Thorne Smith - The Glorious Pool

60 year old Rex Pebble inadvertently discovers that the fountain of youth happens to be in his back yard swimming pool. A magical statue of a nymph by the name of Baggage, an ornamental pool decoration, has playfully endowed the Pebble swimming pool with the power to reverse the aging process. Typical Thorne Smith fun ensues when Pebble, his wife, and his mistress take a dip and take 20 years off their lives. One of the funniest scenes concerns a book dealer wanting to display his old and rare to Pebble's unresponsive mistress.

The Ron Howard movie Cocoon borrowed the theme from the Glorious Pool with many of the same humourous results.

Pages: 236
ISBN: 9781365536946

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Fred M White - The Doom of London

THE DOOM OF LONDON is a collection of six loosely-connected stories describing a series of calamities which beset Victorian London. Britain's largest city is overwhelmed by poisonous smog, a plague of diphtheria, a massive blizzard, underground explosions, the pollution of the Thames, and a man-made disaster: stock market manipulation threatens to undermine the empire.

Frederick Merrick White (1859-c.1931) was a British author known for his early spy stories. He published more than thirty books during his career.

Pages: 136
ISBN: 9781365205347

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Richard Marsh - The Beetle

'The Beetle' tells the story of a fantastical creature, "born of neither god nor man," with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician Paul Lessingham through fin de siecle London in search of vengeance for the defilement of a sacred tomb in Egypt.

Marsh's novel is of a piece with other sensational turn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker's Dracula, George du Maurier's Trilby, and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels. Like Dracula and many of the sensation novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used in many late nineteenth-century novels (those of Wilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense.

Richard Marsh was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldmann .

Pages: 412
ISBN: 9781365205446

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George MacDonald - At the Back of the North Wind

George MacDonald - At the back of the north wind A Victorian fairy tale that has enchanted readers for more than a hundred years: the magical story of Diamond, the son of a poor coachman, who is swept away by the North Wind - a radiant, maternal spirit with long, flowing hair - and whose life is transformed by a brief glimpse of the beautiful country - at the back of the north wind. It combines a Dickensian regard for the working class of mid-19th-century England with the invention of an ethereal landscape.

Pages: 308
ISBN: 9781365205613

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