Here are 15 books that The Destroyer of Worlds fans have personally recommended if you like
The Destroyer of Worlds.
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I fell in love with speculative fiction in high school (1967) when I found LOTR collecting dust on a library shelf in San Marcos, Texas. I majored in philosophy in college, which required a high degree of speculative imagination. Some might call my philosophizing bullshit, but seriously, it’s the only academic field that takes zombies seriously. I taught visual and multimedia design at Austin Community College, helping students commit their imaginations to realized projects. Love in the Ruins inspired me to write three speculative novels and dozens of published short stories.
Okay, I’m a big fan of Lovecraftian lore, but who needs me to recommend Lovecraft? I might as well recommend White Castle to stoners.
While this book (which was also an HBO series) isn’t as funny as Ruff’s Sewer, Gas, and Electric (a wonderful spoof of Atlas Shrugged), I reread it after watching the series and found it as thrilling and exciting as the first read. It plays on science fiction as well as horror, and the chapter depicting Hypolita Freeman’s discovery of a portal to other universes in an observatory has haunted me since I first read it.
I’ve never read a book that weaves horror and science fiction so seamlessly. (Note: I love the irony of writing a book about a closely-knit black family tackling the horrors inspired by the openly racist Lovecraft.)
Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George - publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide - and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite - heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus's ancestors - they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.
At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
A New York Times Notable Book “You’re in for a treat. The Reformatory is one of those books you can’t put down. Tananarive Due hit it out of the park.” —Stephen King
A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
Gracetown, Florida
June 1950
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son…
I’m an award-winning and bestselling novelist known for writing in a wide variety of genres. My most popular work to date is Lovecraft Country, a supernatural horror novel that served as the basis for the acclaimed HBO series of the same name.
I also love books that combine thrilling adventure stories with the thoughtful exploration of ideas.
The protagonists of this haunting sci-fi/existential horror novel make contact with an alien species that, while highly intelligent, appears to lack any sense of self-awareness. This leads to the scary question: Are the aliens the weird ones in this scenario, or is human consciousness a unique mutation in a universe filled with zombies?
Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us.Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?Send a linguist with multiple - personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
A great book can supplant your consciousness and bring you into a new headspace of altered mood and perception. Good writing about elevated human experiences can elevate the reader, as the words on the page inspire the release of "feel-good" neurochemicals like endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine. These are the effects I seek to produce in my readers’ experience – I want them to feel the buzzes and the highs and lows my characters feel. In Death By Cannabis, by focusing on the legalization of weed in Canada, I sought to tap into the passionate subculture and complex emotions the emancipation of pot brought to the surface after simmering so long underground.
Early in this book, a character uses his kitchen oven to dry out some psychedelic mushrooms harvested from the rooftop garden at his flat in World War II London. Dosing the characters (and somehow the reader) with Amanita Muscaria is an appropriate way to set the tone of this book.
Mushroom experiences are fun and giggly and clever, at times, but they can also open the mind to the evils mankind is capable of and the intricate conspiracies seemingly hiding in plain sight. Which is what I love about Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon’s writing is hilarious, but then he’ll hit you with a gut punch so poignant it will linger in your mind for decades.
Hailed by many as the major experimental nov el of the post-war period, Gravity''s Rainbow is a bizarre co mic masterpiece in which linguistic virtuosity creates a who le other world. '
I’m a lifelong New Jerseyan married to a man whose family comes from Georgia. It gave me an opportunity to observe the white, Southern, upper-class weltanschauung, up close. To hear them talk, you’d think the Civil War had ended just a few days earlier, and if the Yankees had only respected states’ rights, none of that mess would have happened. My book is about a dysfunctional Georgia family who has far too much money than is good for them. Hijinks ensue.
I love a sprawling family saga set in a small town. My husband’s father came from a small town in South Georgia that was founded by one of his ancestors. My husband’s grandfather, after visiting Chicago and being impressed by the big department stores he saw there, decided that what his tiny little town needed was a huge department store of its own. He built one, and amazingly, it was a success for many years, with folks coming from all around to marvel at its architectural sophistication and its dazzling array of wares. Like the fictional town of Perdido, Alabama, where the action is centered in Blackwater, everyone there knows everybody else, and nothing secret stays hidden for long.
On Easter Sunday, 1919, a flood engulfs Perdido. Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of the town’s most influential family, discovers a stranger named Elinor Dammert waiting patiently inside a room on…
Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido’s first family. But her beautiful exterior hides a shocking secret. Beneath the waters of the Perdido River, she turns into something terrifying, a creature whispered about in stories that have chilled the residents of Perdido for generations. Some of those who observe her rituals in the river will never be seen again…
As a writer, I consider myself lucky to be born and raised in the Deep South. Although I currently live near Los Angeles, I continue to draw upon the region’s complex history, regional color, eccentric characters, and rich atmosphere for inspiration. I also love to read fiction set in the South, especially mysteries and thrillers—the more atmospheric, the better!
Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout
As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.
In this taut, chilling novel from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail.
While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
"Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post
Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
There are some books that give you both a gut punch and a heartache at the same time. This is one of those. Karen Russell is one of my favorite authors, and this year I have read three of her books. She has a wild, weird way of dissecting the world through the wild, weird microcosm of Florida. She creatively uses point of view in Swamplandia!, giving us the first-person voice of Ava Bigtree while casting other point-of-view characters in third person narration. This allows the reader to ache and hope and fail and succeed with Ava, our hearts breaking with each step. Oh, and did I mention--this is one hilarious book.
New York Times Bestseller | Pulitzer Prize Finalist
"Ms. Russell is one in a million. . . . A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book."--The New York Times
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.
I’m a lifelong New Jerseyan married to a man whose family comes from Georgia. It gave me an opportunity to observe the white, Southern, upper-class weltanschauung, up close. To hear them talk, you’d think the Civil War had ended just a few days earlier, and if the Yankees had only respected states’ rights, none of that mess would have happened. My book is about a dysfunctional Georgia family who has far too much money than is good for them. Hijinks ensue.
The action is set in the fictional east Texas town of New Long Lincoln, where Daniel Russell returns after a long absence. He was 13 when his father tried to kill them both by driving his car into Moon Lake. Now a drought has caused the lake to evaporate and the car’s been found, with the remains of Daniel’s father inside, as well as an extra body in the trunk. Daniel teams up with a childhood friend who’s become a police officer to untangle a web of old grudges and strange murders.
Drowned towns – ones that are deliberately submerged in order to build dams and reservoirs – fascinate me. There’s one in Sussex County, New Jersey, called Walpack. It was intended to be buried under a man-made lake in the nineteen-seventies, as part of a project to build a dam across the Delaware River. It was a cause célèbre…
Daniel Russell was only thirteen years old when his father tried to kill them both by driving their car into Moon Lake. Miraculously surviving the crash- and growing into adulthood- Daniel returns to the site of this traumatic incident in the hopes of recovering his father's car and bones. As he attempts to finally put to rest the memories that have plagued him for years, he discovers something even more shocking among the wreckage that has ties to a twisted web of dark deeds, old grudges, and strange murders.
As Daniel diligently follows where the mysterious trail of vengeance leads,…
I fell in love with speculative fiction in high school (1967) when I found LOTR collecting dust on a library shelf in San Marcos, Texas. I majored in philosophy in college, which required a high degree of speculative imagination. Some might call my philosophizing bullshit, but seriously, it’s the only academic field that takes zombies seriously. I taught visual and multimedia design at Austin Community College, helping students commit their imaginations to realized projects. Love in the Ruins inspired me to write three speculative novels and dozens of published short stories.
I read this book every year. In my opinion, Walker Percy, along with Flannery O’Connor, is the premiere southern novelist of the last half of the 20th Century. I consider it one of the finest novels written and an example of the plotting, character development, use of language, and religious parody to which young novelists should aspire.
Percy’s novel blends Southern Gothic, science fiction, and comedy to create a world in which the racial divide in New Orleans blossoms into an apocalypse with hilarious and unpredictable results.
A pair of profound dystopian novels from the “brilliantly breathtaking” New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer (The New York Times Book Review).
Winner of the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, the “dazzlingly gifted” Southern philosophical author Walker Percy wrote two vividly imagined satirical novels of America’s future featuring deeply flawed psychiatrist and spiritual seeker Tom More (USA Today). Love in the Ruins is “a great adventure . . . so outrageous and so real, one is left speechless” (Chicago Sun-Times), and its sequel The Thanatos Syndrome “shimmers with intelligence and verve” (Newsday).
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m an award-winning and bestselling novelist known for writing in a wide variety of genres. My most popular work to date is Lovecraft Country, a supernatural horror novel that served as the basis for the acclaimed HBO series of the same name.
I love books that refuse to fit neatly into genre categories. This underappreciated novel by the author of "The Lottery"and The Haunting of Hill House reads like a Seinfeld episode set on the eve of the apocalypse.
The Sundial’s combination of social satire and horror got lackluster reviews when it was published in 1958, but that’s just because it was way ahead of its time.
Before there was Hill House, there was the Halloran mansion of Jackson’s stunningly creepy fourth novel, The Sundial
When the Halloran clan gathers at the family home for a funeral, no one is surprised when the somewhat peculiar Aunt Fanny wanders off into the secret garden. But then she returns to report an astonishing vision of an apocalypse from which only the Hallorans and their hangers-on will be spared, and the family finds itself engulfed in growing madness, fear, and violence as they prepare for a terrible new world.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher…
