Book picks similar to
Bob by Tegon Maus
science-fiction
reviewed
ebook
fantasy
The Dreamers
Karen Thompson Walker - 2019
She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned. Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
The Half Life of Molly Pierce
Katrina Leno - 2014
Waking up. Going to school, talking to your friends. Watching a show on television or reading a book or going out to lunch.You take for granted going to sleep at night, getting up the next day, and remembering everything that happened to you before you closed your eyes.You live and you remember.Me, I live and I forget.But now—now I am remembering. For all of her seventeen years, Molly feels like she’s missed bits and pieces of her life. Now, she’s figuring out why. Now, she’s remembering her own secrets. And in doing so, Molly uncovers the separate life she seems to have led…and the love that she can’t let go.The Half Life of Molly Pierce is a suspenseful, evocative psychological mystery about uncovering the secrets of our pasts, facing the unknowns of our futures, and accepting our whole selves.
Spontaneous
Aaron Starmer - 2016
Mara Carlyle’s senior year is going as normally as could be expected, until—wa-bam!—fellow senior Katelyn Ogden explodes during third period pre-calc.Katelyn is the first, but she won’t be the last teenager to blow up without warning or explanation. As the seniors continue to pop like balloons and the national eye turns to Mara’s suburban New Jersey hometown, the FBI rolls in and the search for a reason is on.Whip-smart and blunt, Mara narrates the end of their world as she knows it while trying to make it to graduation in one piece. It's an explosive year punctuated by romance, quarantine, lifelong friendship, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bloggers, ice cream trucks, “Snooze Button™,” Bon Jovi, and the filthiest language you’ve ever heard from the President of the United States.Aaron Starmer rewrites the rulebook with Spontaneous. But beneath the outrageous is a ridiculously funny, super honest, and truly moving exemplar of the absurd and raw truths of being a teenager in the 21st century . . . and the heartache of saying goodbye.
The Future Is Yours
Dan Frey - 2021
But what they can’t predict is how it will tear their friendship—and society—apart.If you had the chance to look one year into the future, would you?For Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry, the answer is unequivocally yes. And they’re betting everything that you’ll say yes, too. Welcome to The Future: a computer that connects to the internet one year from now, so you can see who you’ll be dating, where you’ll be working, even whether or not you’ll be alive in the year to come. By forming a startup to deliver this revolutionary technology to the world, Ben and Adhi have made their wildest, most impossible dream a reality. Once Silicon Valley outsiders, they’re now its hottest commodity. The device can predict everything perfectly—from stock market spikes and sports scores to political scandals and corporate takeovers—allowing them to chase down success and fame while staying one step ahead of the competition. But the future their device foretells is not the bright one they imagined.Ambition. Greed. Jealousy. And, perhaps, an apocalypse. The question is . . . can they stop it?Told through emails, texts, transcripts, and blog posts, this bleeding-edge tech thriller chronicles the costs of innovation and asks how far you’d go to protect the ones you love—even from themselves.
The Experiment of Dreams
Brandon Zenner - 2014
After years of testing experimental medicines and participating in repetitive sleep-related studies, all is finally going well for Ben ... until strange dreams begin to plague him and memories once hidden begin to reveal themselves. The doctors and staff onboard project Lucy are not who Ben thinks they are, and the organization will stop at nothing to keep his emerging memories buried for good. Ben is put on a collision course that will bring him to the brink of total insanity, and perhaps even death. At the heart of it all, Ben's worst enemy is his own mind, and he must confront his past in order to save his future. "The twists and turns of the plot will leave your head reeling and possibly questioning your own mental state for a moment.” (The San Francisco Book Review). With over 100 five star reviews on Amazon.
The Gone World
Tom Sweterlitsch - 2018
In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family--and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.
Flowertown
S.G. Redling - 2012
Those who survived contamination were herded into a US Army medically maintained quarantine and cut off from the world. Dosed with powerful drugs to combat the poison, their bodies give off a sickly sweet smell and the containment zone becomes known simply as Flowertown. Seven years later, the infrastructure is crumbling, supplies are dwindling, and nobody is getting clean. Ellie Cauley doesn’t care anymore. Despite her paranoid best friend's insistence that conspiracies abound, she focuses on three things: staying high, hooking up with the Army sergeant she's not supposed to be fraternizing with and, most importantly, trying to ignore her ever-simmering rage. But when a series of deadly events rocks the compound, Ellie suspects her friend is right—something dangerous is going down in Flowertown and all signs point to a twisted plan of greed and abuse. She and the other residents of Flowertown have been betrayed by someone with a deadly agenda and their plan is just getting started. Time is running out. With nobody to trust and nowhere to go, Ellie decides to fight with the last weapon she has—her rage.Flowertown is a high-intensity conspiracy thriller that brings the worst-case scenario vividly to life and will keep readers riveted until the final haunting page.
3:59
Gretchen McNeil - 2013
Her parents are divorcing, her boyfriend Nick has grown distant, and her physics teacher has it in for her. When she's betrayed by the two people she trusts most, Josie thinks things can't get worse.Until she starts having dreams about a girl named Jo. Every night at the same time—3:59 a.m.Jo's life is everything Josie wants: she's popular, her parents are happily married, and Nick adores her. It all seems real, but they're just dreams, right? Josie thinks so, until she wakes one night to a shadowy image of herself in the bedroom mirror – Jo. Josie and Jo realize that they are doppelgängers living in parallel universes that overlap every twelve hours at exactly 3:59. Fascinated by Jo's perfect world, Josie jumps at the chance to jump through the portal and switch places for a day.But Jo’s world is far from perfect. Not only is Nick not Jo's boyfriend, he hates her. Jo's mom is missing, possibly insane. And at night, shadowy creatures feed on human flesh.By the end of the day, Josie is desperate to return to her own life. But there’s a problem: Jo has sealed the portal, trapping Josie in this dangerous world. Can she figure out a way home before it’s too late?From master of suspense Gretchen McNeil comes a riveting and deliciously eerie story about the lives we wish we had – and how they just might kill you.
Fragment
Warren Fahy - 2009
. . an ecosystem that could topple ours like a house of cards. The time is now. The place is the Trident, a long-range research vessel hired by the reality TV show Sealife. Aboard is a cast of ambitious young scientists. With a director dying for drama, tiny Henders Island might be just what the show needs. Until the first scientist sets foot on Henders—and the ultimate test of survival begins . . .For when they reach the island’s shores, scientists are utterly unprepared for what they find—creatures unlike any ever recorded in natural history. This is not a lost world frozen in time, an island of mutants, or a lab where science has gone mad: this is the Earth as it might have looked after evolving on a separate path for half a billion years.Soon the scientists will stumble on something more shocking than anything humanity has ever encountered: because among the terrors of Henders Island, one life form defies any scientific theory—and must be saved at any cost. International Thriller Writers nominee Best First Novel
Season Of The Harvest
Michael R. Hicks - 2011
The group’s leader, Naomi Perrault, is a beautiful geneticist who Jack believes conspired to kill his friend, and is claiming that a major international conglomerate developing genetically engineered crops is plotting a sinister transformation of our world that will lead humanity to extinction. As Jack is drawn into a quietly raging war that suddenly explodes onto the front pages of the news, he discovers that her claims may not be so outrageous after all. Together, the two of them must battle a horror Jack could never have imagined, with the fate of all life on Earth hanging in the balance…
The Murders of Molly Southbourne
Tade Thompson - 2017
Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne.The rule is simple: don't bleed.For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?
Battle Royale
Koushun Takami - 1999
Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan - where it then proceeded to become a runaway bestseller - Battle Royale is a Lord of the Flies for the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world. Made into a controversial hit movie of the same name, Battle Royale is already a contemporary Japanese pulp classic, now available for the first time in the English language.
Glimpse: A Novel
Jonathan Maberry - 2018
Ten years ago, at age sixteen, she gave up her baby after the father, her first love, dies in Iraq. Now, three years clean and on the way to a job interview, Rain borrows a pair of reading glasses from an old lady on a Brooklyn train. The lenses are cracked and through the crack she catches a glimpse of a little boy running and screaming. The boy looks so much like Rain’s dead lover. Like their son must look now. Rain realizes that the glasses give her quick glimpses of her lost son, Dylan, who needs her to find him. Dylan is important to our damaged, hopeless world. But he’s in terrible trouble because evil creatures - the Shadow People - are trying to corrupt and destroy him. If Dylan dies, then hope dies. But how does a recovering junkie fight supernatural monsters? And how far will one woman go to save her lost son?GLIMPSE is a supernatural thriller by NY Times best-selling author and 5-time Bram Stoker Award winner Jonathan Maberry. It will be published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Griffin in 2018.
The Running Man
Richard Bachman - 1982
The protagonist of The Running Man, Ben Richards, is quick to realize this as he watches his daughter, Cathy, grow more sick by the day and tread closer and closer to death. Desperate for money to pay Cathy’s medical bills, Ben enlists himself in a true reality style game show where the objective is to merely stay alive.
The Punch Escrow
Tal M. Klein - 2017
Advancements in nanotechnology have enabled us to control aging. We've genetically engineered mosquitoes to feast on carbon fumes instead of blood, ending air pollution. And teleportation has become the ideal mode of transportation, offered exclusively by International Transport—a secretive firm headquartered in New York City. Their slogan: Departure... Arrival... Delight!Joel Byram, our smartass protagonist, is an everyday twenty-second century guy. He spends his days training artificial intelligence engines to act more human, jamming out to 1980's new wave—an extremely obscure genre, and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. Joel is pretty much an everyday guy with everyday problems—until he's accidentally duplicated while teleporting. Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves in a world that now has two of him.