Books worth a second look

Short and Twisted 2010

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House of Horror Best of 2009 Anthology

300 Pages of pure terror from within the walls of the House of Horror. Includes stroies, poetry, artwork,interviews and book reviews. Also includes the third appeareance of my short story The Cat called Follow Me.

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'I Heard You Paint Houses' 

Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa

Written by Charles Brandt

'I heard you paint houses' are the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank 'the Irishman' Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the wall and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the Mob, and for his friend Hoffa. Sheeran learned to kill in the US Army, where he saw an astonishing 411 days of active combat during World War 2. After returning home he became a hustler and a hit man, working for legendary crime boss Russell Bufalino. Eventually Sheeran would rise to a position of such prominence that he was named as one of only two non-Italians on a list of the twenty-six most wanted Mob figures.When Bufalino ordered Sheeran to kill Hoffa, the Irishman did the deed, knowing that if he refused, he would have been killed himself. Sheeran's important and fascinating story includes brand new information on other famous murders, and provides rare insight to an infamous chapter in US and Mafia history.

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Kingdom of Fear

Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

By Hunter S. Thompson

‘I like this book and I especially like the title. Only a fool or a whore would call it anything else’

Hunter S. Thompson

Be Afraid. Hunter S. Thompson – hellraising author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, high priest of hedonism and supreme chronicler of the American nightmare – tells the uncensored story of a life dedicated to excess in this outrageous autobiography.

Here, for the first time, the godfather of Gonzo journalism takes on the subject no one else could handle: himself. It’s a tale of fast living, hard drinking, sharp writing and ingesting most illegal substances known to humanity. Of crazed road trips, girls, guns, bikes, brushes with the law and accidentally being accused of trying to kill Jack Nicholson. And it’s an explosive, no-holds-barred assassination of America today. Read it and feel the fear …

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Leviathan: the unauthorised biography of Sydney

by John Birmingham

'To peer deeply into this ghost city, the one lying beneath the surface, is to understand that Sydney has a soul and that it is a very dark place indeed.'Beneath the shining harbour, amid the towers of global greed and deep inside the bad-drugs madness of the suburban wastelands, lies Sydney's shadow history. Terrifying tsunamis, corpse-robbing morgue staff, killer cops, neo-Nazis, power junkies and bumbling SWOS teams electrify this epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core. Birmingham drills beneath the cover story of a successful multicultural metropolis and melts the boundaries between past and present to reveal a ghost city beneath the surface of concrete and glass. In Birmingham's alternative history of Sydney, the yawning chasm between the megarich and the lumpen masses is as evident in the insane wealth of the new elites as it was in the head-spinning rapacity of the NSW Rum Corps. This is a city shattered by the nexus between government, big money and the underworld, where the glittering prizes go to the strong, not the just. Combining intensive research with the pace of a techo-thriller, John Birmingham creates a rich portrait of a city too dazzled by its own gorgeous reflection to care much for what lies at its dark, corrupted heart. Illuminated by wild flashes of black humour, violent, ghoulish and utterly compelling, Leviathan is history for the Tarantino generation.

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What We Believe But Cannot Prove:

Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty

by John Brockman 

More than one hundred of the world's leading thinkers write about things they believe in, despite the absence of concrete proof Scientific theory, more often than not, is born of bold assumption, disparate bits of unconnected evidence, and educated leaps of faith. Some of the most potent beliefs among brilliant minds are based on supposition alone -- yet that is enough to push those minds toward making the theory viable. Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of "Edge" (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors. Thought-provoking and hugely compelling, this collection of bite-size thought-experiments is a fascinating insight into the instinctive beliefs of some of the most brilliant minds today.

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