34 books like Halo (Standalones)

What is the essence of creating art? That’s what I took away from this book. The main plot of the book has to do with hamartia and the fall of an angel, but it is the commentary on the perfection of art that really stuck with me.

This is more so because Graham McNeil’s prior attempt to depict corruption in False Gods was such a disappointment, which turns Fulgrim into glorious vindication. Artists always lament and torment themselves over their work. Constant doubt makes an artist strive for perfection, with brief moments of feeling like we succeeded. No book encapsulated that for me like this did.

This book isn’t about the war itself; the core focus here is the military technology and its consequences.

As a big fan of the Alien series, I understood the risk of any human-alien encounter... and here I was confronted with the idea of weaponising the aliens. I knew from the very beginning that everything will go wrong, so my fundamental question was, “How exactly would it go wrong?”

If aliens weren’t enough, some members of the space station crew had pretty unfriendly intentions too. That was my favourite aspect of this book – yes, you should fear aliens, but you can’t be sure that your co-worker isn’t planning something sinister.

I love books that make me bite my nails and shake like a leaf.

Helsreach was so intense that I could read it in about two days. Every page is filled with action and suspense, what doesn’t downgrade the character development. These two things made this book perfect in my eyes.

Following the characters who struggled to fight an inhuman enemy was fascinating in itself, but discovering their complicated relationships let me get completely involved in this story. They all had a different way of thinking, but the common enemy united them. I want to avoid spoilers, so I will just say that the ending was mind-blowing.

I always treated Star Wars as a fun series to watch. Lasers, spaceships, some cool droids, but that’s all.

I felt that some element is missing here: the “wars” in "Star Wars” were usually too clean, and the warriors were just some heroes going for some fun adventures. My view was violently changed by two things: Rogue One (movie) and Twilight Company (book). These two things presented wars from a completely different perspective.

Twilight Company tells a story of common soldiers, whose whole purpose is to die and become forgotten, while the famous heroes collect all the glory. This book shows that every epic victory has its ugly side.

I love Edgar Allan Poe. His stories are so visceral and yet so simplistic in their scares. Of all of the stories by Poe, however, I think this book was a bit of a sleeper agent for me. It wasn’t until COVID-19 happened that I really saw how terrifying this story really was.

The idea of the rich hiding out from a plague that’s destroying the world was much too relatable in 2020. Just like in other titles in this list, the actual ghost itself isn’t necessarily what’s scary. It’s what the ghost represents. Not just death but pride, privilege, selfishness, guilt, and apathy.

Re-reading this book back in 2020 was an experience much too understandable, and it really scared me in a way it hadn’t before. The message Poe was trying to convey stuck with me in a new and horrifying way.

I typically like to read original fiction rather than a video game story adapted into a book, but this book was the exception. I love it when a story focuses on social issues and the way they affect ordinary people. Even though the world and location of Bioshock are fantastical, the self-serving and corrupt capitalistic society hits too close to home.

Seeing the worst of humanity and the way things quickly devolve into chaos and anarchy when society's basic needs are ignored in favor of profit absolutely terrified me. And while, yes, there are definitely traditionally scary things in this story, the scariest thing about it is the lack of human compassion the residents of Rapture have for each other.

Even if the book didn’t have the terrifying Splicers climbing on the ceilings or the precariously built city at the bottom of the ocean, its unflinching look at the negative… show more.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials (my youngest daughter is even named Salem), and so, in my search for a good modern take on them, I stumbled across this book. The fact that it was based on a true story immediately drew me in.

Like other books on this list, this story isn’t outright horror. It’s subtle. Rather than using ghosts and violence to scare the reader, this book focused on mob mentality, hysteria, and bias in a way that was so real and relatable that it felt like this could actually happen to me or someone I know.

I think the most effective horror puts you into a situation that’s so familiar and plausible that it keeps you looking over your shoulder. In my opinion, people are always much scarier than ghosts, and so this book that studied mob mentality chilled me with just how easily… show more.

This book has one of the most fun depictions of heart disease you’ll read. Wait! Don’t leave! That came out wrong!

Superhero comics rarely consider the toll of an intensely physical role. In this continuation of the landmark superhero series, Blue Beetle struggles with his sense of self-worth when he puts on weight and discovers that he has heart disease. The character’s role in the long-running series had mostly been comic relief, and this storyline gave the character some greater nuance and shading.

As a less-popular character, Blue Beetle can consider retirement without the guarantee that writers will have him miraculously discover the cure to a lifelong condition. While cracking jokes about himself in spandex to cover up his own insecurity, this comic takes time to consider aging, chronic conditions, and the way friends react to a life-changing diagnosis.

I’m recommending this book for how delightfully it considers the ill human body as a site of new possibilities. The Doom Patrol have never been well-known superheroes, perhaps because of the willingness of writers to confront the bodily trauma at the heart of their stories.

Morrison’s contribution to the series was to consider the Doom Patrol truly as freaks: people who could not fit into a society that demands gender, mental, and physical homogeneity. Mixing allegorical forms of illness—Cliff “Robotman” Steele’s fallible technological body—with more direct conditions like Kaye “Crazy Jane” Callis’ dissociative identity disorder.

Morrison, along with artistic collaborators, built a celebration of difference into a genre where most heroic bodies never break the mold.

Deadpool is superhero comics', and perhaps literature in general’s, most consistently challenging fictional engagement with cancer. Deadpool’s healing factor prevents his cancer from ever being cured, which traps him in a never-ending cycle of remission and relapse.

Unlike a superhero who responds to a bodily transformation by self-sacrificingly upholding the status quo, Deadpool is a mercenary and anti-hero. In this collection, writer Joe Kelly creates much of the narrative infrastructure that eventually made the character one of Marvel’s most popular.

Kelly also crafts a story where Deadpool is offered a heroic transformation that—through personal weakness, history, bad luck, and supervillainous interference—tragically fails. This book establishes the template for Deadpool stories and digs into Deadpool’s cancer for the first time.