Here are 74 books that It Only Comes Out at Night & Other Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
It Only Comes Out at Night & Other Stories.
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Since I was a young boy, I’ve been fascinated with the concept of time. I’ve spent hours studying the physics of time as a hobby, and to this day, as an adult, that fascination continues. Whenever the topic of time arises in conversation, I will be the first to contribute my understanding of this mystery that has baffled humankind since the beginning of...well, time.
This book did something amazing to me. I was mesmerized by Finney’s narrative of the past, which negated the method of self-hypnosis he used to bring the protagonist from the future to the past, so it no longer seemed far-fetched.
The narrative recreation of the late 19th century captivated my imagination, enabling me to feel the protagonist’s awe at seeing, feeling, and smelling the past as actual reality. Isn’t this every writer’s dream?
Si Morley is bored with his job as a commercial illustrator and his social life doesn't seem to be going anywhere. So, when he is approached by an affable ex-football star and told that he is just what the government is looking for to take part in a top-secret programme, he doesn't hesitate for too long. And so one day Si steps out of his twentieth-century, New York apartment and finds himself back in January 1882. There are no cars, no planes, no computers, no television and the word 'nuclear' appears in no dictionaries. For Si, it's very like Eden,…
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…
When I was about twelve years old I noticed a tattered old paperback in a box at a flea market. Titled Third From the Sun and Other Stories,it featured a colorfully bizarre illustration on the cover along with the author’s name: Richard Matheson. I bought the book—nearly fifty years later I still have it—and so began my journey into the works of one of America’s greatest fantasists. Decades later, I had the honor of working with the man himself, which ultimately led to the creation of my anthology,He Is Legend. Richard is gone now, but his timeless works live on.
Charles Beaumont was close friends with Richard Matheson, and they worked together on such projects as the Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe films and Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone. Beaumont’s stories are as rich and varied as Matheson’s, with delightfully witty language and fantastic plot twists. If you love classic Matheson short stories like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Death Ship,” you’re bound to love Beaumont.
That Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone is only natural: for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. So take one uneasy step and fall headlong into his world: a world where lions stalk the plains, classics cars rove the streets, and spacecraft hover just overhead. Here roam musicians, magicians, vampires, monsters, toreros, extraterrestrials, androids, and perhaps even the Devil himself. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five stories that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.
When I was about twelve years old I noticed a tattered old paperback in a box at a flea market. Titled Third From the Sun and Other Stories,it featured a colorfully bizarre illustration on the cover along with the author’s name: Richard Matheson. I bought the book—nearly fifty years later I still have it—and so began my journey into the works of one of America’s greatest fantasists. Decades later, I had the honor of working with the man himself, which ultimately led to the creation of my anthology,He Is Legend. Richard is gone now, but his timeless works live on.
The Ritual of Illusion is a brilliant short novel by Richard Christian Matheson (Richard Matheson’s son). Written entirely in dialogue from the points of view of numerous different witnesses, it tells the story of Hollywood star Sephanie Vamore’s strange rise and bizarre fall. This is Sunset Boulevard Matheson-style…another generation of Matheson, that is.
A sinister love letter to the movies, acclaimed author Richard Christian Matheson’s The Ritual of Illusion is a novella of modern fear about where stars truly come from. Oscar-winning film siren, Sephanie Vamore, meteors to iconic fame … but like cinema itself, nothing is as it appears. The fifty witnesses to her mythic ascent and bizarre fate are film royalty … many based on Hollywood glitterati; directors, stars, agents, studio heads, screenwriters, lovers, producers.
Widescreen with lies and revelation, Vamore’s story is told Rashomon-style with dialogue alone—each hypnotic character adding poignant or lurid details to the shocking truth of what…
When I was about twelve years old I noticed a tattered old paperback in a box at a flea market. Titled Third From the Sun and Other Stories,it featured a colorfully bizarre illustration on the cover along with the author’s name: Richard Matheson. I bought the book—nearly fifty years later I still have it—and so began my journey into the works of one of America’s greatest fantasists. Decades later, I had the honor of working with the man himself, which ultimately led to the creation of my anthology,He Is Legend. Richard is gone now, but his timeless works live on.
Richard Matheson’s “Button, Button” is a classic story of a couple given a box with a button on it that, if pressed, will yield them great riches…but will also kill someone unknown to them. Matheson’s most famous acolyte, Stephen King (who has said, “without Richard Matheson, I wouldn’t be around”), joins forces with master storyteller Richard Chizmar to create a short novel that is a fascinating variation and extension of Matheson’s tale.
'A resonant novella set in one of King's signature locales: the small town of Castle Rock, Maine' Washington Post
The small town of CASTLE ROCK, MAINE has witnessed some strange events and unusual visitors over the years, but there is one story that has never been told...until now.
There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974 twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong (if time-rusted) iron bolts and zig-zag up the cliffside.
The biggest compliment a reader can give me is to tell me my book made them cry. Yes, I love a great tear-jerker. I love writing them, and I love reading them. When we feel more deeply, we can live more fully. Books that evoke emotion can help us tune into our authentic selves and confront falsehoods that have held us back from full victory in our lives. Plus, reading is cheaper than therapy! I seek to bring hope, healing, and freedom through fiction. You have to feel to heal, so bring on all the feels.
This was a hard pick because I could easily have chosen any of Joanne Bischof’s other books.
She writes with such excellence and depth of feeling that you bond with the characters and go through their trials alongside them. I chose The Gold in These Hills over her other equally loved books because I read it with tears streaming down my face. The theme of restoration after loss and betrayal resonated with me. Deep despair gives way to soul-stretching hope.
Beautiful, quotable prose stuck with me long after I finished. If you want a novel about second chances that speaks deeply to the heart, give this one a try.
When mail-order bride Juniper's husband vanishes, she writes to him-but fears she's waiting for a ghost in a ghost town. A century later, Johnny Sutherland discovers her letters while restoring her abandoned farmhouse. Can her loving words from the distant past change his present?
1902: Upon arriving in Kenworthy, California, mail-order bride Juniper Cohen is met by the pounding of the gold mine, an untamable landscape, and her greatest surprise of all: the kind and charming man who awaits her. But when the mine proves empty of profit, and when Juniper's husband, John, vanishes, Juniper is left to fend for…
My first book love was Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The game between author and reader that centers a whodunit has always delighted me. The breadcrumb trail of clues, the misdirection, the inevitable I should have seen it! are my jam. Now an author of whodunits—I have one series published and a second on the way, along with several short stories – I read mysteries with greater scrutiny—in admiration and with a selfish desire to learn from other authors’ envious talents. Each of the books on my list excited me for their excellent storytelling. In the end, I found them just plain entertaining. I hope you do too!
A flat-out clinic on how to infuse humor in mystery! Author Catriona McPherson is hilarious, both in person and on the page.
I am continually amazed by her ability to create fully realized characters, like series star Lexy Campbell, who read so true on the page while being laugh-out-loud funny. Oh! And I also greatly admire the plotting of each terrific installment in this long-running Last Ditch Mystery series.
To me, the discovery of a top-notch series is a gift that keeps on giving. I hope this one keeps it up for a long time.
Despite efforts to create a safe environment to see out the pandemic, the residents of the Last Ditch Motel face more dangers than they imagined possible in this hilarious yet claustrophobic mystery.
March 2020 and Operation Cocker is a go! The owners of the Last Ditch Motel, with a little help from their friend Lexy Campbell, are preparing to support one another through the oncoming lockdown, offering the motel's spare rooms to a select few from the local area in need of sanctuary.
While the newbies are settling in, an ambiguous banner appears demanding one of them return home. But…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
I teach literature, Labor Studies, and writing at San Diego City College and have written three San Diego-based novels: Drift, Flash, and Last Days in Ocean Beach, along with Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a radical history of San Diego that I co-wrote with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew. Both as a writer and as a daily wanderer on the streets of San Diego, I have a passion for the psychogeography of the city space and a deep curiosity for and love of the people I encounter there.
In this moving novel, the late great Oakley Hall took me back to World War II era San Diego. What I love about it is it paints a much fuller portrait of the lost city of old than he does in his first San Diego-based novel.
This book is filled with wonder, dread, love, and longing but what makes it noteworthy is its keen eye toward history and the darkness at the heart of the city’s streets and neighborhoods—and at the center of the war itself.
The Sweeping Novel of a Twentieth-Century California Life
Love and War in California tells the story, through the eyes of Payton Daltrey, of the last sixty years of an evolving America. The award-winning author Oakley Hall begins his newest work in 1940s San Diego, where his endearing, wide-eyed narrator must define his identity in terms of self, family, and World War II. As his classmates disappear into the war one by one, he becomes obsessed with abuses of power and embroiled with the charming, dangerous Errol Flynn; with the Red Baiting of the American Legion; with the House Un-American…
We’ve all read them: the girl who is unknowingly of royal blood but was sequestered to an ordinary family to protect her identity. The detective with the broken home and a drink problem is driven to solve the crime. The action hero who can shoot their way out of any encounter. While these tropes are the bread and butter of genre fiction, they get overused. I found that my favorite and most engaging characters were those with complicated lives whose pasts might catch up with them at an inconvenient moment. Here are some of my favorite stories with unconventional characters that shine through the narrative.
My copies of this series are so worn by reading and re-reading that they are falling apart. There’s no higher praise from me as a reader.
This is my comfort read, which is odd because it’s about the fall of a civilization—and The Dark, in particular, is terrifying. We never really see them. That’s partly because they aren’t entirely corporeal and can change size and shape at will. It’s also because anyone we know in the story who encounters them is almost certainly fighting for their life.
Are The Dark one character or many? Certainly, what one of them knows, they all know. The key to this conundrum is what motivates them to do as they do, and alien as they are; their motivations are as unexpected as they are profound.
This is beautifully written classic fantasy in all its glory. If you only read one book of these five,…
Gil, a graduate student, discovers that her nightmares of people fleeing in panic from a hideous evil are not dreams and that she is standing in the doorway to another world
I taught English and creative writing for 37 years in San Francisco, California. In 2018, Ron Cabral and I published And Then They Were Gone, which tells the story of the People’s Temple teenagers we taught. Many of them never returned after the Jonestown massacre and died there. We hope this story about our young students—their hopes, their poetry, their efforts to help make a better world—will bring some light to the dark story of Jonestown.
Woollett’s novel is based on much research on Peoples Temple and Jonestown. She came to the US from Australia for interviews with many survivors and others—including Ron Cabral and me because of our knowledge of the teenagers in the Temple. It’s a great read and adds much to the understanding of those who joined the Temple. Evelyn Lyndon (all the characters have fictional names except Jim Jones) is the “Beautiful Revolutionary” who, with her idealistic husband, joins the Temple and eventually becomes one of Jones’s mistresses. I recognize many of the book’s characters, sometimes two people rolled into one. Only in a novel could Woollett be in the minds of the characters she follows in this story, who are all believable and vividly drawn.
The thrilling new novel, inspired by the events at Jonestown in the 1970s.
It's the summer of 1968, and Evelyn Lynden is a woman at war with herself. Minister's daughter. Atheist. Independent woman. Frustrated wife. Bitch with a bleeding heart.
Following her conscientious-objector husband Lenny to the rural Eden of Evergreen Valley, California, Evelyn wants to be happy with their new life. Yet she finds herself disillusioned with Lenny's passive ways - and anxious for a saviour. Enter the Reverend Jim Jones, the dynamic leader of a new revolutionary church ...
Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Beautiful…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
As a second-generation immigrant, I knew very little of my family’s migration story. My grandparents never really learned English despite living in the US sixty or more years. In my twenties when the country was undergoing turmoil about immigration reform once again, I began looking at the immigrants all around me (and in literature) and identifying what we had in common—how our lives intertwined and were mutually dependent on one another. In 2007 I traveled 8,500 miles around the perimeter of the US by bicycle on a research trip to collect stories from immigrants and those whose lives they impacted. I wrote two books based on that experience.
I read The Brick People when it was first published in 1988.
At the time, I was already familiar with Morales’ work, but this historical novel about the Simons Brick Factory in Southern California and the Mexican migrants who the Simons brother depended upon for their success seized my imagination.
The author blends folklore, history, myth, and magical realism into a novel that relates the story of Mexican migrants and their complicity with or rebellion against the Simons brothers and the mores of the early 20th Century Los Angeles region.
Morales shows how history from the ground up is manifested in people’s lives. His characters work and play hard as they seek to build community and pursue dreams of social mobility even when customs and laws prohibit them.
This engrosing historical novel traces the growth of California from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries by following in the development of the Simons Brick Factory. With an attention to historical reality blended with myth and legend, the prolific Morales recounts the epic struggle of a people to forge their destiny, along with Califonia's.
