Books like The Books of Magic

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!

This novel is a wonderful East meets West tumble into the afterlife that will leave an impression on you long after you close the book. The main character is nothing like the usual hero, but an overweight 10-year-old, taciturn, lonely, but most of all, fiercely determined to save her mother. 

We follow Melanie into a creepy and harsh underworld heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs and discover the terrible truth about monsters and how they are created. This book is like a Japanese Alice in Wonderland where no punches are held back, celebrating courage, family, and tenacity.  

This must be one of the strangest works I have read in a long while, and I admire it deeply. It surfs on the documentary graphic novel trend. It exists to teach people about the disastrous impact of intensive farming on the environment, and more particularly on dirt. Not a very attractive topic, despite how serious it is – but, and that’s where this comic is so innovative, it twists all this knowledge around a suspenseful battle royal orchestrated by Hades in the Underworld. Unlikely, isn’t it? I loved discovering the facts while cheering on my main characters, two lost 16 years old, who struggle to survive in the underground. While it is directed at teens, I would recommend it to the above 16 only, as there is gore (this book follows the Hunger Games pattern of only one survivor) and nudity. 

I read this book not long after reading Spook, and it scratched many of the same philosophical itches for me. I love its dreamlike quality and haunting sense of nostalgia. As far as I know, it's also unlike any other work of fiction in its approach to the question of life after death.

It blends two seemingly unrelated topics—historical disasters (e.g., the Hartford circus fire, the sinking of the Titanic)—and the science of near-death experiences in a striking, unique way. Although it is, in many ways, a deeply sad story, it ultimately feels hopeful. This is one of those novels that left a lasting impact on my psyche.   

This was the first book I ever read by HP Lovecraft and after reading it, I read everything else that I could find by such a talented writer. Lovecraft’s stories are dark, doom-ridden tales that are filled with cosmic horror, nightmarish landscapes, and indescribable monsters. But it’s not only the tales themselves that captivated me, it’s the style in which they were written. Lovecraft has such a beautiful literary style of writing that really made me feel what the characters felt and see what horrors they witnessed. His work definitely inspired me to pick up pen and paper and write stories of my own.

 Okay, technically, Malice is a futuristic young adult novel, but there's a fantastic mystery here with a strong female protagonist. I did mention these books would be genre-bending. In this one, a young girl knows part of the future--the part where one of her classmates releases a virus that kills two-thirds of the population. Now she's in a race against time to find out who he is before he kills everyone she knows.

I have had a personal experience of an adored cat communicating with me telepathically when he was alive, from a liminal state shortly after he died, and then through a clairvoyant many years later. His simple messages transformed my understanding of death and what comes next.

Reading The Amazing Afterlife of Animals was a profound confirmation of those experiences. Unusual, mystical encounters with our animals after death can be deeply alienating—until you discover that many others have felt exactly the same thing. This book gave me that recognition.

I read this book as fiction, being that it is written by a psychic, and I’m still not convinced that anyone knows what exists on the other side. As such, I was fascinated by the wonders and possibilities that are put forth and it was extremely encouraging to me during my time of grief.

My young daughters also loved the “book about heaven” and would insist on me reading parts of it to them at bedtime after their dad died.  

I was astonished when I opened this book and saw all the gorgeous art depicting heavens, hells, and afterlives from around the world. The colors and printing are lush, and it’s incredible to see everything from brightly colored Islamic art showing magnificent gardens of paradise to ancient illustrated manuscripts of Valhalla and mind-bending medieval portraits of Christian hell.

I also love the full, yet concise, descriptions of every hell, underworld, purgatory, and heaven that humans around the world and throughout history have imagined. I learned so much about the different cultures and religions through their visions of the afterlife, and all alongside the art depicting it. I feel like I got an art history class as a bonus!

James Haddock is another author whose writing style I have enjoyed for a while now. His books are entertaining, though his grammar tends to be all over the place. This was either the first story of his I read or one of the first. I can’t remember which.

There is something about the way he describes magic and uses it in his books that I simply enjoy. The MC in this one is dying and finds himself brought over into a new land with magic, wherein his adventure promptly begins with a knife struggle.

The magic, though…it’s different from how others usually describe their magic systems. It would be so easy to abuse, and while he does grow powerful, Haddock never has him abusing it like another author would.