There's trouble in store for Brenda in this second outing for Whitby's fearless supernatural investigators. Poison pen letters are flying about and the garden furniture at the Hotel Miramar seems to be possessed. Not only that, but there are old flames re-igniting and deadly deities from the dawn of time making themselves apparent! Brenda has no choice but to pull herself back together... quite literally!
Brenda and Effie have made a brief escape from Whitby and are whooping it up on the continent. A brief encounter with a Parisian Phantom and his hunchbacked boyfriend sends the pair hurrying back to the North Yorkshire coast, where they have a whole new set of menaces to contend with. Here come the ineffable forces of darkness! Vengeful vampires! The long-dead Bronte sisters! And... a Panda!
An essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction. Attention pays. In today's online economy it has become a commodity to be bought and sold. Bombarding us with free smartphone apps and news websites, developers and advertisers have turned what and how focus our attention into the world's fastest growing industry. In exchange for our attention, information and entertainment is ever at our fingertips. But at what cost? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell asks what has been lost in this trade off. How can we reclaim our attention? In a world of infinite distraction, how can attention become radical?
In this new volume of adventures for Brenda and Effie we do battle with vampires and mummies and haunted cats! We uncover the mystery of both Elephant Men and meet Tolstoy the Long-Eared Bat out of Hell! Brenda also gets to go back to her roots with Baron Frankenstein, and we even share an investigation at the Christmas Hotel with the famous Sherlock Holmes. Whitby has never felt so hectic, and everyone here is very glad to welcome you back..!
Frank Lurcher and Tolstoy the Long-Eared Bat! Twenty years ago they were the biggest names in ventriloquism with their TV show. But all good things come to an end. Now, Frank Lurcher's a washed-out, grumpy has-been and his scraggy puppet Tolstoy is stuffed away in a trunk in the loft. But trouble is brewing. Frank suddenly declares that his teenage son, Jason, must follow in the family tradition and get a puppet of his own! But someone's got a shrewd idea who that puppet should be. Someone with green eyes, moth-eaten velvety wings, a snarling snout and two extra-large pointy ears. . . Tolstoy is making a comeback - with Jason as his new chosen puppeteer. He's out for another shot at TV superstardom, and a gruesome revenge on the showbiz puppets and people that wronged him in the past. Can Jason fight his evil controlling power? Will the lovely Lisa Turmoil, hair-stylist to the stars, help him in his battle - or just go off and give someone a perm? And if you cook a puppet ostrich in a microwave oven, does it count as murder? Paul Magrs' hilarious second novel for Simon & Schuster is for twisted children of all ages.
A new mystery bookstore has opened up in Whitby and a particular Edwardian lady novelist is suddenly all the rage. Brenda and Effie's investigations draw them away from vampire-infested Whitby into a terrifying and primordial alien land... where something very alarming indeed happens to Effie...
This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it's how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time which tells us about how Bell got here. Not the whole story, but her story.
Penny has fled to the town that seems like a Mecca to all Goths. But Whitby is rather more than a quaint seaside resort. This is the place where Brenda and Effie have pledged to protect all mankind from demonic forces. This season they've got their work cut out for them, with the arrival of a film crew set upon remaking a cursed horror classic. Among their cast is the weirdly ageless Karla Sorenson. She's a femme fatale with a dodgy past and long-held grudges of a spooky kind...
A charming collection of quotes about cats from our favourite authors, accompanied by artwork in the trademark style of Paul Magrs (author of The Panda, the Cat and the Dreadful Teddy).
Forty Writers Share Advice and Exercises for Poetry and Prose
A comprehensive guide for improving your creative writing. This coursebook takes aspiring writers through three stages of practice: gathering, shaping, and finishing. Throughout exercises and activities encourage writers to develop their skills.
It was a kind of portal - a portal into the myths of the ancient world . . . Everyone knows the Doctor loves museums (it's his way of keeping score). But when Jo Grant and the Doctor visit the British Museum in London, they might have got more than they bargained for. A mysterious object is revealed, which grants those who touch it strange visions of Greek Myths. Gods, warriors and monsters are contained within this device, which its discover calls the mythoscope. But there is something sinister at play. A powerful influence seems to be controlling the mythoscope . . . mastering it. Jo and the Doctor must enter the mythoscope to face an old and terrible enemy - bargaining with Zeus, battling dragons and journeying into the underworld. As dangers beset them on all sides, only an object of wondrous power can save them from total destruction . . .
Doctor Who is the longest running sci-fi show in the world, and a flagship BBC property. First appearing on air in 1963, it follows the adventures of the Doctor, a Time Lord who travels through time and space, fighting alien monsters and saving the universe.
Iris is an enigma... She's an enigma wrapped in a mystery. With a shapeless, tasteless hat clamped to her head. She's an enigma wrapped in a mystery, with a shapeless, tasteless hat clamped her head and she's puffing on a gold-tipped black Sobranie.And she drives a big red double-decker bus, ostensibly bound for Putney Common. Except it's not. She's been to Putney Common precisely once and that was by accident. That was when she picked up Tom, who is now her best friend.Together they journey through the multiverse: boozing and fighting; righting wrongs and buggering things up again. Here, in their first exciting anthology of ludicrous adventures they meet monsters, klllers, ambassadors, insect-things, detectives, weirdos, psychics, fiends and sundry perverts.
Arriving on the almost impossibly ancient planet of Hyspero, a world where magic and danger walk hand in hand, the Doctor and Sam are caught up in a bizarre struggle for survival.Hyspero has been ruled for thousands of years by the Scarlet Empresses, creatures of dangerous powers -- powers that a member of the Doctor's own race is keen to possess herself; the eccentric time traveler and philanderer Iris Wildthyme.The Doctor and Sam themselves must escape the clutches of the dying Scarlet Empress, and they encounter many strange creatures on their travels -- bearded ladies, humanoid mock turtles, transvestite cyborgs and many more -- but in a land where the magical is possible, is anything really as it seems?
With the scale and scope of the great science fiction epics, Lost on Mars tells the story of Lora and her family, third generation human settlers on the red planet who are strugging to survive in incredible circumstances.
After a long and eventful life, Brenda has settled here in Whitby, to run a guest house by the sea. But it isn't long before she has teamed up with Effie, the white witch from the antiques shop next door. Together they get themselves involved in a series of supernatural investigations including a visit to the Deadly Boutique and a romantic run-in with a certain immortal Count...
The surely soon-to-be million-copy bestselling sort-of inspirational parody..
It's the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who this November (as well as Iris's 15th anniversary since her first appearance in print, in a Doctor Who novel!)Each post card is a very silly parody of a different Doctor Who story - adding up to 50 in all. It's very silly, often rude and hopefully funny. It is a lovely little gifty hardback.
For the Doctor, this was his first visit to the prince of thieves. For Robin, it's been a long time coming . . .Robin Hood is disenchanted. Maid Marion has left, the Merry Men have settled down, and the legend of the Doctor has retreated deep into the shadows of Sherwood Forest.But the Doctor is back! (Although this is his first visit - time travel does strange things to a story.) The poor are fed, and the gang are together again.That is until a desperate King John calls on the deadliest alien force at the nobilities' the mysterious, shape-shifting Mother Maudlin .As dark magic is spun, heroes are captured, and the Doctor must find a way to save the Kingdom.It's time for the return of the Lionheart . . .
Tiermann's World: a planet covered in wintry woods and roamed by sabre-toothed tigers and other savage beasts. The Doctor is here to warn Professor Tiermann, his wife and their son that a terrible danger is on its way. The Tiermanns live in luxury, in a fantastic, futuristic, fully-automated Dreamhome, under an impenetrable force shield. But that won't protect them from the Voracious Craw. A gigantic and extremely hungry alien creature is heading remorselessly towards their home. When it gets there everything will be devoured. Can they get away in time? With the force shield cracking up, and the Dreamhome itself deciding who should or should not leave, things are looking desperate...
In this volume: Iris and her various friends are stranded on the perplexing and magical world of Hyspero. Ruled over by the all-knowing and all-powerful Scarlet Empress, this is a place where seemingly anything can happen. As Iris and her faithful companion, Panda, are drawn into a nightmarish subterranean adventure, their friends are captured by the guards of the Empress herself for nefarious reasons of her own. Iris descends into memories of her bizarre childhood in a universe far from here... a dreadful place that the despicable poet Anthony Marvelle is trying to unleash, convinced that great riches lie in that mythical region known only as the Obverse...Friends old and new are along for the ride — including Barbra the brave vending machine, Jenny the ex-traffic warden and Kelly, the Goth girl from the bookshop who discovers she has a strange destiny as the mystical key to unlocking the dimensions. Hyspero itself awakens memories inside her... of a magical book she once read as a child... or, perhaps a book in which she once had her own adventures...And meanwhile on Earth — two or three dimensions to the left, in the realm of fictionality — Iris's fans and fanfic writers are gathering and quibbling at the curious turn the lady's adventures are taking...
Trouble has a way of finding Brenda and Effie. Whether it's long-held secrets coming out on the local radio phone-in, or ancient superheroes meeting a grisly end at the Christmas Hotel, there's always some new devilment to deal with. And then - to make matters worse - here comes Frank! Brenda's first and most notorious gentleman friend...
