Book & Comic Book links

Books Online

Project Gutenberg - The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. Being a book freak, I absolutely love this cause, they are responsible for getting tons of entire books online and freely available to us every year. Search or browse for subject, author or title.

The Online Books Page - 15,000 free online books, you can search the listing, not sure about all of them, but many are in html format to read online, and the alice in wonderland ones even have pictures.

greylib.by.ru - Lots of free new books to download, most of the site is in Russian, but the book titles & authors are english as well as the books. The books are downloadable and you will need WinRar to unzip them. You can put the page on altavista translater to see what the menu links say, but then it messes up the english text.. you'll get the idea. The categories (and main menu links) are Sci-Fi Fantasy, Action, Mystery, Thrillers, childrens, & coming attractions. Some titles include Nancy A. Collins Sunglasses After Dark, J.R.R.Tolkien Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, Return the King, Dune, Terry Pratchet, The Princess Bride, Michael Crichton, The Godfather, Clive Barker, Poppy Z Brite, Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter, R. L. Stine, Wizard of Oz series, Whinnie-the-pooh, peter pan

Bartleby.com: great books online - Thousands of free books online, fiction, reference, non-fiction & verse. Some include: reference - thesarus, dictionaries, columbia ency, english usage, kings english, elements of style, art of writing, quotations, bibles, lit (shakespeare), grays anatomy, fannie farmer cookbook, Emily post Etiquette, verse (homer). Fiction - anthologies, volumes (poe, Arthur Quiller-Couch 1910 The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales, mark twain, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Virgina Woolf). Nonfiction - History, military, Eminent Victorians.

Check out the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader and the Microsoft Reader, both free and easy to use. You can buy eBooks for them on Barnes & Nobel (they have a Buffy the Vampire Slayer book for $1), Amazon, or other book sites, check those sites & Adobe for the free books too. There are quite a few good ones, like Dracula and other classics. I think I like the MS Reader better because you can copy the book files from computer to computer, whereas Adobe forces you to download it for each computer no matter what. They have cool features like bookmarking, and you can even highlight. Printing is an option by the book's author/publisher.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in wonderland with music and Talking - includes secrets of Lewis Carroll and a Mad Hatter Tea Party software kit you can buy for $20.

CyberRead - Tons of free books you can download including Grimm's Fairy Tales, Shakespeare, Twain, Doyle.

SurLaLune Fairy Tales - A portal to the realm of fairy tale and folklore studies featuring annotated fairy tales. Beautiful pictures, very clean design also.

Ring of Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Mythology - Sites with content on fairy tales, folk tales or mythology; stories, essays, discussion, creative writing, anything related to the literature of myths, fairy tales and folk tales.

About.com: British Literature - By period, there you should find Beowulf, Chaucer, medieval lit, mythology/folklore, Shakespeare, Poe.

About.com: Book Collecting

The BoOK oF nOt! - The greatest Malkavian hoax? (This is an FTP site, but it works)

The Faerie Queene

Authors

Charles Addams - (1912-1988) This is a nice short life bio of the creator of The Addams Family, yet another great thing to come out of NJ, he was born in Westfield, NJ.

Poppy Z Brite official site - she is a gothic fiction erotica author, her tales set in New Orleans.

Nancy A. Collins - Author of Sunglasses After Dark, the first of a series about a vampire Sonja Blue. This site is for it's 10th anniversary edition.

Christa Faust - official site, gothic fiction

The Works of Edward Gorey - spooky gothic victorian beautiful black & white illustrations accompany Gorey's satiric writing. This site has articles, excerpts, lots of illustrations including covers of almost all his books, an interview, profile, bibliography, an exibit of 60 paperback covers he illustrated fromm 1953-1960. His books look like childrens books in format and are often mis filed in bookstores (when I worked for Borders they were in the humor/cartoons section, amazon.com has most listed as childrens books). Reccommended if you like Nightmare Before Christmas, JTHM, the Addams Family, and Poe. This is a quote supposedly by Gorey I found on a website: "A lot of my books I've intended for children primarily, but nobody would ever publish them as children's books. I don't know many children. And I don't know if I really remember what it was like being a child. I use children a lot because they're so vulnerable. Children are pathetic and quite frequently not terribly likeable. I don't really know any babies. I've never known any babies."

Gorey's Dark Demented Gothic Alphabet - A-Z it's the best alphabet I've seen.

A Tribute to Edward Gorey - Scans from some of his books.

The Edward Gorey Bibliography - very good complete bib, lists him as author, as contributor, periodicals, sound recordings, a foreign bib, some rare pictures by him, translations of the French verses from The Listing Attic, and a Gorey FAQ.

Caitlin R. Kiernan - official site, gothic fiction

Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher - Great Poe site: Poe's Incomplete Works, Poe's Favorite Essays and Criticisms, Poe's Favorite Felines, Poe's Favorite Flics, Poe's Favorite Haunts, Poe's Favorite Songs, Poe's Pet Raven, Poe's Virtual Library.

Edgar Allan Poe - this site has a short bio, all online works available, and a few links.

Anne Rice - official site

Publishers, Shops, Book info

Desert Island Books - Their Dracula Library promotes the study of Dracula, vampirism, and the works of Bram Stoker.

Tempest Books - specializing in books for history buffs, re-enactors and researchers. Based in Ontario, Canada.

Miscellaneous

Dark Side of the Net - Dark and Gothic Comics, Dark Literature

Once Upon A Time... - A list of books based on fairy tales, many of them are romance novels, each title has next to it the fairy tale it's about, since you can't always tell from titles.

Serialkillers.net - The Serial Killer Info Site, no sensationalism, no gore. Victim Awareness, Criminal Profiling, forensics, articles, case studies, interviews, book reviews.

Book Happy - World of weird books, magazine about collecting weird books old and new, complete with catalog, it's also a print magazine.

The Weird Fiction Research Library - I'm not sure where this really should go, but it has a Glossary of Cthulhu Mythos Terms Compiled by Chris Jarocha-Ernst, a searchable database of nearly all horror/weird fiction books published since 1991, and coming soon will be an on-line guide to all of the books which were in H. P. Lovecraft's personal library.

Comic Books

MC Comics - This is where I get all my smutty comics, located at 22 Old Matawan Rd, Old Bridge, NJ. (732)238-5969.

OPi8.com: New Dark Culture - This should maybe go with art, but it is comics so it can go here. There are some gothy cool original comics here free and online. Check out Writhe & Shine especially.

About.com: Comic Book Collecting

Comic Book Publishers

5th Panel Comics - Titles such as Gothic, Pieces, Razarwire, Teen-age angst, futuristic vampires, cyber-punk warriors, & nightmare realms type comics.

Boneyard Press - alternative publishing house promoting counter culture material. One of the first underground comic publishers I started reading, they have a few books about Jeffry Dahmer.

Dark Horse Comics - Titles: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ghost, Grendel, Madman, Star Wars, Magic The Gathering, Dirty Pair, Oh My Goddess, Alien, Preditor.

DC/Vertigo Comics - Books of Magic, Books of Faerie, Sandman, Preacher, Vamps. Lots of dark gothic titles.

Eros Comics - lots of good smutty comics, must be 18 and older to view this site. Great online catalog, you get to see an entire page from each comic.

Fantagraphics - alternative comics, lots of sick stuff, they have some of the best comics ever produced including Frank by Jim Woodring, Eightball, R. Crumb books, Trailer Trash by Roy Thompkins, Reed Waller's Omaha the Cat Dancer.

Innervision Comics - They publish The Legend of Dracula, Dr. Shroud Vampire Killer, Black Staff, Brother Angel. I'm not that familiar with their stuff but the artowork is great on most of their titles.

Sirius Comics - Dawn, Chi-Chian (Voltaire), Poison Elves, Animal Mystic, Safety Belt Man, Scary Godmother, Enchanted. Lots of dark gothic titles.

Slave Labor Graphics - publish some of my favorite gothy (& non gothy) titles: Lenore, Gloom Cookie, Spookgirl, the Gruesome Alphabet, JTHM.

Todd McFarlane - creator of Spawn, toys & comics.

Spumco - John K's current thing, legendary creator of Ren & Stimpy.

Comic Titles/Authors/Artists/Characters

Milk & Cheese - Evan Dorkin's hysterical invention of dairy products gone bad.

Poison Elves - one of my faves

Omaha the Cat Dancer/Reed Waller - This is one of my favorite comics, but it's done.

Marvel pictures FTP - lots of nice pictures of all the Marvel super boys and girls.

SpookyLand - Home of Roman Dirge and his titles Lenore, Monsters in my Tummy, and whatever disturbing children's stories he pops out. Not to be missed.

Mike Diana - This brilliant but controversial artist/author was arrested on charges of obsenity in Florida for his art. This site has good info on him and his saga. However, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund links are outdated, they're here now.

Other

Art Comics

Earl and Maceda's Cartoon Page - The Saddest Place on Earth - ...a wondrous collection of disturbed, puzzling, and sometimes inexplicable comic-strip art...