Bridging history from 1890s Aix-en-Provence to American involvement in 1950s Vietnam, In the Fabled East is a timeless love story and riveting adventure, charting the loss of innocence of both individuals and the world at large.Adélie Tremier, a turn-of-the-century widower and socialite suffering from tuberculosis, flees Paris flees for French-occupied Indochina, to seek out a fabled spring of immortality in the Laotian jungle that might allow her to return to her nine-year-old son. Years later, Pierre Lazarie, a young academic turned Saigon bureaucrat, is sent by Adélie's grown son, now an army captain, to find this mysterious woman. Although his mission fulfills Pierre’s fantasy to travel up the exotic Mekong, he is saddled with his colleague Henri LeDallic, who would rather glory in booze and his loutish past than hunt for ghosts. This mismatched pair stumbles through the lush jungle in the faded footsteps of Adelie, where history and fable are...

When widowed father and substitute teacher Peter Giller leads an eleventh-grade class on a field trip to a plastics factory, he thinks the worst that could happen is that the parent volunteers won't show up (they don't), the kids will be rude (they are) or the free lunch will be terrible (it is).A leaking pipe sprays Peter and the students with a mysterious pink goo and “the worst that could happen" spikes from inconvenient to catastrophic. At first, the goo's strange side effects are mild: short-temperedness, sawdust-scented B.O. and an unquenchable craving for bacon. Then things get spooky: Peter's fingers start falling off, his students forget how to read, no one has to pee—ever—and empathy for human suffering plummets, especially if anyone gets between them and their bacon.Peter can't figure out what's happening—surely he's not a zombie? At no time in any movie does a zombie drive a car and count on his reattached fingers the ways in which he...