Books like Go, Mutants! — picked by fans

It’s hard to beat Scalzi for nailing the execution of a high concept.

Redshirts could have so easily been nothing but a gimmick, but Scalzi really gets into the guts of the horror and humor of being a character written for the sole purpose of dying. I picked up the book with a cynical eye, expecting to hate it, but it drew me in.

Scalzi went so much further with the concept, shined a light on every corner of the idea, that he managed to create a deconstruction and reconstruction of the same trope at the same time. 

Liking Terry Pratchett is a bit like liking pizza: not terribly remarkable.

Pratchett is a master storyteller who commands not only tropes but the idea behind them with such skill that I can read one of his books and never realize I’m getting the most profound lesson of my life. I could have recommended any of his books, and more to the point, any of his City Watch books, but I single out this particular book for a reason. I’m a humanist, like Pratchett, and this book explores his humanism most effectively.

And it’s also an amazing mystery and incredible comedy. 

Like a lot of folks, I found out about this book when the movie version came out, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The world-building in the movie was so compelling and unique that I decided to pick up the book. And I’m so glad that I did. The plot in the book is much more complicated, and the social satire is even sharper. One of my all-time favorite noir mysteries.

I’m cheating a little with this one since this is technically three books but go with me. Slaves of the Volcano God, Bride of the Slime Monster, and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies are some of those series that used to be thick on the ground but now are harder to find.

They’re adventure novels that play with the tropes of B-movies, and not only are they hilarious, but they made a young Justin like B-movies more. Playing with tropes can get exhausting, but when it’s done with genuine love, as it is here, it makes for an airy joy of a series.

Shrek! was a book before it was ever a wildly successful film franchise, but the book bears almost no resemblance to the movies.

Yes, William Steig’s ogre is both vile and reviled, and he has a donkey for a friend, but the story itself is very straightforward, detailing Shrek’s rampage across the countryside on his way to meet a “stunningly ugly princess” with whom he can live “horribly ever after.”

Steig had been a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist for almost four decades when he produced his first children’s book in 1968. He wrote and drew Shrek! when he was in his early 80s. He breaks the cardinal rule of using simple language, but makes up for it with fun-to-read-aloud choices in vocabulary and sentence structure, such as “The irascible dragon was preparing to separate Shrek from his noggin.”

There is nothing more fun than a rag-tag group of kids living in a tree house and battling monsters, zombies, and whatever else bleeds into their dimension.

Max Brallier does an amazing job of tapping into a middle grader’s pituitary. What he squeezes out is a thrilling and hilarious roller-coaster of an adventure. Just writing this makes me want to take the ride all over again. And I didn’t even mention the art yet either.

Douglas Holgate draws monsters so cool, that they are often drool inducing. Seriously. Do a Google search if you don’t believe me.

You're drawing, you're painting, you're doing whatever you do – you're making things that weren't there before. You're creating images, you're creating visual stories. Sometimes creation is a thrill, and sometimes it's a bizarre disorienting struggle. Nobody expresses the creative life quite like Mr.Earbrass (and Edward Gorey). Is it a how-to book? No. Is it a how-not-to book? It's not really that either. It's a story about an eccentric novelist crafting his latest book. I give this weird little storybook as a gift to artist and writer friends all the time. Everyone I've given it to just raves about it.

This book takes a comic yet piercing look at espionage. 

Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, is recruited by MI6 out of desperation and fabricates his spy reports. He invents agents, sketches of weaponized vacuum parts, and absurd clandestine plots—all to keep the money coming and satisfy his daughter’s extravagances.

What makes the novel shine is its satire of the spy apparatus—how credulity, vanity, and bureaucratic inertia turn fiction into danger. Greene balances light humor with real human stakes: financial strain, moral compromise, a man pretending to be something he is not. Even decades after its writing, Our Man in Havana remains sharp, funny, and deeply relevant in its critique of power, truth, and illusion.

This is both your main course and palate cleanser. Absolutely riveting!

This is the second book in the Guards sequence, but it’s easy enough to start here. This detective story set in the sprawling, smelly metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, featuring dwarves, werewolves, and (occasionally) humans, is a laugh-out-loud and anarchic book, managing to be hugely joyous and page-turningly compelling at the same time. Insanely silly and utterly real, with characters so solid you can see (or in some cases, smell) them long after you turn the last page.

No one has taught me more about life than Terry Pratchett. No one has taught me how to wrestle with my demons (both literal and metaphorical) or how to be a better person no matter what fate befalls me. Humanists don’t need a bible, but if they did, the collected works of Terry Pratchett would be that book.

More than just fantasy, humor, or satire, his words work at a profound and subtle level. All of his books are favorites of mine, but this one is my most favorite of all. It’s a book about witches and magic and fairy tales. It’s also a story that contains stories within stories, but most of all, it’s a book about knowing who you are.