Michael E. Bell

The Wandering Man strides through a world of abject desolation, all civilisation a hundred years dead. Kept alive by mutation and a burning desire to understand what happened, he seeks a purpose; a destiny that's worth fulfilling. The Chronicles of the Wandering Man is a narrative poem that asks us how far we might go, how determined we might be, in the face of a battle where all the stakes are irrelevant, and everything worth fighting for has already been lost. Winner of the prestigious Fanstory.com Seal of Quality award.

In the endless night of space, reality is not what it seems. The world's first viable off-world community, Onekka is a technical marvel - a space station that showcases the best in human achievement, a platform for research and development in the ultimate sterile environment. Jaqui Fennet has lived there since the station's inception, and played a key part in its growth. She knows Onekka like a mother knows her child, proud of every achievement. Or does she? When a strange disappearance leads Jaqui to question the innocence of her baby, reality starts to unravel. Each question she asks deepens her predicament, and soon she finds herself lost between the sudden violence of the present and a past she tried to forget. Strange voices accost her dreams with prophetic predictions, agents and investigators dog her heels, and nobody in her life seems trustworthy. In the end, Jaqui will be faced with two distinct possibilities: Is she going insane, or has she stumbled upon the biggest conspiracy in the history of the Earth? Onekka is a novel about what it means to be human, and whether understanding that is the key to enlightenment or oblivion.

For nineteenth-century New Englanders, "vampires" lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. This Wesleyan paperback edition includes an extensive preface by the author unveiling some of the new cases he's learned about since Food for the Dead was first published in 2001.