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Orc Priest posted:There was a cosmic horror story collection by 1 author and one of the stories was about a guy who dies, sees the other side and finds out that god is evil or something. But he come back to life somehow and was traumatized by what he experienced. there was also an evil guy who hunts him down and skins him alive in the end i think. because the evil god wanted the protagonist back in heaven/hell Is this possibly Books of Blood by Clive Barker? The framing narrative from the first and last stories could maybe fit some of those details depending on how dim your memory is.
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Jul 23, 2021 23:14
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Shadow of the Sand from Lone Wolf has a sewer section.
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Aug 14, 2021 00:06
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I love a happy ending.  (Please tell me the book doesn’t turn out to be, like, super racist or something.)
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Aug 25, 2021 14:53
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I definitely haven't read it but did some googling of my own...is it Temple by Matthew Reilly? From wikipedia: Temple is split into two stories, both set in South America: One set during the Spanish Occupation of South America and one set in 1999 at the same place. The main focus of the former story is the journey of a monk named Alberto Santiago who becomes a traitor to his country after witnessing Spanish atrocities among the Incan civilisation. Aiding an Incan Prince named Renco Capac to escape, Santiago begins a quest to protect a special Idol - 'The Spirit of the People', an idol carved from black stone with purple veins running through it, actually carved from a meteorite that fell on earth, from the invading Spaniards. Upon his return to Spain, Santiago records his story in a transcript in San Sebastian Monastery in France. Four hundred years later, a group of German armed militia known as the Stormtroopers raid the monastery, executing all but one of the Jesuit monks living there, recovering the Santiago manuscript. Meanwhile, another party raids DARPA (The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) headquarters in order to capture a new superweapon known as the Supernova. DARPA sends Colonel Frank Nash to Peru with the aid of NYU linguistics professor William Race to recover the idol before anyone else can retrieve it. Their mission: to retrieve 'the Spirit of the People' (as the natives call it), carved out of Thyrium-261, a nuclear material from a binary star system that came to Earth via a meteorite. Thyrium has the potential to provide virtually limitless clean energy, which can fuel the Supernova, a next-generation weapon of mass destruction with the power to decimate a third of the Earth's surface and bring about Doomsday. e: the detailed plot summary mentions jaguar monsters later on, that's gotta be the same book. (Unless there are--gulp--two of them?) wizzardstaff fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Sep 1, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 23:42
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I'm still looking for a story I posted about in this thread a while ago. I listened to it many times on an audio cassette in the early 90s but I don't know if it was a retelling of a folk tale or narration of a specific book. It was a short story about some sort of contest/trial/gauntlet. A king would send people through it (maybe to win the hand of his daughter?) and the story was about someone determined to win (maybe the daughter herself?). The gauntlet was well-known and people would train for it in advance. The first trial was to go into a pitch-dark cave and cross a chasm filled with snakes. There was a pillar in the middle (my childhood ears misheard this as "pillow" which really changed the story until I learned a new word) so people would practice blind-jumping the specific distance necessary to reach it. The second trial was a lion sleeping deeper in the cave. Its back and sides were full of eyes which it would slowly open. (I can distinctly hear the narrator saying "eye after eye after eye".) When the lion finished, whoever it gazed at would turn to stone. The protagonist defeated it by pulling out a mirror. I don't really remember the third trial but I want to say it was something simple and unremarkable, like "face an inner demon and grab the prize, you've won" because no one ever made it past the lion.
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Sep 2, 2021 01:06
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Someone in the comments claims to have a copy at home! Scans may be coming! 
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Sep 10, 2021 00:36
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The whole internet loves Gasoline Boy, the tantalizingly obscure story about a boy with an interest in full-body transmogrification! (15 seconds later) We regret to inform you that Gasoline Boy is child pornography.
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Sep 14, 2021 17:35
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xiw posted:quoting myself from five years ago, but someone just posted this for me on twitter and i'm so happy: Oh hey, I'm pretty sure I read that book too when I was a kid! I don't recognize the cover but the author had a bunch of SF in the children's section of the library that I absolutely burned through. Reading the plot summary is stirring some memories. I remember some pretty far-out stories, like the one about starfish-shaped parasites that overtook a generation colony ship and grew big enough to encompass a planet.
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Sep 16, 2021 23:42
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Trying to recall a sci-fi/horror book I once heard of where some kind of creature takes people and sticks them onto a huge tree made of knives, where they suffer for eternity and it feeds on their suffering. I thought it was a Clive Barker book but I can't find anything by him that seems to fit. I think you are thinking of the Shrike in Dan Simmons' Hyperion books. https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Shrike quote:The Shrike derives its moniker from the family of Old Earth birds of the same name, which are known for impaling their prey on the thorns of trees. Much like its namesake, the Shrike has a special "tree" for its victims: a vast, artificial tree-like armature made of a substance resembling chrome steel and studded with three-meter-long thorns, known as The Tree of Pain. When the Shrike chose to impale victims on the thorns, they would not die, but rather continue living while experiencing the full physical pain of impalement.
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Nov 9, 2021 22:49
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VROOM VROOM posted:Read this one as a kid like 20 years ago. It centers around I think a boy and a girl, one of them might have been new in town (I think the boy), they ride bikes together in the countryside, one of them (I think the girl) crashes their bike, gets lockjaw (that specific term is the main thing I remember), and I think dies. Is it "The Diary of Trilby Frost" by Dianne Glaser? The author of this article also remembered similar details from childhood and tracked that book down. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-11-30-9711300193-story.html
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Nov 14, 2021 07:32
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Carthag Tuek posted:on the surface that is a good description, i ju st wish you'd stop see sricjnf thj ha. Aut No, that’s the Tower of Babel.
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Nov 28, 2021 04:19
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Probably not it, but I'll mention it anyway since someone else might want it; it's a classic "where did I see that" book: Dougal Dixon's Man After Man. It's an illustrated guide to a future where humans have abandoned the earth, which is populated by their genetically engineered descendants. Over millions of years, we see fish people, rat people, sloth people, and more. One of the illustrations is the source of the "Season's Greetings" image that goes viral occasionally, with a spindly brown biped attacking a bulky white yeti. Lots of neat images here: http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2010/12/dougal-dixon-man-after-man-1990.html
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Dec 9, 2021 05:53
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Sounds like you're thinking of the same books as this person on Stack Exchange, who eventually found it was Dave Duncan's "A Man of His Word" series. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/192841/fantasy-novel-where-magic-is-granted-by-knowledge-of-words-of-power
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Feb 26, 2022 19:10
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Is it In The Net Of Dreams by William Mark Simmons?
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Mar 26, 2022 08:08
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I very strongly remember reading a book like that in middle school (a little earlier than the time range you gave) but the title is escaping me. Do these points resonate with you: - Cover had three kids on it in kind of a photo collage style, with their heads pasted on pictures of people in a virtual war zone - Main protagonist was an angsty teen dude, other kids on the cover were a rebellious teen girl and a younger genius kid whose body was physically underdeveloped or weak - Protagonist was raised by a virtual parent figure who had male, female, and neutral modes of presenting - Virtual war training involved a series of tough scenarios, I remember one was having to escort civilians by pushing them around and avoiding mines or something, and they were scored on the number of casualties - When the kids escape the virtual environment, they sneak around in a locked-down city - Author’s name may have been something eastern european sounding Maybe this isn’t the same book, but if it isn’t then now that’s two requests for the thread because my interest is piqued. Edit: shoulda just started looking, because in less time than it took to type that I found my own book. Virtual War by Gloria Skurzynski. Looks like it had a few different covers with later editions but this is the one I remember: 
wizzardstaff fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 13:32
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Facebook Aunt posted:Kind of weird one. Probably pre-1980. I'm 90% sure I've read this one but I'm blanking on a title. Feel like I remember a domed city in the distance on the cover but that doesn't help much.
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Jul 3, 2022 04:00
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ScienceSeagull posted:Something I'm looking for myself: a short story in which scientists prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the existence of the immortal soul. The story is mostly about social and religious ramifications of this discovery and the further questions it raised (e.g. when does a fetus acquire a soul?). There might also have been an additional twist where it turned out that some humans don't have souls, and there's no way of telling without a soul scanner or whatever.
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Jul 10, 2022 16:18
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Kids living in the museum sounds like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg.
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Jul 26, 2022 23:57
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Oh my god, he wrote a sequel to The Boxes? I loving devoured everything he had written while I was in middle school but I guess I tuned out any works after that. My library’s copy of House of Stairs had a bunch of graffiti on the title page from prior readers warning you what a ride you were in for. I, too conscientious to deface a book, wrote mine on a slip of paper and stuck it in.
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Oct 3, 2022 15:35
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Are you thinking of Rhapsody and its sequels by Elizabeth Haydon? Been ages since I read it but I remember the framing narrative is that everything is being recorded by a narrator who isn't supposed to interfere.
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Oct 9, 2022 03:26
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Is it The Red Herring Mystery by Paul Adshead? I didn't read that myself, but the description seems to match. I had a few other books by him as a kid and that really sounds like his style.
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Apr 6, 2023 20:23
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Ortho posted:A thread in the new Scholastic Book Fair forum made me think of this: That sounds like A Street Through Time illustrated by Steve Noon. https://youtu.be/Vog1shTL6f0
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May 22, 2023 23:04
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I was thinking it might be a Stephen Biesty book, the guy who does all the cross sections. In fact that's who I remember creating A Street Through Time and I had to do a double take when I searched it just now.
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May 23, 2023 05:36
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IIRC the neutron star creatures aren’t in “faster time” than the humans because of any relativistic stuff, they just have very fast life cycles and metabolisms.
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Sep 28, 2023 17:07
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Annath posted:I'm trying to remember the name of a book that was about, like, someone resurrected a Neanderthal in modern (or futuristic?) times, and he was like educated and able to interact, but had definite differences for Homo Sapiens. Sounds like Hominids by Robert J Sawyer.
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Dec 11, 2023 20:55
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I think that was another Judy Blume book, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great.
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Feb 3, 2024 04:12
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Hughlander posted:With 3 body problem coming out soon was thinking of a book series i read the start of then I think I threw across the room. I haven't read it myself but the summary for the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove sounds very much like it fits.
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Mar 5, 2024 09:10
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 04:50 |
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I dunno the book but in case it helps you search, the story with the woman holding her husband is a Scottish ballad about Tam Lin.
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Mar 12, 2024 01:16
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