Eight edge-of-your-seat reality TV thriller titles

L.M. Chilton is a journalist with fifteen years of experience working on TV shows for the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 in the UK, as well as writing columns for magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and reporting for national newspapers across the world, everywhere from Doncaster to Delhi. He lives in London, procrastinating.

Chliton's new novel is I Think We Should Kill Other People.

At People magazine he tagged "eight of the best thrillers and mysteries set in the terrifying world of television," including:

The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey by Astrid Dahl is The Real Housewives meets Knives Out

This campy mystery follows the scandalous lives of the back-stabbing (sometimes literally) cast of Garden State Goddesses. When a murder occurs, the cast become suspects and a producer must turn detective. Every lead she follows is one she helped create.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best twisty horror retellings

At Book Riot Kendra Winchester tagged seven titles that take a familiar story and reimagine it in the most delightfully gruesome way, including:

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

In this award-winning novella, Victor LaValle subverts Lovecraft’s Cthulhu story “The Horror at Red Hook,” this time telling the story from a new perspective. Charles Thomas Tester takes risky jobs to keep a roof over his head and take care of his father. But when he delivers a magical tome to a sorceress, he accidentally opens up a door to another world. This story is all-engrossing, so it’s no wonder that it won the Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. When we’re talking about the best retellings, this novella has to make the list.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Ballad of Black Tom is among Lyndsie Manusos’s six top horror retellings of well-known stories, Erica Ezeifedi's six books for fans of the movie Sinners, Brittany K. Allen's ten top books for fans of Sinners, Chase Dearinger's seven horror titles where the setting is a monster, and Colleen Kinder's ten titles about chance encounters with strangers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven experimental books that reimagine how trauma is told

Erik Fuhrer is a queer, nonbinary poet, playwright, and trauma writing teacher. They hold a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and a PMP. They are the author of nine books, including Gellar Studies (2023) and the forthcoming hybrid memoir My Buffed Up Life (2026). They were the UCLA Extension Winter 2026 Writer in Residence.

At Electric Lit Fuhrer tagged seven books by "writers use form to convey the experience, emotions, and structure of trauma, keeping the gaps, the flaws, the inventions, scalping together image and sensation into something legible but messy and tangled and raw." One title on the list:

Nox by Anne Carson

Nox is an elegy for Carson’s brother, who was already partially ghost before he passed, as he left home and called rarely in his absence. In a way this elegy started years before his death, and the reproduced letters, family photographs, and sketches montaged into the book are a testament to the imprints of his presence in her life before and after death. Its accordion spine mimics an ancient scroll, log, and epic, its creased pages paralleling the fracturedness of grief. It cannot be viewed all at once, so sprawling that it would take up many rooms of feet, and therefore becomes like the history and the memory and the body lost to it: accessible in small unfoldings of time and space, but never quite tangible and accessible as a whole.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten essential Ukrainian reads

Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange.

Her latest book is Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War.

At Lit Hub she shared a list "of books written by Ukrainians in English or translated from Ukrainian into English [that] sheds light on what has long been overshadowed by empires seeking Ukraine’s erasure: the country’s rich literary tradition and its tradition of resistance." One title on the list:

Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025)

A novelist turned war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina travelled her war-torn country photographing bomb craters in children’s playgrounds and recording survivors’ testimonies, standing alongside the women she called her sisters: lawyers, soldiers, journalists, museum workers fighting for justice. She did not survive to finish her telling of their stories—killed by a Russian missile strike in 2023, two-thirds through the manuscript of Looking at Women Looking at War. Assembled by her close friends and family, the book’s forced silences and empty pages become its own form of testimony: a verdict for Amelina’s killers, and eternity for her voice. The book received the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the best gothic mystery novels

Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer and reviewer based in the south of Argentina. She hoards books like they’re going out of style. In case of emergency, you can summon her by talking about Ireland, fictional witches, and the Brontë family. At Book Riot she tagged eight of the best gothic mystery novels. One title on the list:

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-García

No list of gothic mysteries would be complete without this instant classic: although it is mostly known as a horror, there’s a strong current of mystery underlying this novel.

When her cousin sends her a plea for help, Noemí embarks upon a journey to High Place. She’s determined not to be afraid of anything or anyone, not even of the house itself. But soon enough, she discovers that it’s not enough to not be afraid… she also has to resist the house’s pull on her.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Mexican Gothic is among Lucy Ashe's six titles that make us question those closest to us, C.J. Dotson's five novels featuring decaying settings, and Samsun Knight's seven horror novels about mysticism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top titles set in decadent locales

Alex Hay is a bestselling author whose debut novel The Housekeepers was a Waterstones Book of the Month and Paperback of the Year and won the Caledonia Novel Award 2022. He is also the author of The Queen of Fives and The Midnight Guests, both published to great acclaim.

Hay was born in London and now lives in Brighton, U.K. with his husband.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six brilliant novels that thread the darkest psychology into rarefied settings to completely thrilling effect." One title on the list:

Tom Hindle, Death in the Arctic

Like Agatha Christie, Tom Hindle is a master at taking an intriguing, must-visit setting—a magnificent ocean liner, a fabulous wedding on Lake Garda, a hotel in the Costa Rican jungle—and unfurling a carefully-layered mystery within it. I thought this was such a distinctive and clever setup—a luxury airship on a specially-chartered trip to the North Pole—and when you read a Tom Hindle book you always know you are in safe hands.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books that show that the Great American Road Trip Novel isn’t just for white people

Winnie M Li is an American author and activist living in the UK with her partner and young son. A Harvard graduate, Li has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed eco-tourism projects. Her first novel, Dark Chapter, was nominated for an Edgar Award and translated into ten languages, followed by the critically acclaimed Complicit. A survivor and advocate against gendered violence, she holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and teaches creative writing and media studies.

Li's new novel is What We Left Unsaid.

At Lit Hub Li tagged "eight books (both fiction and non-fiction) that narrate this most American of stories from the perspective of people of color." One title on the list:

Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon

This is the book I always recommend when asked about US road trip narratives. A bestseller upon publication in 1982, this memoir chronicles Least Heat-Moon’s 13,000-mile road trip around the perimeter of America. He drove only on two-lane ‘blue highways,’ avoiding the large interstates and taking him through small towns and neglected corners of the country. The result offers both beautiful prose and an intimate glimpse of an America which may no longer exist. Least Heat-Moon is part-indigenous, and his sensitive awareness of race, class, and historical inequalities enriches his anthropological, but poetic style.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top nineteenth-century novels

Joanna Trollope was an English writer. Some of her best known works include The Rector's Wife (her first #1 bestseller), A Village Affair, Other People's Children, and Marrying the Mistress. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honors List for services to literature.

In February 2000 at the Guardian she tagged ten top nineteenth-century novels, including:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This has everything - joy, grief, success, failure, wealth, poverty, comedy, tragedy - and above all, atmosphere by the bucketload.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Bleak House is one of Alex Wade's ten top dodgy lawyers in literature, Elizabeth Day's ten favorite books about cities, Daisy Hildyard's ten best poems, books and plays about our human inheritance, George Packer's six favorite books, Oliver Ford Davies's six best books, Ian Rankin's 5 favorite literary crime novels, Tim Pigott-Smith's six best books, James McCreet's top ten Victorian detective stories and one of Rebecca Ford's favorite five fiction books. It is on John Mortimer's list of the five best books about law and literature and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature and ten of the best men writing as women, and is among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top mythology- and folklore-inspired horror titles

Lyndsie Manusos’s fiction has appeared in PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has worked in web production and content management. When she’s not nesting among her books and rough drafts, she’s chasing the baby while the dog watches in confused amusement. She lives with her family in a suburb of Indianapolis.

At Book Riot she tagged six of the best mythology- and folklore-inspired horror books, including:

Skin Folk: Stories by Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson is a titan in speculative fiction. In 2021, Hopkinson was named the 37th SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Among her many brilliant works, Skin Folk is a great title to jump into if you’re looking for a place to start with her oeuvre. Hopkinson’s collection shows her mastery not only of the short form but also of a range of genres. From stories inspired by Caribbean folklore to chilling superstitions and mind-blowing science fiction, this is a perfect read for the Fall season.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top thrillers about mothers and daughters and sisters

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan is the author of more than seventeen thrillers including All This Could Be Yours, One Wrong Word, and The House Guest which have won every major mystery award in the industry and have been translated into multiple languages throughout the world. Her fiction is inspired by a lifetime of groundbreaking true-crime cases from a storied career as an on-air investigative journalist for Boston’s WHDH-TV for which she was awarded multiple journalism honors, including thirty-seven Emmy Awards. A TedX speaker and in-demand literary moderator, she has been called a “master of suspense” (Publishers Weekly). A native of Chicago with roots in Indianapolis, Ryan lives in Boston.

Her latest novel is Mother Daughter Sister Stranger.

At CrimeReads Ryan tagged six favorite thrillers about mothers and daughters and sisters, including:

The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths.

Diaries are supposed to be secret, that’s inviolable. And in this brilliant gothic-adjacent thriller, the mother and the daughter are each keeping one. When there’s a murder and both diaries become pivotal evidence, what the mother and daughter learn about each other’s devastating secrets in these no-longer-private entries will keep you turning the pages as fast as you can. This is a perfect book club book—when the killer uses the daughter as leverage, how will the vulnerable mom stop them?

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

The Stranger Diaries is among M. E. Hilliard's seven best, creepiest old houses in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about the body

Lydia Mathis has an MFA in fiction from New York University. She earned her BA in English Literature with a minor in Classical Civilizations from Agnes Scott College. She has worked as a teacher for Teach for America in Memphis and as a teaching fellow at Coler-Goldwater Hospital in New York City. She is the recipient of A Public Space’s 2023 Editorial Fellowship and is currently an assistant editor at A Public Space. She has stories published in North American Review, Southeast Review, Torch Magazine, Stanchion, Five on the Fifth, and oranges journal.

Mathis's debut story collection is Desperate Bodies.

At Lit Hub she tagged five "books that have an entrancing focus on the body." One title on the list:

Naben Ruthnum, Helpmeet

I’m not one to typically read horror, as I’m a baby and prone to nightmares, but I read this with a friend and lived for the descriptions of a decaying body. The horror here is understated, observational. Emotions are near entirely removed, and we get to watch as if this is a kind of Cronenberg directed nature documentary. Besides the beauty and preciseness of language describing a deteriorating body, there’s also the quiet contemplation of the characters affected. There’s the crumbling husband, who makes you consider what you’d do if your body so viciously revolted against you. And then there’s the wife, who takes care of her husband. How do you bear watching a live decomposition? What must you do to survive that?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top books for fans of "Slow Horses"

At Book Riot Megan Mabee tagged four entertaining espionage books for fans of Slow Horses. One title on the list:

Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart

Like Slow Horses, this action-packed assassin story promises plenty of dark humor, as well as a protagonist trying to move on from his notorious past. While Mark was once known as the most dangerous assassin-for-hire in the world, he’s changed his ways, given up this questionable career, and joined a program to help him turn things around. Unfortunately, there seems to be someone who wants him dead, and this will send Mark on a hunt around the world trying to figure out who’s got it out for him.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Assassins Anonymous is among Isabelle McConville's eight hitman stories you don’t want to miss.

Q&A with Rob Hart.

The Page 69 Test: Assassins Anonymous.

--Marshal Zeringue