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This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.
Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night's central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, astronomy, nightclubs, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, the art of darkness, and endless nights. With infectious curiosity, a lyrical, intimate tone, and an eye for nighttime beauties both natural and man-made, Christopher Dewdney paints a captivating portrait of our hours in darkness. Christopher Dewdney is the author of three books of nonfiction-Last Flesh,...
From Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer; from Castlevania to Tru Blood, the romance between popular culture and vampires hearkens back to humanity's darkest, deepest fears, flowing through our very blood, fears of death, and life, and insatiable hunger. And yet, there is an attraction, undeniable, to the vampire archetype, whether the pale European count, impeccably dressed and coldly masculine, yet strangely ambiguous, ready to sink his sharp teeth deep into his victims' necks, draining or converting them, or the vamp, the count's feminine counterpart, villain and victim in one, using her wiles and icy sexuality to corrupt man and woman alike... Edited by John Joseph Adams (Wastelands, The Living Dead), By Blood We Live gathers together the best vampire literature of the last three decades from many of today's most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Joe Hill, Garth Nix, Neil Gaiman, Kelley Armstrong, Ken Macleod, Harry Turtledove, Carrie Vaughn, and Tad Williams.
This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story. Victorian ghost stories have traditionally been read in the context of agnosticism – as stories which reveal a society struggling with Christian orthodoxy in a new ‘Enlightened’ world. This book, however, uses theological ideas from St Augustine through to modern theologians to identify a theological journey taken by the protagonists of such stories, and charts each stage of this journey through the short stories it examines. It also proposes a theory of reader participation which creates an imaginary space in which modern epistemology is suspended. The book studies the work of four major authors of the supernatural tale: Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James.
Singularity gathers award-winning writer Melanie Tem’s most important short fiction, highlighting her diversity and mastery of her art. The sixty stories collected here range from "Sitting with the Driver," a western with a dark woman at its center, to "Little Shit," a contemporary tale of a woman who uses her deceptive appearance and psychic power to trap those who prey on the helpless. The child in "Corn teeth" longs not only to become a part of an alien family, but also to become an alien. And in the title tale, a man studies singularities and strin theory to both understand and blind himself to the truth about the woman he loves. Although the story is not science fiction, its explorati...
The finest exponents of horror fiction writing today, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Graham Joyce, Paul McCauley, Stephen Gallagher, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Basil Cooper, Glen Hirshberg, Jay Russell, feature in the world's premier annual horror anthology series, another bumper showcase devoted exclusively to excellence in macabre fiction. To accompany the very best in short stories and novellas is the year's most comprehensive horror overview and contacts listing as well as a fascinating necrology.
A Chronology of the Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was first published in 2009; this was fully revised, expanded in 2012 and 2014, an Addenda & Corrigenda was published in 2016. This 2018 edition has been completely updated and revised and supersedes all previous editions, it includes all of the revisions and corrections that were made previously plus the information and maps included in the Addenda & Corrigenda. Also included is information located during research since 2016. New photographs have been added to those already published and The Times is now listed in the sources with the date of publication. The first section contains a family tree and a detailed chronology of the major and mi...
Mapper of Mountains follows the career of Dominion Land Surveyor Morrison Parsons Bridgland, who provided the first detailed maps of many regions of the Canadian Rockies. Between 1902 and 1930, this unheralded alpinist perfected phototopographical techniques to compile a series of mountaintop photographs during summers of field work, and spent his winters collating them to provide the Canadian government, tourists, and mountain climbers with accurate topographical maps. Bridgland was a great climber and co-founder of the Alpine Club of Canada. Mapper of Mountains also tells the story of the Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project, which studies the changes sustained in the Rockies, repeating the field work accomplished by Bridgland almost a century ago.
The very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet was also the first of Conan Doyle's books to be published. His two creations, Holmes, the master of the science of detection and Watson, the great detective's faithful companion, are immediately in fine form. The mystery itself, its solution plucked unerringly by Holmes from the heart of Victorian London, proves to be the inevitable consequence of a tragedy of the American West. The story is harrowing in its alternating hope and despair, although Holmes himself was later to complain that the book `produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid'. - ;The very first Sherloc...