Carnage

New York Times' Top Books of 2019 Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump. The 2016 election was a watershed for the United States. But, as Tim Alberta explains in American Carnage, to understand Trump’s victory is to view him not as the creator of this era of polarization and bruising partisanship, but rather as its most manifest consequence. American Carnage is the story of a president’s rise based on a country’s evolution and a party’s collapse. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: They had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s forceful pursuit of his progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing cultural and demographic landscape, lit a fire under the right, returning Republicans to power and inviting a bloody struggle for the party’s identity in the post-Bush era. The factions that emerged—one led by absolutists like Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz, the other led by pragmatists like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell—engaged in a series of devastating internecine clashes and attempted coups for control. With the GOP’s internal fissures rendering it legislatively impotent, and that impotence fueling a growing resentment toward the political class and its institutions, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to announce his run in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the Republican Party—and of the parallel sense of cultural, socioeconomic, and technological disruption during that period—can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. How did a party obsessed with the national debt vote for trillion-dollar deficits and record-setting spending increases? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans and walls? How did the party of family values elect a thrice-divorced philanderer? And, most important, how long can such a party survive? Loaded with exclusive reporting and based off hundreds of interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and Reince Priebus, and many others—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period as we’ve never seen it before and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of this political era.

When your world, your life and all of your hopes and dreams for the future are ripped out from under you, how do you go on? Death without dying is not only the most painful kind of death, it's also the most painful kind of life and I don't know if I'm strong enough to live it. I spend my lonely days and nights trying to make sense of what my life has become. Do I have the strength to move forward into the light, or should I just let the darkness take me? I'm Georgia Rae Layton McCarthy and this is the story of me, just me. You're no longer a part of an us, it's just me. Alone. By myself.

A dark, mafia standalone from Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling authors Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti His family killed my brother, so I stole his bride... I was there to murder her father, but then I saw her walking down the aisle. She's been my secret obsession for too long. The sinfully beautiful Calabresi princess. Sloan was the perfect payment for their crimes. Now she's mine. Mine to claim. Mine to possess. Mine to destroy. Her fiancé is still hunting for us, but his bride might not be so innocent by the time he tracks her down. I'm lining her family up like dominoes. And she'll be the first to fall. Unless I fall prey to temptation and decide to keep her for myself.

The serial-killing symbiote's sadistic spree starts here! As if Venom wasn't lethal enough, imagine what would happen if his symbiotic "other" had been joined to a murderous psychopath? That's where Cletus Kasady comes in, as Venom's symbiotic spawn transforms him into Carnage, Spider-Man's sickest foe! Killing on a whim, Carnage is a painful, twisted thorn in the sides of Peter Parker, Ben Reilly, Venom...even the Silver Surfer! COLLECTING: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (1963) #361-363, #410, #430-431; VENOM: CARNAGE UNLEASHED #1-4; CARNAGE: MIND BOMB; CARNAGE: IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE; SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN (1996) #3; SPIDER-MAN (1990) #67; SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN (1976) #233; PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN (1999) #13; WEBSPINNERS: TALES OF SPIDER-MAN #13-14.

Carnage, the spawn of Venom, has assembled an army of Spider-Man's criminally insane adversaries to spread his message of hostility, chaos and wholesale slaughter: Carrion, Demogoblin, Shriek and the Spider-Man Doppelganger! Outmanned and overpowered, the wall-crawler must recruit his own band of super-beings to combat the rising tide of evil: Black Cat, Cloak & Dagger, Firestar, Captain America, Deathlok and ... Venom?! Spider-Man's worst enemy becomes his uneasy ally in the battle to halt Carnage's mad rampage. But when he finds himself at odds with a number of his allies, who want to finish Carnage and his cronies once and for all, Spider-Man must decide whether to violate his personal code of honor to rid the world of pure evil. Can the web-slinger find an alternative before it's too late? Either choice carries dire consequences! Collects Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #378-380, Spider-Man: Unlimited (1993) #1-2, Spectacular Spider-Man (1976) #201-203, Web of Spider-Man (1985) #101-103, Spider-Man (1990) #35-37.

First there was Spider-Man. then, Venom. but they broke the mold when they created Carnage. Marvel's fan-favorite villain is back from the dead, as industrialist Michael Hall attempts to exploit the symbiote - engineering the next generation of prosthetic limbs and outfitting his own paramilitary security force, the Iron Rangers, in suits of hybrid battle armor. but when the alien intelligence asserts control of Hall's derivative tech, only Spider-Man and Iron Man stand in the way of an unprecedented wave of rioting and mass murder. And Carnage has brought some friends! COLLECTING: CARNAGE 1-5

At about 9 o’clock on the morning of November 9, 1971, soon after sending her three children off to school, Helen List sat in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee. She was still in her nightgown and slippers. John List came up behind her and put a 9mm German-made Steyr automatic pistol to the side of her head and fired once. She died instantly. The bullet smashed into the opposite wall... John made his way up the stairs to the third floor where his 85-year old mother, Alma, wearing a housedress, was preparing breakfast in her efficiency kitchen…She was standing near the storage room that adjoined her kitchen when a 9mm bullet ripped through the side of her scull. Alma List was dead before her body crumpled in a heap on the floor… The righteous carnage had begun.

Collects Carnage: Black, White & Blood (2021) #1-4. Carnage is back, carving a path of chaos crafted by some of Marvel's greatest creators! Beware, True Believers: These spine-chilling tales are not for the faint of heart - and they are presented in brutally beautiful black, white…and blood! Featuring the serial-killing super villain in savage battle with Spider-Man like you've never seen before, a horrifying tale set against the backdrop of the classic Maximum Carnage event and much more! And now the symbiotic slaughter-fest is bigger and badder than ever, collected in the oversized glory of a Treasury Edition!