Books by Schuy R. Weishaar

Warring factions, a perilous new drug, a mysterious death and a small Illinois town on the edge...

Abraham Jacobsen is misfit for this world. His peculiar gifts have cursed him with a past of good deeds he cannot escape, with dreams and visions he cannot explain, with a future as stone-set as the etchings on a grave marker. Now, just as he has found a suitable place to loose his haunted thoughts in the outer blanks of rural Illinois, Abraham finds himself the prime suspect in the murder of a local girl. He is edged in upon by a priest who wants to see him canonized, an ancient vigilante group with ties to the county's founding fathers, the dead girl's farmer father, and local law enforcement. In his roving, Abraham has burned up the road of life in both directions, scorching and scarring as many as he has helped or healed. And the journey has only taken him deeper within the dark of the center line, into a country nothing-world of fields, farms, and roads, a place that seems peopled with his own inner demons and bad memories. But does the dark of the center line lead somewhere too?

The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their employment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch. The author argues that interpreting these directors' films through the lens of the grotesque allows us1to situate both the auteurs and the films within a long history of the grotesque in art and aesthetics. This cultural tradition effectively subsumes the contribution of any artist or1genre that intersects it but also affords the artist or genre--the auteur and the genre filmmaker--a pantheon and an abundance of images, themes, and motifs through which he1or she can subversively represent the world and our place in it.