2364. A terrified girl flees a brutal slumlord... It's been a long time since Ritry risked his sanity on a deep-brain Soul-jack. Once renowned for hacking the most lethal minds, now he peddles cheap memory implants on the neon-lit slums of the Arctic Circle - staying out of trouble, mostly. Then a terrified girl bolts into his jack-site, seeking a unique brain-hack to escape Don Zachary, the vicious slumlord. Ritry's no hero, but he won't stand by and watch while another innocent dies. Yet the Don does not forgive. Hounded from the slums, Ritry flees into the forgotten ruins of the old world, only to find a far crueler predator lying in wait, one with a dark taste for living Souls - plunging Ritry into one last desperate jack with the Souls of all humanity on the line... If you love Neuromancer, Altered Carbon or Ghost in the Shell you'll love the cyberpunk thriller Soul Jacker. Pre-order the trilogy today to plunge into Ritry's battle for his Soul. Available as ebook and paperback. Series order: 1. Soul Jacker2. Soul Breaker3. Soul Killer

They stole his truck. Big mistake. CIA black-ops legend Christopher Wren pulls over on a Utah highway after three weeks on the road. An arbitrary decision he's about to regret. A biker gang attacks Wren, leaves him for dead and steals his truck. Now he's going to get it back. From a secret warehouse in the desert. Ringed with fences. Filled with human cages. As the body count mounts and a shocking national conspiracy unravels, one thing is for certain. Justice will be done.

No heroes endure... Three thousand years ago the world fell into darkness, when the great black mouth of the Rot ravaged the land. Across the glorious library city of Aradabar its dark tongues hammered down, leveling the glass towers of learning and entombing the bookyards in a thick blanket of lava. Only a single child survived the devastation; an infant with a prophecy carved into his skin, promising the rise of a hero powerful enough to slay the Rot for good. Now that child is a young man, beginning to question the meaning of his many scars… Now those scars are hunted by a jealous King, ruler of a brutal industrial city, where a thousand bizarre castes toil away like slaves… Now a dark beast is watching, an Unforgiven, seeking to fulfill a promise made long ago… And now the Rot has returned, its great black mouth gaping large in the sky, bringing chaos and fear to a world where no heroes endure… The first book in The Ignifer Cycle, a new epic fantasy series.

Includes jargon, sports slang, and ethnic and regional expressions

Play helps define who we are as human beings. However, many of the leisurely/ludic activities people participate in are created and governed by corporate entities with social, political, and business agendas. As such, it is critical that scholars understand and explicate the ideological underpinnings of played-through experiences and how they affect the player/performers who engage in them. This book explores how people play and why their play matters, with a particular interest in how ludic experiences are often constructed and controlled by the interests of institutions, including corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Each chapter explores diverse sites of play. From theme parks to comic conventions to massively-multiplayer online games, they probe what roles the designers of these experiences construct for players, and how such play might affect participants' identities and ideologies. Scholars of performance studies, leisure studies, media studies and sociology will find this book an essential reference when studying facets of play.

"One morning late in May, between three and six A.M., a group of lonely men and women wait to be brought together, like the elements in an equation. Ernst Spengler is about to throw himself out his window. Mylia, terminally ill and in enormous pain, goes out to visit a church. Hinnerk Obst, who's always been told by the neighborhood children that he looks like a murderer, walks the streets with a loaded gun. As these characters are manipulated and brought together, a world of violence, fear, pain, and uncertainty is portrayed, where human nature itself, and the mechanisms determining our actions, our fictions, and the elements of our imagination, are laid bare. Jerusalem is a terrifying and grimly humorous summation of the possibilities and limits of the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century." --Book Jacket.

I Will Survive is the story of Gloria Gaynor, America's "Queen of Disco." It is the story of riches and fame, despair, and finally salvation. Her meteoric rise to stardom in the mid-1970s was nothing short of phenomenal, and hits poured forth that pushed her to the top of the charts, including "Honey Bee," "I Got You Under My Skin," "Never Can Say Goodbye," and the song that has immortalized her, "I Will Survive," which became a #1 international gold seller. With that song, Gloria heralded the international rise of disco that became synonymous with a way of life in the fast lane - the sweaty bodies at Studio 54, the lines of cocaine, the indescribable feeling that you could always be at the top of your game and never come down. But down she came after her early stardom, and problems followed in the wake, including the death of her mother, whose love had anchored the young singer, as well as constant battles with weight, drugs, and alcohol. While her fans always imagined her to be rich, her personal finances collapsed due to poor management; and while many envied her, she felt completely empty inside. In the early 1980s, sustained by her marriage to music publisher Linwood Simon, Gloria took three years off and reflected upon her life. She visited churches and revisited her mother's old Bible. Discovering the world of gospel, she made a commitment to Christ that sustains her to this day.

Pleasures of Horror is a stimulating and insightful exploration of horror fictions—literary, cinematic and televisual—and the emotions they engender in their audiences. The text is divided into three sections. The first examines how horror is valued and devalued in different cultural fields; the second investigates the cultural politics of the contemporary horror film; while the final part considers horror fandom in relation to its embodied practices (film festivals), its "reading formations" (commercial fan magazines and fanzines) and the role of special effects. Pleasures of Horror combines a wide range of media and textual examples with highly detailed and closely focused exposition of theory. It is a fascinating and engaging look at responses to a hugely popular genre and an invaluable resource for students of media, cultural and film studies and fans of horror.