Monster In The Park

Muddy prints trail down the soccer field and over the tennis court. They're stamped down the sidewalk and circle around the park. So great is the mess! So large are the marks! I fear there must be a monster in the park! Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Looking Glass Library is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

When she finds large muddy footprints in the city park, a little girl investigates and tracks the monster to it's lair.

"Monster play. Monster 'Yay!' Monster Park is fun all day."--Back cover.

When a worldwide monster invasion brings civilization to a crashing, blood-soaked halt and puts humanity on the Endangered Species list in the space of a single afternoon, 23-year-old misanthrope Fay Tucker must set out across the ruins of northeast Ohio in search of her little sister Daisy. To see her mission through, the embittered wannabe hermit is forced to associate with “those treacherous simians” (a.k.a. human beings) and soon becomes the nucleus of a small group of equally dysfunctional young women. As their quest takes them from the corpse-strewn streets of suburbia to the red-litten alleys of a city ablaze with unholy fire, from a harpy-besieged National Guard base to an amusement park turned ogre-run death camp, the women are forced to contend with both demons within and monsters without, and Fay finds herself forming bonds with her allies that may prove too strong for even her prickly soul to resist. If, that is, she—and they—can stay alive that long.

This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are ‘managed’ in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

Monster Cinema introduces readers to a vast menagerie of movie monsters, from gigantic beasts to microscopic parasites, from grotesque demons to normal-looking serial killers. Film expert Barry Keith Grant considers what each type of movie monster might reveal about how we regard the natural, the supernatural, and the human.

A visually stunning road trip through pro baseball’s wacky, wondrous, and revered ballpark attractions Exploding scoreboards, treetop seats, and neon skylines are just three of the more than 100 ballpark design features, field eccentricities, historic displays, traditions, concession items, and even super-fans and mascots profiled in this armchair baseball journey. Combining engaging storytelling with fun sidebars and beautiful color photos, author Josh Pahigian captures the essence of each ballpark treasure—from the retractable lighthouse at the Portland Sea Dogs’ Hadlock Field to the Sausage Race at the Brewers’ Miller Park to Fenway Park’s Green Monster and even to the delicious biscuits served by the aptly named Montgomery Biscuits. From the Rookie Leagues to the Majors, there are more than 250 professional baseball parks in the United States where fans partake in special game-day rituals, eat unique foods, laugh along with the zany mascot, marvel at the park’s special features, and revel in a communal experience that removes them for a few hours from life’s daily grind. The Amazing Baseball Adventure brings to life the very best of these cherished ballpark features, the ones that motivate fans to return again and again to baseball cathedrals large and small.