69 Books Like Covenant

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. 

This novel was not what I was expecting. It was dark and provides an interesting commentary on human behavior. The town of Black Spring and its locals are cursed. If someone is born there, or moves into the town, they’re doomed to stay until they die. If they try to leave and never come back, they’ll die. The town is also home to the Black Rock Witch, whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. She’s been there since the town was cursed in the seventeenth century. The town was cursed because people did terrible things. The novel takes place during the final days of the town because some people did more terrible things to the Black Rock Witch.

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, and In the Dark is one of his best.

Junji Ito is the master of the unsettling.

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. 

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.

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.

It is a joy to read.

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. 

Elroy wrote many other books before he took on this epic noir crime novel (one in a quartet). He made his bones in writing, and it's evident in his skill level, story, and prose. Elroy excels in this novel (and the other three) in voice. And voice is the Big Kahuna in writing, it’s the everything in writing and Elroy has it in spades.

Another great addition to the above is the length (because you don’t want this book to ever end) and that it’s a historical novel that absolutely captures the time period and adds the historical nuance to all the characters.

In this book by Jennifer J. Chow, I loved how the differences between Yale Yee, the sleuth, and her cousin, Celine, not only created tension throughout the book but ultimately played on each of their strengths to solve the mystery. 

The two cousins are thrown together when quiet Yale is tapped by her dad to run the family bubble tea stand at L.A.’s night market. Loud and flamboyant Celine, a social media influencer, arrives in L.A. and gets tasked with helping Yale out.

Chow does a great job of showing the two girls' very different personalities and adding in that family tension. On top of that, the L.A. night market is fascinating! I hope this will be a long-running series!  

I first read this book as a teenager and missed the full force of its ferocious satire. Re-reading it years later, I laughed out loud. Waugh’s genius is to set his story of a love triangle in a Los Angeles funeral home. This way, he gets to poke fun at Hollywood and the American funeral industry while giving the dead a prominent role in the drama.

When, for example, embalmer Mr. Joyboy starts wooing young cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos, he does it through the expressions he puts on the faces of the corpses he sends to her makeup studio. When Aimée falls for his rival, a poet and pet mortician, the beatific smiles of Mr. Joyboy’s death turn into ghastly grimaces. It’s one of my favorite moments in the book—but there are many more.