Frank Carlson Library

Prudence Honeysett is a wealthy, aging widow who's also quite done with the world. A hopeless curmudgeon, she withdraws from Victorian society by purchasing an old priory reputed to be haunted, convinced that her desire for peace and quiet would be perfectly met regardless. Fortune, however, has different plans for her, her hapless servants, and her trio of monstrous cats. The sudden appearance of a heartbroken nephew at her doorstep stirs the ghostly...

Young Nicola Gregori has always wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a brilliant clock-maker who's famous for his wild, fantastical designs. But his father instead sends him to school to learn more practical matters. Nicola, stricken with infantile paralysis that left him with a deformed right leg, becomes an object of mockery and cruel jokes in school. He learns that in order to survive his daily ordeals, he needs to vanish in the crowd,...

It is the Christmas season in mid-19th century Bavaria. Two fathers, Abelard Bauer and Andreas Schifffer, are brought together through the tragic deaths of their sons. Bauer, a brilliant toymaker, fashions glass Christmas ornaments, and his latest creation is a minstrel with a secret molded into its features. When Schiffer sees Bauer's minstrel ornament in the toy shop, he realizes that Bauer is struggling to keep his son's memory alive through his...

Orphaned and sickly, young Joscelin Charpentier, along with older sister Eulalie, is taken in by a wealthy uncle. The children cope with Uncle Marcel's cold indifference as best as they can, but Eulalie enjoys all the attention as the healthier child while Joscelin is subjected to the cruelty of a resentful nurse. Comfort and affection come his way in the person of Aunt Rosanna, a rapidly fading gentlewoman from Italy who develops and nurtures a unique...

Coming out to his parents may have burdened him with unfortunate difficulties, but nineteen-year-old Adam Sheridan didn't expect a sudden flood of nightmares and fragmented dreams to ruin his nights and threaten his mental health. But there's a reason for these dreams, these baffling images of people and moments from a time and place that have never once crossed Adam's mind. As these grow more and more insistent, triggered by harmless little things...

Book 1: The Hunted Prince Young Henning Babkis has learned not to consider himself to be anything special. Ignored and taken for granted by his family, his education suffering as a result of their neglect, he nevertheless struggles to fit in and improve himself, though with unimpressive results. He's also learned not to expect anything more for himself, convinced that he's doomed to live his life in a deep closet, surrounded by people who don't care...

Following Arachnaman's bigoted, hateful attacks, life in beleaguered Vintage City finally quiets down, but it doesn't last long. Eric's father begins to show symptoms of extreme fatigue, symptoms that Eric notices in a number of other people he sees elsewhere. Along with the superheroes, he tries to find a common denominator in all this, the surprising result being a new perfume shop that hawks very strong fragrances. A familiar pair of supervillains...

Even before things can settle down to the expected calm of a bucolic countryside, another mystery drops into Frederick Bisset's lap. This time it involves a skull, its presence in an otherwise pretty and snug cottage revealing a history of madness and its macabre effects on a mother-daughter bond. The cottage's present owner, Ada Darrow, is an aging spinster, an intellectual who suffers neither fools nor supernatural shenanigans, and she willingly...

In the seventh and final installment of the Masks series, nothing comes easy to sixteen-year-old Eric Plath -- and the Shadow Puppet. On one hand, Eric suffers through the tedium of more homework, more groundings from irate parents, and sudden and inexplicable attention from mutated killer mannequins from the Shadow Puppet's cabal. On the other hand, those evolving mannequins appear to have rattled a supervillain's schemes of terrorizing Vintage City,...

Life can be a real hot mess for a budding teenage poet. Meet Eric Plath: an ordinary high school boy with an obsession for the color blue, a gay kid surrounded by loving parents and an annoying older sister, a teenager who'd have gone through this dicey life stage without a hitch had it not been for those crummy superheroes and supervillains. This omnibus contains the original three books of a seven-volume superhero comedy series. Rise of Heroes:...