Romancing Death

Romancing Death sheds the light of God on the popularity of vampirism in today’s pop culture. This fascinating exposé of the dark realities behind romanticizing the occult in our current culture reveals the naked truth about how the church has not addressed the needs of people young and old who fill the holes in their souls and spirits with evil rather than good. Weaving his personal history—including involvement in Wicca, Freemasonry, and vampirism—the author lays out the literary and cultural history of vampirism and closely analyzes the romanticized presentation of the occult in the Twilight saga. Romancing Death is a clarion call for the Church to take responsibility to be true salt and light in the world.

The past comes back to haunt a high-profile defense attorney in the newest book in the Baltimore series from the New York Times bestselling author of Edge of Darkness and Monster in the Closet. In his work as a defense attorney in Baltimore, Thorne has always been noble to a fault--specializing in helping young people in trouble just as someone did for him when he was younger. He plays the part of the bachelor well, but he secretly holds a flame for his best friend and business partner, Gwyn Weaver, a woman struggling to overcome her own demons. After four years, he thinks he might finally be ready to confess his feelings, come what may. But his plans are derailed when he wakes up in bed with a dead woman--her blood on his hands and no recollection of how he got there. Whoever is trying to frame Thorne is about to lead him down the rabbit hole of his past, something he thought he had outran long ago. Thorne must figure out who has been digging into his secrets, how much they know, and how far they will go to bring him down . . .

Did you know that God wants you to have amazing sex? Join pastor Levi Lusko for a unique and compelling understanding of the power and the pleasure attached to God’s plans for relationships. There is nothing more powerful on earth than the forces of love, sex, and romance. In fact, relationships are a matter of life-and-death importance. But as apps like Tinder foster no-strings-attached sexual encounters, sex is being stripped of any emotional or spiritual significance. So how can you train today for the relationship you want tomorrow? In Swipe Right, Levi Lusko shares with raw honesty from his own life experiences and God’s Word how to: Resist settling for instant pleasure by discovering what your heart really longs for Learn how to avoid and treat sexual scars by careful living today Regret-proof your marriage bed and your deathbed Transform a stagnant marriage by trading predictable nearness for mind-blowing intimacy With equal parts prevention and cure, the book is not just a list of rules to live by but something to live for: God’s powerful plan for our lives. To get there we must learn how to swipe right—to live up in a left, right world—because what we do with sex and romance is one of the most important choices we’ll make. God’s dreams for your life are not intended to kill your joy but to enhance it. Whether you’re fed up with dating and hooking up as usual, tired of being single, numb because of porn and casual sex, or curious about how to improve your marriage, this book is for you.

***AN INSTANT BESTSELLER!*** Best Books of 2021 · NPR ALA/The Reading List Best Horror 2021 Pick Longlisted for the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in a Novel, 2021 From the Bram Stoker-nominated author of The Luminous Dead comes a gothic fantasy horror—The Death of Jane Lawrence. "A jewel box of a Gothic novel." —New York Times Book Review “Delicious.... By the time the book reached that point of no return, I was so invested that I would have followed Jane into the very depths of hell.” —NPR.org “Intense and amazing! It’s like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meets Mexican Gothic meets Crimson Peak.” —BookRiot Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him. By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is deeply wrong at Lindridge Hall, and with the man she has so hastily bound her safety to. Set in a dark-mirror version of post-war England, Caitlin Starling crafts a new kind of gothic horror from the bones of the beloved canon. This Crimson Peak-inspired story assembles, then upends, every expectation set in place by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca, and will leave readers shaken, desperate to begin again as soon as they are finished.

Romance Writing explores the changing nature of both the romance genre and the discourse of romantic love from the seventeenth century to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the first studies to approach romantic love as both genre and discourse in more than sixty years. Faced with the challenge of writing a cultural history for what is commonly understood to be one of lifes most universal, a-historical and cross-cultural phenomena, Lynne Pearce has invoked the concept of the gift to calculate loves added value at different cultural/historical moments. Building upon those philosophical traditions which have argued for the powerfully transformative nature of romantic love, Pearce shows how in the history of literature lovers have utilized its spark to change not only themselves, but also their worlds, through acts of creativity and heroism. The gift of love ranges from the simple gift of a name in the seventeenth century, through notions of immortality, self-sacrifice and selfhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through to the liberating temporal and spatial dislocations of the postmodern age. The opening chapter, The Alchemy of Love, also undertakes an in-depth engagement of the changing nature, and meaning, of romantic love. Providing a judicious blend of close reading and cultural history, Romance Writing will be essential reading for undergraduate students as well as postgraduates and scholars working in the field, while also offering much of interest to the general reader.

In this book, Emily Griffiths Jones examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688 to show how writers during this politically turbulent time used the genre of romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves. Right Romance argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multigeneric narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre and rejects the common assumption that romance was a short-lived mode most commonly associated with royalist politics. Puritan republicans likewise found in romance strength, solace, and grounds for political resistance. Two key works that profoundly influenced seventeenth-century approaches to romance are Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which grappled with romance’s civic potential and its limits for a newly Protestant state. Jones examines how these works influenced writings by royalists and republicans during and after the English Civil War. Remaining chapters pair writers from both sides of the war in order to illuminate the ongoing ideological struggles over romance. John Milton is analyzed alongside Margaret Cavendish and Percy Herbert, and Lucy Hutchinson alongside John Dryden. In the final chapter, Jones studies texts by John Bunyan and Aphra Behn that are known for their resistance to generic categorization in an attempt to rethink romance’s relationship to election, community, gender, and generic form. Original and persuasive, Right Romance advances theoretical discussion about romance, pushing beyond the limits of the genre to discover its impact on constructions of national, communal, and personal identity.