Mallins Wood is home to the last surviving gorgon, and Col's mother, the gorgon's supernatural Companion, is determined to save it from encroaching development--even to the point of endangering Col and his best friend Connie, the most powerful Companion alive.

Mythical creatures still exist, hidden from the modern world by a secret society determined to keep these wild and mysterious creatures safe from those who wish to destroy them.

Magical Mallins Wood is under threat from developers. Unknown to everyone but the members of the top secret Society for the Protection of Mythical Creatures, the wood is the home of the last gorgon, a creature so deadly she can kill with a look. Col's difficult mother is the gorgon's Companion - a human with a special bond with the gorgon - and she's determined to save it. So determined, that she'll allow the evil shapeshifter Kullervo to help her, even if it means having to sacrifice her son to him. But Kullervo wants more than to help the gorgon. He wants universal power, and he needs Col's best friend Connie to get it. Col's mum tells Col that she wants to meet this powerful girl. But is it a trap? And, if so, who is the hunter, and who the hunted?

Mallins Wood is home to the last surviving gorgon, and Col's mother, the gorgon's supernatural Companion, is determined to save it from encroaching development--even to the point of endangering Col and his best friend Connie, the most powerful Companion alive.

"Originally published in the UK by Oxford University Press, 2006."

This interdisciplinary study of recurrent themes in German cinema as it has developed since the early twentieth century focuses on pertinent films of the pre- and post-World War II eras. The author explores the nature of expressionism, which is generally agreed to have ended with the advent of sound, and its persistence in the styles of such modern masters of film noir as Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman. In considering the possibility of homologies between the necessary silence of pre-sound cinema and the widespread modernist aspiration to an aesthetic of silence, Coates relates theories of the sublime, the uncanny, and the monstrous to his subject. He also reflects upon problems of representability and the morality of representation of events that took place during the Nazi era.