Books like Willard by Stephen Gilbert

The Bell Jar is the only novel written by American poet Sylvia Plath. It is an intensely realistic and emotional record of a successful and talented young woman's descent into madness.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants -- by observing the rat. Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat stories -- everyone has one, it turns out -- Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win basic rights for tenants, Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses -- its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting yet always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.

When Billy forgets to follow specific instructions for care of his strange new pet, Gizmo, beastly gremlins pop up to wreak havoc on the town.

A surrealistic novel on a man who finds himself in a strange city, not knowing what he is doing there, but everyone seems to know him. What is more, he must be important because people ask him for favors. As he goes from encounter to encounter, the man discovers himself.

Snatched by Satan himself from the fiery stake of a Salem witch burning, a warlock lands right in the middle of 20th century Los Angeles. His age-old quest to bring about the reign of ultimate evil leaves a trail of blood and terror across America. Only one man can stop him, a witch hunter who has come from the past to stop the warlock and prevent the ultimate horror that would change the fate of the world. [Back cover synopsis]

The bizarre and the outrageous, the horrifying and the romantic, the make-believe and the futuristic are the special provinces of the fantasy film. In no other film category is the terrain so breathtakingly unfamiliar, and, to guide us through it, the authors of Cinema of the Fantastic spotlight fifteen classics of the genre. Featured are A Trip to the Moon, Metropolis, Freaks, King Kong, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Flash Gordon, Things to Come, The Thief of Bagdad, Beauty and the Beast, The Thing from Another World, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Forbidden Planet. Each film is generously illustrated with both studio stills and prints made from the original films. Each of these movie greats is a unique sample of the imaginary worlds of man as portrayed by the motion picture, from the early silents with their innovative trick photography to the monsters and necromancy of the thirties, the enchanted escapist worlds of Beauty and the Beast and The Thief of Bagdad, and the invasions from outer space that exploited postwar anxieties about the achievements of science. Here, too, are the great cult films now rarely available for viewing — Freaks, the Flash Gordon serials, and Mad Love. Steinbrunner and Goldblatt trace the development of the techniques from which this form developed and bring to life the inspiring creativity of the writers, producers, and directors, actors and actresses who established the cinema of the fantastic as a current movie staple. This book is a thorough and enthusiastic picture-and-text documentation of major milestones of this fabulous specialty of cinematic art.

The lush, over-the-top novelization of Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of the 1922 horror film, *Nosferatu*.