Following a formative encounter with the British pop movie Slade in Flame in 1975, Mark Kermode decided that musical superstardom was totally attainable. And so, armed with a homemade electric guitar and very little talent, he embarked on an alternative career – a chaotic journey which would take him from the halls and youth clubs of North London to the stages of Glastonbury, the London Palladium and The Royal Albert Hall.

HOW DOES IT FEEL?: A Life of Musical Misadventures follows a lifetime of musical misadventures which have seen Mark striking rockstar poses in the Sixth Form Common Room, striding around a string of TV shows dressed from head to foot in black leather, getting heckled off stage by a bunch of angry septuagenarians on a boat on the Mersey, showing Timmy Mallet how to build a tea-chest bass – and winning the International Street Entertainers of the Year award as part of a new wave of skiffle. Really.

Hilarious, self-deprecating and blissfully nostalgic, this is a riotous account of a bedroom dreamer’s attempts to conquer the world armed with nothing more than a chancer’s enthusiasm and a simple philosophy: how hard can it be?

On New Year’s Day 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was first published in an anonymous three-volume edition of 500 copies. Some thought the book was too radical in implication. A few found the central theme intriguing… no-one predicted its success.

Since then, there have been many, many adaptations – 120 films alone, at the last count – on screen, stage, in novels, comics and graphic novels, in advertisements and even on cereal packets. From a Regency nightmare, Frankenstein became a cuddly childhood companion – thoroughly munstered, so to speak. The story has been interpreted as a feminist allegory of birthing, an ecological reading of mother earth, an attack on masculinist science, the origin of science fiction, an example of ‘female gothic’, a reaction to the rise of the industrial proletariat… and much else besides.

Frankenstein lives! The ‘F’ word has been applied, since the 1950s, to test-tube babies, heart transplants, prosthetics, robotics, cosmetic surgery, genetic engineering, genetically-modified crops, and numerous other public anxieties arising from scientific research. Today, Frankenstein has taken over from Adam and Eve as the creation myth for the age of genetic engineering…

This book, celebrating the two hundredth birthday of Frankenstein, will trace, in colourful and engaging ways, the journey of Shelley’s Frankenstein from limited edition literature – to the bloodstream of contemporary culture. It includes new research on the novel’s origins, and a facsimile reprint of the earliest-known manuscript version of the creation scene; visual material on adaptations for the stage, in magazines, on playbills, in prints and in book publications of the nineteenth century; series of visual essays on many of the film versions – and their inspirations in the history of art; and Frankenstein in popular culture – on posters, advertisements, packaging, in comics and graphic novels.

Christopher Frayling has spent 45 years exploring the history of one of the most enduring figures in the history of mass culture – the vampire. Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of Eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. Frayling recounts the most significant moments in gothic history, while extracts from a huge range of sources – including Bram Stoker’s detailed research notes for Dracula, penny dreadfuls and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, new to this edition – are contextualized and analysed.

This revised and expanded edition brings Vampyres up to date with 21st-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary and a revised introduction. For the first time, Christopher Frayling also explores the development of the vampire in the visual arts in four colour-plate sections, with illustrations ranging from 18th-century prints to 21st-century film stills, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the vampire from popular press to fine art and, finally, to film.

This stunning tome is a previously unseen look behind-the-scenes at the making of this most legendary of science fiction classics. It is an in-depth examination of the complete, largely unpublished archive of art director Harry Lange’s designs, concepts, roughs and photographs.

Lange’s strikingly realistic designs created an extraordinary vision of the future. By releasing this unpublished archive and explaining its significance, the book takes the reader/viewer on a journey deep into the visual thinking behind 2001, for the first time ever – visual thought that might actually work.

The book is about the process, as well as the finished product. It examines how Harry Lange’s experience with NASA fed into the innovations of the film.

It includes rejected designs, concepts and roughs, as well as the finished works. It reveals how the design team was obsessed with things that actually might work. The book illustrates several innovations that were science fiction in the 1960s but have since become science fact, including a ‘newspad‘ designed by IBM, which bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s iPad. The remarkable designs for 2001 created a credible vision of the future.

Whatever your ailment, the nation’s best-loved film experts have the perfect cinematic prescription for you, whether it’s a course of the Coens or a dose of Die Hard. And they’re ready to cure the movies too, taking their scalpels to bloated blockbusters and warning of the ill effects of overpraise.

Where medical ignorance and movie expertise meet – the surgery of Doctors Kermode and Mayo is now open.

Leading cultural historian and broadcaster Christopher Frayling reflects on gothic themes in literature, art and popular culture, through the lens of his friendship and correspondence with Angela Carter during her formative Bath years, during which she wrote most of her key works; The Bloody Chamber, The Sadeian Woman, The Passion of New Eve. Inside the Bloody Chamber collects Frayling’s articles, essays and lectures written since then on various aspects of the Gothic several in hard-to-find places, many never published before, but all revised for this new book. The subjects match Angela’s interests, are mirrored in the stories within The Bloody Chamber and mesh with his memories of their time together in Bath in the 1970s.

A hundred years ago, a character made his first appearance in the world of literature who was to enter the bloodstream of 20th-century popular culture: the evil genius called Dr Fu Manchu, described at the beginning of the first story in which he appeared as ‘the yellow peril incarnate in one man’. Why did the idea that the Chinese were a threat to Western civilization develop at precisely the time when that country was in chaos, divided against itself, victim of successive famines and utterly incapable of being a ‘peril’ to anyone even if it had wanted to be?

Here, Sir Christopher Frayling assembles an astonishing diversity of evidence to show how deeply ingrained Chinaphobia became in the West – so acutely relevant again in the new era of Chinese superpower. Along the way he talks to Edward Said, to the last Governor of Hong Kong, to Sax Rohmer’s widow, to movie stars and a host of others; he journeys through the opium dens of the 19th century with Charles Dickens; takes us to the heart of popular culture in the music hall, pulp literature and the mass-market press; and shows how film amplifies our assumptions, demonstrating throughout how we neglect the history of popular culture at our own peril if we want to understand our deepest desires and fears.

A hatchet job isn’t just a bad review, it’s a total trashing. Mark Kermode is famous for them – Pirates of the Caribbean, Sex and the City 2, the complete works of Michael Bay.

Beginning with his favourite hatchet job ever, Mark tells us about the best bad reviews in history, why you have to be willing to tell a director face-to-face their movie sucks, and about the time he apologized to Steven Spielberg for badmouthing his work.

But why do we love really bad reviews? Is it so much harder to be positive? And is the Internet ruining how we talk about cinema? The UK’s most trusted film critic answers all these questions and more in this hilarious, fascinating and argumentative new book.

If blockbusters make money no matter how bad they are, then why not make a good one for a change?

How can 3-D be the future of cinema when it’s been giving audiences a headache for over a hundred years?

Why pay to watch films in cinemas that don’t have a projectionist but do have a fast-food stand?

And, in a world where Sex and the City 2 was a hit, what are film critics even for?

Outspoken, opinionated and hilariously funny, The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex is a must for anyone who has ever sat in an undermanned, overpriced cinema and wondered: ‘How the hell did things get to be this terrible?’