Books like Nepenthe — picked by fans

Fenn’s Orc Sworn series transports the reader to a world both familiar and utterly strange, where gray-skinned, monstrous orcs show courage, kindness, and compassion to the human women they desperately need to continue their race while being hunted by human men. It’s a world of darkness, oppression, and fear, but also wonder, beauty, and hope. Fenn’s world building is utterly immersive—you will hear, feel, smell (and only rarely see, because it’s dark under Orc Mountain!)—what it is to be Orc Sworn.

I’m always enamored of a truly dark, gritty setting. I want to see the dirt under the hero’s nails. Smell his sweat and hear his harsh breaths as he fights or...does other things. Aimes’s world in the Ruthless Warlord series is visceral. It grabs you by the throat, shakes you, throws you down, and smothers you. It’s brutal and in some ways unbearably harsh. But Aimes’s books are always tempered with humor, warmth, and ultimately, triumph of the human spirit. I may shiver and shudder my way through Nikolai and Dahlia’s story, but I feel hopeful by the end, and that’s why I return to Aimes’s books again and again—to be, ultimately, uplifted.

This book made me completely shift my frame of reference. Why? It’s set in the modern world. It should be familiar to me as a reader. But it’s not. It’s wholly “other.” It’s a world in which moth fae and succubae use a dating app to set up their monstrous rendezvous. It’s a world in which they work side by side with humans, one of them “out” and public in every way, the other closeted and fearful, and it’s not the ones you might expect. It’s a world of deep needs almost too ugly to be expressed which drive behavior in a way I immediately recognized, and sympathized with, but only when seen through the lens of these very alien characters in a very familiar world. It’s a world that requires you to completely open your mind, and you will come away much richer for it.

All of R. Lee Smith’s novels are dark, explicit, and fascinating, but my favorite (and it was a Sophie’s Choice, for sure!) is The Last Hour of Gann. The heroine, Amber, and her spaceship full of fellow pioneers crash land on a dystopian alien world inhabited by lizard people. The humans are woefully unprepared to survive in the wild and all too willing to turn on one another. When a passing lizard/warrior/judge, Meoraq, stumbles upon their camp, Amber jumps at the opportunity to beg for his aid, a near-impossible task without knowing his language. Together, they learn to communicate, and as Meoraq embarks on the futile task of keeping “his humans” safe, so begins the delicious, inexplicable, slow-burn romance between woman and lizard that I never knew I needed.

If dragons and elves are the mainstays of traditional fantasy, then mushrooms and squids are the mainstays of weird fantasy. And there’s no city with more squids or mushrooms than Vandermeer’s Ambergris. A haphazard port town infested by fungi and built on ancient ruins holding dark secrets, there’s nothing quite like Ambergris.

What I love so much about Vandermeer’s trilogy is that the city evolves and changes. City of Saints and Madmen is an excellent short story collection that introduces the setting in peacetime, and by the end of Finch it has seen so much conflict and upheaval that Ambergris evolves into a completely different and yet equally fascinating city. 

Vance is one of the best Sci-Fi authors of the twentieth century, although for a long time he wasn’t a household name in the genre. Over 70 years he has written an abundance of books, all of which focused on distant worlds and human societies that have differentiated into freedom-loving, anarchic and weird cultures. “Planet of Adventure” is a set of four books, and deals with Adam Reith, a single astronaut stranded on a planet ruled by four races of extraterrestrials. Humans are little more than slaves on this planet, and Adam needs all his wits to survive… and to find a way off the planet and back home. The book resembles a wild, expressionist painting; the extraterrestrials and their strange cultures and the humans that serve them provide the color and texture to a truly amazing adventure.

The “Cthulhu” in the title is a bit of a misnomer, since the big squid doesn’t actually make an appearance, but this anthology does collect some wonderful contemporary authors of Weird fiction exploring the autumn season. I love fiction that hints at the hidden world(s) behind our own, and these stories capture that immense and unsettling feeling of when the world’s disguises rot and fall away. You can open it to any page and find a gem, but my personal favorites include Laird Barron’s invocation of small-town bizarreness in “Andy Kaufman Creeping Through the Trees”; Nadia Bulkin’s election season meets haunted corn maze allegory “There Is a Bear in the Woods”; and Gemma Files’s archaeological horror “Grave Goods.”

Evolution, extinction, evo-devo, a “vampire squid from hell”—what more could a paleo-curious reader ask for? Staaf keeps it interesting and breezy as she takes a deep dive into the mysteries of that most ancient and fascinating group, the cephalopods. The fossil record for this extraordinary, important, and long-surviving class (which includes ammonoids and nautiloids as well as the shell-free squids and octopuses) goes back 500 million years. The book is full of “wows,” like a 20-foot-long fossil shell, and the fact that ink has been reconstituted from fossil belemnites and used for illustration. Just wow.

I love this book because it introduces our beloved children (6-10 years old) to one of the most mysterious and elusive creatures on Earth: the giant squid. Just think about it: until 2006, no humans had even seen one of these animals alive!

I study dolphins and whales, and sperm whales hunt these creatures in the cold and dark depths of the oceans. But while even kids know something about sperm whales, giant squid remains a mystery to most of us. How do they hunt? What do they eat? How do they breed? Award-winning author Candace Fleming and illustrator Eric Rohmann do a wonderful job of describing and painting this little-understood species.

This book has two concepts that have stuck in my memory for years: the uplifted space-faring squid and the end-of-universe-scouring of astronomical bodies into perfectly smooth spheres. How many stories take the notion of the future to its logical extreme by showing the cosmos literally withering away countless eons downstream?

This book directly shows such a far-flung world, an endgame to which almost no science fiction story ventures. Mind uploading occurs in the novel in the far future of humanity, less so in much of the novel’s storyline in the near future, but I included it in this list because the book itself is fantastic and Baxter genuinely leans into a future in which mind uploading is an inevitable and expected outcome.