Strange Days

At the edge of chaos, one geek stands tall. Five years ago, dateless dork Bill Ryder somehow saved the world, banishing magic and monsters to the shadows. He thought it was over, that he was finished with that life. Too bad for him, shit’s about to get surreal again. Now the impossible has happened. His goddaughter is conjuring fireballs from thin air and two vampires have shown up at his doorstep looking to kick his ass.

Christmas: a time for family and festivity. Unless you’re in Adder’s Fork, home of the Essex Witch Museum, where it’s a time for ghostly spirits and demonic visits. In these 12 short stories, menacing ghosts and supernatural terrors haunt Rosie Strange and Sam Stone, as well as characters past and present from beyond the Essex Witch Museum. Featuring stories from The Strange Casebook as well as original short stories.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

Christopher Boone ist fünfzehn Jahre, drei Monate und zwei Tage alt. Er kennt alle Länder und deren Hauptstädte sowie sämtliche Primzahlen bis 7507. Er liebt die Farbe Rot, sagt immer die Wahrheit und kann nur zwei Gefühle voneinander unterscheiden: Trauer und Glück. Unordnung, Überraschungen und Unbekannte kann er absolut nicht leiden. Christopher hat eine leichte Form von Autismus und findet, manchmal ist die Welt schwer zu verstehen.

These experiences of sensing a “presence” when no one else is there have been given many names—the Third Man, guardian angels, shadow figures, “social” hallucinations—and they have inspired, unsettled, and confounded in equal measure. While the contexts in which they occur are diverse, they are united by a distinct and uncanny feeling of visitation. But what does this feeling mean, and where does it come from? When and why do presences emerge? And how can we even begin to understand a phenomenon that can be transformative for those who experience it, and yet so hard to put into words?

Sports day gets off to a shaky start when a bump to Stacey’s head kicks off a chain of events that aren’t on the programme. It soon becomes clear that the pupils are up against more than just each other, and James, Lenny and Alexander find themselves in a race to save their school from winning first prize for freakiness...The fifth spooky story in the 'Too Ghoul for School' series.