Rust And Redemption War Within

Towards Redemption

Safety of War

David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide. His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbalances through New Age games and rites of necromancy. In a paranormal experiment gone awry, they inadvertently raise a mysterious bloodthirsty creature that may be a) the Devil, b) David's deceased father, c) George C. Scott as General George S. Patton in the movie Patton, or d) all, or any, of the aforementioned. Carnage ensues, leading David through a woozy landscape of churning highways, deserted shopping malls and small towns, lured backward through the chasms of memory and nostalgia by the monster's coaxing squeals and forward toward an uncertain, hallucinatory future. Here, Lolita meets Maldoror meets 50s pulp horror comics. Safety of War is a hellride of exploded symbolism and beery misadventures, murders and tragedies, laughs, puzzles and meditations on valour and sacrifice in a world short on true heroes.

Empire and Liberty

Empire and Liberty brings together two epic subjects in American history: the story of the struggle to end slavery that reached a violent climax in the Civil War, and the story of the westward expansion of the United States. Virginia Scharff and the contributors to this volume show how the West shaped the conflict over slavery and how slavery shaped the West, in the process defining American ideals about freedom and influencing battles over race, property, and citizenship. This innovative work embraces East and West, as well as North and South, as the United States observes the 2015 sesquicentennial commemoration of the end of the Civil War. A companion volume to an Autry National Center exhibition on the Civil War and the West, Empire and Liberty brings leading historians together to examine artifacts, objects, and artworks that illuminate this period of national expansion, conflict, and renewal.