A Short Stay in Hell (2009)

Others: Mixed

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.

ISBN:: 9780983748441
Length:: 104 pages

Genres: fantasy

Lists: …

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2015 · 390 pages · 9 reviews
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Sour Candy
Kealan Patrick Burke
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Others: Mostly positive
At first glance, Phil Pendleton and his son Adam are just an ordinary father and son, no different from any other. They take walks in the park together, visit county fairs, museums, and zoos, and eat overlooking the lake. Some might say the father is a little too accommodating given the lack of discipline when the child loses his temper in public. Some might say he spoils his son by allowing him to set his own bedtimes and eat candy whenever he wants. Some might say that such leniency is starting to take its toll on the father, given how his health has declined.What no one knows is that Phil is a prisoner, and that up until a few weeks ago and a chance encounter at a grocery store, he had never seen the child before in his life.
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Ella Minnow Pea
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Others: Positive
An epistolary novel set on a fictional island off the South Carolina coastline, Ella Minnow Pea brings readers to the hometown of Nevin Nollop, inventor of the pangram "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog." Deified for his achievement in life, Nevin has been honored in death with a monument featuring his famous phrase. One day, however, the letter Z falls from the monument, and some of the islanders interpret the missing tile as a message from beyond the grave. The letter Z is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride them-selves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock when another tile falls. And then another...In his charming debut, first published in 2001, Mark Dunn took readers on a journey through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea, a young woman forced to create another clever turn of phrase in order to save the islanders' beloved language. About the author: Mark Dunn is the author of more than twenty-five full-length plays that have been produced nationwide and beyond. His debut novel, Ella Minnow Pea, was winner of the Borders Original Voices Book of the Year award, a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selected title. His second novel, Welcome to Higby, was published in 2003, followed by 2004's Ibid. He is currently at work on a children's book and a novel, both forthcoming from MacAdam/Cage.
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And Lucifer said: “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of heaven down…” The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission: to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned. As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.
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Mrs Caliban
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1982 · 125 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Mixed
In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research... Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe's stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates's domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter--how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.
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Before Your Memory Fades
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