La Belle Bête starts off as the three main characters return home on a train. Immediately, the characters’ relationships with one another, as well as their physical beauty as a status, are established. As they return home, their daily activities reveal even more of their living situation with one another, as Isabelle-Marie is the Cinderella of the family, working hard and being neglected, while Louise fawns over her beloved beautiful Patrice. Patrice is so incompetent from his constant dependence on his mother, that he can do nothing but accept her attention. Eventually, Louise announces that she needs to travel to pick up farm equipment for their vast land, and leaves Patrice and Isabelle-Marie. Isabelle-Marie continues her distaste for her brother, and as her mother is no longer there to support Patrice, she takes the opportunity to let him starve to release her anger and jealously towards him As she grows to pity his incompetence and dependency on Louise, Isabelle-Marie begins to care for him ever so slightly. When Louise returns, she brings with her Lanz, who becomes the new controlling figure over the family. Patrice rejoices and cleaves to his mother, but she can no longer respond with her attention as she is consumed by her own relationship with Lanz. As Lanz brings Louise further and further from her children, Patrice spirals into deterioration while Isabelle-Marie relishes in her new found freedom. As Isabelle-Marie becomes more upbeat, she learns to care for Patrice, as well as meets her lover Michael, who she convinces to love her by lying about her beauty . From here the story splits into two. On one side of life, Isabelle-Marie begins her life with the blind Michael, while Patrice is continued to be neglected as Lanz demands the attention of Louise. Both children’s’ stories end in despair as Michael eventually regains his vision and comes to terms with the ugliness of Isabelle-Marie and consequently, their newborn child Anne. He abandons both of them and disappears from their lives. As the torn spirit of Isabelle-Marie returns to her unwanted home, she finds that Louise is being controlled by Lanz, and has chosen him over Patrice. Her new found anger towards outer beauty drives her to push Patrice’s face into a pot of boiling water, thus bringing his now beast-like face to her lowly status. Patrice cries to his mother, and she makes the ultimate choice to live her life with Lanz, abandoning Patrice entirely (pg 52). Patrice is sent to an insane asylum by Louise, who becomes fed up with his incompetence, however he escapes shortly afterwards. As their lives quickly become disillusioned, Isabelle-Marie ends up setting fire to the farm. Louise, who has slowly been cracking under the loss of her beautiful child, and the control – and eventual death - of her husband is lost in the fire. Isabelle-Marie commits suicide as she pushes her child off the train tracks that once brought her home, as Patrice drowns himself when he sees his hideous face in the reflection of a lake.

La Belle Bête

The novel begins in November 1999 with Rosemary Woodhouse waking up in a long term care facility after the last member of the coven from the first novel is killed in a car accident. She learns that she has been in a coma since 1973, the result of a spell cast on her by the coven when they discovered that she planned to remove her son Andy from their influence. Rosemary immediately becomes a national sensation after waking up from such a long coma. In her absence, Andy was raised by Minnie and Roman Castevet, the leaders of the coven. Andy is now 33, the same age as Jesus is said to have been when he died -- he also has twelve assistants and a girlfriend called Judith S. Kharyat who threatens to reveal his parentage and is spectacularly murdered with 30 silver knives. He is the leader of a charitable foundation with a worldwide influence. Rosemary immediately suspects that Andy''s foundation has a demonic purpose, but he reassures her that he has fought his evil side, and is trying to do good work. Supporters wear pins that say "I (heart) Andy" -- in fact, this is the first thing Rosemary sees when she wakes -- and after Rosemary''s story becomes known, they begin wearing "I (heart) Rosemary" pins as well. Andy consorts with Republican Party members and members of the Religious Right, who want him to endorse a slightly retarded millionaire for President. Throughout the book, various characters playfully mention the riddle "roast mules",often out of context or à propos of nothing. The foundation has distributed candles worldwide with the intention that they be lit at midnight on New Year''s Eve to help usher in the year 2000. Rosemary gradually comes to suspect that all is not right with the candles, but her concerns fall on deaf ears. In the climax of the book, the candles release a deadly virus which causes people to disintegrate into dust particles. Andy''s real father returns for a visit, and takes Rosemary with him to Hell. After being taken to Hell, Rosemary wakes up in bed with her husband Guy and finds that it is 1965 again. The events of the entire first book and nearly all of the sequel are revealed to have been a vivid dream of Rosemary''s. Even the Bramford, the apartment building where Guy and Rosemary lived in the first book, was revealed to be a creation of Rosemary''s mind after reading Bram Stoker''s book, Dracula. Rosemary then receives a call from her friend Edward Hutchins (who in the first book was killed to prevent his revealing the coven''s existence). He offers her and Guy a rent-free apartment in the Dakota Apartments (the model for the Bramford) for a year. Hutch then makes a comment about "roast mules", and about the candle lighting, causing Rosemary to sense danger. Guy questions why she would want to turn down a chance to live at the Dakota, but Rosemary takes Hutch''s remarks seriously as a warning.

Son of Rosemary

Edwer Thissell, the new consul from Earth to the planet Sirene, has trouble adjusting to the local culture. The Sirenese cover their faces with exquisitely crafted masks that indicate their social status or strakh. They also communicate by singing, accompanying themselves with one of a dozen musical instruments, selected based on the social situation. Furthermore, errors of etiquette may prove fatal. Thissell is a maladroit musician and lacks confidence in the alien society, so he is forced to wear a lowly Moon Moth mask. One day, he receives an alert to arrest a notorious assassin named Haxo Angmark, who is due on the next starship. Thissell, however, gets the message too late. He races to the spaceport, but Angmark, thoroughly comfortable with Sirenese customs, has already landed and disappeared. Thissell commits a number of serious social blunders in his haste to reach the spaceport and in enquiring after Angmark. The next morning, Thissell is shown the body of an outlander. He concludes that, since the fugitive would be unable to pass himself off as a native, Angmark must have killed and taken the place of one of the handful of expatriates on the planet. But since even they wear masks, how is Thissell to know which one? Eventually, Thissell solves the mystery by borrowing a slave from each of the suspects and determining their masters'' mask preferences before and after Angmark''s arrival. He succeeds in identifying his quarry, but is captured and forced to walk unmasked in public (the ultimate impropriety to the natives), while Angmark masquerades as Thissell, even to wearing his Moon Moth mask. However, the Sirenese turn on Angmark and kill him for the perversion of unmasking another man and, ironically, for Thissell''s previous gaffes. Thinking quickly, Thissell cleverly represents his humiliation as an act of unsurpassed bravery, asking if any present would be willing to be so shamed in order to destroy his enemy. With his new-found confidence, Thissell receives offers of gifts (the acceptance of which would enhance the prestige of both the giver and the recipient). He first goes with a mask maker to procure a covering more befitting his lofty new strakh.

The Moon Moth

Cassie and the Animorphs discover from Ax and Tobias that the Yeerks have set up a dummy logging company, called Dapsen Logging Company, in the woods. The Yeerks want to destroy the forest in order to find the "Andalite bandits," who they believe to be living there. The Animorphs go to check it out, but are discovered, chased away, and shot at. Cassie and her father later find an injured skunk, that was hit by a Dracon beam in the fighting. Cassie''s father finds that there is a good chance that the skunk had recently given birth, and Cassie is stricken with guilt. Cassie suggests to the others that they need to find out how the Yeerks got permission to cut trees in a National Forest. If they didn''t have permission, the news media would bring attention to them; something they surely did not want. The group decides to go back and enter the logging camp to find this information. Tobias notices that there are termite tunnels in the building, and they decide to morph termites to get in. Jake causes a distraction by morphing into a wolf while the others (excluding Tobias) morph and enter the building. There is a brief episode where they are controlled by the termite queen''s orders and lose control of themselves. Cassie kills the termite queen to free her friends and herself from the queen''s control, but felt much guilt by it. The Animorphs get the information they need, disable the Yeerks'' defenses, and escape unnoticed. The Animorphs find out that there is a committee of three people who must decide on giving the logging operation a go. One has already voted yes and one has voted no; the other, a man called Farrand, was due to make a visit to the camp in order to make his decision. The Animorphs decide to intercede when Farrand makes his visit, as the Yeerks will surely turn him into a Controller at that point to ensure an affirmative vote. Meanwhile, Cassie is still concerned with the skunk babies and decides to look for them. Tobias is able to tell her where the litter of kits is, having found five and eaten one. Cassie rescues them and the Animorphs take over tending the kits, with Tobias doing much of the skunk-sitting while the other Animorphs are in school. Marco ends up naming the skunk kits after members of The Ramones, such as Joey, Johnny, Marky and C.J. In the final showdown, the Yeerks capture Cassie and Farrand, but she morphs into a skunk and sprays all of the Controllers and Visser Three. Ax makes a bargain with Visser Three, offering information on how to get rid of the skunk smell in return for the release of Farrand. Visser Three agrees, and Farrand is transported to a hospital. As soon as he can, Farrand makes a phone call to vote against the logging, and he will likely bring litigation against the company. In return for the release of the human, Ax tells the Yeerks that grape juice will remove the stink (instead of tomato juice, which at best masks the smell), and Tobias later reports that a pool of grape juice was made for Visser Three to soak in. Visser Three hasn''t gotten rid of the skunk smell, and in addition is a "lovely, attractive shade of purple."

The Secret

Danny Lopez, a young teenager, is the main character of Mexican WhiteBoy. The first part of this book talks about him as a shy boy from San Diego. His school, Leucadia prep, has a majority of white children and he feels different from all of the other kids even though he has only a slightly darker skin tone. During this summer he went with his cousin Sofia. Danny’s uncle, Tommy, wanted to beat up someone but did not know who to beat up because Danny wouldn''t tell him because he was afraid to. After his uncle left, then Danny got in a car with his friends and his other friends got on another car and they were going to Del Mar Fair. In Danny’s car somebody got out a bottle of alcohol and they were passing it around so everybody would get a sip. Danny had never had a drink in his life but Sofia influenced him to drink a little bit, so Danny did. At one point in the fair they went to go feed some goats celery and Danny remembered his dad. When Danny first sees Liberty, he feels something inside of him that cannot be described. Danny, and Sofi’s friends go to the theatre and Danny bought them popcorn. Danny sees Liberty in the line of the theatre where they were standing at. Danny, and Uno are in the mound, they go against Carmelo and JJ. Danny had a bad day because he couldn''t pitch the ball straight at Uno’s hands. Danny overhears Sofie and his Uncle Tommy talking about his dad abusing his mom. Danny, and Uno go against Carmelo and JJ. This time Danny gives Carmelo three strikes, and Carmelo keeps saying do duble or nothing, and they keep on raising money, and Carmelo gets mad JJ grabes the hat with the money inside and tries running with it but Uno gets JJ from behind and punches him and all of JJ’s friend’s comes in and tackle Danny and Uno then this guy from Los Padres scout came and taclke all the kids that were punching Danny and Uno. Later both Danny and Uno runs to the bus stop. Danny gets a phone call from his mother from San Francisco, she tells him how beautiful San Francisco is but out of nowhere she starts crying. In the novel his mother tells him that she wants to be with the family again and be happy so she told him that she is going to pick him up in a few days. So Uno and Danny decide to have one last practice at Las Palmas, that evening Uno and Sofie was talking about there life and how would it change if this happened and looking to the future. She tells him “ Anyways this girl climbs up the ladder real slow right? But her parents let her do it all by herself. And the whole time she has this huge smile in her face. And when she gets to the top of the slide, she sits there for a sec, clapping her hands and laughing. Her parents hustle around to the bottom of the slide and she says ‘Here I come’ its like she was saying it to the world (212). Uno takes Danny to his old school and they found Kyle a future baseball player that had been scouted, Uno tells Kyle to put money on the line but Danny and Uno losses the bet. After getting into a fight with the other guys, Uno and Danny head home. At Sofia''s house they talk about their future. As the story ends, Uno and Danny go to their favorite spot throw some rocks. Danny realizes that after all that he''s been through he''s glad to be where he is today.

Mexican WhiteBoy

After proposing to his childhood sweetheart Beth Wilson, Danny Cartwright takes her brother Bernie and her to celebrate at a nearby pub. In the pub, they are accosted by four people. Danny, Beth and Bernie attempt to leave the pub without getting involved in a fracas, but Spencer Craig, one of the four that confronted them, follows them out of the pub along with his friends. A fight breaks out; Bernie is stabbed and dies. Danny is blamed for his murder in a well-orchestrated plot by Spencer and his friends: a popular actor, an aristocrat, and a young estate agent. Danny is arrested and convicted. Sentenced to 22 years in Belmarsh prison, the highest security jail in South-east London, United Kingdom, he encounters two prisoners, Albert Crann, known as "Big Al," and Sir Nicholas Moncrieff. Meanwhile, outside the prison, Beth is pregnant with Danny''s daughter. Sir Nicholas slowly teaches Danny to read and to write. Their friendship grows closer, and Danny decides to dress like his friend in the hope that it will help his upcoming appeal. Danny begins to gather evidence for his appeal with the help of a young lawyer, Alex Redmayne, but unable to present the new evidence, Danny''s appeal is denied, and he must serve his complete sentence in Belmarsh prison. Nicholas is murdered by a fellow inmate and his death is made to be seen as a suicide but he was thought to be Danny himself. The timely intervention of Big Al leads to the subsequent escape of Danny. On the outside of the prison, Danny pretends to be Nicholas. He finds that he must sort out his friend''s family affairs before pursuing his goals of clearing his name and taking revenge upon the four individuals who framed him for Bernie''s murder. A lengthy legal battle between himself and Nicholas'' hated uncle Hugo leaves Danny Cartwright in the possession of over 50 million dollars (20 million pounds) with which he plans to expose Spencer Craig and clear his name, so that he will be able to live with Beth and his daughter. Dann is caught out by Nick''s friends and is held in custody, while his counsel begins Danny''s bid for freedom the Barrister (QC), Actor and friend are all brought to justice. Alex''s father (ex Barrister QC and Judge at the High Court) gains Danny''s freedom and his name is cleared. Danny has another child (male) and it''s called Nick in honour of his friend and Alex his Barrister is given title of Godfather for all his hard work in freeing Danny.

A Prisoner of Birth

The book starts by relating the biography of Chang''s grandmother (Yu-fang). From the age of two, she had bound feet. As the family was relatively poor, her father schemed to have her taken as a concubine to a high-ranking warlord General Xue Zhi-heng, in order to gain status, which was hugely important in terms of quality of life. After a wedding ceremony to the General, who already had a wife and many concubines, the young girl was left alone in a wealthy household with servants, and did not see her "husband" again for six years. Despite her luxurious surroundings, life was tense as she feared the servants and the wife of the General would report rumors or outright lies to him. She was not even allowed to visit her parents home. After his six year absence, the General made a brief conjugal visit to his concubine, during which a daughter, Chang''s mother, was conceived. General did not stay there for long, even to see his daughter but he named his daughter Bao Qin meaning precious zither. During the child''s infancy, Chang''s grandmother put off persistent requests for her to be brought to the General''s main household, until he became very sick and it was no longer a request. Chang''s grandmother had no choice but to comply. During her visit to the household, the General was dying. The general had no male heir, and Chang''s mother was very important to the family. Realizing that the General''s wife would have complete control over her life and her child''s, when he would die, Chang''s grandmother fled with her baby to her parents'' home, sending false word to her husband''s family that the child had died. With his last words, the General unexpectedly proclaimed her free at age twenty-four. Eventually she married a much older doctor (Dr. Xia) with whom she and her daughter, Chang''s mother, made a home in Jinzhou, Manchuria. She was no more a concubine, but a true, beloved wife. The book now moves to the story of Chang''s mother (Bao Qin/De-hong), who at the age of fifteen, began working for the Communist Party of China and Mao Zedong''s Red Army. As the Revolution progressed, her work for the party helped her rise through the ranks. She met the man who would become Chang''s father (Wang Yu/Shou-yu), a high-ranking officer. The couple were soon married but Communist Party dictates meant they were not allowed to spend much time together. Eventually, the couple were transferred to Yibin, Chang''s father''s hometown. It was a long and arduous trek. Chang''s mother traveled on foot because of her rank, while her father rode in a Jeep. He was not aware that Chang''s mother was pregnant. After arrival at Nanjing, Chang''s mother undertook gruelling military training. After the strain of the training coupled with the journey, she suffered a miscarriage. Chang''s father swore to never again be inattentive to his wife''s needs. In the following years Chang''s mother gave birth to Jung and four other children. The focus of the book now shifts again to cover Jung''s own autobiography. The Cultural Revolution started when Chang was a teenager. Chang willingly joined the Red Guards though she recoiled from some of their brutal actions. As Mao''s personality cult grew, life became more difficult and dangerous. Chang''s father became a target for the Red Guards when he mildly but openly criticised Mao due to the suffering caused to Chinese people by the Cultural Revolution. Chang''s parents were labeled as capitalist roaders and made subjects of public struggle meetings and torture. Chang recalls that her father deteriorated physically and mentally, until his eventual death. Her father''s treatment prompted Chang''s previous doubts about Mao to come to the fore. Like thousands of other young people, Chang was sent down to the countryside for education and thought reform by the peasants, a difficult, harsh and pointless experience. At the end of the Cultural Revolution Chang returned home and worked hard to gain a place at university. Not long after she succeeded, Mao died. The whole nation was shocked in mourning, though Chang writes that: "People had been acting for so long they confused it with their true feelings. I wondered how many of the tears were genuine". Chang said that she felt exhilarated by Mao''s death. At university Chang studied English. After her graduation and a stint as an assistant lecturer, she won a scholarship to study in England and left for her new home. She still lives in England today and visits mainland China on occasion to see her family and friends there, with permission from Chinese authorities.

Wild Swans

Clifford Stoll (the author) managed some computers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. One day, in August 1986, his supervisor (Dave Cleveland) asked him to resolve a USD$ 0.75 accounting error in the computer usage accounts. He traced the error to an unauthorized user who had apparently used up 9 seconds of computer time and not paid for it, and eventually realized that the unauthorized user was a cracker who had acquired root access to the LBL system by exploiting a vulnerability in the movemail function of the original GNU Emacs. Over the next ten months, Stoll spent a great deal of time and effort tracing the hacker''s origin. He saw that the hacker was using a 1200 baud connection and realized that the intrusion was coming through a telephone modem connection. Stoll''s colleagues, Paul Murray and Lloyd Bellknap, helped with the phone lines. Over the course of a long weekend he rounded up fifty terminals, mostly by "borrowing" them from the desks of co-workers away for the weekend, and teleprinters and physically attached them to the fifty incoming phone lines. When the hacker dialed in that weekend, Stoll located the phone line, which was coming from the Tymnet routing service. With the help of Tymnet, he eventually tracked the intrusion to a call center at MITRE, a defense contractor in McLean, Virginia. Stoll, after returning his "borrowed" terminals, left a teleprinter attached to the intrusion line in order to see and record everything the cracker did. Stoll recorded the hacker''s actions as he sought, and sometimes gained, unauthorized access to military bases around the United States, looking for files that contained words such as "nuclear" or "SDI". The hacker also copied password files (in order to make dictionary attacks) and set up Trojan horses to find passwords. Stoll was amazed that on many of these high-security sites the hacker could easily guess passwords, since many system administrators never bothered to change the passwords from their factory defaults. Even on army bases, the hacker was sometimes able to log in as "guest" with no password. Over the course of this investigation, Stoll contacted various agents at the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Air Force OSI. Since this was almost the first documented case of hacking (Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily log book of the hacker''s activity), there was some confusion as to jurisdiction and a general reluctance to share information. Studying his log book, Stoll saw that the hacker was familiar with VMS, as well as AT&T Unix. He also noted that the hacker tended to be active around the middle of the day, Pacific time. Stoll hypothesized that since modem bills are cheaper at night, and most people have school or a day job and would only have a lot of free time for hacking at night, the hacker was in a time zone some distance to the east. With the help of Tymnet and various agents from various agencies, Stoll eventually found that the intrusion was coming from West Germany via satellite. The Deutsche Bundespost, the German post office, also had authority over the phone system, and they traced the calls to a university in Bremen. In order to entice the hacker to reveal himself, Stoll set up an elaborate hoax (known today as a honeypot), inventing a new department at LBL that had supposedly been newly formed because of an imaginary SDI contract. He knew the hacker was mainly interested in SDI, so he filled the "SDInet" account (operated by the imaginary secretary Barbara Sherwin) with large files full of impressive-sounding bureaucratese. The ploy worked, and the Deutsche Bundespost finally located the hacker at his home in Hanover. The hacker''s name was Markus Hess, and he had been engaged for some years in selling the results of his hacking to the Soviet KGB. There was ancillary proof of this when a Hungarian spy contacted the fictitious SDInet at LBL by mail, based on information he could only have obtained through Hess (apparently this was the KGB''s method of double-checking to see if Hess was just making up the information he was selling them). Stoll later had to fly to Germany to testify at the trial of Hess and a confederate.

The Cuckoo''s Egg

The apparent cause of this distribution of humans is the mysterious and immensely powerful posthuman entity which calls itself "the Eschaton". Although the Eschaton is usually benign and uninvolved in human affairs, it strictly enforces certain rules on human civilization out of apparent self-interest. To this end, the Eschaton has helpfully left a message throughout human space, for example, engraved in huge letters on the sides of mountains, and dispersed everywhere throughout computer networks. The message is as follows: :I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. :I am descended from you, and exist in your future. :Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else. The most important commandment of the Eschaton appears to be "thou shalt not violate causality"; that is, the Eschaton strictly prohibits the use of faster than light travel for reaching any point in its own relative past, with the ominous proscription "or else". The Eschaton apparently makes use of time travel itself, but whenever a civilization attempts to break this rule, it is forcibly prevented from doing so immediately before the act (often with immense overkill, such as in at least one case where the relevant civilization''s star is induced into going supernova). Inscrutable, and uncommunicative beyond disseminating the knowledge of its laws, the Eschaton generally does not provide further warnings before it acts. The Eschaton''s other major involvement is that at a particular point in the book''s history, it scattered pieces of human civilization, against their will, throughout nearby (within a few thousand light years) space, but it did so using instantaneous travel, and in some cases actually moved them backwards in time. This means that some civilizations, such as the Festival mentioned below, have been progressing for hundreds of years on their own before they encounter the rest of human civilization. Although human civilization on Earth collapsed in the wake of singularity, by the time of the events in Singularity Sky, Earth has recovered and become one of the more powerful and influential human societies. The Earth non-government, known as the United Nations and descended from the modern-day Internet Engineering Task Force, uses its agents to prevent other civilizations from breaking the Eschaton''s rules so as to avoid the Eschaton taking enforcement action which may affect the very existence of Earth and the wider galaxy-spanning human race. Unknown to human civilization at large, the Eschaton also has its own human agents working to this end. The novel features the exploits of one such agent, Martin Springfield, an engineer specializing in faster-than-light starship engines who is hired by the New Republic (a totalitarian and relatively backward neo-luddite civilization) to upgrade the faster-than-light engines of their fleet of warships. The UN also suspects that the New Republic may attempt to use the upgraded engines to violate causality, so it dispatches one of its agents, Rachel Mansour, to the New Republic. This attempt comes to pass sooner than expected, when the New Republic colony on Rochard''s World encounters the Festival, a spacefaring transhuman civilization/entity which trades highly advanced technology if prospective recipients can respond to the request: "entertain us". The old world order on Rochard''s World quickly breaks down under this onslaught. Interpreting the failure of communications with the colony as the result of enemy action, the New Republic dispatches a mighty war fleet to Rochard''s World, with Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansour aboard the flagship. A recurring theme of this book is that information and by extension progress are inexorable: the conflict between the neo-luddite/monarchist New Republic and the post-singularity transhuman culture that contacts them is utterly devastating for the status quo of the former, and our spy heroes are world-weary enough to realize this, exasperated by their apparent inability to understand that one can no more avoid change than one can avoid breathing. Information is, by whatever mechanism, the phlogiston of said change, providing its vital energies.

Singularity Sky

Flip doesn''t think she''ll ever fit in at the Swiss boarding school. Besides being homesick for her father and Connecticut, she isn''t sophisticated like the other girls, and discussions about boys leave her tongue-tied. Her happiest times are spent apart from the others, sketching or wandering in the mountains. But the day she''s out walking alone and meets a French boy, Paul, things change for Flip. As their relationship grows, so does her self-confidence. Despite her newfound happiness, there are times when Paul seems a stranger to her. And since dating is forbidden except to seniors, their romance must remain a secret. With so many new feelings and obstacles to overcome in her present, can Flip help Paul to confront his troubled past and find a future? (Source: Madeline L''Engle Online) And Both Were Young is distinctive among L''Engle''s works because she restored some of the original story decades after its original publication. Her first editor softened the relationship between Flip''s father and Eunice Jackman. The introduction to the later edition details the changes both at the time and why the author felt it worthwhile to restore her original intent. Philippa Hunter also makes an offstage appearance in A Severed Wasp when one of her paintings becomes a plot point.

And Both Were Young

A new vampire arrives in town who walks outside during the day and yet does not seem to be affected by the sun''s rays. The vampire, called Solitaire, is here to challenge the Slayer. He wants to reassure himself that he can beat a Slayer in physical combat. He is an old vampire and Giles struggles with his research. At the same time a band called Vyxn arrives at the Bronze and plays for four nights straight. Vyxn is made up of four girls who appear to be not quite human, especially when they seem to be turning all the males at the Bronze into slobbering idiots and bending them to their will. Xander is especially taken by them and would do anything to help them out. Buffy and the gang need to figure out what Vyxn is in town for, and why Solitaire can walk in the sun. It is later discovered that Vyxn are a group of ghouls that can seduce men (and it is hinted vampires) at will through their voice. Giles and the others rescue Xander from them just prior to Buffy''s final fight with Solitaire. Solitaire it is discovered is immune to sunlight because he is not actually a vampire, he is a full-blooded demon, that can shift forms between human and demon, and the halfway mark looks remarkably like a vampire. Buffy decapitates him with an axe.

Ghoul Trouble

As the Fifth Doctor and his companions vacation in Tasmania they get caught up in a scheme by the Time Lord Ruath to resurrect the vampire Yarven (from Blood Harvest). Ruath sends a vampire baby to attack the Doctor and turn him into a vampire, but the child instead attacks and converts Nyssa. Unable to provide Yarven with the Doctor''s Time Lord blood, Ruath gives her own blood to Yarven, causing her to die and regenerate into a vampire Time Lord. Nyssa, while trying fight her new vampire nature, is drawn to Yarven''s castle, where she learns more about Ruath''s plan. Ruath has created a genetically enhanced mist that can turn normal humans into vampires, and kill those who use traditional methods (garlic, crosses, etc.) to protect themselves. Ruath has also invented a Time Freeze, a small Time Loop that can hold the Earth in a perpetual night, leaving the vampires free to roam and feed. Nyssa contacts the Doctor and aids him in entering the castle, which turns out to be Ruath''s TARDIS. Ruath captures the Doctor and Tegan. She informs Yarven that his brain, now enhanced by Time Lord blood, will become the controller of the Time Freeze mechanism, and offers the Doctor the change to become her vampiric consort. Yarven, however, decides he doesn''t want to sacrifice himself, and places the Doctor in the Time Freze. The Doctor manages to use Ruath''s command ring to take control of her TARDIS and force it to materialize on a distant planet, where the rising sun incinerates Yarven and his vampire hordes. The death of the vampire child cures Nyssa of her vampirism. Ruath survives the dawn, but is sucked into the Time Vortex after Nyssa opens the doors to the Doctor''s TARDIS while it is in flight.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

La Belle Bête

By Marie-Claire Blais

Son of Rosemary

By Ira Levin

The Moon Moth

By Jack Vance

The Secret

By K. A. Applegate

Mexican WhiteBoy

No Author Listed

A Prisoner of Birth

By Jeffrey Archer

Wild Swans

By Jung Chang

The Cuckoo's Egg

By Clifford Stoll

Singularity Sky

By Charles Stross

And Both Were Young

By Madeleine L''Engle

Ghoul Trouble

By John Passarella

Goth Opera

By Paul Cornell