Beyond Brain Death offers a provocative challenge to one of the most widely accepted conclusions of contemporary bioethics: the position that brain death marks the death of the human person. Eleven chapters by physicians, philosophers, and theologians present the case against brain-based criteria for human death. Each author believes that this position calls into question the moral acceptability of the transplantation of unpaired vital organs from brain-dead patients who have continuing function of the circulatory system. One strength of the book is its international approach to the...

Horror poems should invade the ordinariness of the day and allow the reader to sense the chill of the uncanny. They should form dream images that haunt during sleep. This broad collection of horror poetry ranges in subject matter from death to ghosts, from dark corners of the human psyche and human behavior to Lovecraftian monsters. They will haunt and they will cling to the mind like an ancient beast's tentacles. Be careful looking over your shoulder if you feel fingers touch it--you may find that the fingers are fleshless but the claws sharp.

From Field to Thicket won the 2006 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Award of the North Carolina Writers' Network. Jim Clark, Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Barton College in Wilson, NC, says, ""Mortality haunts these poems of love, family, friendship, and betrayal. Well-crafted but with a casual but elegant formality, they set the scalpel to our conflicted humanity, asking the big questions that don't always have comforting answers."

When Summer Ends, The Dark Days Begin

Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

Matthew 12:32

Jeffrey Conley sits beside Aunt Jenny at Sunday evening service, the hard wooden bench serving as security in the midst of chaos. He has come home - to a land of loss. Parents, dead. Grandparents, dead. Twin brother, dead two hours after birth. Great-aunts, great-uncles, Aunt Jenny's husband Lawton, all...

It is a lazy summer day in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee; much like the day before, and the day before that. Everything seems normal - at least on the surface; like an idyllic, pastoral painting; the sky dyed with pastels of blue and white, the ground carpeted with dark green fescue and bluegrass, a clapboard farmhouse resting on top of a hill, sugar maples, oaks and Eastern red cedars providing welcome shade from the heat of a Tennessee summer sun. You can almost see moving images of little children running barefoot through the grass; an era before tweeting and texting and...

Gwyn Paisley sleeps by day, and travels by night. She always has. When she crashes her car during a snowstorm and strands herself in the forest, she holds little hope for rescue. Gwyn does not have friends. She only has toys...and none of those toys would answer a call for help. Luckily for her, Jack and Monica Glass see the wreck and invite this stranger into their home. Something immediately appears wrong with Ms. Paisley, who ducks by mirrors and declines to use silver utensils. But when nightmares start to haunt the waking, is Ms. Paisley to blame? Monica would like to say so, but Gwyn is...