The Sickness

Possibly the darkest and most shocking six scary short stories yet ever created from bestselling author Stephen R. King. An instinct of passion and disrespect for decency and humanity fill this volume of life experiences we mostly keep in the back of our conscience, never wanting to bring to the forefront. Its truly sick!

Hiro Sheuri lives a semi-comfortable life in the middle of a forest inhabited by territorial Jinns, except for the minor annoyance of being possessed by a Vampire Spirit. He has an easy job, cleaning up after the creatures of the Secret World run riot in human cities. He must hide the existence of demons but they have started obliterating whole cities. His life becomes unwelcomingly interesting when he is attacked on what was supposed to be a straightforward job, by his enemy the A'richeils, hauntingly beautiful beings that feed on emotions. Hiro's world turns destructive and dark when he discovers the creatures are being infected by a sickness that is driving them insane. While Hiro investigates the cause of this sickness, a new dark power appears that has the potential to devastate both the human and Spirit world. Darkness and death, monsters and madness clash in a world gone insane.

The caller whispers, I know what you did, but what did Carter McCoy do? Someone has been watching, waiting, and he won't stop tormenting the college professor until his revenge is complete and Carter's life is destroyed. The mystery begins when Carter sleeps with a student named Leslie Steel. After Leslie disappears later that night and is presumed dead by the authorities, Carter's carefully constructed facade begins to crumble. Anonymous phone calls, cryptic letters, haunting song lyrics, a bloody murder weapon someone is trying to implicate Carter in Leslie's death. But who? With his life falling apart, Carter attempts to cover up a murder he doesn't remember committing. Unfortunately, Detective Bruce Kraft is always one step ahead. Handsome, rugged, and confident, Kraft is everything Carter McCoy is not namely, a good guy trapped in a crummy world. In Carter's cluttered mind, everyone is a suspect, but who killed Leslie Steel? Who is attacking his friends? Who kidnapped his girlfriend? Who is the mystery person known as Vengeance? With time running out, Carter is given one last chance to uncover the truth, leading to a rollercoaster conclusion full of shocking twists. Nothing is what it seems in Fuller's debut suspense novel.

A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

A harrowing chronicle by two leading historians, capturing in real time the events of a year marked by multiple devastations. When we look back at the year 2020, how can we describe what really happened? In A Deeper Sickness, award-winning historians Margaret Peacock and Erik Peterson set out to preserve what they call the “focused confusion,” and to probe deeper into what they consider the Four Pandemics that converged around the 12 astonishing months of 2020: • Disease • Disinformation • Poverty • Violence Drs. Peacock and Peterson use their interdisciplinary expertise to extend their analysis beyond the viral science, and instead into the social, political, and historical dimensions of this crisis. They consulted with dozens of experts and witnesses from a wide range of fields—from leading epidemiologists and health care workers to leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, district attorneys, political scientists, philosophers, and more. Their journey revealed a sick country that believed it was well, a violent nation that believed it was peaceful; one that mistook poverty for prosperity and accountability for rebellion. Organized into the journal-entries along with dozens of archival images, A Deeper Sickness will help readers sift through the chaos and misinformation that characterized those frantic days. It is both an unflinching indictment of a nation that is still reeling and a testament to the power of human resilience and collective memory. Readers can share their story and become a contributing author by visiting an interactive digital museum, where the authors have preserved dozens of more stories and interviews. Visit Margaret Peacock and Erik L. Peterson’s digital museum at adhc.lib.ua.edu/pandemicbook/.

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short, it is a synthesis.

“A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.” –Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.

"The only plan right now is to kill everybody" Joey Jordison, drummerIgnoring every rule in the book and more besides, Slipknot are a notoriously controversial band who combine a talent for outrage with their music. Reminiscent of the outlandishness of punk, 'nu metal' has become the fastest growing area in rock, with Slipknot selling over 2 million copies of their debut album. And yet Slipknot spit, swear and risk injury night after night in their extraordinary live performances. Incredibly, their apparel of masks and boiler suits, which they refuse to remove, means that their fans still do not know what they look like. Jason Arnopp, the first British journalist to interview Slipknot face to mask, describes the transformation of the Des Moines crew into unorthodox mega stars. Featuring an introduction by the legendary Gene Simmons of Kiss, this biography will be the first published on the band either in the UK or America and will include exclusive interviews and in-depth information on the mysterious nine masked men.

It's frustrating and a nuisance--and it can be a major obstacle to experiencing the joy of pregnancy. But morning sickness doesn't always strike in the morning, and for many women it doesn't even strike--it's an ever-present part of their pregnancy, with symptoms ranging from mild nausea and exhaustion to crippling depression and physical illness. We all know the standard suggestions--crackers and tea, Jell-O and ginger ale--but when they don't seem like enough, what can women really do to manage their symptoms and recover the happiness their pregnancy should bring? As debilitating as morning sickness is, we don't hear much about it. But finally, just when it seems as though there's nothing out there, women have somewhere to turn. Elizabeth Kaledin's The Morning Sickness Companion is a book by and for women suffering morning sickness. Morning sickness is a reality of pregnancy--many women are affected--and this book is dedicated to them. It fills a major void in pregnancy literature, providing a brief history of morning sickness, all the latest scientific thinking, research on its emotional toll, and lots of reassuring tips and advice from other women about what they ate, how sick they really were, sources of relief, and how to survive, since the fact is it is nearly inevitable. Engaging, warm, often funny, and always informative, The Morning Sickness Companion offers women who are suffering the wisdom and comfort they really need.