No.119
Remembering a few young adult books that I would have read probably in the late 80s/early 90s, roughly. Can't remember the titles and haven't had much luck searching them up based on what I remember.
- Fantasy story where the MC's sidekick had a name I found pretty ridiculous, it was like "Pompoo" or something, pretty sure there was a "poo" syllable in it at least, because that's a great choice for a name in a kids' book right? The villain was described as having "a claw of iron", in full it might have been "a heart of stone and a claw of iron" but I'm only sure about the claw part. One of the chapters left off on the MC about to fall and grabbing what he thought was his friend's hand and it was like "but it wasn't a hand. It was a claw of iron". I forget what happened then but that chapter cliffhanger stuck with me.
- Fantasy setting that lays out the classic "whatever brave knight can slay the dragon plaguing our kingdom can marry the princess" setup, but the twist is that the princess runs away, gets herself outfitted with a suit of full plate armor, and goes around the countryside disguised as a man, hunting the dragon herself. Ultimately finds and engages the dragon in a really brutal battle where half her face gets burnt off and it almost ends in a mutual kill, but she gets that Sigfried type dragon blood magic that lets her understand animals who are having a conversation like "poor girl, if only she knew there was a magic healing spring right over there". So she recovers, goes back to the king while still in her knight disguise, demands the hand of the princess as promised and keeps pressing even after the king is like "but the princess has run away". When he finally promises to uphold the bargain if the princess comes back, she takes off the helmet and is like "and so my hand is my own to give as I please".
- Fantasy setting where there's this drug called "surka" (I think) that's basically wizard crack, powers up your magic power and you can do wizard duels for days on end but you might drop dead of overexertion afterwards. The royal heir ends up abusing it after being frustrated by a lack of magic power, and ends up burning their magic power out completely, only to be told "didn't you know the royals are always late bloomers", sort of a downer ending but it was clearly meant to be a "drugs are bad mmkay" type of story.
- Modern setting story preaching a "video games are bad mmkay" type of message. The basic premise was that these kids got hold of some gun-like device that if you "shot" someone with it, you would send them into a parallel dimension game world, but only if you pulled the trigger with real hate in your heart. One of the kids was named Mario (I'm sure the author thought this was very clever, even though the character generally went by the nickname Mars for most of the book). Mars was special because he hated himself enough that he could send *himself* into the other world without a helper.
- Modern setting where some kids have a club for their little friend group, and as part of the club stuff they start doing sacrifices to a papier-mache volcano as a joke. They end up contacting an actual demon called something like Yargh the Terrible (who resembles a tyrannosaurus) and tries to get them to "plant" the volcano so that it turns into a real volcano. They chanted "magma magma magma" during the rituals and ultimately stopped the volcano from becoming real by saying it backwards, "amgam amgam amgam". Pretty much the moral seemed to be "don't fuck around with demon worship even as a joke".
Any of these sound familiar?