Books like Midnight Pleasures — picked by fans

This book originally consisted of six short collections of novellas and stories, but they’ve since been gathered into a two-volume set, so I’m hoping I can count them as one. They go together, and I think they’re nearly all excellent.

When I was a kid, these stories helped build a bridge for me, from the likes of Stephen King (whom I still adore) to new imaginative worlds of horror that include all kinds of transgressive imagery.

I love how Barker combines the fantastic with the visceral, blurs lines between the monstrous and the human, and makes desire dark, dirty, and wonderful. I also love these stories for all they taught me and helping usher in modern extreme/hardcore horror.

Jeff Strand is the flip side to the coin that I continually try to write. He takes a horrifying premise and makes it funny. I try to take a funny premise and make it horrifying. We both succeed to varying degrees.

The opening story in Gleefully Macabre Tales only spans 750 words and it was the last time I can remember laughing out loud at a written story. It concerns a door-to-door magazine salesman, crotchety old man, and a Weiner dog. To embellish further would be to betray the author’s intent. But know that if you do not find yourself smiling by the time the tale is told you desperately need to check for a pulse.

I should not have to recommend the president of the Horror Writers Association, but if you are unfamiliar to Lansdale, this is a great introduction. He is a caustic voice with no pretense, or subtlety. I love him for his sincerity, his abruptness, and his ability to make me feel really bad for laughing.

It should be noted, before wading into this collection, that Rage is credited as the story that inspired the Columbine killings, and is therefore not recommended for a general audience. It is not, however, the novella for which this recommendation is made. The Long Walk is without a doubt, King’s strongest ending ever written. The collection only includes four stories that achieve varying degrees of success. Personally, I find Road Work a complete waste of time. If you never read another Stephen King story, however, The Long Walk is his most iconic piece of fiction to date.

This clever graphic novel is sure to inspire kids.

It features a wonderful variety of writers, including Sandra Cisneros, Roald Dahl, Gene Luen Yang, and Beatrix Potter. In an easy-to-read format with colorful illustrations, Elizabeth Haidle highlights key moments about each writer’s childhood.

My favorite fun facts: J.K. Rowling wrote a story about a rabbit when she was six, and Dr. Seuss drew animals on his sister’s bedroom walls.

CN Crawford is one of my favourite authors. I know the pen-name includes 2 authors – a man and wife team who co-author the books but to make it easy, here I’ll refer to ‘them’ as ‘her’.

Her books are really fast-paced. This series was steeped in Scandinavian mythology and folklore which I loved. But it also contained lots of references to cultural tropes in our own modern world which I also loved. The dialogue is always really clever and funny.

There is a badass female lead who can do magic and kick butt. And there’s also an enemies-to-lovers romance at the centre of the plot. It’s highly addictive and I loved all three books. I couldn’t put them down.

Thompson’s novel is another story about strong, intelligent, and powerful women who are manipulated and used by men. There have been numerous retellings of the birth of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. The fact that it occurred on a dark and stormy night is literary folklore. However, Thompson’s tale is the first time it has been told for a YA audience and he puts a wicked spin on the well-known origin story. This appealed to me as an English teacher. The characters—Mary, the poet Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron—are given a contemporary vibe. Mary is a lonely and moody teenager, swept off her feet by Shelley who is characterised as the 19th century’s version of a brooding and insatiable rock star, part Mick Jagger and part Nick Cave. 

Who needs Bram Stoker and boring old Dracula, when Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu had a better name, and penned the original vampire tale, Carmilla, a whole quarter-century earlier?

Personally, I dislike obvious attempts to scare or horrify me. So I appreciate that Le Fanu is always subtle, concentrating on creating an atmosphere of threat and fear, as in Schalken the Painter. He is never obvious, but always eerie.

Christmas is a wonderful time for magical tales that children love. In this one, a poor but good-hearted cobbler is rewarded for his honesty during the night, when clever elves sneak into his shop and make shoes for him to sell. It gives children the chance to imagine invisible helpers, and also the thrill of doing good deeds in secret.

I grew as a person after reading Outlaws of Sherwood, largely because McKinley penned this mythic retelling of the story in such an introspective way.

I realized that life was grounded in reality, not in the fantastical, possibly “legendary” things that are said about us… or done to us. I also realized the difficult choices I had to make in the midst of conflict didn’t entirely define me—though they might in the eyes of everyone else.

What was more influential to my own life story (and vitally important) was my own inner perspective—the way I viewed myself, the way I related to my own situation, whether healthy or unhealthy. This story shaped me as a person and set the stage for me as an inward-looking writer.