Seven of the best scary books of recent years

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Johnson's latest novel is Sisters.

At the Guardian, she tagged seven of the best scary stories of recent years, including:

Any number of Helen Oyeyemi’s books would be perfect for this creepy time of the year but my favourite, White Is for Witching, is especially apt. Set in a tall house on the Dover cliffs the novel opens with the disappearance of one of its characters. The house is an unsettled place, the lift stopping between floors, the walls populated by generations of women who lived there before. Probably best read with the lights on.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten groundbreaking urban fantasy titles

David R. Slayton grew up in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where finding fantasy novels was pretty challenging and finding fantasy novels with diverse characters was downright impossible. Now he lives in Denver, Colorado, with his partner, Brian, and writes the books he always wanted to read. White Trash Warlock is his first novel. In 2015, Slayton founded Trick or Read, an annual initiative to give out books along with candy to children on Halloween as well as uplift lesser-known authors or those from marginalized backgrounds.

At Publishers Weekly, Slayton tagged ten of his favorite urban fantasies that break new ground, including:

Jade City by Fonda Lee

Lee juggles multiple points of view like so many knives. Her characters live in a crowded, fast-changing city where jade is a status symbol, carefully controlled, and a channel for magic, making for cutthroat politics whether you're a would-be jade thief working a dead-end job or a powerful member of one of the clans rivaling for control. This book unwinds quickly, shifting from one perspective to the next. The characters are compelling, even when they're not sympathetic. After all, they're just trying to survive as the ground shifts out from under them.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Jade City is among Emily Temple's top six epic fantasy series for fans of Game of Thrones and R.F. Kuang's five top East Asian SFF novels by East Asian authors.

The Page 69 Test: Jade City.

--Marshal Zeringue

The six most haunting settings in crime fiction

Max Seeck devotes his time to writing professionally. An avid reader of Nordic noir for personal pleasure, he listens to film scores as he writes. His accolades include the Finnish Whodunit Society’s Debut Thriller of the Year Award 2016.

Seeck's new novel is The Witch Hunter.

At CrimeReads, he tagged six of his favorite haunting settings in crime fiction, including:

Misery, Stephen King

The events of Misery take place in an isolated (of course) cabin on the Rocky Mountains. Author Don Sheldon is nurtured and later kept hostage by her biggest fan, Annie, who insists that Don write her a new novel. Now. Here. Faster. Or else she will kill Don. This novel too has been adapted to an amazing feature film and there’s a good reason for it. Or actually two. The important elements are the unstable, clearly out of her mind Annie and the cabin that acts as Don’s prison. And this cabin is much more scary than any spooky Halloween-style horror house.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Misery is among Rula Lenska's six favorite books, Jake Kerridge's top ten Stephen King books, John Niven's ten best writers in novels, Emerald Fennell's top ten villainesses in literature, and Lesley Glaister’s top ten books about incarceration.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top horror novels

Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. He won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award in 2015, was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing and went on to win several awards at the 2017 VDL One Act Play Festival circuit. In 2016 his first young adult novel, Boone Shepard, was shortlisted for the Readings Young Adult Prize. A film adaptation of his novel The Hunted is currently being developed in a joint production between Stampede Ventures and Vertigo entertainment in Los Angeles.

At the Guardian, Bergmoser tagged ten "horror stories that in different ways revolutionised the genre by being far more than just bumps in the night," including:

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin’s epic vampire saga is a sprawling tale of love, loss and societies destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again, centred not only on characters we could care deeply for, but a slowly growing sense of insidious evil whispering from the shadows, a terror so unknowable that it was always going to lose a little menace once it was explained. But like the best horror writers, Cronin uses that inevitability to make his point – that all too often evil grows from a place that is a little more understandable than we might care to confront. The whole trilogy is fantastic, but for its singular atmosphere of growing dread the first will always be the best.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Passage is among C.J. Tudor's eight thrillers featuring a child with a mysterious supernatural power, Anthony Horowitz's top ten apocalypse books and Annalee Newitz's ten works of science fiction that are really fantasy.

--Marshal Zeringue

The six best books on life outdoors

Stef Penney is a screenwriter and the author of three novels: The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), The Invisible Ones (2011), and Under a Pole Star (2016). She has also written extensively for radio, including adaptations of Moby Dick, The Worst Journey in the World, and, mostly recently, a third installment of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise series.

At the Guardian, Penney tagged six books "to remind us of the beauty and danger nature can offer," including:

Alan Garner’s Thursbitch is a slender novel of huge scope. It focuses on a Pennine valley – thursbitch means “demon valley” in Old English – where, 300 years ago, a drover is found dead in the snow next to the print from a woman’s shoe. In the present day, a couple – friends? Lovers? Something else? – argue as they walk over the same ground. Gradually these stories weave together, invoking the enduring power of landscape, myth and magic in wonderful language to arrive at an ending with tremendous emotional heft. Next time you walk somewhere familiar, this odd, unforgettable novel will make you question what may have gone before.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best books about Texas

Aaron Gwyn is the author of three novels. His fiction has appeared in his story collection Dog on the Cross, finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award; and numerous magazines and anthologies such as Esquire, McSweeney’s, Best of the West, and Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina. He is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where he teaches fiction writing and American literature.

Gwyn's new novel is All God's Children.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged the ten best books about the Lone Star state, including:

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne

A nonfiction book about Quanah Parker, the last great war chief of the formidable Quahadi-Comanche, and Jack Coffee Hays, the Ranger who taught Anglo-Texans how to face Comanches in combat. Gwynne is a fantastic stylist and a great storyteller; the tale of the rise and fall of the Comanche People is both thrilling and devastating.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight epic journeys in literature

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century.

Her latest book is The New American.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight epic quest stories, including:

The Odyssey by Homer

Written down, along with the Iliad, soon after the invention of the Greek alphabet around the 8th-century BCE, the epic poem sings of Odysseus’ return home after the Trojan War and his encounters with monsters, the Sirens, shipwrecks, and captivity by Calypso on her island until he finally makes it back to Ithaca. Because the poem survived more or less continuously until modern times and has had influence in so many cultures for millennia (unlike the more recently rediscovered and older Gilgamesh), there’s no need to reiterate a narrative which so many of us already know, either directly or through the many stories the poem has inspired and influenced. One of my favorite moments comes in Book 14 when Odysseus finally makes it to Ithaca after ten years of traveling and, disguised as a beggar, seeks out Eumaeus the swineherd, who, not recognizing Odysseus, asks “But come…tell me of thine own sorrows, and declare me this truly, that I may know full well. Who art thou among men, and from whence?” These lines have seemed to me to in some way encapsulate some of storytelling’s most basic questions across the ages.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Odyssey is among Megan Whalen Turner's eight sci-fi & fantasy books featuring deities, Daniel Mendelsohn's six all-time favorite books, four books that changed Mardi McConnochie, four books that changed Nicole Trilivas, Jill Ciment's ten top dog stories, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's top seven bad witches in literature, Ellen Cooney's ten top canine-human literary duos, Nicole Hill's ten best names in literature to give your dog, Alexandra Silverman's biggest fictional literary crushes, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello's top ten journeys across the Mediterranean and Caspian seas, Panayiota Kuvetakis's top ten fictional female friends who would make good real-life friends, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello's top ten journeys across the Mediterranean and Caspian Sea, Tony Bradman's top 10 list of father and son stories, John Mullan's lists ten of the best shipwrecks in literature, ten of the best monsters in literature, ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, and ten of the best caves in literature, as well as Madeline Miller's top ten list of classical books, Justin Somper's top ten list of pirate books, and Carsten Jensen's list of the top ten seafaring tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels featuring unlikely detectives

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England City and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new novel is Back Bay Blues.

[My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues; The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues; Q&A with Peter Colt]

At CrimeReads, Colt tagged eight novels featuring "amateur sleuths [who] never asked to get mixed up in a murder investigation—but they won't stop looking until they find the truth," including:

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

The protagonist of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s excellent The Club Dumas is Lucas Corso. Corso is a very Unlikely Detective, as he is a mercenary of a sort, whose moral code, if it can’t be bought, can certainly be rented if the price is right. Corso is referred to as a book mercenary who, for the right price, will chase down rare books and acquire by means fair and foul. He draws the line at murder. Corso lives out of a canvas shoulder bag that he carries his tools of the trade in, passport, cash, notebooks, pens and manuscripts. His clients are rich and, as the rich often are, unscrupulous when it comes to acquiring their desires. Corso is their guy.

He is hired to find a rare portion of the original manuscript of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Corso moves through Europe meeting with collectors and dealers, femme fatales and a mysterious young woman. His search for the manuscript brings him into contact with a secret society, devil worship, murder and characters that are straight out of the book he is looking for. The Club Dumas is an intellectual puzzle wrapped in a mystery story and, like Hive of Glass, provides a close look at the dark side of collecting.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about the intersection of witchcraft and feminism

Lucile Scott is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She has reported on national and international health and human rights issues for over a decade. Most recently, she has worked at the United Nations and amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and has contributed to such publications as VICE and POZ magazines. In addition, she has written and/or directed plays that have been featured in New York City, Edinburgh, and Los Angeles. In 2016 she hit the rails as part of Amtrak’s writers’ residency program. An American Covenant: A Story of Women, Mysticism, and the Making of Modern America is her first book.

At Electric Lit, Scott tagged eight books about hexing the patriarchy, including:

Circe by Madeline Miller

One’s cultural myths should reflect the values one holds most sacred, as our myths shape our psyches and life choices—even if we don’t think they do. However, most Western myths, told only from the perspective of white men, do not reflect the values I hold most sacred. And many of these myths began with the Greeks. In Circe, Madeline Miller recasts these archetypal tales through the gaze of the witch Circe, revealing the bombastic brittleness that always undergirded the patriarchal originals equating brutality with valor and narcissism with honor.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Circe is among E. Foley and B. Coates's top ten goddesses in fiction, Jordan Ifueko's five fantasy titles driven by traumatic family bonds, Eleanor Porter's top ten books about witch-hunts, Emily B. Martin's six stunning fantasies for nature lovers, Allison Pataki's top six books that feature strong female voices, Pam Grossman's thirteen stories about strong women with magical powers, Kris Waldherr's nine top books inspired by mythology, Katharine Duckett's eight novels that reexamine literature from the margins, and Steph Posts' thirteen top novels set in the world of myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven great thrillers that take readers to far-flung places

Rose Carlyle is a law professor who has written intermittently throughout her life and who began writing fiction in 2016. She was awarded first class honours in her creative writing Masters at the University of Auckland and was granted a prestigious mentorship under which she developed and completed this manuscript. She spends her spare time in far-flung places and currently lives in New Zealand. The Girl in the Mirror is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads, Carlyle tagged seven "books that have transported me to places I’ve never been with such vividness that I feel as though I have." One title on the list:

Call Me Evie by JP Pomare

“Evie,” the young woman who narrates this impressive debut thriller, is coy about everything including her real name, but she doesn’t hold back when describing Maketu, the brooding, remote New Zealand village she finds herself living in with a mysterious man who seems to be her captor. While Evie misses the city she left behind, the reader is enthralled by the wintry, haunted landscape, the menacing ocean, and the locals who seem to know too much about her troubled past. Melbourne-based Pomare chose a setting he knows intimately as the perfect backdrop to this atmospheric and unsettling tale.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about the Himalayas

Ed Douglas is an award-winning writer with a passion for the Himalaya. The author of a dozen books, including a biography of Tenzing Norgay, he has reported from the region for more than twenty-five years, covering the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the Tibetan occupation. He lives in Yorkshire, England.

Douglas's new book is Himalaya: A Human History.

At the Guardian, he tagged ten "books that catch the human texture and shape of the world’s highest mountain range," including:

The Wayward Daughter by Shradha Ghale

The status of women in Nepal continues to hold the country back. Domestic violence is rife while women’s healthcare and education lag behind. Even the constitution is discriminatory. Highly regarded journalist Shradha Ghale knows this better than anyone, but her first novel is not at all clunky or overly worthy. Her high-school heroine Sumnima and the women around her are rounded, memorable characters making sense of changes to a traditional society that offers security as well as injustice in a world where poverty is never far away. It’s full of warmth and humour, and features a fearsome grandma called Boju who swears like a docker.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels that explore "mean girl" culture

Avery Bishop is the pseudonym for a USA Today bestselling author of over a dozen novels, including the newly released Girl Gone Mad.

[The Page 69 Test: Girl Gone Mad; Q&A with Avery Bishop.]

At CrimeReads, Bishop tagged "five novels that, while they may not mainly focus on mean girl culture, certainly contain aspects that are important to the plot; in some of the books, bullying is what sets the story in motion." One title on the list:

Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Gillian Flynn has described Abbott’s novel as “Lord of the Flies set in a high-school cheerleading squad,” and there’s really no better way to describe it. This is the quintessential “mean girl” novel. There’s Abby, the narrator, and her best friend, Beth, who’s captain of the pep squad. When a new coach enters the scene and Beth sees her as a threat, all hell breaks loose. As the coach remarks early on in the book: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

Dare Me is among Kelly Simmons's six books to buddy-read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Katie Lowe's top eight crime novels for angry women in an angry world, Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction, S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue