In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the character of the South, and even its persistence as a distinct region, was an open question. During Reconstruction, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South’s image, romanticizing the Lost ...

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death. The notorious episode was...

The smuggling ring is a big case…‪…that got his partner killed.‪How will Simon go on without her?‪In 2029 Kansas City, Master Detective John Simon is a tough cop with a disdain for technology. His new movie quoting partner doesn’t make him happy. How can you trust a robot?‪And what’s with the name…‪…Lucas George?‪Simon and Lucas don’t have time for squabbles. Something isn’t right about this case. There’s more to it than smuggling, but they d...

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen...

Vivid images of the apocalypse proliferate throughout contemporary cinema, which pictures the death of civilization in wildly different ways. Some films imagine a future where humanity is wiped out entirely, while others envision humans as an endangered species, enslaved by alien invaders or hunted by zombie hordes.This book provides a lively overview of apocalypse cinema, including alien invasions, nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions, climate change, and terrifying plagues. ...

"A mighty slab of a book in which Stephen covers an awful lot of ground with his writings on film and TV, directors, writers, books, musicians, record labels and so on... from Bagpuss to Jane Weaver, The Eccentronic Research Council to John Carpenter, Excalibur, Quatermass, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, Delia Derbyshire, Cosey Fanni Tutti and so much more. If you know about Stephen and his fine work you won't be hesitating to pick up a copy of this mighty tome." Neil Mason, Moonbuilding...

On the night of 22–23 April 1918 the Royal Navy carried out a raid on the German held ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend – Operation Z-O.Under the cover of clouds and smoke, over 70 ships and an assault force of 1,800 Royal Marines embarked on a daring mission which involved a vicious battle of incredible intensity. However, despite the gallant and courageous efforts of the attackers, 11 of whom were later awarded the Victoria Cross, the raid was only partly successful....

A Year In The Country: Wyrd Explorations collects writing from the first decade of the A Year In The Country project, which has explored and documented the interconnected rise of interest in the wyrd, eerie and re-enchanted landscape, folk horror, the further reaches of folk music and the parallel worlds of hauntology. The book includes a selection of revised and at times extended writing from the first five A Year In The Country non-fiction books and the first ten years of posts on the pr...

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds intertwines and cross pollinates the A Year In The Country project's core exploration of wyrd and hauntological culture with journeys to far off lands and seeks out hidden links in the cultural undergrowth. Amongst other "far off lands" of films and music etc it wanders to the Winter of Discontent witchcraft battles of the 1979 television adaptation of M.R. James' Casting the Runes and the timeslip folk horror Cold War dread of Hammer House of Mystery an...

The book undertakes in-depth studies of films, television programmes and documentaries and wanders amongst depictions of rural areas where normality, reality and conventions fall away and the landscape becomes deeply imbued with hidden, layered and at times dreamlike stories, taking in modern-day reinterpretations of traditional myth and folklore and work that has become semi-obscured from view through being unofficially available or otherwise having become partly hidden away. It explores ...

More than any other filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah opened the door for graphic violence in movies. In this book, Stephen Prince explains the rise of explicit violence in the American cinema, its social effects, and the relation of contemporary ultraviolence to the radical, humanistic filmmaking that Peckinpah practiced.Prince demonstrates Peckinpah's complex approach to screen violence and shows him as a serious artist whose work was tied to the social and political upheavals of the 1960...

Lost Transmissions weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television’s dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds. It is a recording of a personal journey that delves amongst both the esoteric fringes and mainstream of culture, and which at times holds a shadowed scrying mirror up to the modern world and some of its ills, while also reflectin...