Beautiful Monsters

Matthew Callahan has spent seven years struggling against the insatiable hunger for blood consuming him. Unable to stop the vampire inside from preying on humans, he keeps himself confined to a lonely existence. Everything changes the night he is lured into a trap and taken prisoner by High Lord General Tarrick-a seductive incubus who feeds off sexual energy. Forced into the middle of a war between vampires and incubi, Matthew is used as a weapon against his own kind. Although he's desperate for freedom, he is unable to deny the burning desire drawing him to the incubus general he now calls Master.

"A harrowing, perverse, laugh-aloud funny rocket ride of catastrophes…Gutsy, terse and cunning, Invisible Monsters may emerge as Palahniuk’s strongest book." —Greg Berkman, Seattle Times She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you’ll ever want to look.

All Kat wants is vengeance. Kat dreams of one thing: driving a stake through the cold, dead heart of the vampire lord who turned her father and killed her mother. When she¿s offered the chance to earn magic-laced tattoos that make her stronger and faster, she jumps at it, even if it means working for monsters. Incubi. Seductive creatures who feed off sexual energy. And one of them wants her. If only she could ignore his ridiculously perfect body with those stupid sexy abs¿All Darius wants is Kat. Lord Darius of House Tarrick has worked hard to earn his title, not to mention money, sex, and power¿the incubus has it all. Until some new, wild-haired hunter recruit strolls in like she owns the place, throwing him off balance and igniting an unquenchable fire in him. He wants her. He needs her. And he¿ll do anything to have her¿

Beautiful Monsters explores the ways in which "classical" music made its way into late twentieth-century American mainstream culture—in pop songs, movie scores, and print media. Beginning in the 1960s, Michael Long's entertaining and illuminating book surveys a complex cultural field and draws connections between "classical music" (as the phrase is understood in the United States) and selected "monster hits" of popular music. Addressing such wide-ranging subjects as surf music, Yiddish theater, Hollywood film scores, Freddie Mercury, Alfred Hitchcock, psychedelia, rap, disco, and video games, Long proposes a holistic musicology in which disparate musical elements might be brought together in dynamic and humane conversation. Beautiful Monsters brilliantly considers the ways in which critical commonplaces like nostalgia, sentiment, triviality, and excess might be applied with greater nuance to musical media and media reception. It takes into account twentieth-century media's capacity to suggest visual and acoustical depth and the redemptive possibilities that lie beyond the surface elements of filmic narrative or musical style, showing us what a truly global view of late twentieth-century music in its manifold cultural and social contexts might be like.

Weird, wicked, spooky and delicious, PRETTY MONSTERS is a book of tall tales to keep you up all night. Blending fairytale, fantasy, horror, myth and mischief in a delicious cocktail, Kelly Link creates a world like no other, where ghosts of girlfriends past rub up against Scrabble-loving grandmothers with terrifying magic handbags, wizards sit alongside morbid babysitters, and we encounter a people-eating monster who claims to have a sense of humour. Combining the imaginative brilliance of Borges with the madcap escapades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more than a pinch of macabre humour, this is writing to come back from the dead for.

There were no surprises in Gatlin County. We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere. At least, that's what I thought. Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. There was a curse. There was a girl. And in the end, there was a grave. Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever. Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them. In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.

Written from the perspective of a teenager, this chilling psychological thriller follows Tessa as she copes with the blood-stained event that changed her life forever. Set in Perth, Western Australia, this gripping novel demonstrates how Tessa clings to anorexia and to her sinister, imaginary friend, Ned—her greatest support and her staunchest ally who is privy to her deepest secrets—in an attempt to deal with the loss of her brother and the resulting change in her parents.

The end of the 1970s was a turning point for science fiction and horror films. A new film would blend these genres together into a cinematic experience that would cross boundries, and which would feature a villain that audiences and critics alike would find far scarier than the knife wielding antics of Michael Myers or Jason and Pamela Voorhees That film was Alicn. In this unofficial companion, David McIntee takes us behind the scenes to reveal how the Alien films were developed, what their influences and antecedents were, and how they have continued to develop and influence to this day. We also take in the popular Predator films and see how, through various ranges of spin off merchandise, we arrived at the 2004 clash of the titans, the long awaited Alicn vs Predator movie. This book takes you further than ever before into the domain of the beautiful monsters. Book jacket.