The sole priest at the Church of San Domenico tries to teach jaded children catechism using puppets, but he doesn't know that after dark the puppets emerge from their box

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than thirty feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance. Among them are fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh and her friend and employer, Felix Orlov. Once upon a time Orlov the Conjuror was a celebrated stage magician, but now he is an old man, a psychic medium, contacting the spirits of the departed for the grieving loved ones left behind. When a seance goes horribly wrong, Felix Orlov is abducted by strange men wearing gas masks and rubber suits, and Molly soon finds herself on the run. Her flight will lead her into the company of a mysterious man, and his stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem, whose own past is a mystery to him, but who walks his own dreams as a man of stone and clay, brought to life for the sole purpose of hunting witches.

Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's World shows how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media—including children’s books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts—Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader’s experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola’s art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.

Fantasy-roman.

Given his line of work in the employ of a psychotic Brooklyn crime boss, Trent finds himself on the wrong end of too many bullets. Yet each time he's killed, he wakes a few minutes later completely healed of his wounds but with no memory of his past identity. What's worse, each time he cheats death someone else dies in his place. Sent to steal an antique box from some squatters in an abandoned warehouse near the West Side Highway, Trent soon finds himself stumbling into an age-old struggle between the forces of good and evil, revealing a secret world where dangerous magic turns people into inhuman monstrosities, where impossible creatures hide in plain sight, and where the line between the living and the dead is never quite clear. And when the mysterious box is opened, he discovers he has only twenty-four hours to save New York City from certain destruction, in Dying Is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann.

"Night-Black Sorcery and the Wrath of Malevolent Gods" More than any writer since Robert E. Howard, Keith Taylor has a unique ability to evoke sheer terror amid the remote and haunted reaches of the ancient world. His tales of Kamose, archpriest of Anubis, the Egyptian god of death have been among the most popular features of the modern "Weird Tales" magazine. Kamose... awesomely powerful, yet scarred, cursed, and nearly driven mad by forces even he cannot control for long.... Here are eleven of his supernatural adventures, two of them published for the first time. ..".convincing and authentic, revealing a deep knowledge of the history and cultures of the period." --"The Encyclopedia of Fantasy" Keith Taylor's fiction won two Ditmar Awards, and was nominated for four more, as well as for two Aurealis Awards.

"The original prose novel featuring multiple illustrations by Hellboy artist Mike Mignola, plus the one-shot comic The Widow and the Tank"--Dark Horse website.

Forty years after disaster left Lower Manhattan submerged in thirty feet of water, the Drowning City has taken a turn for the weird and Joe Golem is there to investigate. A mysterious and terrifying creature has been snatching children and pulling them into the depths of the canals, and the those that drowned in the floods are coming back to the surface--alive.

Discover the complexities of nobility and societal expectations in Guy de Maupassant’s The Marquis De Fumerol, a narrative that delves into the life and ambitions of a marquis within a shifting social landscape. In The Inn, Guy de Maupassant crafts a vivid and atmospheric tale set in an inn and the lives of its inhabitants. The story explores themes of hospitality, human interactions, and the often-hidden dramas that unfold within the confines of the inn. Maupassant’s evocative description and keen observations create a rich narrative that reveals the deeper layers of everyday life and the stories that lie behind closed doors.

First published in English in 2007 under title: The history of terrorism: from antiquity to al Qaeda.