Let's help each other identify books we dimly remember reading as kids

I vaguely remember reading a book about a boy who is chased along a river by a man and they end up in a sort of cave (I think) . Quite disturbingly, the man forces the boy to eat some sort of tasteless grey clay? That's all I remember

this is weirdly familiar! but i think your description might just be prompting my brain to fuse Z For Zachariah with the Hatchet sequel The River. hmm...

I always like the vibe of threads like this. They're collections of half-remembered dreamlike fragments -- images and moods -- asking for resolution and mostly not finding it. Feels like you could collect the most evocative examples online into a found poetry thing or at least a twitter feed.

Pretty sure this is a real memory and not a dream, in fact it might be a pretty well-known book: there was a radio station that was only on late at night, and there was some connection with lizard people I think? But not bad lizard people a la V or conspiracists, these were cool lizards. There’s a sense that the radio station was like a portal to another dimension.

I was just searching for another story on stackoverflow so I had a go with yours, I found this which mentions a radio and lizard people: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/46650/childrens-novel-about-a-boy-who-buys-a-device-from-an-old-man-and-travels-to-a - but the answer doesn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mendelsohn,_the_Boy_from_Mars - but this by the same author sounds closer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63321.Lizard_Music

The story I was searching for involved some kids who decide to take revenge on a bully, they turn up to his birthday party laden with presents which turn out to be empty; maybe they also try to scare him by putting their clothes on back to front and walking towards him backwards ?? sounds lame - anyway it ends inside an old empty warehouse or factory with him escaping through a door which then disappears, one of the other kids wonders where you go if you go through a door that isn't there. Early/mid 80s, probably a short story, probably extremely obscure.

sounds wild, no idea but would love to know.

(re: lizard music, the goodreads summary isn't that helpful but one of the reviews says this: But when he falls asleep in front of the TV one night, he awoke to the strangest thing. After the TV station goes off the air, his TV picks up this show of anthopomorphized lizards playing jazz music)

Awesome job ledge, it was definitively Daniel Pinkwater now that I recall, and it must have been Lizard Music. But now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t so “cool” after all. Maybe it was all part of their saurian scheme.

Sorry I’ll stop. Heh.

Definitely Lizard Music, and they are cool lizards. It's a great book. Worth a re-read.

Yeah Lizard Music is great.