The Internet has its limits. Sometimes one of those limits is simply not knowing what to search for. There is a book that I read in school which I have been trying to track down for many years. It was an anthology of short stories, called Twisters – each story had a surprise ending, you see. I remembered the title, several of the story plots, and that it was purple; but not the author, nor any story titles (nor the ISBN!). Unfortunately, as you can guess, searching for “twisters” produces about 100 pages of books about tornadoes.
So it wasn’t until today, when I was reading a book of short-short stories that I happened upon a story that was also in Twisters. Adding the appropriate search terms finally led me to a google books listing which revealed the author (editor) of Twisters to be one Steve Bowles.
From there it was a hop and a skip to abebooks, and another blast from the past has been tracked down for posterity.