His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory.As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aur lia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

    Noting the similarity between prehistoric rock art and that created by some contemporary traditional societies, archaeologists Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams suggest that the ancient images were created by shamans, powerful individuals who were able to contact the spirit world through trance and ritual.

    Focusing on witchcraft reports and trials outside of Salem and utilizing case histories and psychological analyses, this study evaluates the incidents and trials within the context of late-seventeenth-century New England.

    They have lifelong endearing names for each other – Lard Arse and Fat Man. Whilst on a fishing trip in Spain, they hatch a plan to travel around the Iberian Peninsula on motorbikes. No problem for Dave as a proficient biker of many years, but Martin is a complete beginner to riding motorcycles. He doesn’t even have a motorcycle licence. Follow Martin through the trials of taking his bike test, juggling a busy life and planning the journey with Dave while they live in different countries. Nothing can be taken for granted when these two plan anything. When everything is in place their journey through Spain and Portugal begins, starting in Marbella, then riding west along the Spanish coast and up through Portugal, through the northern coast of Spain and over the Pyrenees, finishing with the east coast of Spain and heading back into Marbella. Expect to laugh in places at their simple boyish behavior, as they act like two teenage, middle-aged men with mental age of young men going through puberty. They experience many comical events, as well as close calls for Martin the novice on his first-ever ride out. This book is a light-hearted but a true travel journal of two good friends enjoying their journey on the road in the sun.

    Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot-button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac. “Vidal’s erudition, candor, and exceptional sense of humor shine.” — San Francisco Chronicle

    Beginning with an analysis of the basic mentality of those who have believed in or practiced the magic arts, and covering witchcraft's startling rise throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, it launches into an absorbing and original study that upsets many of the popular notions about the nature and history of the subject. Includes much enthralling material from art, literature, and ecclesiastical and legal documents, as well as discerning psychological studies of witches and their accusers.

    Essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theater, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film, the struggles between high and popular culture, and changing attitudes towards human identity, life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

    She returned to save another life. This experience transformed her, allowing her to enjoy a full and happy life, free from fear.In “24 Minutes on The Other Side”, Tessa tells us about her amazing journey to the afterlife―where she established contact with other beings―to help you understand the sense of life and death. One cannot exist without the other. Thanks to her experience with patients suffering from a terminal disease, the author learned that it is possible to live without fear of death and presently helps others to overcome their fear and die in peace, with dignity, knowing that death is only an awakening to a new life.Why are we afraid of dying? Is there life after death? Can we live without fear? Tessa invites us to follow her during her journey with the object of finding an answer to these fascinating mysteries. SELECTED REVIEWS “This shocking book gave me goosebumps. It successfully combines experience with science. The story is clear and the reading is fluid. Its pages present the author as a benevolent person with good intentions to help us. In hard times, I remember Tessa and her story, and try not to forget that there is life before death.” Benjamín Espinoza. Chemical engineer “This book has helped me face my death-related fears. It made me aware of how easy it is to live without fearing death as such. It gave me a lot of strength, energy and, most preciously, Love. Tessa taught me that instead of living in fear we should learn how to live.” Filli Ramírez. Entrepreneur. THE AUTHOR Tessa Romero is a writer, journalist, sociologist, and life coach. She is a volunteer for the defense of human rights and a journalist with a wide experience in Spain’s leading news media. She has written educational manuals on lyrical and symphonic music, tourist guides for several countries, as well as touristic and cultural articles for both the Spanish and the international printed press. She won her first literary award when she was only 8 years old and was prompted by her true vocation, as an author, to write her story and thus give life to this, her first personal-growth book, thus fulfilling her dream of helping others. Copyright©TessaRomero2020

    Someone has abducted television star Kelly Rogers, and the police and the FBI both believe that it was him. And Jake Stelton can't really blame them, after all, he's done it before, Ten months earlier, their meteoric love affair ended with Jake taking Kelly hostage and threatening to kill anyone who dared try to separate them. When the chaos of that day ended, there were five innocent people dead, and Jake Stelton was in jail awaiting trial for murder. His lawyer assured him that his record as a war hero would gain him little favor in the wake of five dead bodies, and that an emotionally shattered Kelly Rogers would gladly testify against him, and had in fact, already told the police about his increasingly bizarre behavior in the days leading up to the killings. Things looked dim for Jake, that is, until they discovered the tumor. A leading brain surgeon testified that the tumor found growing inside Jake's skull, was the culprit that propelled him to such violent and paranoid behavior, and it was this testimony that set him free. His freedom meant little, because Kelly wanted nothing to do with him, her love for him could not overcome her fear of him, and so Jake retired to his farm, to live out his life alone. But someone has taken Kelly Rogers, someone has taken the woman he loves and put her life on the line, and Jake Stelton has made a vow to find her, to save her, and possibly, to even find redemption.

    Partly because horror continues to evolve radically--every time the genre is deemed dead, it seems to come up with another twist--it has been one of the most often-dissected genres. Here, author Kendall Phillips selects ten of the most popular and influential horror films--including Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, and Scream, each of which has become a film landmark and spawned countless imitators, and all having implications that transcend their cinematic influence and achievement. By tracing the production history, contemporary audience response, and lasting cultural influence of each picture, Phillips offers a unique new approach to thinking about the popular attraction to horror films, and the ways in which they reflect both cultural and individual fears. Though stylistically and thematically very different, all of these movies have scared millions of eager moviegoers. This book tries to figure out why.

    Opening with the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, and his status as a national hero in Romania, he endeavors to winnow out truths from the complex legend and folklore. From Demons to Dracula tracks the evolution of the vampire as an icon and supernatural creature, drawing on classical Greek and Roman myths, witch trials and medieval plagues, Gothic literature, and even contemporary works such as Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.  Beresford also looks at the widespread impact of screen vampires from television shows, classic movies starring Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and more recent films such as Underworld and Blade.  Whether as a demon of the underworld or a light-fearing hunter of humans, the vampire has endured through the centuries, the book reveals, as powerfully symbolic figure for human concerns with life, death, and the afterlife.A wide-ranging and engrossing chronicle, From Demons to Dracula casts this blood-thirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complex and telling totem of our nightmares, real and imagined.

      Continuing his interest in the history of emotion, this book explores how fear has been shaped into images of monsters and monstrosity. From the Protestant Reformation to contemporary horror films and fiction, he explores four major types: the monster from nature (King Kong), the created monster (Frankenstein), the monster from within (Mr. Hyde), and the monster from the past (Dracula). Drawing upon deep historical and literary research, Braudy discusses the lasting presence of fearful imaginings in an age of scientific progress, viewing the detective genre as a rational riposte to the irrational world of the monstrous. Haunted is a compelling and incisive work by a writer at the height of his powers.

    In "Gothicka, " Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of "The Shack"), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration.Fictions such as the "Twilight" and "Left Behind" series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in "The Da Vinci Code" and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in "Pan's Labyrinth, " Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.

    The furrows of Robin Hardy ('The Wicker Man'), Piers Haggard ('Blood on Satan's Claw'), and Michael Reeves ('Witchfinder General') have arisen again, most notably in the films of Ben Wheatley ('Kill List'), as has the Spirit of Dark of Lonely Water, Juganets, cursed Saxon crowns, spaceships hidden under ancient barrows, owls and flowers, time-warping stone circles, wicker men, the goat of Mendes, and malicious stone tapes.Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange charts the summoning of these esoteric arts within the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, using theories of psychogeography, hauntology, and topography to delve into the genre's output in film, television, and multimedia as its "sacred demon of ungovernableness" rises yet again in the twenty-first century.

    Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.