The grave: where no one wants to be, but everyone will go. Or will they? And then stay put? There's the rub! Restless spirits abound here, from those who cannot go to their rest, to those who will not--and a motley assortment of those who, knowingly or not, go about disturbing them in diverse ways. And even some poor souls who didn't even know they were scheduled for departure. Oh, there's no one crankier than someone rudely awakened on the wrong side of the dirt! Come along, brave heart, as we venture abroad in good company of authors both familiar and obscure, exhuming Gothic tales, pulp fiction and more. We'll all be right here with you, m'dear . . . in spirit . . .

The commemorative brass plate in the abandoned Derbyshire village church showed Sir Humphrey and Lady Sybil de Latours standing together. At the side of the man is a lion, and beside Sybil a fanged dog. Strangely, the face of Sybil has been obliterated, despite the clear detail elsewhere. But young artist Sally Fenton takes a rubbing nonetheless, to sell to tourists from the shop that she and her paramour, Andrew Thomas, share. She hangs it in their bedroom, but at night the moonlight makes the static objects in the image begin to move--and writhe. Soon life in the village becomes a nightmare, and Sally and Andy are powerless to stop the evil from spreading. And then the ancient image comes alive! A first-rate horror novel by a masterful writer.

Let’s face it: this generation is increasingly not waking up Sunday morning thinking, what’s a great church I can go to today? Part of the problem is that for too long we’ve made church mostly about Christians doing spiritual stuff on Sundays. Of course, we love our Sundays, but we should be even more excited about our Mondays, because on those days God has positioned us in shop fronts, in salons, in classrooms, in playgroups, on building sites, and in boardrooms where we can engage with those who don’t yet know Him. Church must be less about us and more about others. We should be empowering Christians to act as Christ in their communities Monday through Saturday. That’s why Christians should be waking up on Mondays declaring, “Thank God it’s Monday!” In this thought-provoking book, Paul Bartlett encourages us that can have a huge influence in our community, across our town or city, and throughout the nation... and it starts on Monday.

Here is presented a new theory of the origins of tragedy, based on its perceived kinship with mourning ritual. Mourners and tragic protagonists alike journey through dangerous transitional states, confront the uncanny, express themselves in antithetical style, and, above all, enact their ambivalence toward their beloved dead. Elements common to both tragedy and mourning ritual are first identified in actual Chinese, African, and Greek funerary rites and then analyzed in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, O'Neill, Miller, Beckett, and Ionesco. Included is a firsthand account of exploration of the tragedy-mourning link in the rehearsal process of the great experimental theater director, Joseph Chaikin. Opening her first chapter, Dr. Cole says, "The grave is the birthplace of tragic drama and ghosts are its procreators. For tragedy is the performance of ambivalence which ghosts emblematize: what we fear in particular--the revenant, the ghost returning to haunt us--is also what we desire--the extending of life beyond the moment of death."

The Devil's Mistress by J.W. Brodie-Innes is about young Isabelle Goudie married to boring old John Gilbert. Isabelle attempts to find love, excitement, and meaning in her life. Excerpt: "IF the story which follows were to be regarded as a work of imagination, it might justly be characterized as too wildly fanciful to deserve even serious consideration. But it is not this: it is an attempt to portray exactly one of the most curious phases of belief or superstition that ever passed over this country, the witchcraft, namely, of the latter part of the seventeenth century."

Wouldn't it be great if instead of catching a nasty cold, we could catch our friend's good mood, or our colleague's healthy habits? You don't need to be on the Internet to be connected. We are all part of interconnected networks, whether we're aware of it or not. Everything you think, say and do can be felt by people on the other side of the world. The Contagious Power of Thinking provides astonishing scientific evidence to show how habits, attitudes, emotions and even kindness spread rapidly outwards from person to person through personal contact. Learn the fascinating facts behind: • how infants feel their mother's emotions • how more than 25% of your happiness is due to the happiness of your friends • how your brain reads the emotions of others and reproduces the feeling in you • and how your best friend's sister's hairdresser can make you fat! In this book, David Hamilton explores the amazing implications of this phenomenon and suggests that a small group of committed people really can change the world.