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The Cartographers
Peng ShepherdPeng Shepherd - 2022
Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn’t seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable and exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence . . . because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one—along with anyone who gets in the way.But why?To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret and discovers the true power that lies in maps . . .Perfect for fans of Joe Hill and V. E. Schwab, The Cartographers is an ode to art and science, history and magic—a spectacularly imaginative, modern story about an ancient craft and places still undiscovered.ps...
One of Us
Michael Marshall Smith - 1998
He works for REMtemp, taking on other people's memories. It's illegal, but usually harmless. Maybe a petty criminal wants to pass a lie detector test. Or an unfaithful spouse wants to enjoy a guiltless affair. All Hap has to do is carry the memories for a couple of hours. It's easy money. Until a beautiful young woman who committed murder leaves her memory with Hap and won't take it back.Now Hap is on the run: from the LAPD, from six angels of death in gray suits and sunglasses, and from the best hit man in the business his ex-wife. Even worse, people all around Hap are disappearing in a strange white light. His only hope is to negotiate with a guy who may be much more than he seems, so he can stay alive long enough to discover who is and who isn't...
End of the World House
Adrienne CeltAdrienne Celt
Bertie is a semi-failed cartoonist, working for a prominent Silicon Valley tech firm. Her job depresses her, but not as much as the fact that Kate has recently decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles.When Bertie’s attempts to make Kate stay fail, she suggests the next-best thing: a trip to Paris that will hopefully distract the duo from their upcoming separation. The vacation is also a sort of last hurrah, coming during a ceasefire in a series of escalating world conflicts.One night in Paris, they meet a strange man in a bar who offers them a private tour of the Louvre. The women find themselves alone in the museum, where nothing is quite as it seems. Caught up in a day that keeps repeating itself, Bertie and Kate are eventually separated, and Bertie is faced with a mystery that threatens to derail everything. In order to make her way back to Kate, Bertie has to figure out how much control she has over her future—and her past—and how to survive an apocalypse when the world keeps refusing to end.
Hellucination
Stephen Biro - 2011
A drug-fueled trip through the gruesome levels of Hell may sound like a fictional horror story to some, and since the traveler in question was movie distributor Stephen Biro, it could just as easily have been one of his film projects. But Stephen's experiences were the real, life-changing sort. They're also proof that the Lord does work in mysterious ways -- extending all the way to squares of LSD and nitrous oxide cartridges.Armed with psychedelics, hallucinogenics and a brave desire to meet God no matter the personal cost, Stephen pushed beyond the boundaries of safe drug use. He took the most nightmarish of trips from a cramped one-bedroom apartment that he used for running his underground video business. With initial difficulty finding God in his altered state, Stephen instead encountered depravity and grotesquery enough to make his soul weep, but he pushed on. And if that wasn't bad enough, his Hellish experiences bled over into his waking days, and his friends and acquaintances began identifying themselves to him as Antichrists, deities and other assorted beings from "the other side." Reality was blurring and shifting, and Stephen was run utterly ragged. Could he fulfill his quest to learn universal truths before his extreme drug use took its toll?Hellucination: A Memoir spares no disturbing detail of the unusual route that one man took to find Christ and the God of the Bible. The memoir also follows younger Stephen through his 1970s childhood and his bizarre early encounters with religion that drove him to Atheism."An utterly surreal memoir. I'd say it was 'mindbending, ' but "HELLUCINATION" doesn't just bend your mind, it twists it, stretches it, stabs it, and tosses it on the grill!" - Jeff Strand, author of the upcoming book, "PRESSURE" and "WOLF HUNT" He's been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2006, 2008, and 2010."HELLUCINATION takes the form of a page-turning memoir, combining personal trip reporting with science fiction, horror movie, and religious mythologies, philosophical speculation on the nature of the author's experiments with psychedelic drug combinations, strange encounters with other people who may not be what they seem, and the rationale behind his spiritual conversion from atheism to Christianity." --David Jay BrownAuthor of "Mavericks of the Mind" and "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse" "HELLUCINATION is a powerful read. In fact, it might distinctly appeal to fantasy readers, film lovers and lovers of fiction. Biro writes passionately with a purpose... you may end of ripping your eyes out afterwards though." -- Review, Horrornews.netMind-boggling and enthralling. The visualization techniques used is astounding. - Paul White - Producer of Bride of Re-Animator and Brian Yuzna's SocietyI felt myself questioning my faith, or lack of faith, on religion, Jesus, God, the Devil, and what the purpose and point of my life and existence really was/is. I think that is the point of the book. The book raises awareness and makes readers think about the meaning of life and what their purpose is in it. That, in itself, is a pretty scary thing to think and ponder about. - Hellucination - Book review by www.shuizmz.comCinematic... it's going to scare the Hell out of some Christians. - Jim VanBebber - Director of The Manson Family and Deadbeat At Dawn
Blind Faith
Ben Elton - 2007
Where 'sharing' is valued above all, and privacy is considered a dangerous perversion.Trafford wouldn't call himself a rebel, but he's daring to be different, to stand out from the crowd. In his own small ways, he wants to push against the system. But in this world, uniformity is everything. And even tiny defiances won't go unnoticed.Ben Elton's dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a sex-obsessed, utterly egocentric culture. In this world, nakedness is modesty, independent thought subversive, and ignorance is wisdom. A chilling vision of what's to come? Or something rather closer to home?
Scouting for the Reaper
Jacob M. Appel - 2013
These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor.Jacob M. Appel is the author of more than two hundred published short stories and is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition.
Awakened
James S. Murray - 2018
The shining jewel of this state-of-the-art line is a breathtaking visitors’ pavilion beneath the river. Major dignitaries, including New York City’s Mayor and the President of the United States, are in attendance for the inaugural run, as the first train slowly pulls in. Under the station’s bright ceiling lights, the shiny silver cars gleam. But as the train comes closer into view, a far different scene becomes visible. All the train’s cars are empty. All the cars’ interiors are drenched in blood. As chaos descends, all those in the pavilion scramble to get out. But the horror is only beginning. High levels of deadly methane fill the tunnels. The structure begins to flood. For those who don’t drown, choke, or spark an explosion, another terrifying danger awaits — the thing that killed all those people on the train. There's something living beneath New York City, and it's not happy we've woken it up.
The Torah Codes
Ezra Barany - 2011
When an intercepted note connects the landlord to a secret society, and a detective ends up dead, Nathan must abandon his home and everything familiar to him, open his heart to a tarot reader he has never met, and trust her with his life--just as the ancient scriptures have foretold.
Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
Dexter Palmer - 2019
His apprentice Zachary knows John is reluctant to believe anything that purports to exist outside the realm of logic. But even John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local farmer, manages to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John realizes that nothing in his experience as a village physician has prepared him to deal with a situation as disturbing as this. He writes to several preeminent surgeons in London, three of whom quickly arrive in the small town of Godalming ready to observe and opine. When Mary's plight reaches the attention of King George, Mary and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences for the first time a world apart from his small-town existence, and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. All the while, Mary lies in bed, waiting for another birth, as doubts begin to blossom among the surgeons and a growing group of onlookers grow impatient for another miracle...
The Enchanted
Rene Denfeld - 2014
Others don't see it, but I do.The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits. Fearful and reclusive, he senses what others cannot. Though bars confine him every minute of every day, he marries magical visions of golden horses running beneath the prison, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs, with the devastating violence of prison life.Two outsiders venture here: a fallen priest, and the Lady, an investigator who searches for buried information from prisoners' pasts that can save those soon-to-be-executed. Digging into the background of a killer named York, she uncovers wrenching truths that challenge familiar notions of victim and criminal, innocence and guilt, honour and corruption-ultimately revealing shocking secrets of her own.
The Doll Factory
Elizabeth Macneal - 2019
1850. The Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and among the crowd watching the spectacle two people meet. For Iris, an aspiring artist, it is the encounter of a moment – forgotten seconds later, but for Silas, a collector entranced by the strange and beautiful, that meeting marks a new beginning. When Iris is asked to model for pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint. Suddenly her world begins to expand, to become a place of art and love.But Silas has only thought of one thing since their meeting, and his obsession is darkening . . .
The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova - 2005
The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself--to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive. What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.
The Ghost Notebooks
Ben Dolnick - 2018
So Hannah accepts a job as live-in director of the Wright Historic House, a museum dedicated to an obscure nineteenth-century philosopher whose life was marred by tragedy.At first, life in this old, creaky house feels cozy. Nick and Hannah explore the deserted museum at night, wandering the twisting halls and sneakily trying out the former owners' original master bed. But as summer turns to fall, Hannah begins to have trouble sleeping; reluctantly, she tells Nick she's hearing whispers in the night. Then one morning, Nick wakes up to find Hannah gone. In his frantic search for her, Nick will discover the hidden legacy of Wright House: a man driven wild with grief, and a spirit aching for home.
The Tree of Knowledge
Daniel G. Miller - 2021
Imagine a person who can visualize ten steps ahead, not simply in the game of chess, but in every human interaction.Imagine a person who could anticipate what you say before you said it, who could see a punch before it was thrown. Imagine a person who could see the chess game of politics, economics, and power itself unfold long before it happens.Imagine a secret that could make all of this possible.Mathematics professor Albert Puddles is such a person, and as he is thrust into a murder and burglary investigation on the Princeton campus he finds that there is such a secret buried within an obscure cipher. The discovery leads Albert to team up with an aging mentor, a curious graduate assistant, and an unusual “book club” on a frantic chase across the country to recover the secret and clear his name.Through this adventure, Albert rediscovers a woman from his past and is forced to confront his own understanding of love, rationality, power, and the limits of the human mind.The #1 Bestseller and BookLife Editor’s Pick“The Tree of Knowledge is a dynamite read... reminiscent of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code but smarter, sharper... A thrill ride with no seatbelt but what an incredible view.”—Junot Díaz, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Termination Shock
Neal Stephenson - 2021
Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?