]."Gabrielle's father was an alchoholic and he left the family home when she was young, eventually being found dead on a London street. Consequently, her writings were the main source of income for her family. She was married twice, initially for four years to a Sicilian named Zefferino Emilio Constanza, who died of turberculosis, and then to Arthur L. Long.This collection comprises the following eighteen short stories: Scoured Silk; The Breakdown; One Remained Behind - A Romance A La Mode Gothique; The House By The Poppy Field; Half-Past Two; Elsie's Lonely Afternoon; The Extraordinary Adventure Of Mr John Proudie; Ann Mellor's Lover; Florence Flannery; Kecksies; The Avenging Of Ann Leete; The Bishop Of Hell; The Crown Derby Plate; The Fair Hair Of Ambrosine; The Housekeeper; Raw Material; The Hidden Ape; The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes

    This collection of essays traces the roots of the Gothic to an unexpected source: eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. Through close attention to literary, cultural, and historical detail, the contributors demonstrate that even as Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer, he was also being cited as justification for early Gothic writers’ abandonment of literary decorum and their interest in the supernatural.

    While many critics propose that the Gothic has been exhausted, and that its significance is depleted by consumer society's obsession with instantaneous horror, analyses of a number of terror-based postmodernist novels here suggest that the Gothic is still very much animated in Gothic-postmodernism. These analyses observe the spectral characters, doppelgangers, hellish waste lands and the demonised or possessed that inhabit texts such as Paul Auster's City of Glass, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park. However, it is the deeper issue of the lingering emotion of terror as it relates to loss of reality and self, and to death, that is central to the study; a notion of 'terror' formulated from the theories of continental philosophers and contemporary cultural theorists. With a firm emphasis on the sublime and the unrepresentable as fundamental to this experience of terror; vital to the Gothic genre; and central to the postmodern experience, this study offers an insightful and concise definition of Gothic-postmodernism. It firmly argues that 'terror' (with all that it involves) remains a connecting and potent link between the Gothic and postmodernism: two modes of literature that together offer a unique voicing of the unspeakable terrors of postmodernity.

    Take a disturbing, yet fascinating walk through this collection of short stories and poetry expressing the darker side of the gothic / steampunk point of view as written by a goth librarian.

    She was accused of having by her sorceries caused sterility in many families, particularly in that of the ancient reigning house of Pomerania, and also of having destroyed the noblest scions of that house by an early and premature death. Notwithstanding the intercessions and entreaties of the Prince of Brandenburg and Saxony, and of the resident Pomeranian nobility, she was publicly executed for these crimes on the 19th of August 1620, on the public scaffold, at Stettin; the only favour granted being, that she was allowed to be beheaded first and then burned.This terrible example caused such a panic of horror, that contemporary authors scarcely dare to mention her name, and, even then, merely by giving the initials. This forbearance arose partly from respect towards the ancient family of the Von Borks, who then, as now, were amongst the most illustrious and wealthy in the land, and also from the fear of offending the reigning ducal family, as the Sorceress, in her youth, had stood in a very near and tender relation to the young Duke Ernest Louis von Pommern-Wolgast.These reasons will be sufficiently comprehensible to all who are familiar with the disgust and aversion in which the paramours of the evil one were held in that age, so that even upon the rack these subjects were scarcely touched upon.The first public, judicial, yet disconnected account of Sidonia's trial, we find in the Pomeranian Library of Daehnert, fourth volume, article 7, July number of the year 1755.Daehnert here acknowledges, page 241, that the numbers from 302 to 1080, containing the depositions of the witnesses, were not forthcoming up to his time, but that a priest in Pansin, near Stargard, by name Justus Sagebaum, pretended to have them in his hands, and accordingly, in the fifth volume of the above-named journal (article 4, of April 1756), some very important extracts appear from them.The records, however, again disappeared for nearly a century, until Barthold announced, some short time since, [Footnote: "History of Rugen and Pomerania," vol. iv. p. 486.] that he had at length discovered them in the Berlin Library; but he does not say which, for, according to Schwalenberg, who quotes Daehnert, there existed two or three different copies, namely, the -Protocollum Jodoci Neumarks,- the so-called -Acta Lothmanni,- and that of -Adami Moesters,- contradicting each other in the most important matters. Whether I have drawn the history of my Sidonia from one or other of the above-named sources, or from some entirely new, or, finally, from that alone which is longest known, I shall leave undecided.

    Charles L. Crow demonstrates how the gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of changing American culture, explores forbidden subjects, and provides a voice for the repressed and silenced.

    From there, however, we enter a world of cutting edge biochemistry, experimentation with DNA and implanted memories, of modifications of near-microscopic life, albeit still in a gothic setting more reminiscent, perhaps, of authors like Hawthorne or Poe. Add to this setting the reclusive daughter, Alma Sharp, of an almost legendary invertebrate zoologist, mix with a graduate student from Boston, Steven Kerridge, whose upcoming thesis is based on the work of Sharp’s father, and what results is a cocktail of science and love, of death and horror, a horror that ultimately will spill out to the world beyond.

    Orrin Grey pays homage to the Gothic pulps in a poignant but chilling novella that features a haunted monastery and a rundown movie palace; a vampiric monk and an army of animated skeletons; arcane magic and the search for a long lost secret; and caught in the middle of it all, a bewitched young woman and a reluctant hero made of clay!

    Considering a range of Gothic texts produced between the eighteenth century and the present, the contributors explore the relationship between reading Gothically and reading Queerly, making this collection both an important reassessment of the Gothic tradition and a significant contribution to scholarship on queer theory. Writers discussed include William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, George Du Maurier, Oscar Wilde, Eric, Count Stenbock. E. M. Forster, Antonia White, Melanie Tem, Poppy Z. Brite, and Will Self. There is also exploration of non-text media including an analysis of Michael Jackson’s pop videos. Arranged chronologically, the book establishes links between texts and periods and examines how conjunctions of "queer," "gay" and "lesbian" can be related to, and are challenged by, a Gothic tradition. All of the chapters were specially commissioned for the collection, and the contributors are drawn from the forefront of academic work in both Gothic and Queer Studies.

    In The Brontës: A Life in Letters, the much anticipated follow-up to that landmark biography, Barker uses newly discovered letters and manuscripts, some appearing in print for the first time, to reveal the authentic voices of the three novelist sisters. The letters detail the siblings' self-absorbed childhood, highlighted by wild, imaginative games; the years of struggling to earn a living in uncongenial occupations before they took the literary world by storm; the terrible marring of that success as Branwell, Emily, and Anne died tragically young; the final years as Charlotte, battling against grief, loneliness, and ill health, emerged from anonymity to take her place in literary society. In The Brontës: A Life in Letters, Juliet Barker has produced a work of impeccable scholarship but also a story as dramatic, and undeniably readable as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. "Barker proves herself an impeccable editor of family papers we are all the richer for possessing." (New York Times Book Review) "Provides a real sense of what those strange, brilliant people were like." (The Atlantic Monthly)

    In Everybody's Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century.Harkins's interdisciplinary approach reveals how women's narratives about incest were co-opted by-and yet retained resistant strains against-the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. Across chapters examining legal cases on recovered memory, popular journalism, and novels and memoirs by Dorothy Allison, Carolivia Herron, Kathryn Harrison, and Sapphire, Harkins demonstrates that incest narratives look backward into the past. In these accounts, images of incest forge links between U.S. chattel slavery and the distributive impasses of the welfare state and between decades-distant childhoods and emergent memories of the present.In contrast to recent claims that incest narratives eclipse broader frameworks of political and economic power, Harkins argues that their emergence exposes changing structural relations between the family and the nation and, in doing so, transforms the analyses of American familial sexual violence.

    When he leaves to confront her, weretiger Jura Griet goes with him. Neither are prepared for what they discover along the way.