Books

With the exception of horror, fantasy is likely the oldest of all literary genres. Rooted in the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and Classical Greek and Roman mythology, the sagas of the Viking age, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, medieval romances like Le Morte d’Arthur, the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, fantasy in the modern sense began with authors George MacDonald, William Morris, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, C. S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany and E.R. Eddison, whose otherworldly odysseys paved the way for the pulpy sword-and-sorcery of Robert E. Howard and High Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ever since The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings left their indelible imprint on popular culture, fantasy has influenced everything from role-playing games to television and movies, and the genre’s ageless Good-versus-Evil themes and immersive escapism provide the perfect antidote for our troubled times.

According to legend, American author Ernest Hemingway famously penned one of the shortest short stories with the six-word tale, ‘For sale, baby shoes, never used.’ Unlike a novel, where there’s the literary legroom to overindulge in-depth narratives, short stories require an immediate seizure of the reader’s attention. Flash fiction cuts that definition even closer to the quick; with the average available space of a social media post (sometimes less), it’s storytelling at its most Spartan.

It has been said that the human mind is the true final frontier. In that squishy gray matter between our ears originates every earthly idea, impulse, urge, desire and function, and there are those who argue the mind is capable of feats—ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis—as yet unproven by medical science. Certain esoteric disciplines such as Theosophy teach that human thoughts exist in reality as surely as any tangible object, and remote Tibetan Buddhist practitioners have pushed the notion to its extreme with the manifestation of tulpas, three-dimensional corporeal entities conjured solely through concentration. Such thought-forms, it is believed, may initially act in accordance to their creator’s wishes, but can, and often do, develop their own willful, independent personalities.

While grand Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Stoker’s classic Dracula were benchmarks of early horror, beginning with the days of Poe and Hawthorne and carrying through to the pulp-era of the twentieth century, the genre’s most innovative works lay indisputably within the realm of the short story. Indeed, acerbic American critic Amborse Bierce, himself an acknowledged master of the weird tale, defined novels in his satirical 1906 tome The Devil’s Dictionary as ‘...A short story, padded.’ One individual’s opinion, perhaps, but short form fiction provides a quick hit of adrenaline in a way that longer works cannot; plots, characters and atmosphere here are reduced to their most chilling, primal state, like a ghost story told ‘round the campfire.

As the infamous tagline for Ridley Scott’s 1979’s classic film Alien noted, ‘In Space No One Can Hear You Scream’, and audiences ever since have been drawn to the devilish combination of science fiction and horror. Movies such as the Alien franchise (and, by extension, the Predator movies), Event Horizon, Cube, Starship Troopers, Dark City, Splice, and even Jordan Peele’s Nope have bequeathed a wealth of distinctly disturbing futurist visions, yet literary icons including H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson were mixing the two elements into hybrid concoctions decades before Xenomorphs first burst onto the silver screen.

"What’s your sign, baby?”

It’s perhaps the oldest pick-up line in existence, and for good reason: astrology, that oft-misunderstood, sometimes vilified study of celestial movements, dates back to Babylonian times. Dividing the night sky into wedges under the guidance of twelve distinct constellations, to believers the effects of each zodiac sign imprint themselves on an individual at the moment of their birth, influencing them in ways both great and small, from body types to personality, romance and health. And though critics have for centuries attacked the practice on scientific grounds, its popularity has nonetheless surged in recent years.

The fictional worlds created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) have had an immeasurable influence on modern horror. An isolated, introverted, impoverished pulp writer, in death The Gentleman of Old Providence has achieved the success that constantly eluded him during life, and the cosmicism of his work has spread to become the ideological backbone to an entire subgenre of stories, novels, films, comics and games. Lovecraft’s conceptual output was a unique byproduct of the changing post-Victorian industrial-machine era he came of age in: his terrors were not the antiquated ghosts, vampires and werewolves of European folklore or the demonic shades of Judeo-Christian construction, but the stark conceit that humanity is an insignificant speck in a hostile universe, forever at the mercy of uncaring alien forces far beyond its comprehension.

Previously, on Salmonweird: retired Detective Inspector (DI) Karl Blackman, sole living human in the cozy coastal Cornish village of Salmonweir, revealed the otherworldy Christmastime killer responsible for the deaths of two of the English ghost town’s spectral inhabitants, dealt with the reappearance of an ex, learned of several matrimonial engagements, and enjoyed copious amounts of mulled wine. What hilarity and hijinks will the next installment bring? Stay tuned and stay put, because the latest adventure is about to begin...

Greetings! We at the British Board of Tourism welcome you to the wonderful seaside hamlet of Salmonweir. Here on the lovely windswept southwestern Cornish coast, you will have the time of your life visiting the most enigmatic village in all of England. What is it that makes Salmonweir so, well, weird? The ghosts, of course! Over five-hundred of the returned incorporeal dead have taken up residence on our storied streets, but fear not, these spirits are just like you and I, hard-working souls who only want to make their mark on the world. And seeing as they come from throughout two-thousand years of British history, any holiday to Salmonweir will be steeped in educational fun for the entire family! SEE the 18th century galleon The Lady Catherine and her spirited crew of scallywags! EXPLORE the age-old church! WATCH a bout of reenacted Roman-era combat!

What used to be said about people who were knowledgeable in many topics, and could calmly debate and maintain conversations in any company? He is a well-read person. After all, it is true that people used to get the main information from books. Today, with the rapid development of information technology, a person does not have an urgent need to look for it in printed sources. But still, books, even if electronic, are one of the main sources of wisdom. And even great films, games, and roulette casino games for real money will never replace masterpieces of books.  Improving your reading skills is easy if you know how to do it. Here are some speed reading techniques you can learn to read faster:

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Books are a part of the life of a college student. They help students to write essays, research papers, and the best discussions during exams. However, the bright students go beyond the academic books to other topics and materials that expand their knowledge.

Students have been selecting fiction and non-fictional books for their leisure reading. The books are available in libraries as classics or can be found on contemporary shelves. Here are some of the most popular books among students today.

This Side of Paradise

Since time immemorial humans from every civilization and have been fascinated with what lies past this mortal coil. It’s the Eternal Mystery: once we exhale that final breath, is there only the dark embrace of oblivion, or do we, as some assert, continue to exist in some spectral state? While the more practical among us may scoff at the notion of post-mortem survival, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the analytics company YouGov, two out of every five Americans—roughly 41%—believe in ghosts. The results get spookier from there: a similar 2009 Pew Research Center study found eighteen percent report encountering a spirit, whether by seeing, hearing or being physically touched.

‘They strive, and yet delay; They perish, Do we die; Or is this Death's Experiment, Reversed in Victory?'—Emily Dickinson

Since the dawn of humankind, the inescapable fact of our individual mortality has inspired more volumes of codified thought than any other. The question of what, if anything, lies beyond this mortal coil is the philosophic keystone of every religious doctrine, and from the prayers of saints to bored teenagers with oujia boards, our search for answers remains unabated. Accordingly, a 2021 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that nearly three-quarters of American adults believe in some form of afterlife. And while the largest body claiming a firm conviction in Heaven were from Christian denominations, fully half of religiously unaffiliated respondents (37% of the overall survey) assert the same belief.

The eternal existential question ‘Who Am I?’ has various answers depending on what audience we entertain. In our daily lives there’s often a struggle with which facet of our personality to hide or reveal; to our parents, for instance, we show a different side of ourselves than we do to our co-workers, our lovers, our friends. For writers this friction between one’s innermost self and that which we expose to the world at large can provide an unending wellspring of dark inspiration.

Exploding onto the literary horror scene in 2022 with her terrifying examination of a disturbed mother-daughter relationship in the novella This Is Where We Talk Things Out, Canadian author Caitlin Marceau explores those same issues of identity in a way that will satiate anyone ravenous for more of her intense strain of terror fiction in the DarkLit Press release Femina, a captivating collection of fifteen short stories.

'Heroic Fantasy’ is an umbrella term encompassing any number of adventurous subgenres that mix magic, myth and drama to one degree or other. With roots extending back to the Akkadian epic Gilgamesh in the 3rd century BCE, the tree of fantasy has since sprouted many divergent branches, from the seminal works of literary legends like Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock, to the escapist role-playing games of Dungeons & Dragons and the gritty, sex-and-horror infused variant known as grimdark.

The rush of adrenaline is a heady sensation. That evolutionary fight-or-flight response strikes a primal chord deep within our primitive reptilian brain, and the heart-pounding, blood-pumping energy that protected our ancestors from hungry predators has, in modern humans, become a kind of addiction. The exhilaration of extreme sports can often satisfy such a need, attested to by the popularity of ever-more perilous ‘adventure vacations’—skydiving, wingsuit flying, base-jumping, alpine skiing—it seems the more dangerous the activity, the more we yearn for a chance to partake. Even the simpler, far safer indulgence of watching a scary movie can induce a burst of adrenaline-fueled excitement, a fact that explains the unshakably enduring success of horror films.

Imagine, if you will, this hypothetical scenario: Stephen King, pre-eminant author of the United States, one day decides to storm an army base with a group of friends, intending to spark an insurrection against the government through a broadcast reading of his stories before committing grisly suicide. Sound implausible? Preposterous? Perhaps. But that’s exactly the bizarre situation the Japanese public awoke to on November 25, 1970, when Yukio Mishima, then that nation’s foremost literary icon, led four members of a right-wing militia into a central Tokyo military installation, took its commandant hostage, and tried to inspire the country’s Self-Defense Forces to overthrow the post-war regime he’d so long held in contempt. When the coup d’etat inevitably failed, Mishima and one of his followers both performed seppuku—the ritual suicide of the samurai—to the shock of the entire world.

According to figures from both the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Safety Council, there were more than 106,000 reported drug overdose fatalities in the United States in 2021, a 58% rise from only two years earlier. The overwhelming majority of these deaths (70,601) can be directly attributed to opioids, primarily heroin and its deadlier chemical cousin, fentanyl, and that statistic increases significantly when one factors in the suicides, homicides, and undetermined deaths related to the general drug trade.

Tales of vampires and their carnivorous ilk have spanned centuries and continents. The most commonly known legends in the Western world originate from Eastern Europe—the dreaded nosferatu of Slavic lore: a reanimated corpse, retaining its personality post-mortem, existent among the craven human herd, jealous of life and hungry for the blood pumping through our veins. From those benighted Transylvanian forests an archetype arose that has permeated every facet of popular culture, from books and movies, comics, video games, to the somber cemetery dirges of Gothic clubs and their related leather-and-lace fashions. The steely, hypnotic glare of Dracula and his varied progeny bewitches us as no other mythic monster has.

On the storytelling family tree, suspense and horror are shoots of the same literary branch, attached to a common trunk and rooted in our primitive collective reptilian brain. That sense of disquieting tension one feels when watching Clarice Starling wade through the murky pitch darkness of Buffalo Bill’s death house plucks a chord deep within our psyche, reminding us of a time when our distant, primal ancestors braved untamed wilds on a daily basis.