Rats Tales

Rats' Tales brings together a hugely entertaining, dark and magical cycle of folk tales from around the world. The volume contains two texts for each story: Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's wonderful prose and Melly Still's lively dramatization. Rats' Tales celebrates the power of storytelling and will be published to coincide with the premiere at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in November 2012. On Beasts and Beauties, on which Carol Ann Duffy and Melly Still also collaborated: 'The first night audience did not exit from the theatre, they hover-crafted out of it on a balloon of bliss.' Independent

For someone seemingly afraid of almost everything Garry Stanley is something of a genius, for he has an innate ability to entertain people or more specifically to understand exactly what will entertain Mancunians sufficiently to make them throw a quid or two in his guitar case on a Saturday afternoon. Garry is the inspiration and emotional glue which binds the most famous busking band in the UK, the Piccadilly Rats. Each of the Rats has led a colourful life on society's margins; there is former friend of the Krays Ray Boddington, whose pavement performances were so beloved of Mancunian audiences that his untimely death was commemorated on the front page of the Manchester Evening News and bass player Heath whose personal journey led him to cross three continents before finding his spiritual home on a street corner in Manchester's city centre from where the Rats blasted their way into the public's conscience. In the past decade the Rats have conquered the country from London to Blackpool, appearing on the main stage at some of the biggest festivals in the UK and even appeared on ITV's Judge Rinder Show but their ability to stop commuters and shoppers in their tracks by the sight, sound and sheer insanity of their performance in full flow has left many onlookers wondering just who these people were and how the hell they got here...

Having just endured the death of his son during the First World War, Delapore moves from the US to his ancestral property, Exham Priory, in England, seeking space and peace to mourn his loss. He begins to restore the estate - despite dire warnings from locals - and hears rats scurrying behind the walls. Joined by academics, he investigates - and discovers a truly spine-chilling family secret. His ancestors had an underground city populated by prisoners, some walking on all fours, who were kept to feed their desire for human flesh! As the sound of the scurrying rats grows to a cacophony in his ears, Delapore is seized by madness and the uncontrollable urge to feast on flesh. Fans of James Herbert's 'Rats' trilogy, 'The Rats', 'Lair', and 'Domain', will get a similar shiver from 'The Rats in the Walls'. There is also a taste of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author famed for his horror and fantasy fiction. Born in Rhode Island, he became a pioneer of ‘cosmic horror’, conjuring up the lore of supernatural creatures who exist beyond our understanding. His best-known stories include "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Colour Out of Space". While he was a mainstay of pulp magazines, Lovecraft never achieved wider literary recognition in his lifetime. But his posthumous influence has been profound. It can be found in everything from the fiction of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman to the HBO series "Lovecraft Country".

Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive-and massively controversial-wildlife rescue mission is under way. Islands, making up just 3 percent of Earth's landmass, harbor more than half of its endangered species. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically disrupted by mainland predators-rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by humans to islands around the globe. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on annihilating the invaders. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from helicopters. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with rat poison. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today's conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy. Touring exotic locales with a ragtag group of environmental fighters, William Stolzenburg delivers both perilous adventure and intimate portraits of human, beast, hero, and villain. And amid manifold threats to life on Earth, he reveals a new reason to hope.

Ralph the rat learns what his best qualities really are when his friend Bing needs help after a big bunch of balloons carries him away. Lists the birth years and characteristics of individuals born in the Chinese Year of the Rat.

The Sewer Rats, a group of "loser" kids, engage in a round of paintball in the sewers beneath their town, but things get dangerous when one of them has a grudge against the other.

Had your rabies shots yet? The rats are loose! Twenty-four 'rat' themed short stories, and the first book in a three-book collection, The Creature Tales. Many of the stories here are traditional blood and gore filled horror, but several venture slightly into the realms of science fiction and the supernatural. Within this collection, the reader will find every rat incarnation imaginable, from the super strong and ultra intelligent to bloodthirsty and seemingly immortal. While every story has been written to stand alone, several are loosely inter-connected with an ongoing reference to the future. Among the stories are: A farmer's imaginative though barbaric attempt to solve his rat problem backfires in the worst possible way. A young boy's efforts to repay the kindness of his childhood rodent friends has consequences that will change the course of history. A vicious ghostly rat falls victim to karma. A centuries-old rat looks back on how it became the seemingly immortal creature it is. Some escaped convicts realise too late they've chosen the wrong couple to terrorise when their rodent pets see their own comfy lives threatened. A grim fate awaits those who take shelter in an abandoned house. A country squire finds himself on the receiving end of his sporting cruelty. These are just some of the stories in this extensive collection, so brace yourselves for ... A Mischief of Little Horrors. *A further two books in this three-book collection, Canine Tales and Six, Eight & Many Legged Tales, are scheduled for early 2019 ...