Mike Sager is to drugs, porn, and crimes of desperate delusion what Dominic Dunne is to the society murder. In addition to his long-classic Rolling Stone story "The Devil and John Holmes" (which helped inspire the upcoming Val Kilmer film, Wonderland) and his groundbreaking GQ piece about murdered Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin (also the subject of a major film starring Cate Blanchett), Scary Monsters and Super Freaks is a wonderful rogue's gallery of up-close pieces about the most public failures of the American dream. From Rick James and his drug-fueled detour into white slavery to the life and suicide of porn starlet Savannah, from deep inside the beating of Rodney King and the Heaven's Gate cult suicides to Chuck Berry's sexual predilections, this book brings to high-profile true crime a highly identifiable voice and style. Currently Esquire's Writer-at-Large, Sager takes us along for the ride with a raft of other figures including the late NWA Rapper Easy E. Winner, the FBI agent who fell in love with his informant, and the highest ranking DEA agent to be busted for drug trafficking. This is a brilliant debut collection by one of America's most respected and stylish crime writers.

Dom Joly sets off round the world again, but this time he's not looking to holiday in a danger zone - he's monster hunting. Ever since he was given a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Worldfor his ninth birthday Dom has been obsessed with the world of cryptozoology (monster hunting), and in Scary Monsters and Super Creepshe heads to six completely different destinations to investigate local monster sightings. He explores the Redwood Curtain in northern California in search of Sasquatch; in Canada he visits Lake Okanagan hoping to catch a glimpse of a thirty-foot snake-like creature called Ogopogo; and near Lake Télé in Congo he risks his life tracking the vegetarian sauropod Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Naturally he heads to Loch Ness - but for this hunt he has his family in tow; he treks across the Khumbu Valley in Nepal looking for Yeti; and in the hills above Hiroshima in Japan he enlists the help of a local man to find the Hibagon, a terribly smelly 'caveman ape'. In typically hilarious and irreverent fashion, Dom explores the cultures that gave rise to these monster myths and ends up in some pretty hairy situations with people even stranger than the monsters they are hunting. Are the monsters all the product of fevered minds, or is there a sliver of truth somewhere in the madness? Either way, the search gives Dom an excuse to dive into six fascinating destinations on a gloriously nutty adventure.

Rick James played with Neil Young, self-produced his first album (later picked up by Motown), crossed rock and funk to come up with one of the best-selling albums of the 1980s, became one of the biggest pop stars of the era, turned a young white woman named Teena Marie into an R&B superstar, displayed an outrageously sex- and drug-filled lifestyle, was tried and found guilty of assaulting and imprisoning a young woman, went on to record new music that was compared to the Beatles' White Album, and ended his life as a punch line for Dave Chappelle. James attempted to tell his own story—in two different books—but left out many incidents that reflected badly on his character. Now, based on court records, newspaper archives, and extensive interviews with dozens of family members, band members, friends, and lovers, here is the definitive biography of Motown's most controversial superstar.

Docktopus, the aquatic nibbler; Skeeterman, the campground creep; and Spook Ook, the attic thumper: these and other creatures lurk on the pages of this quirky how-to. And they’ll reach out and grab kids, "drawing” them into the world of monster art. There’s a ton of great information here on creating weird eyes, strange skin textures, bizarre legs and arms, and a host of creepy facial features so kids will have no trouble creating their very own freaks of nature. See how to add extra limbs, tails, horns, wings, scales, and other effects too! It won’t be long before you’ve brought to life a gallery of fleshed-out monsters.

It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, video games, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences, the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or "camera" movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters-horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out, video games including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn, and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address, and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.

From his landmark story "The Devil and Miss Jones" to his Rick James piece, this new collection focuses on the dark side of American life, including an intimate glimpse of Roseanne Barrs multiple personality disorder and an essay about hanging out on the road with death metal gods.

A collection of the very best in contemporary first-person journalism compiled by the award-winning former Washington Post reporter and author. Great journalists, at one time or another, have all been characters in their own stories: people with personalities that shaped what they saw and reported, and were touched and changed by the experiences about which they wrote; and innovators who borrowed the storytelling techniques of fiction. The Beholder’s Eye showcases the very best of an increasing trend toward personal narrative: Mike Sager stalking Marlon Brando in the Tahitian jungle; J. R. Moehringer’s quest to discover the true identity of an old boxer; Bill Plaschke’s story about a woman with cerebral palsy who runs an obscure Los Angeles Dodgers Web site; Scott Anderson’s story of his lifetime of covering war after war; Harrington’s own tale of his interracial family’s struggle to persevere; and many others. Written by reporters who were willing to reveal themselves in order to bring readers insights that were deeper than supposedly objective third-person stories, their articles are an invaluable resource for aspiring journalists, students, and teachers of the craft of writing, and any reader with an appreciation for masterful storytelling. “Aims to dispel the old journalistic cliché: that a journalist writing about him/herself is always ‘self-indulgent and, quite likely, narcissistic.’ He couldn’t have put together a better lineup of writers to make the point that it doesn’t have to be . . . Not just some of the country’s finest personal journalism, but some of its finest journalism, period.”—Kirkus Reviews

Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley sets the stage for this shocking thriller with an actual security threat the CIA secretly investigated during the peak of the Cold War: that the Soviet Union's KGB had cleverly smuggled a nuclear bomb into the very heart of Washington, D.C. In Lethal Secrets, the bomb is now in the hands of a band of Chechen rebels, led by Movladi "the Viper" Islamov, who's threatening to detonate the device unless his demands are met. The fate of the city rests in the hands of a disgraced deputy U.S. marshal, Wyatt Conway, who is reluctantly called into action by his FBI and CIA rivals because he was once a friend of Islamov's, before the freedom fighter turned into an international terrorist. His only hope at getting to Islamov lies with Vladimir Khrenkov, a possibly corrupt Russian intelligence agent. Conway suspects Khrenkov of being the man who executed a top Russian mobster whom Conway was protecting in the federal witness protection program. Kept on short leash by Kimberly Lodge, a skeptical CIA beauty who finds him incompetent and foolish, Conway must find a way to manipulate and expose Khrenkov, keep Lodge and her bureaucratic cronies off his back, and prevent Islamov from igniting the spark for Armageddon.

This collection of heroin stories from Eric Bogosian, Jerry Stahl, Lydia Lunch, and more “will satisfy devotees of noir fiction and outsider art alike” (Publishers Weekly). On the heels of The Speed Chronicles (Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Franco, Beth Lisick, etc.) and The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, etc.) comes The Heroin Chronicles, a volume sure to frighten and delight. The literary styles of these stories are as diverse as the moral quandaries they explore. From the groundbreaking novels of William S. Burroughs to the mind-altering music of The Velvet Underground, heroin—in all its ecstasy and tragedy—has been the subject of many an underground masterpiece. Collected here are all-new short stories about the infamous drug by some of today’s most celebrated and provocative writers, including Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl, Nathan Larson, Ava Stander, Antonia Crane, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, John Albert, Michael Albo, Sophia Langdon, Tony O’Neill, and L.Z. Hansen.

This is a critical overview of monster magazines from the 1950s through the 1970s. "Monster magazine" is a blanket term to describe both magazines that focus primarily on popular horror movies and magazines that contain stories featuring monsters, both of which are illustrated in comic book style and printed in black and white. The book describes the rise and fall of these magazines, examining the contributions of Marvel Comics and several other well-known companies, as well as evaluating the effect of the Comics Code Authority on both present and future efforts in the field. It identifies several sub-genres, including monster movies, zombies, vampires, sword-and-sorcery, and pulp-style fiction. The work includes several indexes and technical credits.