The best books to cleanse your true-crime palate

Joe Hill is a masterful storyteller.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, but The Fireman has it all––a pandemic that causes its afflicted to spontaneously combust (called Dragonscale because Spinal-Tap Drummer Disease was too long), a plucky pregnant nurse determined to have a healthy baby in spite of the odds (which includes an unhinged husband and a blood-thirsty post-apocalyptic death squad), a commune that has figured out a way to live with the disease, and a lone wolf that wears a fireman’s jacket who has somehow learned how to control his fire.

The characters are so real they still live rent free in my head. I read it during the COVID lockdown and the parallels were both scary and hopeful. 

There is an intrinsic link between comedy and horror.

Fans of Jordan Peele’s horror films would probably appreciate that author John Ajvide Lindqvist worked as a stand-up comedian for twelve years. And his take on the vampire story is immersive, thanks to Ebba Segerberg’s amazing English translation of the Swedish novel. The descriptive scenes rival both movie adaptations. 

You are transported to a suburb in Sweden in 1981 where a twelve-year-old boy is struggling with the loneliness brought on by bullies and his parents’ divorce. Until an attractive new neighbor moves in that only goes out at night. Oh, and a body is found in the woods, completely drained of blood. Now life is a bit less monotonous for our protagonist.

I’ve been a fan of horror stories for as long as I could read.

(God bless those librarians who talked my mother into letting me bring home the books that I wanted to check out, or I wouldn’t be the person I am today.)

The scariest element of horror in my opinion, is a predator without boundaries in the physical world. Combining that element with rattlesnakes, uninterred graves, and river-soaked apparitions, you’ll get a southern gothic tale of revenge on a young girl’s murderer who usually finds himself immune to the law. 

The dynamic between the protagonist and her aloof, hypochondriac mother was all too familiar, and maybe that’s what attracted me to the storyline.

This book is more than just a murder mystery––it’s a book about women and the toxic relationships we make with ourselves and others that are perpetuated from unhealthy upbringings. But it’s also about finding inner strength while it challenges the stereotypes that portray femininity as weak, nurturing, and safe.

This is a very psychologically complex story with very real, very flawed characters, and is worth the raw, dark journey to the perfect conclusion.

A young pharmacist is hired in a rural town and begins to question what happened to the original druggist he replaced.

This Appalachian tale of murder and drugs even has its own soundtrack; I swear I could hear the radio and smell the characters, because the descriptions in this novel are so well written. This is one of the rare times I’ve read a book in one sitting because I had to know what was going to happen next.