Image descriptions
Image one: Happy Halloween
Image two: E-book titled Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture (1989) - synopsis: Cemeteries house the dead, but gravemarkers are fashioned by the living, who record on them not only their pleasures, sorrows, and hopes for an afterlife, but also more than they realize of their history, ethnicity, and culture. Richard Meyer has gathered twelve original essays examining burial grounds through the centuries and across the land to give a broad understanding of the history and cultural values of communities, regions, and American society at large.
Image three: E-book titled The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America's Loch Ness Monster (2012) - synopsis: Robert E. Bartholomew embarks on a search for the Champ monster, both of the Lake Champlain firsthand and through period sources and archives, many never before published. Although he finds the trail obscured by sloppy journalism, local leaders motivated by tourism income, and bickering monster hunters, he weighs the evidence to craft a rich, colorful history of Champ. From the nineteenth century, when Champ was a household name, to 1977, when he appeared in Sandra Mansi’s controversial photograph, Bartholomew covers it all. Real or imaginary, Champ and his story will fascinate believers and skeptics alike.
Image one: E-book titled Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present (2010) - synopsis: Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres, and they appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda. They remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reider’s book is the first in English devoted to oni as she fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as “others” to the Japanese.
Image two: E-book titled The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2015) - synopsis: Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture that acts as a cipher for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he develops a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design and argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.
Image one: E-book titled Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (2007) - synopsis: In Haunting Experiences, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Image two: E-book titled Boo!: Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex (1996) - synopsis: The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated, and socially used in a wide variety of times and places. It offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found across cultural settings and for the differences engendered by diverse social environments.
Image one: E-book titled Witchcraft in Early North America (2010) - synopsis: Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games’ engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The documents begin with first encounters between European missionaries and Native Americans in New France and New Mexico, and they conclude with witch hunts among Native Americans in the years of the early American republic.
Image two: E-book titled Frankenstein - synopsis: Victor Frankenstein, a young university student, becomes obsessed with discovering the secret to creating life. Over several months, he builds a creature out of body parts stolen from graves. Yet after he brings his work to life, Victor becomes terrified and, wanting nothing to do with his creation, abandons the “monster.” Rejected by the world because of his appearance, the monster lives in hiding but searches for his creator.
Image one: E-book titled Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids (2013) - synopsis: Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero have written an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths. After examining the nature of science and pseudoscience and their relation to cryptozoology, Loxton and Prothero take on Bigfoot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural incarnations; the Loch Ness monster and its highly publicized sightings; the evolution of the Great Sea Serpent; and Mokele Mbembe, or the Congo dinosaur.
Image two: E-book titled Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (2012) - synopsis: Silent Hill: The Terror Engine is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer’s cinematic and literary influences, this book uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history.
Image one: E-book titled Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (2007) - synopsis: In Haunted Halls, the first book-length interpretive study of college ghostlore, Elizabeth Tucker presents campus ghost stories from the mid-1960s to 2006, with special attention to stories told by twenty-first-century students through e-mail and instant messages. Her approach combines social, psychological, and cultural analysis, with close attention to students’ own explanations of the significance of spectral phenomena.
Image two: E-book titled: Doom: Scary Dark Fast (2013) - synopsis: This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM’s contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM’s status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993.
Image one: E-books for Halloween
Image two: E-book titled The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Expedition (2018) - synopsis: In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past.
Image three: E-book titled Dracula - synopsis: Shrugging off warnings of vampires from villagers he meets on his journey, Jonathan Harker, a young lawyer from England, travels to a castle in Transylvania to handle a real estate transaction with the mysterious, reclusive Count Dracula. Harker discovers he has become Dracula's prisoner and barely escapes with his life, only to learn that Dracula has hijacked a Russian ship to follow him back to England.
