Seven novels about the modern problems of supernatural beings

Meghan Tifft teaches English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is the author of The Long Fire and From Hell to Breakfast.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "stories about the modern problems of supernatural beings," including:

Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter

This novel about a 19th century aerialiste extraordinaire is fanciful and flamboyant in its attentions to Sophie Fevvers, the part woman-part swan who runs the show of this book. Or so she claims. She’s a self-cultivated spectacle, glitzy and lurid and flaunting an air of greasy hoax, and she wields a raunchy feminine virility that wins everybody’s adulation. For all her audacity, Fevvers is sly and calculating, as she must be, for she exists in a man’s world and must fly torpidly into the swarm. While we cling to her migrations across London with the circus, through St. Petersberg, and into the wilds of Siberia, we experience her great soaring escape, which is always a woman’s dubious triumph, and especially at the end of a restless century—as if it is the natural order of things to slip from gaudy spectacle to the strange tribulations of the unmade self, and finally go out on the truancy of real myth.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue