Books like Our Monsters — picked by fans

I absolutely loved this quiet, lyrical novella with a sapphic sea monster romance and an underlying paranormal mystery that needs to be solved. The characters were flawed and real to me, and, like the rest of this novella, they were fully fleshed out despite the relatively few pages they have together.

The language is stunning, the pacing is perfect, and the sea monster lady is scaly and incredibly cool. I will be thinking about the impact this book left on me—and the way it proved to me that indie books can be very high quality—for years.

I couldn’t leave out one of my favorite monsters of all time: dragons. Also, I just love secondary-world fantasy, especially the kind that has important themes like the effects of imperialism and that are set in a shifting palace full of magical rooms.

This book beautifully executes one of my favorite relationship dynamics in fiction: the dragon love interest starts out ice cold and very gradually warms up to the main character as they get closer, and they both overcome their past traumas as their romance grows deeper. That’s the good stuff!

I love, love, love fairy lore, but a lot of books with fairies cut out some of the darker aspects—and this one decidedly leans right into the morbid, deceitful side of fairies.

I adored the setting of the fairy court, and while I don’t always consider fairies to be monstrous, the Fae Queen has unique, see-through, glass anatomy and a decidedly inhuman demeanor that made it all the more satisfying when she started to fall for the human main character. I found the thrill-seeking personality of the main character to be refreshing, and her encounters with the icy queen had strong chemistry (in addition to being super steamy).

Count me in any time a book addresses the theme of “What makes a monster a monster?” One of the protagonists is Lord Wraith, a fun concept in itself as she’s an assassin cursed to take a wraith’s form once a month—but it’s really the other, manipulative human character who has a “monstrous” personality.

I already love that dynamic and the questions it poses, and throwing in an enemies-to-lovers angle and an unreliable narrator-induced plot twist over it really seals the deal on my love for this book.

I’ve read this one more than once, and I definitely plan to read it again.

This was one of the best books about werewolves—that isn’t really about werewolves—I have ever read. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed boy who lives with his aunt and uncle—who happen to be werewolves—and the struggles he and his family face while living on the edge of society to avoid discovery.

What fascinated me the most was that Jones created entirely new werewolf lore with its own culture, rituals, and traditions, and it all felt real. I loved the non-linear timeline following the boy from 8 to 16, yearning to change like his aunt and uncle. Jones encapsulated the real difficulties of living on the fringes of society for whatever reason. It’s a dark book, raw and visceral, but also really funny. 

I found myself surprisingly captivated by this present-day body horror mermaid transformation tale focused on a high school swim team.

This novel follows a gradual decline from an everyday reality towards an increasingly unhinged climax, and I appreciated how slowly this sneaks up on you. Even though the book makes no secret of where it’s ultimately going, I was still pleasantly surprised about how we got there and the weirdness of the ending.

The sapphic relationship between the protagonist and her best friend is a key throughline, with an interesting dichotomy between the best friend’s long-term adoration and the protagonist’s relative detachment and bitterness.

Do you have to be captivated by aquariums and otherworldly travel to enjoy this book? No, but if, like me, you’ve always wondered what it would be like to have an octopus for a work wife or a boyfriend who’s moving to Mars, you’ll love Sea Change.

Come for the reality-bending critique of life on Earth; stay for the achingly true-to-life portrait of a daughter of Korean immigrants who’s just trying to make her way in the world.

Taking stock of my selections, I realise that they are all to some degree autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. Just why I am attracted to this genre I don’t know: perhaps I am fascinated by the technical challenge of finding a narrative voice that is both personal and detached, of impersonalising emotions that could easily just be self-indulgent. Humour is often useful here, and Vladislavics’s novel is richly humorous, in its (lightly fictionalised) account of a culturally challenging boyhood in Pretoria, at the time the whitest and most conservative city in South Africa (interestingly, also the setting for Galgut’s The Promise). Young Joe, the stand-in for the author has, apart from an addiction to reading, a consuming interest in Muhammed Ali, and has kept a scrapbook of every newspaper item he could find relating to the great boxer. The bookworm-boxing addict is entirely engaging, as brought to life by a master… show more.

As this novel is set in 1970s Islamabad, Pakistan and the ex-pats are mainly American, it’s technically not about the British in India. But the ex-colonial legacy is there to see: Pakistan was a creation of independence from British rule and is still being affected by geo-politics. I was gripped by the description of life in the Pakistani capital; an area where my grandparents had lived and worked and through which I had travelled in the ’70s. This coming-of-age story is told by teenager Aliya, (half-Pakistani and half-Dutch) who attends the American school. Not only are the tensions of identity well portrayed but also the growing unease between the communities after a traffic accident leaves a young boy dead and world events ignite further unrest. Fascinating and unusual historical fiction.

Even though this book has some major plot issues, when I read it a decade or more ago it instantly became one of my favorites. I don’t think Laymon writes about kids much, but he did a good job with the three friends in The Traveling Vampire Show. The budding, awkward romance between the two of them was realistic, and the comic relief that the third provided was great. The story gets a bit wild at the end with the excessive violence and nudity, but that’s what Laymon got off writing about (sadly he passed away a number of years ago), and if you’re okay with those types of things, you’ll certainly enjoy the ride.