The 8 books on this stack
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Night Film
Marisha Pessl · 2013
Ashley Cordova is dead. Scott McGrath, a veteran investigative journalist wants to know why. The reason why the death of this beautiful, young woman has piqued his interest so much is because of who her father is. He is Stanislas Cordova, the world famous director of strange cult/horror films that hasn't been seen publicly in over thirty years. The last time McGrath got involved with Cordova he lost his marriage, child, and career. This time he might lose everything else. With the aid of two strangers, McGrath takes a strange and psychedelic journey where not everything in front is real and what is real is more horrifying than anything that Cordova has put on screen.
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The Raw Shark Texts. Steven Hall
Steven Hall · 2008
Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house one day with no idea who or where he is. Instructed by a mysterious note to visit a Dr. Randle, Eric learns that the agony of losing the love of his life in a scuba-diving accident three years before has destroyed his memory. As Eric begins to examine letters and papers left in the house by 'the first Eric Sanderson,' a staggeringly different explanation for what is happening to Eric emerges, and he embarks on a quest to recover the truth and escape the remorseless predatory forces that threatens to devour him.
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Our Share of Night
Mariana Enríquez · 2019
"A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality. For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar's father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate? Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina's military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America's most original novelists, "a mesmerizing writer," says Dave Eggers, "who demands to be read"--
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Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo · 1955
Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such village of the mind, Comala, he set his classic novel Pedro Paramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed, Susana San Juan.
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The third policeman
Flann O ́Brien · 2014
The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe, " he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him. The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.
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Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov · 2006
The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.
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S.
J.J. Abrams · 2013
A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown. The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey. The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world's greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him. The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they're willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears. S. ... is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don't understand, and it is also Abrams and Dorst's love letter to the written word
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House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski · 1998
*Special hardback edition with foil cover* The first-ever UK hardback publication of the cult horror classic, featuring a special embossed 'maze' case design and full-colour text. Get ready to (re)discover the terrifying, thrilling, and mind-expanding immersive classic horror that redefines the boundaries of a novel . . . 'Phenomenal . . . thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent.' Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho 'A genuinely scary chiller , a satire on the business of criticism and a meditation on the way we read.' OBSERVER 'I've never read anything like it' ***** Reader review A young couple - Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his partner Karen Green - move into a small house on Ash Tree Lane. It soon becomes clear that something is terribly wrong - their new home is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside . . . Neither Will nor Karen are prepared to face the consequences of this impossibility until the day their two small children wander off, and their voices eerily begin to tell another story - of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams and create nightmares. What happened next is loosely recorded on videotapes and in interviews, and impelled an eccentric old man to compile - on loose sheets of paper, stained napkins, crammed notebooks - a definitive account of what took place at Ash Tree Lane that seems to unveil a thrilling and terrifying history. Because these scraps prove to be far more than the deranged ramblings of a reclusive old man . . . Immensely imaginative. Impossible to put down. Impossible to forget. House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have read before. Praise for House of Leaves- 'Genuinely clever and learned, often funny, brilliantly constructed and surprisingly touching . . . a debut of scintillating intelligence and scope.' Mail on Sunday 'An astonishing book . . . buy it, read it, be scared. - SFX 'Intricate, erudite and deeply frightening. ' - Wall Street Journal 'A fascinatingly insane triumph .' - Independent on Sunday 'Demonically brilliant' - Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn 'Strange, highly addictive and slowly creepy' ***** Reader review 'Genuinely chilling ... I can't recommend this book highly enough.' ***** Reader review 'The creativity and originality is astonishing' ***** Reader review