The Horror on the Links


Book Description

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn. Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries—and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)—captivated readers for nearly three decades. Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero. The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Horror on the Links” (1925) to “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.




The Murder on the Links


Book Description

Monsieur Renauld dies on a golf course just days after sending a plea for help to detective Poirot. Since Renauld possessed a plundered fortune, a scorned wife, a mistress, and an estranged son, there is no lack of suspects. It's up to Poirot to put the police onto the culprit before more murders occur.




Missing Links


Book Description

When a group of middle-class buddies obsessed with golf set up a bet to see who can finagle their way onto the nearby private course, their friendship is tested in ways they had never expected in this humorous novel from Rick Reilly, one of America’s most popular sportswriters. Missing Links is the story of four middle class buddies who live outside of Boston and for years have been 1) utterly obsessed with golf and 2) a regular foursome at Ponkaquoque Municipal Course and Deli, not so fondly known as Ponky, the single worst golf course in America. Just adjacent to these municipal links lies the Mayflower Country Club, the most exclusive private course in all of Boston and a major needle in their collective sides. Frustrated by the Mayflower's finely manicured greens and snooty members, three of Ponky's finest and most courageous—Two Down, Dannie, and Stick—set up a bet: $1,000.00 apiece, and the first man to somehow finagle his way on to the Mayflower course takes all. Lying, cheating, and forgery are encouraged, to put it mildly, and with the constant heckling and rare aid of Chunkin' Charlie, Hoover, and Bluto--a few more of Ponky's elite--the games begin. One of the three will eventually play the Mayflower's course, but their friendships--and everything else--will change as various truths unravel and the old Ponky starts looking like the home they never should have left.




Paperbacks from Hell


Book Description

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires comes a nostalgic and unflinchingly funny celebration of the horror fiction boom of the 1970s and ’80s. Take a tour through the horror paperback novels of two iconic decades . . . if you dare. Page through dozens and dozens of amazing book covers featuring well-dressed skeletons, evil dolls, and knife-wielding killer crabs! Read shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate! Horror author and vintage paperback book collector Grady Hendrix offers killer commentary and witty insight on these trashy thrillers that tried so hard to be the next Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. Complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles, this unforgettable volume dishes on familiar authors like V. C. Andrews and R. L. Stine, plus many more who’ve faded into obscurity. Also included are recommendations for which of these forgotten treasures are well worth your reading time and which should stay buried.







The Summer People


Book Description

Kelly Link's new collection of stories explores everything from the essence of ghosts to the nature of love. And hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the pyramids. . . The Summer People is a bite-sized sample of Link's incomparable writing, telling the story of Fran, her friend Ophelia, and their adventures at the house belonging to the mysterious and rarely glimpsed 'summer people'. As the tales Fran tells about the house and its inhabitants become ever stranger and more magical, it gets harder and harder to tell what is real and what exists only in her imagination, and the lines between truth and fantasy become deliciously blurred.




The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales


Book Description

The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales collects eight stories of literary dark fiction. Tense and terrifying, these masterful stories by Eric LaRocca explore the shadow side of love. You Follow Wherever They GoBodies Are for BurningThe Strange Thing We BecomeThe Trees Grew Because I Bled ThereYou're Not Supposed to Be HereWhere Flames Burned Emerald as GrassI'll Be Gone by ThenPlease Leave or I'm Going to Hurt You




Stranger Things Happen


Book Description

"An alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer."--Salon.com (Best of the Year) "A delightful collection."--Cleveland Plain Dealer "My favorite fantasy writer."--Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered "Link's stories defy explanation, or at least, brief summary, instead working on the plane between dream and cognitive dissonance. They are true to themselves: witty, beautiful, funny, and startling."--Rain Taxi "Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life."--Booklist "The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement." --Publishers Weekly Kelly Link's collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores. --Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine "A tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy." --Washington Post Book World "Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link's a writer to watch." --Kirkus Reviews "A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they're not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don't happen." --Karen Joy Fowler "Kelly Link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. She puts one word after another and makes real magic with them-funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines." --Neil Gaiman "Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book." --Jonathan Lethem The eleven stories in Kelly Link's debut collection are funny, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. They were all especially written for you. A Best of the Year pick from Salon.com, Locus, The Village Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle. Includes Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree award-winning stories. Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short fiction Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebula, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question "Why do you want to go through the world?" ("Because you can't go through it.") Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, co-edit the fantasy half of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they startd the occasional zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.




Missing Links


Book Description

Are there "missing links", links that are "easy to miss" between art and religion and between the ways in which they respond to or partake of reality? The hypothesis of this anthology is that these in fact do exist and its authors explore these links on the basis of a specific text or oeuvre, a specific artwork or exhibition. Following an introductory essay exploring the discussion on relating art and religion, there are artides on Jannis Kounellis and Andrew Forster, on plays by William Shakespeare, Gerard Jan Rijnders and Anny van Hoof, on an exhibition curated by Julia Kristeva. There is an analysis of a novel by Frederic Buechner and one of the autobiographical writings of Dorothy Day. Poems of M. Vasalis and Judith Herzberg are considered, along with the music of Olivier Messiaen and Plato's dialogue 'Sophist'.




The Horror Readers' Advisory


Book Description

It's a dark and scary world. Pans are tabid. Blood, guts, and gore are the norm. Welcome to the horror genre. Horror classics have been scaring people for years. Nowadays, who doesn't know about Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz? Profiled in a special section, the Big Three have turned horror into best-sellers. For all the horror fans that haunt your library, this is the must-have guide. Readers' advisors and reference librarians will appreciate the key tools provided to expand upon this genre, including listings of top books, authors, and award winners within eleven horror subgenres - like mummies, biomedical, monsters, and splatterpunk. Clear descriptions of characteristics within subgenres are provided throughout. To further help you engage new renders, expert horror mavens Spratford and Clausen draw a savvy connection between film and horror as a potent reminder that the scariest movies have been adapted from novels. Their classic and contemporary recommendations like Rebecca, The Shining, and Rosemary's Baby reinforce activities between readers' advisors and library programming and open up the (cellar) door for further patron involvement. Readers' advisors and referen