The Fun House

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Evil comes in frightening and familiar forms in this terrifying novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz. Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival. She married a man she grew to hate—and gave birth to a child she could never love. A child so monstrous that she killed it with her own hands... Twenty-five years later, Ellen Harper has a new life, a new husband, and two normal children—Joey loves monster movies and Amy is about to graduate from high school. But their mother drowns her secret guilt in alcohol and prayer. The time has come for Amy and Joey to pay for her sins, because the carnival is coming back to town...

DIVA high schooler suspects that a tragic roller coaster crash wasn’t an accident/div DIVIf it weren’t for the Boardwalk, the small town of Santa Luisa might disappear altogether. The amusement park employs half the town’s workers, pulls in tourists, and gives teenagers like Tess Landers someplace to hang out on the weekends. Tess is eating a hot dog when the Boardwalk’s roller coaster—the Devil’s Elbow—jumps the track, hangs for a moment in the air, and then plummets to the ground. One of Tess’s classmates is dead on impact, two are forever maimed, and over twenty others are taken to the hospital. It’s the worst tragedy Santa Luisa has ever seen, but it’s only the beginning./divDIV /divDIVAs people rush to help, Tess spies a black-suited figure running away from the crowd. The crash was no accident. Five more teens will suffer before the killer is through, and Tess may be about to put herself on the list of victims./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Diane Hoh including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection./div

Something creepy is lurking in the funhouse at the annual school carnival. Can the G.H.O.S.T. Squad solve the case in time so their school can raise the money it badly needs?

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction exploring themes of purpose and the meaning of existence. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"--printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Mobius strip--to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do. Highlights include the Homerian story-wthin-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad,' and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence. Together, their stories form a kaleidescope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.

The Fun House by Tom Bissinger is a rollicking tale of coming of age in the sixties and seventies. Based on the childhood thrills he experiences at the fun house at Playland in San Francisco, Tom comes to understand that making fun houses and exploring those of others would become the defining quest of his life. He's brought up in privilege, and like his father who had at one time performed on Broadway, Tom's drawn to the theater. After boarding school and his immersion into a repertory theater company while attending Stanford, he lives in Paris then enlists in the army then moves to New York, and we are at the birth of the sixties, erupting like a bombshell, and Tom is there to celebrate and be open to the Golden Age of New York theater while simultaneously weaving the momentous events of that era into his story: assassinations, civil rights marches, and the Vietnam War. Sexual experimentation and drugs follow Tom as he ricochets through love affairs, directs plays, and marches in Selma. He moves to Philadelphia in 1969 to become the artistic director of the Theatre of Living Arts. In 1970, Tom abandons the legitimate theater and reinvents himself on Philly's South Street. Tom paints emotionally vivid portraits of neighborhood characters who hang out in Tom's new fun house: eccentric old-timers, newly minted hippies, artists, dopers, and a murderer. In 1977, Tom, his wife, Kristen, and their two-year-old travel for nine months as nomads: they live with Samoan families, spend two months on a fifty-foot trimaran in Fiji, live at Papunya Aborigine settlement in Australia, fall into a drug smuggler's den in Bali, and end up in an ashram in Sri Lanka before returning home as the book ends.

Rhyming verses ask readers to find hidden objects in the photographs.

Rhyming verses ask readers to find hidden objects in the phohotographs.