Faust Books

Puppet Plays With A Point presents 20 captivating puppet plays featuring such lovable characters as Grandpa Gray, Stella, Harold, Barney, and Hobart the Worm. They and their friends are seen in everyday situations your pupils will identify with readily, familiar circumstances that combine laughs with learning... the best of all possible Bible learning worlds.

These 20 puppet plays - all with complete dialog texts - have beem used effectively in a wide variety of settings. You'll use them to teach and entertain in Sunday school, VBS, camps, conferences, youth rallies, and many other special programs.

Puppet ministry is a rapidly growing trend in churches, youth groups, and colleges everywhere, because few other teaching media possess the appeal and adaptability that puppets have for children. Puppet Plays With a Point fills the demand for worthwhile, ready-to-use puppet scripts to lead children in the ways of the Lord.

To help you begin your puppet ministry, Puppet Plays With A Point gives instructions for making puppets and building a puppet stage. Also included are eight original songs to add a special measure of joy to your presentations.
--- from book's back cover

This second part of Eliza Butler's trilogical survey of Faustian Literature is rightfully established as an incomparable classic in historical/scholarly works of ceremonial Magic. In words set to atone for the whole, she remarks: "How tenacious those ill weeds that have grown apace on the field of magical ritual, that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower"...I, mere Dedicated Literary Servitor, feel blessed to have been fortunate enough to have come across the blazened trails wending strange ways through those fields Butler charted herein while composing my own work setting out to establish the origins of Gothic Literature, & malefic fictions in general. Having found their incubation chambers within the Renaissance Malefic compendiums of the Witch-Hunters, and innumerable fantastic works in response, respect, or revolt against the remnants of Medieval superstition, Butler's works provided the missing arcane key to "What constitutes the Science of ceremonial magic which its devotees call the Art"...so essential if one is to ever makes sense of divers historical arenas such as Art History or Intellectual & Esoteric History.
"For the inventors & practitioners of the rites/often gave proof to Art/to the advantage of the Literature which has survived/its means show evidence of highly creative instincts, poetical imagination and great feeling for beauty & drama/This is what makes the study of Ritual Magic so interesting today"
Butler speaks with a respective authority that avoids disrespect of her human, all too human subjects; all the while exacting the magical crux of the ritual matter without sacrificing the scholarly critical outside-looking-inside perspective. She writes with a surgeon's sharp intelligibility, without becoming cold as the over-scrutinizing scalpel she wields like a pro. A more profound exegesis and wider span of written works of Ritual Magic is to me, inconceivable. Voluminous quotations from original first & critical second-hand sources graces Butler's pages, revealing the odd often monstrous apparitions that people mankind's collective psyche, which have found a wide deep harbor in the texts and treatise' Ritual Magic, whether they be of Nec-Romantic, Goetic & Theurgic persuasion.
From Akkadian Tableture & Greco-Egyptian papyri; to the great Epic Poems of Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome,& even Iceland; to the Hebrew wisdom of Old-testifying Clavicles of Solomon along with Cabalistic Magic tomes; and of course the French Grimoires (those infernal Grammar books of the underground crypts); and finally, into the very heart of Butler's work: The Germanic works of both Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis, as told of FAUSTUS & MEPHISTOPHELES and All the progenitors, Disciples and Poets of each of these categories and sub-categories; from olden times to new.
Butler's works is..."as subtle and as rich as Sprenger, Bodin, Wierus or de Lancre ever imagined; a whole world of wicked spirits, whose personalities are carefully distinguished, their attributes precisely determined, and their hierarchy learnedly classified" (Lenormant's work on the Magic of Chaldea; Butler,5).
Elizabeth Margaret Butler fearlessly summons all the Harrowings of Hells, the Raising of the spirits of Cain. Spanning through brilliant biographical summations of all variety of Black Magi, she treads on Holy and Accursed grounds. From the Wiley likes of Casanova, the Infernal court records and murderous inhuman charges against poor suffering Bluebeard of Orleans; the penultimate renaissance man of viceful passions Cellini and that Nigromant of Norcia; Dee and that earless rogue Kelly and all exponents of the Dark Arts until finally, after extending her hand carefully into the epitome of more modern times she draws many insightful conclusions from the works of LEVI, Francis Barrett, Mathers, Waite, and even Crowley; until laying a stake through the heart of The Myth Of Satanism, she sets the stage for part three. There the Origins of Faustian Literature in Ritual Magic shall have the same genius applied to them in an equally brilliant exposition on the MAGIC OF LITERATURE----having just come in this work from the dangerous adventure of surmising the LITERATURE OF MAGIC---and as pt.2 was to Occultism, exploring Ritual Magic by means of generous quotations and examples drawn from historical and biographical detail; so shall the next work, The Fortunes of Faust, bring Butler's trilogy round full circle, that snake eating itself continuously, the Ouroboros of the world's magical History, which is Our Own.

Postcryptum: Part one of Butler's Faustian work is entitled 'The Myth of the Magus', and is presently available at the Amazonian encampment through Cambridge press Canto editions. Pts.2 & 3 are (re)published by Penn State's Press's extraordinary 'Magic In History' series, perhaps thanks to the Societas Magica, an entirely scholarly unsecret society dedicated to the discipline and adventure of assessing honestly, and finally, the History of Magic.

Anything Dr. Kildare is so hard to find today. I was so happy to see that they actually have a new hard cover book edition. My mom is going to go nuts.

Frederick Faust, Max Brand and Evan Evans--and an assortment of other names--were one fantastic feast of American "Westerns" for me. Only Faust was a "real" person but Harrison Destry and a stageful of others became personal heroes to this then-young reader and I recall the paperback SONG OF THE WHIP as the cream of the cream--the best western I ever read!

This children's book is a wonderful tool to use as a conversation starter for any parent who is looking for a natural way to discuss diversity with their child!

Joe Faust has considerable experience as an actor in television, film, and commercials. Now a resident of Tucson, Arizona, Tragedy at Tangle Creek is the follow-up to Joe's first mystery, 48 Hours of the Serpent.

When Hank Overton and his lifelong friend, Will Morgan, once again arrive at Blackwater to work on the Tangle Creek Ranch, they have no idea that their lives, and the lives of many of their friends in Blackwater, are about to change. Will discovers that his erstwhile love, Jo Richardson, an attractive client of the dude ranch whom he had a relationship with the summer before, has died in a mysterious manner:

"Will said she rode Billy all last summer. And dammit Hank, she knew the rules about riding alone. This is just why we have that rule. Anyway, she took the trail that follows Tangle Creek up into Butcher Canyon. We figure they got up in the canyon and something spooked Billy, maybe a deer down by the creek. When she came off the horse, her boot caught in the stirrup. You know hot that can happen. He dragged her down into the creek and her head hit some rocks. I guess she came loose then, and Billy made his way back to the ranch."

Hank and Will unwittingly turn into private investigators when more murder victims turn up. Tragedy follows tragedy, and even with the constant revelations Hank and Will uncover, the cause of the murders remain an elusive puzzle until the final pages of an imaginative story. Who doesn't love the image of two hunky but aging cowboys righting a wrong?

Joe Faust has a definite flair for the dramatic, as well as a great working knowledge of the culture of the west. His characters are interesting, the plot is intricate, and Faust does a great job of pulling the reader through the matrix of his story. Being the "wild west," the language is ribald, relationships are intense, and the grammar of the characters is not of Ivy League caliber. But it all makes for an entertaining whodunit that would very easily translate into a television movie. Faust's experience shows he knows his subject, and he has the storyteller's gift. His fertile mind is the key to this everyday whodunit...

As one of the authors, I can tell you that we have gotten many favorable comments over the last ten years as to how much blind and visually impaired students love the stories in this book. Geared for primary aged students, or older students with cognitive disabilities, it contains 17 chapters, each with stories, games, and songs that relate to a particular mobility or envionmental concept. Give it a try - it can enhance your mobility lessons, or be a great way to reinforce concepts.

Before I get into the merits of this fine book, I want to point out that the 2 novels contained in this volume are about as far away from The Twilight Zone as, say, the Saw franchise.

But enough about the packaging.

Contained in this volume are 2 truly excellent full-length horror novels. The first 30 pages of BURNED will rip your guts out with powerful, fast moving prose about two kids who burn to death in a fire while their mother is forced into violent demeaning prostitution by suffocating economic concerns. When their flat is set ablaze by an arsonist, you will fell precisely what it is like to burn to death. The writing is incredible. As for the rest of the story, Faust peoples it with a host of interesting characters from the arsonist, his boss, and two fire investigators with secrets of their own. Captivating reading from one of the brightest new authors around.

All of the above goes for ONE NIGHT AT MERCY. When Death takes a day off (a very Twilight Zone set-up although what follows is pure nightmare) we are presented with a series of quick character sketches as we see how the absence of death can have tragic, horrifying, gut-wrenching and just plain odd consequences.

Faust's characterizations are second to known. In a few pages she paints character portraits that leap off the page and the horrors they face in each of the two novels is all the more potent because we instantly have a grasp of the people subjected to them.

Christa Faust is going to be a star in the publishing world. And it's going to happen sooner rather than later. When it does, this brilliant work for hire (and her other Black Flame titles) will soar in value and be all but impossible to find. My advice is to get them now. Not only for the fantastic reading experience but to save yourself a lot of money down the road.

Brilliant, brilliant work!

If you are a Chemistry teacher and need motivation for your students, if you are a science writer and need an anecdote to enrich an article, if you are a lover of curiosities in science, buy this book. Fascinating.

Most of these stories involve sports fans but they're not really about sports. There are many emotions examined here. An arching theme is that of America Past or perhaps its fading glory. Accompanying that theme is a sort of wistful nostalgia, bittersweet yet not maudlin. I read this one years ago but was reminded of it today when a writer friend of mine and I were discussing ancient baseball parks. This book contains a story of a man walking over the space where his favorite team once played. In another tale, two boys correspond and plan to meet until they discover each other's races. Several stories won O Henry awards in the 80's as I recall. If you like Hemingway's, Raymond Carver's or TC Boyle's short fiction, I heartily recommend Mr. Faust's.