Books like Marianne Dreams — picked by fans

I love this book because it turns reading itself into a haunted space.

House of Leaves doesn’t just tell me something is wrong; it makes me physically experience disorientation on the page. I admire books that take big formal risks and still keep a human pulse underneath the invention.

This one made me feel trapped in a maze made of rooms, footnotes, fear, and obsession, and I mean that as high praise.

This is the book which most inspired Frances’ voice in The Island. 15-year old Anais is troubled, loving, brilliant, and creative. She is also at a young offenders’ institution named the Panopticon after being found covered in blood at a crime scene. A birthday present from my brother, this book is so powerful, moving, and evocative. It’s written in spiky Midlothian. It’s raw. It’s warm. It’s brutal.

No matter what life throws at her (and there is a lot) Anais finds a way to survive with humour and defiance. I just loved it.

An interesting take on a dystopian world, whilst humanity is threatened in this book, the two main characters have pretty decent lives (aside from the fact that they’re destined to be the last humans ever). Loneliness is one of my biggest fears, and the concept of being one of the only two people left on earth is truly terrifying. This book was an intriguing take on the dystopian genre, focusing on what would happen if humans became unable to reproduce. It had some twists I honestly didn’t see coming and a really positive attitude towards diversity. Lowrie (the female narrator) is a compelling, realistic character who records the world around her with compassion. Definitely one for readers who prefer a more ‘positive’ dystopian outlook.

I just love this book. Again, it’s set against such an evocative landscape – this time in Western Australia. It tells the story of a tentative love affair between a reckless poacher and the wife of a wealthy landowner – and the inevitable fall-out. There’s even a soundtrack to go with it – Winton’s a musician too.

The writing’s so pitch-perfect that I had to keep stopping to scribble phrases down. It’s that good. Why is it about survival? As well as Luther Fox, the poacher, struggling to get over the tragedy of his past, the last third of the book focuses on his walkabout up north to Coronation Island, where he deliberately shipwrecks himself. Cue the wilderness: scavenging, hunting, sheltering. True, haunting, survival in its rawest sense as he battles to redemption.

For a character to be stranded alone in the wilderness almost forces the reader to slip into the shoes of the protagonist.

There is no human-to-human interaction, but there is the age-old relationship of human-to-nature. This struggle taps into the atavistic side of man. Such a story contains only one source of thoughts (a boy, in this case), but the countless connections between the boy and all the aspects of wilderness present a plot of myriad give-and-take scenarios.

The protagonist deals with hunger and food, cold and fire, danger and safety, solitude and epiphany. Hatchet is one of the great young adult books that serves adults wonderfully.

This is a really atmospheric graphic novel–a form that can be brilliant at conveying creeping unease (see also Charles Burns). Dowdy Abbey lives with her newish dentist husband (she’s his second wife) and alienated daughter Crystal in his picturesque lakeside house. Living mostly inside her head, Abbey starts to believe there is a dark secret concerning her husband’s first wife, Sheila, who is dead. She starts to dream and then sees what appears to be the ghost of Sheila. Yet, is the increasingly alarming entity what it seems?

This graphic novel pulls off what the supernatural genre almost never manages to–genuinely keeping the reader guessing as to whether or not it’s all happening in Abbey’s head–while also delivering surprising and deft twists and turns all along the way. Loved it.

I found a second-hand copy of this then-basically forgotten book back in the ‘80s, a brittle mass-market paperback that had for its cover a totally inappropriate picture of a withered corncob on parched red earth (the actual setting is a remote part of Ireland).

However, the cover also blazoned an endorsement from H P Lovecraft (himself only intermittently in print in those days), so I gave it a punt. Though most of Hodgson’s stories are set at sea, this, his best novel, centers on a ‘found’ manuscript that tells of a recluse encountering monstrous, pig-like entities in an old house that is on the border between dimensions.

Is he mad, or are they real? Genuinely uncanny, this late Victorian tale is also a precursor of modern, visceral, non-ghostly supernatural fiction.

When Truman Capote reread this book to make a screenplay of it, he grumbled there was ‘barely a writeable scene’ because so much of the book concerns the unnamed governess’s increasingly frantic interpretations of phenomena that may only be hallucinations.

When I first read it, I found its protagonist excessively flighty; since then, it’s grown on me as perhaps the subtlest of ghost stories, its implicitly sexually predatory specters (who hope, it seems, to escape hell by perverting the two young innocents in the governess’s care), prefiguring the garish horrors of films like Hellraiser, in which demon cenobite Pinhead, summoned by the opening of a magical box, threatens depraved protagonist Frank: ‘Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell’–which fate seems apt for the malign Peter Quint and Miss Jessell.

I don’t hear anything like enough love for this fun, quirky, touching book! It was my first John Green, and I loved it.

The main character is a total nerd who keeps having his heart broken by girls named Katherine—until he doesn’t. This book will fill the Big Bang Theory shaped hole in your heart!

The reception of Mozart’s life and works captures our collective fascination with him. Deutsch’s Documentary Biography is a foundational volume in this area. It primarily comprises documents about Mozart published during his lifetime (and shortly after his death on 5 December 1791), detailing among other things his status as a child prodigy, the evolving reputation of his instrumental and vocal works, and crazes for his music in the 1780s. 

Rather than a single authorial voice emerging as is standard in biographical work, many voices convey similar and different views of the activities and achievements in Mozart’s remarkable career.