Here are 12 books that The Descent fans have personally recommended once you finish the The Descent series.
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As a child I grew up around blue-collar type men and women, and as I became an adult I grew to learn that these are the sorts of people who pioneer civilizations, who keep them running once they are built, and who are the ones to brave high-risk labor to bring us the food, shelter, and comforts we often take for granted. Adding a fictional element in the form of aliens, monsters, or the supernatural can put a fine and dynamic point on the life & struggles of such people. I strive for this in much of my military science fiction work and enjoy reading it as an audience member.
Though this is a war novel meets creature feature I think that the novel’s focus on the characters of the soldiers, most of whom were drafted out of everyday 1960s/1970s American life, merits placement on this list. These soldiers are draftees, compelled by the state to participate in a war abroad, and we get to explore their thoughts, feelings, growth, struggle to survive, and for many death as they endure not just war against other men with guns, but giant centipedes, which any creature fiction lover is going to really enjoy.
Tasked with finding a US informant who has gone missing in the village of Hai Trang, Sergeant Reese and Corporal Hanson lead their squad off into the Vietnamese jungle, but it isn't long before they get the sense that there's something different about this mission. They find Viet Cong corpses along the path, strangely mummified or desiccated, and the village of Hai Trang itself turns out to be a ghost town. There, they find just one survivor - a young girl named Lai Anh - who tells them that everyone in the village has been destroyed by the "Vietnam Black".…
As a child I grew up around blue-collar type men and women, and as I became an adult I grew to learn that these are the sorts of people who pioneer civilizations, who keep them running once they are built, and who are the ones to brave high-risk labor to bring us the food, shelter, and comforts we often take for granted. Adding a fictional element in the form of aliens, monsters, or the supernatural can put a fine and dynamic point on the life & struggles of such people. I strive for this in much of my military science fiction work and enjoy reading it as an audience member.
This book also strives to capture the harsh working conditions and rugged individuals who must endure such endeavors, as well as the greed that often can push those in management positions to take risks for profit that might put others in danger. While this book paints with a broad brush, it does very well at telling a story about blue collar heroes, greedy villains, and the price of hubris in the form of a hungry beast.
Bracken, a down on his luck oil man is offered a chance of redemption when a billionaire offers him a job to repair a ghost oil rig in the South Pacific Ocean. The payment is enough to retire him and his small crew.
But when they arrive on ghost rig Sera, Bracken soon discovers they're not alone. Something very large circles under the water around the rig. Something that shouldn't exist, but does. A thing of nightmares. And it's hungry...
As a child I grew up around blue-collar type men and women, and as I became an adult I grew to learn that these are the sorts of people who pioneer civilizations, who keep them running once they are built, and who are the ones to brave high-risk labor to bring us the food, shelter, and comforts we often take for granted. Adding a fictional element in the form of aliens, monsters, or the supernatural can put a fine and dynamic point on the life & struggles of such people. I strive for this in much of my military science fiction work and enjoy reading it as an audience member.
The Black is my first pick because it most keenly represents what I consider to be Blue Collar sci-fi/horror fiction. The novel takes place on an offshore oil rig, and the characters in the story are various laborers and specialists living and working on the rig. Much care and attention were taken by the author to present characters and situations that ring true to the lived experience of oil rig workers, from the technical aspects of their work to the particulars of life on the rig. This deep dive into the minds, lives, and skills of the blue-collar characters truly hammered home the terror and otherness of the antagonist when it was finally revealed. We often overlook the danger and strangeness of high-risk blue-collar professions, and exploring that in the context of sci-fi/horror genre fiction is tremendously engaging.
Under 30,000 feet of water, the experimental exploration rig Leaguer has discovered an oil field larger than Saudi Arabia, with oil so sweet and pure, nations would go to war for the rights to it.
But as the team starts drilling exploration well after exploration well in their race to claim the sweet crude, a deep rumbling beneath the ocean floor shakes them all to their core. Something has been living in the oil and it's about to give birth to the greatest threat humanity has ever seen.
The first book in Paul E Cooley's Parsec Award Winning series, The…
As a child I grew up around blue-collar type men and women, and as I became an adult I grew to learn that these are the sorts of people who pioneer civilizations, who keep them running once they are built, and who are the ones to brave high-risk labor to bring us the food, shelter, and comforts we often take for granted. Adding a fictional element in the form of aliens, monsters, or the supernatural can put a fine and dynamic point on the life & struggles of such people. I strive for this in much of my military science fiction work and enjoy reading it as an audience member.
This is a cyberpunk novel, and while most books in that genre focus more on characters like criminals or rebels, this one narrows in on a former police detective and private security contractor. This is one of the few books in the genre that looks at the working stiffs of the cyberpunk future, instead of the punks with mohawks & machine guns or the corporate suits with their android bodyguards and elegant penthouses.
Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her.
Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.
My PhD work focused on horror fiction and film, and I spent ten years teaching about horror (I even included two of my recommended books in courses). The academic stuff is more a symptom than a cause of my passion for the scary. I’ve been a horror freak forever, becoming interested in vampires by age four, reading Stephen King and writing stories to frighten classmates by age nine, and putting a poster of Freddy Krueger on my wall at age ten. Extremes of fiction take me away from extremes of real life, which are much harder to handle.
This book originally consisted of six short collections of novellas and stories, but they’ve since been gathered into a two-volume set, so I’m hoping I can count them as one. They go together, and I think they’re nearly all excellent.
When I was a kid, these stories helped build a bridge for me, from the likes of Stephen King (whom I still adore) to new imaginative worlds of horror that include all kinds of transgressive imagery.
I love how Barker combines the fantastic with the visceral, blurs lines between the monstrous and the human, and makes desire dark, dirty, and wonderful. I also love these stories for all they taught me and helping usher in modern extreme/hardcore horror.
Rediscover the true meaning of fear in this collection of horror stories from Clive Barker, New York Times bestselling author and creator of the Hellraiser series.
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
In this tour de force collection of brilliantly disturbing tales, Clive Barker combines the extraordinary with the ordinary, bringing to life our darkest nightmares with stories that both seduce and devour. As beautiful as they are terrible, the pages of this volume are stained with unsettling imagery, macabre humor, and visceral dread. Here then are the…
Growing up very pale in a sun-washed Australian coastal town, I often found myself retreating to the cool shadows. It was in the darkness that I felt most at home—which may be why I’ve always been drawn to stories with a darker edge. My fascination with creatures in those frightening tales—immortal, dark, and possessed of terrible appetites—led to Winter’s Shadow, my debut YA novel, and the reason I still write today. I love books that blur the line between horror and the mundane—tales that feel like nightmares recalled in the comforting light of day. These are the stories that linger, and this list is a love letter to them.
I discovered Stephen King when I was eight (I was a precocious reader), sneaking The Shining off my parents’ bookshelf. That book scared me, but it was King’s story of vampires descending on a small Midwestern town that truly kept me up at night and taught me the power of horror fiction.
In recent years, especially in the YA genre, vampires became a little overexposed, so I find it instructive to return to Salem’s Lot periodically to remind myself just how terrifying the monster can be in the hands of a gifted storyteller.
#1 BESTSELLER • Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem’s Lot in hopes that exploring the history of the Marsten House, an old mansion long the subject of rumor and speculation, will help him cast out his personal devils and provide inspiration for his new book.
But when two young boys venture into the woods, and only one returns alive, Mears begins to realize that something sinister is at work.
In fact, his hometown is under siege from forces of darkness far beyond his imagination. And only he, with a small group of allies, can hope to contain the evil that…
You’ve got to root for the underdog, right? And there’s no bigger underdog than fictional villains. While real-life criminals are doing very nicely, thank you very much, in fiction, the bad guy is screwed from the start. What could be more relatable than knowing on a bone-deep, existential level that you’ve already lost? And what could be more heroic than stepping out onto the field of play knowing that no matter how hard you play, you’re still going down? Keep your flawed anti-heroes; they’re just too chicken to go over to the losing side. I’ll cheer for the doomed bad guy every single time.
About halfway into Red Dragon, you meet Francis Dolarhyde, and from then on, the book is all his. Forget the FBI who are looking for him, the only person you care about is Dolarhyde, the serial killer who’s been brutally murdering entire families.
As far as I’m concerned, he’s the hero. Hannibal Lecter isn’t Thomas Harris’ best villain. It’s Dolarhyde. He’s everything Lecter isn’t. He’s awkward, shy, hates his body, hates himself and spends all his time stewing on his inadequacies. If I’ve got to pick between the Virgin Dolarhyde and the Chad Lecter, it’s Dolarhyde every time.
Deep down, he just wants to be loved, but the way he goes about it is almost comically misguided. Dolardhyde is on an impossible, bloody mission to fix himself, and no matter how many bodies he drops trying to do it, I’m always rooting for him to make it out the…
From the author of "Silence of the Lambs" and "Black Sunday", this is the book that introduces the most famous serial killer of them all - Hannibal Lecter.
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
I sometimes imagine what it would be like to wake up on top of a snowbound mountain, knowing you are alone–and then to hear footsteps outside…It is safe to imagine, of course, because I am NOT alone in a chalet in the Swiss Alps but in my own home, surrounded by my family. However, for a character in this stunning European novel, this is how it all starts.
And then, as you follow the incredible twists and turns of the plot and try to puzzle out the relationships among the characters, you realize that nothing is as it seems. The novel perfectly captures the brooding atmosphere of the Swiss Alps, which I visited as a tourist, although I did not end up in the abandoned valley haunted by echoes. I am glad I did not–but thrilled to read about the characters who did.
'Echo is a compulsive page turner mixing supernatural survival horror and pulp adventure' Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts
'Hallucinatory, eerie and terrifying' Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street
'Echo is a haunting contribution to the literature of folk horror' Ramsey Campbell
'The most frightening opening scene ever written' The Guardian
It's One Thing to Lose Your Life It's Another to Lose Your Soul
When climber Nick Grevers is brought down from the mountains after a terrible accident he has lost his looks, his hopes and his climbing companion. His account of what…
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
I love cats and mountains. Both are unrequited loves. I am allergic to cats and have a mild fear of heights. But this is precisely the reason why I am fascinated by informed descriptions of mountaineering in books, especially if the climb leads the reader toward something strange and otherworldly.
Climbing the famous El Cap in Yosemite is a challenge even for experienced mountaineers. But it becomes doubly so when you encounter a ghostly apparition while suspended in a fragile cradle thousands of feet above the ground.
This novel, by turns thrilling, touching, and frightening, satisfied both my love for fantasy and my desire to know more about the actual experience of mountain climbing.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Reckoning comes a thrilling novel about the dangers of obsessive love and a battle for ghostly revenge as Hugh Glass finds himself amidst disaster on the sunlit walls of Yosemite.
Hugh Glass once found glory on El Cap-the same place he would meet the woman he would marry and lose. Now, thirty-five years later, half a mile up the walls of Yosemite, a rope breaks and sends a young woman plummeting to her death, catching Hugh Glass in the rescue mission from hell on her way down.
I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.
I love ghost stories. But I am rather tired of old houses with creaky furniture. The strangest and most dangerous monsters lurk in the wilderness, in the remote and inaccessible corners of the natural world. And what is more remote and inaccessible than Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, located on the border between Nepal and India?
I have always admired those mountain climbers of the past who, with inadequate equipment and minimal knowledge, braved the unknown dangers of the heights. Paver’s beautifully written novel is a historical mystery and a ghost story at one, whose final twist is as vertiginous as the pinnacle of the sacred mountain.
