The seething, thrashing jungles of Alaska are the lair of many secret species. To see them is to disappear. There are life forms here so horrible the sight of them would make a Kodiak bear jump off a cliff, or send a one-ton moose up a tree, or drive a pack of wolves into a rabbit hole. Every summer unknowing tourists anchor a boat off the wrong island and become dinner. Or they drive down some unmarked dirt road and are slaughtered. Every year they trustingly stop over at some strangely-empty campground or wander down an unmarked trail and meet a horrible end. [Author bio]Eugene Shelby has lived in Alaska for twenty-two years, including Anchorage, Barrow, Prudhoe Bay, Shemya and Valdez. He has a BA in journalism from USC.

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness—and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch. When Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family's proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Pilgrim's dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico. Pilgrim soon sparked a tense confrontation with the National Park Service fiercely dividing the community over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. As the battle grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, veteran Alaska journalist, Tom Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.

The 1st ed. includes an index to v. 28-36 of St. Nicholas.

A couple are caught in a violent snowstorm as they ascend notorious Harrow Mountain in Chi Bay, Alaska for a getaway at a Forest Service remote cabin, only to discover that what awaits them is far worse than any blizzard. An archbishop must prowl the streets of the ancient Roman city of Trier, penance for the ultimate sacrilege. On an earth decimated by plague, a survivor fraught with guilt carries on his person a specialized strain of that plague with the teetering intent of unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world again, this time to even more devastating effect. A novelist is tormented by hellish visions of Henry Fuseli's macabre painting The Nightmare. A man haunted by family tragedy takes his girlfriend to Lake Garda, Italy, where secrets reside, secrets that could destroy both of them. These and other strange, dark avenues await the curious among the monks of a separate cloth.

Barbara Croft's stories look at ordinary lives disrupted by extraordinary events: a fallen meteor, dinosaur bones emerging in a corn field, the birth of a two-headed calf. Her finely crafted depictions of setting and character would be sufficient to makePrimary Colors an important debut, but Croft's ability to push her fiction--and her readers--to the emotional edge makes this collection nothing less than remarkable.

"In 15 stories, Alaska looms as a presence that variously is vast and claustrophobic, dangerous and freeing, exhilarating and depressing. A long-time resident frets over and envies a newcomer whose hunger for wild and solitude defies common sense. Elsewhere, an aging hippy tries to woo his estranged daughter with moosemeat pizza and bleached pelican skull knickknacks, but she's a creature of civilization's comforts, committed to Walkman music and double-scoop ice-cream sundaes. Her husband is away drilling for oil and a resentful wife must cope alone with an erupting volcano; a woman leaves the bush for Anchorage and abandons a friend in the process; a miserly recluse wins the lottery; and a thief discovers his girlfriend can kill without remorse. The prose here is pleasantly understated, the tenor of Alaskan existence often is transmitted ("You don't live in a small Alaskan town for the job you can get; you do whatever job you can in order to be able to live in such a place.") and many descriptions, such as shrimp processing in an Alaskan cannery, are authentically rendered. But hampered by obvious and trite plotting, the collection doesn't rise above merely competent. A commercial fisherman in Alaska, Lord wrote The Compass Inside Ourselves." - Publisher's Weekly

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. The WPA Guide to Washington exhibits the beauty and individuality found in the Pacific Northwest. The guide takes the reader on a journey across the Evergreen State, from Seattle to Spokane with the Cascades in between. Essays on the state’s large lumber industry and its role in the westward expansion are included.