• 1816 was called "The Year Without A Summer." In the weird darkness of thatJuly's volcanic winter, Mary Wolfestonecraft Godwin began writingFrankenstein on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. But that is notwhere Frankenstein began. It began a few months earlier when, en routethrough Germany to Switzerland, Mary, her future husband Percy Shelley, and herstepsister Clair Clairmont approached a strange castle. Castle Frankenstein,some one hundred years earlier, had been home to Johann Conrad Dippel, whoseexperiments included the independent invention of nitroglycerin, a distillationof the elixir of life — and the transfer of a live soul into an awfulaccretion of human body parts! Mary never spoke of having entered the realCastle Frankenstein, stark on its hilltop south of Darmstadt. But she did. Andshe was never the same again — because something was haunting that tower,and Mary met it there. Fear, death, and alchemy — the modern age iscreated here, in lost moments in a ruined castle on a day never recorded.
• The newest addition to Warren Ellis' Apparat line of original graphicnovels has arrived! Following up the huge successes of Crecy andAetheric Mechanics, Ellis turns his spark of mad genius to bring us afantastical tale in this all-new original graphic novel illustrated inatmospheric perfection by newcomer Marek Oleksicki.