Here are 71 books that Covenant fans have personally recommended if you like
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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…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I didn’t grow up fearless; I grew up quiet. I learned early how schools and communities can press a girl into something smaller than herself until she feels like a shadow. Horror was the first place I saw that pressure explode into power. When I read Carrie, I felt seen in a way I couldn’t explain. I am drawn to stories where shame turns feral, and silence becomes dangerous. These books speak to that breaking point where a voice is stolen and then reclaimed, proving the most terrifying "monster" is simply a girl who refuses to disappear.
I couldn't put this book down, and I stayed haunted by the ordinary people of the town long after the last page.
What unsettled me most was the chilling reality of what people tolerate to preserve an appearance of peace. I have always been more frightened by the way a community polices its own silence while rot spreads beneath the floorboards. It forced me to see how denial is more dangerous than any haunting because it protects power instead of truth.
This story remains a low hum in my bones, proving the real horror is how easily we turn on each other.
The greats of fiction Stephen King and George R. R. Martin lead the fanfare for HEX, so be assured that Thomas Olde Heuvelt's debut English novel is both terrifying and unputdownable in equal measure.
Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves.
Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed…
Growing up as a kid, I was obsessed with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumpsbooks, most of which took place in small-town settings. Horror could hide anywhere in those towns, whether out in the woods or on the shelf at the local general store. I loved those books to death because they taught me (or perhaps reminded me) that darkness existed within daily life. As I grew older, my passion for the subgenre led me to consume more stories and eventually write my own.
Long before Squid Game popularized the “Game” subgenre, Richard Laymon wrote a wildly fun tale of a young woman running around town completing bizarre requests for money. As the payouts increase, so too does the ridiculousness of each request. Laymon is a guilty pleasure and one of my favorite authors, andIn the Dark is one of his best.
'If you've missed Laymon, you've missed a treat' Stephen King
Nothing much happens in Donnerville. Then librarian Jane Kerry receives an envelope containing a fifty-dollar bill and a note from 'MOG' (Master of Games) instructing her to 'Look homeward, angel'. Jane pulls Thomas Wolfe's novel of that title off the shelf and finds a second envelope with more money and another clue...
This 'game' soon pushes Jane into crazy and immoral actions, but when she ties to quit, 'MOG' has other ideas.
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
Horror was never something that appealed to me when I was younger. However, in adulthood, I realised the fascination of the unsettling. As I began writing, I realised that true horror is not all about monsters and gore but about breaking our everyday complacency and realising the possibility that the world is bigger than us and how we are unprepared to deal with it. This is why I write horror. Not to shock you with a jump-scare, but you leave you thinking about my words long after the lights have gone out.
His storytelling and artwork combined create books which even the strongest stomached would find uncomfortable. And yet, we are drawn to them, unable to look away. And he understands that the most terrifying thing is not an invasion by something outside of our world but the realisation that the everyday world around us might turn against us.
Uzumaki is a story about incomprehensible obsession and how it can take over a society to the point of destruction. One by one, the people of a small Japanese town become obsessed with spirals. Not a monster or a ghost, but a shape, until the power behind it destroys everything.
Kurozu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It manifests itself in everything from seashells and whirlpools in water to the spiral marks on people's bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi's father and the voice from the cochlea in our inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurozu-cho are pulled ever deeper into a whirlpool from which there is…
I'm a mystery writer and teacher now. Back then, I spent 10 years homeless and addicted on the streets of San Francisco. I could always return to Mom in CT and get put in a cushy rehab. Until I couldn't. And then she was dying, and my younger brother was addicted and soon he'd be dead too. It got scary at the end because I wasn't just some white suburban kid playing a scumbag junkie. I was a scumbag junkie. But why do I have a passion for the topic? I guess it's because it isn't all bad. I know that sounds weird, but being homeless and addicted has moments of beauty and joy too.
The gold standard of recovery books. I found this gem literally in the gutter when I was homeless. Changed my life by showing me if I could get my shit together, I, too, could write a book about my experience, and, in the process, maybe help someone else who was suffering as well.
Jerry Stahl's seminal memoir of drug addiction and a career in Hollywood, Permanent Midnight is a classic along the lines of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Illuminating the self-loathing and self-destruction of an addict's inner life, Permanent Midnight follows Stahl through the dregs of addiction and into sobriety. In 1998, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Maria Bello starred in a film version of Permanent Midnight to much acclaim. Nic Sheff, author of Tweak, writes the introduction to this edition.
In my own writing, the setting always is an important backdrop to the novel. Sometimes, it is the element that drives the plot forward. The seedy nature of Atlantic City, where most of my first mystery takes place, is essential to the story. I want my readers to be able to feel that they are witnessing a scene first-hand, whether on the Boardwalk, in a pawn shop on Atlantic Avenue, or in Damien’s favourite hangout. I also want them to identify with the characters. To root for the good guy in spite of his flaws–or for the bad guy if that is their preference.
Keyes was a journalist (she died in 1970), and her background informed every novel she wrote.
Joy Street is set primarily in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. At the time I read this book, I had never been to Boston. When I finally visited that city several years later, her descriptions of the area in and around Beacon Hill still were so vivid in my mind that I felt as though I already knew the neighbourhood intimately.
Keyes had an equally deft hand with character development and plot. Joy Street is a book populated with characters that seem real and a story that moves forward at a satisfying pace.
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
I’m an avid fantasy reader and enjoy stories filled with magic, danger, and a mix of humor and romance thrown in. When I’m not writing my own fantasy novels, you might catch me tucked away in a corner, reading a book, and fueling my imagination. Since my own book, The Wayward Wizard, features a secret organization trying to intercept the supernatural, I knew similar stories would make a perfect list to share with fellow fantasy readers.
As a mom of six, I must say that I’m in a constant state of balancing motherly duties with other obligations—so Lucy Heron has my sympathy as a fellow native of Los Angeles, who juggles her kids, a bakery, and apparently her job as “Agent 485,” fighting supernatural crime.
Lucy works for a secret organization that wants to keep magic in the realm of myth and humanity none the wiser to its existence. Well, that will be tough as a tribe of ancient witches gets thrown into the mix, some unscrupulous magical beings, and the fact that this mom of three has to get this all done in time for dinner. This is definitely a fun read to check out!
Lucy Heron is a mom with three kids, and a baker with a happy marriage in sunny Echo Park. She’s also Silver Griffins Agent 485.
The suburbs will never be the same.
Fighting supernatural crime from a minivan while keeping the magical world a secret is a fulltime job. Then there’s the PTA bake sale and the neighborhood barbecue.
Hard to balance even with a wand.
And now, a monstrous loan shark is spreading his shadowy empire from a hidden kemana. Mix in a tribe of ancient witches and tunnel-dwelling magical misfits.
Why do I have expertise in end-of-the-world scenarios? Well, I am a person living in the 2020s who reads too much. But more than that, I’ve had an interest in space exploration and history for as long as I can remember. While those two might seem like completely unrelated fields, it gives me a wider view of our world in the sense of where we are and where we are going. Civilization is not always a straight line upward. And when it dips down… well interesting things happen. Saturnius Mons specifically blends my love of Roman history with my interest in humanity’s future.
What can you say about the book that kicked off a whole new genre?
Widely regarded as the first ‘cyberpunk’ novel, reading Virtual Light today is beyond eery. It takes place in the dystopian future year of 2006 (the book was written in 1994) and is set in San Francisco during a time when the middle class has disappeared and the only people left are either disgustingly rich or living on the street. And as I look around at what San Francisco, and many other cities have become, it makes me think that Gibson might be the Cassandra of the modern world.
NEW YORK TIMES bestseller * 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California.
The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich-or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart…
Years ago in a psycholinguistics class, I discovered that a person’s primary language—not just their vocabulary but the structure of the language itself—shapes the way that person perceives the world and relationships around them. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated with perspective and how perceptions of an event are shaped by who is experiencing them, what stage of life they’re in, the language they speak, and so on. As a full-time marketer in addition to an author, I have to consider every angle of a project before I can begin, whether I’m designing an ad or writing dialogue between characters.
The Alvarados are an unhealthy family with a very big communication problem. The patriarch turns into a shell of himself obsessed only with rainfall, the matriarch is hiding her own secrets, and their adult children are all in varying stages of trouble in their own relationships.
I loved that this book was set in 2016, in California, centered around a Mexican-American family, and did not explicitly address immigration issues or Donald Trump—even if that was very much hinted at towards the end of the novel.
Aside from the family’s journey to healthier relationships with themselves and each other, it was refreshing to see another perspective of that moment in time. It was a good reminder to me that we all contain multitudes, and that no single story is the whole story.
FORECAST: Storm clouds are on the horizon in L.A. Weather, a fun, fast-paced novel of a Mexican-American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza's Box of Saints
L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He's harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters-Claudia, a television chef…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
My father estranged himself from his sister because she was an alcoholic. I never met my aunt. However, when looking for a strong character for my Lilian Dove Mystery Series, I decided this aunt was a good mentoring character. Fictionally, I gave my aunt sobriety, but her recovery is not so much from drinking as it is recovering from the past to take on life anew. The mysteries Lillian Dove becomes involved her help her see how to do this. And first, she needs to learn to admit life is full of mayhem. Small-town Iowa amateur sleuth who ends up owning a liquor store.
Joyce Carol Oates is genuinely an extraordinary author, known for her prolific output. While some writers focus on series, Oats dedicates her time to crafting numerous standalone books, each a gem in its own right.
The plot may appear simple at first glance—a missing sister, and a protagonist who must piece together the clues to find her. However, as the story unfolds, the reader becomes immersed in a web of subtle evidence that gradually weaves together, resulting in a rich and suspenseful novel. Put the book down.
When a woman mysteriously vanishes from her small town home, her sister must tally up the clues to uncover the truth behind the mystery. Beautiful sculptor Marguerite has disappeared from her small town in upstate New York. But was foul play involved? Did she merely get away for some fun? Or did she finally make the decision to leave behind her claustrophobic life of limited opportunities? Younger sister Gigi wonders if the flimsy silk Dior dress, so casually abandoned on the floor, is a clue to Marguerite's vanishing. The police puzzle over the footprints made by her Ferragamo boots, which…
