Daniel Farson

This biography of Francis Bacon was written by the man who was his confidant for more than forty years. Through this personal, gossip-filled, and thoroughly readable narrative, Daniel Farson takes the reader into the colorful, eccentric, and often decadent behind-the-scenes world of Bacon, moving from London's Bohemian Soho to Berlin, Paris, and the Tangiers of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Bowles. This remarkable artist, who died in 1992 at the age of eighty-two, is considered by many to have been the greatest English painter since Turner. Growing up in Dublin - where his father ran a racing stable - Bacon was said to have been subjected to a sexual education from his father's stable boys at an early age, but almost no formal education except for tutorials from the parish priest. Though he never attended art school, he began painting and was soon championed by Graham Sutherland. Bacon's drinking, petty thievery, escapades with the rough trade, and his running of a gambling casino from the former studio of Sir John Millais - with his loyal old nanny acting as the hatcheck girl - are all part of the life of the man whom Lucian Freud would say was the "wildest and the wisest" he had ever met. Bacon was also known for his savage wit, Edwardian manner, and extravagant generosity. The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon brilliantly reveals his enormous talent as well as his grand style and dark despair. For anyone interested in Francis Bacon the man and the painter, this is a book not to be missed.

Hamlyn young books

Monsters have a strange fascination for us all. In the first half of this two-in-one volume, Daniel Farson explores the monsters we probably fear most - Man Monsters. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, wild men - the questions he asks are absorbing, the answers often astonishing. Angus Hall takes an equally intriguing look at a wider range of monsters, from dragons and dinosaurs to the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster. Might there not be, he wonders, hiding in jungles, lakes or mountains, such improbable creatures? There are more than 300 illustrations, including 12 especially commissioned paintings.

Laney Griffith is a man who will do anything to save his son from leukemia, but the cost of treatment has broken him financially. When he pursues an elusive murderer in the wilderness of his small, rural community, in the hopes of securing a substantial bounty, Laney is confronted with something he never could have expected: a werewolf. The captive lycan, in human form, turns Laney's life upside-down, forcing him to confront his haunted past and race against the clock--because the wolf will return, and Laney's son's condition continues to worsen.

Meditates on the possibility that Jack the Ripper had more victims beyond the five London women confirmed dead, including others in Britain or even across the seas.