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Image one: E-book titled Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales (2013) - synopsis: In new translations and with an introduction by Sibelan Forrester, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales is a selection of tales that draws from the famous collection of Aleksandr Afanas’ev, but also includes some tales from the lesser-known nineteenth-century collection of Ivan Khudiakov. This new collection includes beloved classics such as “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and “The Frog Princess,” as well as a version of the tale that is the basis for the ballet “The Firebird.”
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. Monsters were ciphers 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 considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry.
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Image one: E-book titled Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror (2023) - synopsis: Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap more than we would expect? Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination.
Image two: E-book titled Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters (2021) - synopsis: Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies.
Image one: E-book titled Beyond the Night: Creatures of Life, Death, and the In-Between (2015) - synopsis: From Beowulf and Buffy, to Freddy Krueger and Frankenstein’s Monster, this collection highlights different aspects of the monstrous, and discusses various ways in which they can be read, discussed, and understood. What does the mother in Beowulf really represent? How can the character of Zoey Redbird really be understood? What is the importance of memories in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? And what should we make of Terry Pratchett’s undead creatures? And what role does the children-friendly vampire play? Beyond the Night offers a range of insights into these topics, as well as many more.
Image two: E-book titled The Vampire: A New History (2018) - synopsis: Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori’s publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom’s detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind’s fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.
Image one: E-book titled The Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield (2015) - synopsis: Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them. In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales.
Image two: E-book titled The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (2015) - synopsis: An undying procession of sons of Dracula and daughters of darkness has animated the horror film genre from the beginning. Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics. The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Writing across a full range of critical methods from classic psychoanalysis to feminism and postmodernism, they balance theoretical generalizations with close readings of films and discussions of figures associated with the genre.
Image one: E-book titled Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors before World War I (2011) - synopsis: Blood Will Tell explores the ways in which writers, thinkers, and politicians used blood and vampire-related imagery to express social and cultural anxieties in the decades leading up to the First World War. Covering a wide variety of topics, including science, citizenship, gender, and anti-Semitism, Robinson demonstrates the ways in which rhetoric tied to blood and vampires permeated political discourse and transcended the disparate cultures of Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, forming a cohesive political and cultural metaphor.
Image two: E-book titled Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai (2008) - synopsis: Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yôkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese cultural imagination and offering an abundance of valuable and, until now, understudied material. Michael Dylan Foster tracks yôkai over three centuries, from their appearance in seventeenth-century natural histories to their starring role in twentieth-century popular media.
Image one: E-book titled Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances (2021) - synopsis: From Halloween expert Lisa Morton, a level-headed and entertaining history of our desire and attempts to hold conversations with the dead. Calling the Spirits investigates the eerie history of our conversations with the dead, from necromancy in Homer’s Odyssey to the emergence of Spiritualism —when Victorians were entranced by mediums and the seance was born. The book also considers Ouija boards, modern psychics, and paranormal investigations, and is illustrated with engravings, fine art (from beyond), and photographs.
Image two: E-book titled The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America's Loch Ness Monster (2012) - synopsis: Scotland may have Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, but we have Champ, the legendary serpent-like monster of Lake Champlain. The first recorded sighting of Champ, in 1609, has been attributed to the lake’s namesake, French explorer and cartographer Samuel de Champlain. This is pure myth, but there have been hundreds of sightings since then. Robert E. Bartholomew embarks on his own search, both of the lake 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.
Image one: E-book titled The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory: From Local Legend to International Folktale (2023) - synopsis: The legend of the ghost who terrorized the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee, is one of the best-known pieces of folklore in American storytelling—featured around the globe in popular-culture references as varied as a 1930s radio skit and a 1980s song from a Danish heavy metal band. Legend has it that “Old Kate” was investigated even by the likes of future president Andrew Jackson, who was reported to have said, “I would rather fight the British ten times over than to ever face the Bell Witch again.” While dozens of books and articles have thoroughly analyzed this intriguing tale, this book breaks new ground by exploring the oral traditions associated with the poltergeist and demonstrating her regional, national, and even international sweep.
Image two: E-book titled Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2013) - synopsis: This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, race, genre, technology, consumption, and social change. A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire’s origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany, and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola’s film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.
Image one: E-books for Hallowen
Image two: E-book titled Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis (2017) - synopsis: Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement.
Image three: E-book titled A Guide to Sky Monsters: Thunderbirds, the Jersey Devil, Mothman, and Other Flying Cryptids (2021) - synopsis: Authors T. S. Mart and Mel Cabre introduce 20 flying cryptids with legends that span the United States. With 70 hand-drawn illustrations, A Guide to Sky Monsters details our fascination with these creatures and describes both historical evidence found in the fossil record and the specifics of modern-day sightings. By studying the fact, fiction, and pop culture surrounding these notorious beasts, Mart and Cabre help us lean into the question, “What if?”
