100 Books Like Hollow Kingdom

For me, Hyperion epitomizes the Gothic space opera.

It may not sound like it on the surface, with the book often being described as a sci-fi spin on the Canterbury Tales, but the devil’s in the details, and Hyperion has many details indeed, with each character’s story bringing us deeper into both their personal darkness and the darkness of the larger world: the labyrinthine Time Tombs; the Cruciform parasite that turns immortality into a curse; and of course, the eldritch godlike entity known as The Shrike.

As an easily-bored reader, I was floored by how easily Hyperion held my attention, as each of the characters’ stories not only made me care about them more, but also contributed to the adventure they shared...especially when it all came to a head in the sequel, Fall of Hyperion.

Spanning multiple worlds, time periods, and philosophical ideas, Hyperion has everything I want… show more.

This is really how the Disney film Old Yeller should have ended, with a rabid canine raising hell and ripping out throats. What a phenomenal book.

My first foray into the world of Stephen King. I loved it so much I tried to name my dog Cujo … but I was overruled. We settled on Otto cause it sounds sorta similar. But, again, I love this book for the same reason I love Who Goes There?—a beast is terrorizing people who are trapped and can’t flee. It’s a simple formula for monster-themed novels, but it gets me every single time. 

Although this title seems obscure, most people will recognize the classic movie adaptation under the name The Thing.

For a science fiction story written before the Second World War, this book stands up surprisingly well. It’s the First Contact story we don’t want, where instead of meeting an intelligent extraterrestrial species, we come face to face with a monster. And it is intelligence that saves the day, not brute force or strength.

Although it is out of print, this book can be read online. 

When I was writing my own kid book dealing with monsters, I picked this one up on a whim just to see how kid book authors handle monsters.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it dealt with everything I love: small towns, a gang of kids, and other worldly creatures—in this case vampire-werewolf hybrids. Think Mystic Pizza + Attack the Block. It’s exciting, monster-hunting fun.

A Kirkus review aptly described this novel as “mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart and pretty cool”. 

It’s mostly a fiercely intelligent exploration of both political and personal crises in 2017, the year of Trump and Brexit. Radical feminist Kathy has also fairly inexplicably agreed to get married. Pre-wedding she travels to a resort in Italy with her fiancé where she tumbles through a range of highly-emotive stances on intimacy and closeness.

After an argument about prosciutto and fig ciabattas with her husband “she hated him, she hated any kind of warmth or dependency, she wanted to take up residence as an ice cube in a long glass of aqua frizzante.”  Her fury quickly dissolves “anyway they sorted it out” and the novel travels brilliantly onwards.

I love the fact that this book intertwines humor and satire around subjects of religion, weapons of mass destruction, and human indifference and indolence. I love that it, sadly, also has parallels to the world we currently live in.

Good satire never grows irrelevant, and Cat’s Cradle is as relevant (and funny) today as it was when it was written.

Any novel that shines a light on the adventures and misadventures of a fictional Seattle Mariners third baseman with a pet elephant that answers to the name Renoir is worthy of your time and attention. I’m late to the party on this but so glad I sparked to it. 

If Hunter S. Thompson’s work is writing as rock ’n roll, early Mark Leyner is writing as thrash metal.

And like most practitioners of thrash, he mellowed out and slowed down as he got older. But his early shit? Look out! Faster than a bullet and harder than algebra. Whopping great gobs of language, slanguage, lexicon, and terminology gush up off the page.

Not only are there no brakes, there are seemingly no limits at all, his mind doesn’t wander, it careens and chugs and screeches and free falls… and if you follow you’ll be rewarded: with laughter, shock, awe, poignancy, and something akin to a deep, ecstatic numbness. Leyner’s words sharpen the senses and push the brain into the red, just like thrash metal does. 

Technically, Stephanie Plum isn’t an amateur sleuth because she works as a bounty hunter, but since she was never trained and tends to succeed despite her bungling and ineptitude, I consider her an amateur sleuth. Besides, when you’re sorely in need of a good laugh to release some endorphins, you can’t go wrong spending a few hours with Stephanie and her colorful cohorts. This twenty-seventh outing in the long-running series is one of the best when it comes not only to the humor, but it offers up a well-plotted story, and lots of red herrings. Plus, there’s plenty of Grandma Masur in this one. What more could you ask for?

In this book, three thieves make a plan to dig a tunnel to rob a bank, and I just love a mischievous picture book topic.

The art is so clever because we can see where the thieves are digging and the hilarious mistakes they have made as they end up in places that are definitely not the bank. The art is so charming and the digging teacher is perfection.