1. A slim paperback and the cover was of a man wearing a pig mask and the book had something to do with astral travel. Found! It's:
2. YA thriller/horror from some point in the '90s. I recall this being part of a series, don't think it was from Point Horror as none of the titles on its wiki article jogged my memory but I could be wrong. I do know for sure it wasn't from Fear Street or Nightmare Hall. Cover art was spooky-looking picture of guy on motorcycle, which probably doesn't narrow it down much but plot-wise... Plot concerns girl being haunted by the presence of her jerk biker ex, though he didn't die only moved away, and it was somehow determined the spirit was lingering about because she hadn't emotionally let go of him yet. Found! It's:
4. Short story about the dawning of an "age of plastic" where a boy wakes up one day and finds that he's completely made of plastic. He rearranges his facial features and then his parents don't recognize him, causing him to go on the run. He eventually comes home to realize his parents are now made of plastic as well and that this apparently is the new norm. I want to say it was in a Hitchcock anthology of sorts, but it was in a book prior to 1987-8. Found! It's "The Plastic Age" in:
5. A young girl abused by her father, younger brother finds out and I think the father kills him and blames the girl who is then institutionalized. The murder weapon is some type of tool like a wrench, cover had a blonde girl holding it. Remember them playing Manhunt near beginning, brother's name Bubba maybe.
6 comments:
I think #4 is "The Age of Plastic" from 1974's Adrift in Space and Other Stories.
Goodreads thread about it here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2347586-solved-sci-fi-possibly-part-of-1970s-children-s-digest-series-boy-has
I'm grateful you found The Age of Plastic. That warped my mind as a child too, and I had totally forgotten about it. The payoff was so odd. "No worries, son. We're all plastic now!" More or less. It really pulled the rug out from under me because I was just barely old enough to read the words of the thing.
Any chance that #1 is William Hope Hodgson's classic "The House on the Borderland"? It has themes of astral travel, and I've seen a couple of paperback editions with covers depicting the pig-men who appear in the book which could be mistaken for "a man in a pig mask":-
https://www.amazon.com/House-Borderland-William-Hope-Hodgson/dp/0722146701
http://cosmiccauldronbooks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/017.jpg
Yep I emailed that person a BORDERLANDS cover, we’ll see, thanks
I would imagine the pig mask with astral projection is the first episode of The Night Hunter series, with Robert Holdstock writing as Robert Faulcon. Each UK edition had a mask motif cover, with The Stalking showing a pig. It's also an occult detective series with plenty of magick trimmings. There were US editions for the first three, but with very different covers.
I'll e-mail Will a scan of the cover when I get 5 mins. Justin (The Paperback Fanatic)
My experience of the Lerner sf-of-sorts series was that it was uniformly atrocious, but I didn't get to that volume, as far as I remember...
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