Here are 100 books that Pedro Paramo fans have personally recommended if you like
Pedro Paramo.
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I am a writer and novelist who comes to storytelling via several curious paths. I am a historian trained in archival research and the collection of oral histories. I also come from a long line of ghost magnets–all of the women in my family have been for generations. And while I am living in blissful exile on the West Coast, my heart remains bound to my childhood home, the Great State of Texas.
This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.
McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here, and the day was truly lost to forces beyond the characters’ control, hallmarks of the Southern Gothic tradition. I was hooked on this curious blend of genres!
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’ve been fascinated by how people behave and how in-group bias can change who they are. That interest led me into computational sociology (I study human behavior for a living), with my work appearing in The New York Times, USA Today, WIRED, and more. But my deepest fascination has always been with people’s propensity for the horrific. I LOVE the liminal space where fear, secrecy, and belonging collide. Being neurodivergent, living in a small Virginia town with my wife and our neurodivergent, queer son, I see how communities can both shelter and suffocate. That tension is why I’m drawn to stories saturated in dread, beauty, and what lives in the shadows.
This is the book that taught me how powerful loneliness can be.
Every time I return to it, I feel one character’s ache settle into me, that desperate want to belong somewhere, even if it’s a house that doesn’t love you back. I recommend it because it still feels as if I’m attempting to figure out what is happening alongside the characters, the way only great writing can.
Jackson makes you realize that the scariest hauntings aren’t in the walls, they’re the ones we carry within us.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
Ghost stories have fascinated me since I was a small child, even when they gave me nightmares every night. I've never lived in a haunted house, been part of a cursed family, or been kidnapped by highwaymen and villainous villains, but I've always sensed some people never leave this world. Despite the nightmares, I also believe ghosts aren't always vengeful spirits but loved ones, beings of light who sometimes just want to say hi. I have been writing stories since I learned to write. Ghost stories have always been a part of me, and I hope to shed a different light on this gloomy genre.
Remember when schools handed out a catalog of books for you to order? I do. I chose this book when I was about eleven years old, and while even then I was already reading Caroline B. Cooney and Richie Tankersley Cusick, this book took my childhood love of ghost stories and nudged it into my adolescence and adulthood.
Twin houses, the Civil War and broken families are the backdrop to the principal theme of young and forbidden love across the ages. Jealousy, revenge and a love which is not quite right live within the walls of these houses. Here, the places are not born evil; they are made evil by common human emotions allowed to fester and never laid to rest.
I have read it at least five times and love it still. Barbara Michaels is one of my favorite Gothic writers, and this book holds a vast place in…
Ghosts, a mysterious diary and a harrowing of a family split by the American Civil War sit at the heart of The Walker in the Shadows, a haunting Gothic romance by New York Times bestseller Barbara Michaels.
The house next door to Pat Robbins - eerily identical to the home she shares with her teenage son, Mark - has been empty for years. And it's not surprising, as there's a feeling of darkness radiating from the house that seems to scare everyone away.
But now new tenants are moving in: friendly Josef and his lovely daughter, Kathy, who has stolen…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
Ghost stories have fascinated me since I was a small child, even when they gave me nightmares every night. I've never lived in a haunted house, been part of a cursed family, or been kidnapped by highwaymen and villainous villains, but I've always sensed some people never leave this world. Despite the nightmares, I also believe ghosts aren't always vengeful spirits but loved ones, beings of light who sometimes just want to say hi. I have been writing stories since I learned to write. Ghost stories have always been a part of me, and I hope to shed a different light on this gloomy genre.
Published in 1834, this one amplifies Ann Radcliffe's Gothic-ness to eleven. I loved the story because it's fun, wild, gloomy, rogue, and riveting, like a gripping telenovela.
The plot is all about inheritance, family drama, illegitimate sons, and revenge. It features villains, gypsies, apparitions, corpses, evil priests, murders, curses, and the famous highwayman Dick Turpin and his mare Black Bess. It recounts Turpin's midnight ride through the English countryside as he flees capture, and like it, the entire novel is a wild ride.
Though a bit antiquated and with "songs" aplenty—which Ainsworth himself lamented had been lost in British literature and tried to resurrect—its gloomy and despairing story captivated me. The book begins at night inside a mausoleum, where the sexton Peter Bradley tells his grandson Luke his family history.
Right off the bat, we have a desecration and a rotting hand; how much more Gothic can this story be?
Rookwood is a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth published in 1834. It is a historical and gothic romance that describes a dispute over the legitimate claim for the inheritance of Rookwood Place and the Rookwood family name.
Ghost stories have fascinated me since I was a small child, even when they gave me nightmares every night. I've never lived in a haunted house, been part of a cursed family, or been kidnapped by highwaymen and villainous villains, but I've always sensed some people never leave this world. Despite the nightmares, I also believe ghosts aren't always vengeful spirits but loved ones, beings of light who sometimes just want to say hi. I have been writing stories since I learned to write. Ghost stories have always been a part of me, and I hope to shed a different light on this gloomy genre.
This book by Ann Radcliffe was published in 1794, and I read it in the spring of 2020 (yeah, we all remember). It was a welcome respite from my book club books as I sat on my lawn chair accompanying the main character, Emily Saint-Aubert, as she journeyed through the Languedoc. It was a long and arduous journey with long and arduous descriptions, and while I am averse to these, the narrative and language fascinated me. The story pulled me into a moonlit graveyard abutting an ancient convent, then into the languid beauty of 16th-century Venice, the gloomy castle Udolpho, and Signor Montoni's villainous schemes.
This book is the epitome of classic Gothic fiction, a genre of literature that started with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. But Udolpho sets the bar even higher with its narrative's light and darkness and winding twists.
`Her present life appeared like the dream of a distempered imagination, or like one of those frightful fictions, in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted. Rreflections brought only regret, and anticipation terror.'
Such is the state of mind in which Emily St. Aubuert - the orphaned heroine of Ann Radcliffe's 1794 gothic Classic, The Mysteries of Udolpho - finds herself after Count Montoni, her evil guardian, imprisions her in his gloomy medieval fortress in the Appenines. Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily struggles against Montoni's rapacious schemes and the…
The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert. When she could, my mother took long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons. Her accounts of the changing light on the rock walls, her encounters with silence and sidewinders, and her accumulating collection of fossils piqued my enthusiasm for earth science and led me to earn a degree in geology. I discovered that deserts drew from me a special quality of attention as my body and mind became a single organ for listening.
Not in the best of shape but energized by their imaginations, two friends set out with an overabundance of gear (including two eight-thousand dollar cameras, batteries, solar panels, and all sorts of other accessories) to hike all of the 750-mile Grand Canyon.
Starting in the Sonora Desert to the east, they plan to walk along the Great Basin Desert ecosystem of the canyon floor, shambling westward into the Mojave Desert. The heat—bouncing back and forth between canyon walls—reaches 120 degrees, hot enough to “denature and congeal” human blood. What could go wrong?
Fedarko writes about the riveting adventure (an adventure in both hiking and friendship) with humility and grim humor.
Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile, a rollicking and poignant account of the epic misadventure of a 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America's most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth.
A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert. When she could, my mother took long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons. Her accounts of the changing light on the rock walls, her encounters with silence and sidewinders, and her accumulating collection of fossils piqued my enthusiasm for earth science and led me to earn a degree in geology. I discovered that deserts drew from me a special quality of attention as my body and mind became a single organ for listening.
Mary Austin’s truly remarkable book is set in the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts of California. Austin, who (like me) had degrees in science and literature, developed a deep interest in both ecological issues and indigenous practices, particularly those of the Paiute and Hopi.
In this book of poetic, lyrical essays, her finely-tuned attentiveness to the land as a dynamic ecosystem and her accounts of the dialogue between humans and non-humans foreground a major trajectory in environmental literature and advocacy.
Austin has an unaffected, clear-eyed style that blends philosophy, natural history, and storytelling. First published in 1903, the book remains remarkably relevant and moving.
The enduring appeal of the desert is strikingly portrayed in this poetic study, which has become a classic of the American Southwest. First published in 1903, it is the work of Mary Austin (1868-1934), a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, who was also an ardent early feminist and champion of Indians and Spanish-Americans. She is best known today for this enchanting paean to the vast, arid, yet remarkably beautiful lands that lie east of the Sierra Nevadas, stretching south from Yosemite through Death Valley to the Mojave Desert. Comprising fourteen sketches, the book describes plants, animals, mountains, birds, skies,…
The first dirt I tasted was a fistful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert. When she could, my mother took long walks around the multicolored washes and canyons. Her accounts of the changing light on the rock walls, her encounters with silence and sidewinders, and her accumulating collection of fossils piqued my enthusiasm for earth science and led me to earn a degree in geology. I discovered that deserts drew from me a special quality of attention as my body and mind became a single organ for listening.
William Carlos Williams’ book The Desert Music was published first in 1954 and later collected in volume two of New Directions’ The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. It remains one of William Carlos Williams’ most tender, innovative, and emotionally exigent books.
The so-called desert music becomes, among other things, an enactment and valuing of the “inescapable and insistent” background soundscapes in our lives. Geographically, the poems of the title sequence are situated in the Chihuahua Desert, where Williams, after having suffered a stroke, travels between Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas.
From characteristically astute descriptions—for instance, of a twisted wild mustard flower (that I still see in my mind’s eye)—the poems segue into meditations on art, love, and mortality.
So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.
I’ve always loved magic and pirates. As I kid, I made up games incorporating the two. As a teenager, I wanted to read about them. But at the time, I couldn’t find anything that had both pirates and magic, so I decided to write one myself. As the years blurred past and the young adult book scene exploded, more and more books with pirates and magic have been published and of course, I try to read them all! I read them not only to study books similar to my own, but because I love them and I can’t get enough.
Imagine The Little Mermaid but the mermaid is actually a killer siren and the prince is actually a siren hunter/pirate, and you’ve got To Kill A Kingdom.
If you’re not sold by that alone (because I certainly was) well, this standalone fantasy also has seafaring action, a variety of vibrant kingdoms, strong character arcs, morally grey characters, dashing pirates, siren magic, and of course, a slow burn enemies to lovers romance (you may have noticed I’m a sucker for those.)
I only wish this was a series and not a standalone.
An unforgettable dark romantic YA fantasy about the siren with a taste for royal blood and the prince who has sworn to destroy her.
"Stellar world building and nonstop action will keep readers hooked on this twisted reimagining of 'The Little Mermaid'." Booklist Online
Princess Lira is siren royalty and the most lethal of them all. With the hearts of seventeen princes in her collection, she is revered across the sea. Until a twist of fate forces her to kill one of her own. To punish her daughter, the Sea Queen transforms Lira into the one thing…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I grew up in a talkative family in an extroverted culture near NYC. I discovered I also liked the quiet and found a man to marry who was very introverted. After the “opposites attract” phase we needed to learn ways to make our differences work and we've been doing that for almost 50 years. I took this knowledge to the workplace where, as a career coach and learning and development professional, I became a champion for introverts. I've written 4 books on harnessing the talents of both introverts and extroverts at work and speak about this topic around the world. I believe we are all better off when we work through our differences to achieve magic.
I had a great deal of respect for this author from reading her Psychology Today columns. Sophia Dembling is an introvert and from her research and personal experience knows that relationships between different personality types can be challenging to say the least.
She takes us through all aspects of the dating process and doesn’t slam extroverts. What she does is show us, through her great wit and transparency, how we are not perfect but that we can balance each other.
Dembling teaches introverts “how to let someone into their hearts while honoring the solitude we need..” I found myself laughing many times, even while reading the table of contents. “Whee! Fun With Extroverts” and “I Love you But Please Don’t Call Me.” And she helps extroverted readers understand and empathize with introverts who don’t find joy in too much socializing.
From the author of The Introvert’s Way, a friendly and accessible guide to dating and relationships for introverts.
Love is tricky for everyone--and different personality types can face their own unique problems. Now the author of The Introvert’s Way offers a guide to romance that takes you through the frequently outgoing world of dating, courting, and relationships, helping you navigate issues that are particular to introverts, from making conversation at parties to the challenges of dating an extrovert.
