Occult Science

James Stark, a.k.a. Sandman Slim, crawled out of Hell, took bloody revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, and saved the world along the way. After that, what do you do for an encore? You take a lousy job tracking down monsters for money. It’s a depressing gig, but it pays for your beer and cigarettes. But in L.A., things can always get worse. Like when Lucifer comes to town to supervise his movie biography and drafts Stark as his bodyguard.

In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombies - people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti.

My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame - whatever that is. Truth be told, there's a lot I still don't know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England's wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician's apprentice. But even he doesn't have all the answers. Mostly I'm just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast.

In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.

The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis… vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced all over the world, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned… Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.

The Vampire Archives is the biggest, hungriest, undeadliest collection of vampire stories, as well as the most comprehensive bibliography of vampire fiction ever assembled. Dark, stormy, and delicious, once it sinks its teeth into you there’s no escape.

In a nearly deserted village off the coast of Canada, strange things are happening. A local hunter discovers bare footprints in the snow. The stray dog population has ceased to exist. And people are beginning to ask questions about the town’s recluse.

Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic field is real and has its equivalent in science's zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness.

In the darkest part of the solar system lies a wormhole. Nether. Astrophysicist Cammie Skoura has joined the first research team traveling to the Nether anomaly, eager to understand the mechanics of the wormhole and to explore its possibilities as a shortcut to Alpha Centauri. But another race of ancient beings has already been here—an impossibly long time ago—leaving remnants of their vast complexes and gigantic temples built for horrific beings beyond comprehension.

Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England's secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She tells herself she has fought her way there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI which left the doors to faerie country sealed, the study of its magic banned, and its victims cursed.

Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out 30-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s trying to establish herself as a major psychic operative in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top. Desperate to break the dead-end grind, Julie summons a guardian angel for a quick career boost. But when her power grab accidentally releases an elder god hell-bent on the annihilation of our galaxy, the body count rises rapidly.

In Prometheus and Atlas, Dr. Jorjani endeavors to deconstruct the nihilistic materialism and rootless rationalism of the modern West by showing how it was grounded on a dishonest suppression of the spectral and why it has a parasitic relationship with Abrahamic religious fundamentalism. Rejecting the marginalization of ESP and psychokinesis as “paranormal”, Prometheus and Atlas makes the case that psi is only “super natural” insofar as our reductive modern scientific models have occluded supernature for practical purposes.

Heather Morell is haunted. Otherworldly nightmares and monstrous hallucinations lurk around every corner, relics of childhood bereavement and schizophrenia. Until she meets Evelyn and Raine—a bad-tempered mage and her self-proclaimed bodyguard—and learns that she’s not insane after all. The monsters she sees are all too real, the god-thing in her nightmares is teaching her the secrets of creation, and her twin sister—the lost girl who supposedly never existed—might still be clinging on, a dwindling soul somewhere beyond the walls of reality, Outside.

It’s not true that dead men tell no tales. You can hear their haunting stories on the fog-shrouded banks of Newfoundland, in the aging brick manses of Upper and Lower Canada, on the wind-beaten flatlands of the prairies and among the misty mountains of the far west. This entertaining collection features tales of ghosts and other unexplained phenomena that have found their way into Canadian folklore.

Based on the largest near-death experience study in history, involving 3,000 people from diverse backgrounds and religious traditions, including nonbelievers, God and the Afterlife presents startling evidence that a supreme being exists - and there is amazing consistency about what he is like.

This provocative audiobook starts with an unlikely interview in which America’s foremost skeptic builds a seemingly persuasive case against the miraculous. But then Strobel travels the country to quiz scholars to see whether they can offer solid answers to atheist objections. Along the way, he encounters astounding accounts of healings and other phenomena that simply cannot be explained away by naturalistic causes. The audiobook features the results of exclusive new scientific polling that shows miracle accounts are much more common than people think.

When secret organizations are forced to merge after years of enmity and bloodshed, only one person has the fearsome powers - and the bureaucratic finesse - to get the job done. Facing her greatest challenge yet, Rook Myfanwy Thomas must broker a deal between two bitter adversaries: the Checquy - the centuries-old covert British organization that protects society from supernatural threats, and the Grafters - a centuries-old supernatural threat.

On the Day of Reckoning, the witches of Eileanan were outlawed - and violations of the new order were punishable by death. Eileanan’s Great Towers, once meccas of magic and learning, were left in ruins. And now, the entire land trembles in fear. Yet deep in the mountains, in the shadow of Dragonclaw, a young girl is being tutored in the old ways. Ignorant of her past, uncertain of her future, the foundling Isabeau will soon be forced down a dangerous path of prophecy, conspiracy, and magic.

In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences.

When Branson, Missouri, is hit with a death wave - four unsolved murders - it doesn't take an expert to realize that all is not well. But luckily for the locals, Anita Blake is an expert in the kinds of preternatural goings-on that have everyone spooked. And she's got an "in" with the creature that can make sense of the slayings - the sexy master vampire known as Jean-Claude.