From this prodigiously talented writer comes a stunningly original fictional life of the German director F. W. Murnau (1888–1931). Murnau ranks as a founding father of the cinema, not least for his legendary horror film, Nosferatu. Here he is revealed as a hermetic genius who turns against himself, becoming in a sense his own vampire. 

Regardless of time, place, and blood type, Laura Enright cordially invites you into the dark underworld of the vampire. She sheds light (but not too much) on this captivating, age-defying creature by exploring topics ranging from the powers it can possess to what will kill it—for good. With close to thirty top-ten lists brimming with gore and fang-tastic facts, Vampires’ Most Wanted is sure to provide the reader with a biting good time.

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann demonstrate how the horror film and its offshoots can often be understood in relation to a monstrous nature that has evolved either deliberately or by accident and that generates fear in humanity as both character and audience. This connection between fear and the natural world opens up possibilities for ecocritical readings often missing from research on monstrous nature, the environment, and the horror film.

Witch Hunts in the Western World traces the evolution of Western attitudes toward magic, demons, and religious nonconformity from the Roman Empire through the Age of Enlightenment, placing these chilling events into a wider social and historical context. Brian A. Pavlac discusses witch hunts in fascinating detail by region, highlighting the cultural differences of the people who incited them as well as the key reforms, social upheavals, and intellectual debates that shaped European thought.

When a massive asteroid hurtles toward Earth, humanity braces for annihilation—but the end doesn’t come. In fact, it isn’t an asteroid but a three-mile-tall alien that drops down, seemingly dead, outside Little Springs, Nebraska. Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.

Superpower surveys the appearance of supernatural and superhuman elements in American culture, focusing on the American fascination with narratives involving supernatural adventure, superhuman heroes, and vast conspiracies driven by supernatural evil.

Part memoir and part journalism, Midwestern Strange offers a fascinating, funny, and quirky account of flyover folklore that also contends with the ways such oddities retain cultural footholds. Hollars shows how grappling with such subjects might fortify us against the glut of misinformation now inundating our lives.

This expanded, updated, and revised edition of A Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln takes you on a tour of the known and the obscure sites in Lincoln, Nebraska, where on a dark and silent evening you might feel a slight chill in the air, hear the faint calling of a lost soul, or see the ghostly shape of a spirit fade into blackness.

Originally published in French as two separate volumes, translated as The Prisoner of the Planet Mars (1908) and The War of the Vampires (1909), this riveting combination of science fiction and the adventure story provides a vivid depiction of an imagined Mars and its strange, unearthly creatures who might be closer to earthly humans than we would care to believe.

Taken from an ancient text found abandoned in a cave, The Last Man ends in 2100, “the last year of the world.” A devastating worldwide plague has annihilated all of humanity except for one man, who chronicles the world’s demise. This novel of apocalyptic horror, originally published in 1826, was rejected in its time and was out of print from 1833 to 1965, when the first Bison Books edition appeared.