On the wall in my office, I have an old newspaper article containing a recipe for Boris Karloff's guacamole. (If you're interested, the title of the article is "Boris Karloff Mad About Mexican Food.") I keep it there because it reminds me of what I love about this genre, in that monsters can contain multitudes. They're not just evil... they can also love guacamole. A good monster novel will have you both cowering in fear and feeling a pang of empathy for the creature, making it a ton of fun to read.
My boss raved about this book so I checked it out. He was right. It’s a truly wonderful sci-fi novel featuring a creature called the Shrike (aka Lord of Pain), who is made out of knives.
The novel tells the story of 7 travelers, and each tale is more gripping, interesting, and heartbreaking than the next. There are multiple timelines, kids that grow in reverse, and, again, a creature made out of knives. Sci-fi + monsters = a pretty winning combo.
This book was the basis for the movie The Thing, which I love—the first movie, not the remake.
To me, this book is just an awesome setting for a monster tale. Researchers in the Antarctic trapped with a thawed-out alien creature? I mean, come on! That’s everything I want in a book. It’s a quick read, but it’s truly phenomenal… and frightening.
Who Goes There?, the novella that formed the basis of the film The Thing, is the John W. Campbell classic about an antarctic research camp that discovers and thaws the ancient body of a crash-landed alien.
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
This was a Covid-read for me. We spent some of Covid in Vermont, next to the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT. If you’ve never been, it’s worth going just for this bookstore. Truly incredible.
Anyway, I saw this book in their sci-fi section and read the back copy and was hooked — a foul-mouthed talking crow, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, shambling human zombies. It’s told from the point of view of animals which have survived. There’s also a nice environmental message. It’s weird, odd, funny, insane, and delightful.
A humorous, big-hearted romp through the apocalypse, where even a cowardly crow can become a hero. Perfect for fans of Dawn of the Dead and Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies.
'A thoroughly enjoyable account of the end of the world as we know it. The Secret Life of Pets meets The Walking Dead.' Karen Joy Fowler
'It's transformative, poignant, and funny as hell. S.T. the irrepressible, cursing crow is my new favourite apocalyptic hero.' Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H Is for Hawk
S.T. is a domesticated crow. He is a bird of simple pleasures: hanging out with…
This is really how the Disney film Old Yeller should have ended, with a rabid canine raising hell and ripping out throats. What a phenomenal book.
My first foray into the world of Stephen King. I loved it so much I tried to name my dog Cujo … but I was overruled. We settled on Otto cause it sounds sorta similar. But, again, I love this book for the same reason I love Who Goes There?—a beast is terrorizing people who are trapped and can’t flee. It’s a simple formula for monster-themed novels, but it gets me every single time.
The #1 New York Times bestseller, Cujo “hits the jugular” (The New York Times) with the story of a friendly Saint Bernard that is bitten by a bat. Get ready to meet the most hideous menace ever to terrorize the town of Castle Rock, Maine.
Outside a peaceful town in central Maine, a monster is waiting. Cujo is a two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. One day, Cujo chases a rabbit into a cave inhabited by sick bats and emerges as something new altogether.
Meanwhile, Vic and Donna Trenton, and their young son Tad, move…
A grumpy-sunshine, slow-burn, sweet-and-steamy romance set in wild and beautiful small-town Colorado. Lane Gravers is a wanderer, adventurer, yoga instructor, and social butterfly when she meets reserved, quiet, pensive Logan Hickory, a loner inventor with a painful past.
Dive into this small-town, steamy romance between two opposites who find love…
When I was writing my own kid book dealing with monsters, I picked this one up on a whim just to see how kid book authors handle monsters.
I was pleasantly surprised to find it dealt with everything I love: small towns, a gang of kids, and other worldly creatures—in this case vampire-werewolf hybrids. Think Mystic Pizza + Attack the Block. It’s exciting, monster-hunting fun.
Toby McGill dreams of becoming a world-famous chef, but up until now, his only experience has been watching the Food Network. When Toby lands a summer job at Killer Pizza, where pies like The Monstrosity and The Frankensausage are on the menu, things seem perfect. His coworkers, Annabel and Strobe, are cool, and Toby loves being part of a team. But none of them are prepared for what's really going on at Killer Pizza: It's a front for a monster-hunting organization!
Learning to cook pizzas is one thing, but killing hideously terrifying monsters? That's a whole…
Lily knows better than to listen to the gossip her little
brother, Henry, has heard, but when her school newspaper needs a big
headline, the rumor that Bigfoot has been spotted is the best lead she’s
got. But when claw marks appear on the football
equipment and excessive animal hair starts clogging-up the gym showers,
Lily knows she can’t be afraid. This is her opportunity to break the
story wide-open. But can Lily, Henry, and Oliver, the neighbor-kid
they’re babysitting, discover what Bigfoot wants before it’s too late?
Everything is not as it seems in this hilarious new graphic novel series debut by Emmy Award–winning writer for The Late Show with Stephen ColbertMichael Brumm and bestselling illustrator Jeff Mack.
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
