Occult Science

Scientists are beginning to discover what believers have known for a long time: the rewards that a religious life can provide. For millennia, people have turned to priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, and others to help them deal with issues of grief and loss, birth and death, morality and meaning. In this absorbing work, DeSteno reveals how numerous religious practices from around the world improve emotional and physical well-being.

When the goddess culture was stolen and buried, so too were women's rites of passage into our wild, intuitive femininity and maturity. With Maiden to Mother, Sarah Durham Wilson excavates these ancient rites, guiding us through a sacred and crucial initiation from the immature Maiden into the archetypal Mother—the powerful, safe, compassionate, full-bloom feminine life force that exists within all of us.

After his wife, Helen, is brazenly abducted before his eyes, Special Agent Pendergast furiously pursues the kidnappers, chasing them across the country and into Mexico. But then, things go terribly, tragically wrong; the kidnappers escape; and a shattered Pendergast retreats to his New York apartment and shuts out the world. But when a string of bizarre murders erupts across several Manhattan hotels, NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta asks his friend Pendergast for help.

For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can't quite control: He can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob - a young lawyer with a normal house, a normal fiancee, and an utterly normal life - hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his life's duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other. But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying the world...and for once, it isn't Charley's doing.

A magical serial killer is stalking the Occult town of Wrackton. Hypnotic whistling causes victims to chew their own tongues off, leading to the killer being dubbed the Whistler (original, right?). Enter the Undetectables, a detective agency run by three witches and a ghost in a cat costume (don't ask). They are hired to investigate the murders, but with their only case so far left unsolved, will they be up to the task?

This real-life The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the true story of a computer programmer who tracks paranormal events along a 3,000-mile stretch through the heart of America and is drawn deeper and deeper into a vast conspiracy.

Valroy will let nothing block his path to the Unseelie Crown. He is willing to stop at nothing to see both Tir n’Aill and Earth as his dominion, and he'll crush the self-righteous Seelie beneath his bootheels. He had wished for Abigail to stand beside him as his queen, but that went terribly wrong when she chose death over becoming his bride. It was a setback, certainly, but not one he could not overcome. Yet despite being wrenched from the song of life, Abigail returns to Tir n’Aill, only to be hunted by both Seelie and Unseelie alike.

On a misty cemetery world, three strangers are drawn together through mysterious circumstances. Each of them has a tale to tell of a narrow escape from death. Amid the toll of funerary bells and the creep and click of mortuary-servitors, the truth is confessed. But whose story can be trusted? Whose recollection is warped, even unto themselves?

As the daughter of Dracula, you would think I’d be born the perfect monster. You couldn’t be more wrong. As far as monsters go, I’m a screw up—if I’m not tripping over my own feet, I’m accidentally murdering someone (it’s a real issue, guys). Left with no choice, Dad decides to send me to Prodigium—otherwise known as Monster Academy—to train me on how to be a better monster. When bodies turn up on campus, I’m the prime suspect (not that I can blame them).

How do you fight a foe that is fast, smart, and relentless? How do you prepare for an enemy that doesn't know pain, fear, or mercy? How do you stop the dead from rising again, ripping apart everything you've tried to rebuild? John Talon and his crew race across the state, trying to stop the wave of zombie children from destroying the fragile communities struggling to rebuild after the Upheaval. John will learn the terrible lesson of sacrifice as he makes a final stand against the dead.

In a small Pennsylvania town there are only two ways those with secrets can escape from the unnameable horror of the ghostly 'readers', either face their deepest fears to survive, or kill themselves and take the secret to the grave. The 'readers' will only be released from their limbo if another soul takes their place; they will literally scare those with secrets to death.

Being a goddess is a lot less fun than you might think. Especially when you're only a half goddess, you only found out about it recently, and you still don't know what you're doing half the time. And when you've just used your not-so-reliable powers to burglarize the booby-trapped office of a vampire mob boss. Yeah, that part sucks. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for Cassandra Palmer, aka the Pythia, the freshly minted chief seer of the supernatural world.

After years of struggle, Layla Cassidy has finally mastered the dark powers that threatened to control her and turned them to good. She’s ready to fight, but the next battle will be her greatest test yet. The forces of Avalon are growing ever stronger, reinforcing their dominance with almighty displays of brutality. When Abaddon comes close to crushing Layla and her friends, it’s clear that the thunder of war is about to give way to lightning—and that they have no chance of surviving it alone. The final battle against Abaddon is drawing closer.

The gods are dying. But for one man, death is only the beginning. Murdered as a ritual sacrifice, amateur thief and professional charmer Dustin Graves mysteriously survives, finding himself gifted with strange, dark magic. Then more dead bodies turn up. Some are human, but one is a god of the old world, slain at his own doorstep.

Riptide, Oregon, 1983. A sleepy coastal town, where crime usually consists of underage drinking down at a Wolf Point bonfire. But then, strange things start happening. A human skeleton is unearthed in a local park, and mutilated animals begin appearing, seemingly sacrificed, on the town's beaches. The Mercy of the Tide follows four people drawn irrevocably together by a recent tragedy as they do their best to reclaim their lives - leading them all to a discovery that will change them and their town forever.

In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He reveals that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life, and what we do with our time together.

In this spellbinding novel, Lestat, rebel outlaw, addresses the tribe of vampires, telling us the mesmerizing story of how he became prince of the vampire world, and of the formation of the Blood Communion, and how his vision for the Children of the Universe to thrive as one, came to be.

The so-called "Bigfoot Bible". Ivan T. Sanderson, cryptozoologist (he coined the term) and paranormal and nature writer, methodically examines the wealth of reported sightings and evidence pertaining to the infamous hairy creatures that have been called names like Sasquatch, Yeti and Oh-Mah. This production focuses on the original work's North American material. Originally published by Chilton Company in Philadelphia in 1961.

In the US and Canada, spiritualism's primary focus was on communication between the living and the dead. The spiritual tradition traveled around the world, especially in Latin America, where it evolved in different ways. The Puerto Rican influence on modern Western magic is profound but largely unheralded. Beginning in the early 20th century, Puerto Rican immigrants to the US introduced espiritismo to the US spiritual landscape, strongly affecting the way magic was practiced. Hector Salva's book places Puerto Rican espiritismo in this broader perspective.

We are always attracting the love of others, or their criticism. We are drawing assistance and cooperation into the orbit of our personal experience, or else we are creating frustrations and disappointments. This is because we are always thinking. Mind is the most active thing in the universe. It works ceaselessly, fashioning thoughts into things.