Here are 96 books that The Girl with Ghost Eyes fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up with a serious passion for mythology and fairy tales. By the time I reached college, I knew that would be my path in life: honoring the Old Deities, honoring the earth, and writing new myths and fairy tales. To that end, I have published numerous short stories, novellas, and poems (the majority with a Pagan focus), serve on the board of directors of a Pagan publisher and a Pagan non-profit organization, and edit a Pagan literary ezine.
Charlotte English’s Malykant Mystery series is a rarity. Not only are the mysteries engaging, but the setting is unusual (a wintery Russian-type city) and the main character is the priest-assassin of the God of Death! Konrad Savast swore himself to the God’s service after his sister’s violent death, vowing to track down and kill those who had violated natural law through the act of murder. Savast’s devotion to his God and his duty will appeal to Pagans of every tradition. While tragic, the stories are never gruesome. Short enough to read in a single sitting, and lots of fun.
In an icy, Victorianesque world, a harsh god rules, and He has one law: a life for a life.
Konrad Savast is the Malykant: detective, judge and executioner in one. It's kill and be killed in Konrad's world, and his unhappy duty to mete out his Master's implacable justice.
The body of an aristocrat lies in the mist-shrouded reaches of the Bone Forest. Her killer has signed their own death warrant; but first, Konrad must learn who could have wanted the delightful Lady Rostikova dead...
With a pair of bloodthirsty ghosts to assist him, Konrad will hunt…
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 grew up with a serious passion for mythology and fairy tales. By the time I reached college, I knew that would be my path in life: honoring the Old Deities, honoring the earth, and writing new myths and fairy tales. To that end, I have published numerous short stories, novellas, and poems (the majority with a Pagan focus), serve on the board of directors of a Pagan publisher and a Pagan non-profit organization, and edit a Pagan literary ezine.
Chastain’s Terra Haven Chronicles currently stands at three books, with Deadlines and Dryads as the first. This is an exciting, feel-good urban fantasy series set in an alternate United States. Here, everyone practices some form of elemental magic (environmental destruction is almost unheard of and completely anathema), and humans live peacefully (mostly) alongside gargoyles, minotaurs, centaurs, dryads, and other species. I love the optimism of Chastain’s books. The world is grim enough. When I need a pick-me-up, Chastain is often my go-to read.
Getting the scoop might cost Kylie and her gargoyle companion their lives...
Dryads are a reclusive, passive species—or they used to be. Overnight, the peaceful woodland creatures have turned violent, attacking travelers with crude weapons and whipping the trees of their grove into a ferocious frenzy.
When rumors of the dryads’ bizarre behavior reaches journalist Kylie Grayson, she pounces on the story, determined to unearth the reason behind the dryads’ hostile transformation. Accompanied by Quinn, her young gargoyle friend, Kylie plunges into the heart of the malevolent grove. But nothing she’s learned prepares her for the terrifying conflict she uncovers...…
When I was younger, I turned to fantastical stories of determined, flawed heroes to bring me a world I could understand and control – unlike the scary reality I lived in. Most of the fantasy stories I read as I grew up were, of course, set in a medieval England-type world. But as I got older, I found myself fascinated by the history and mythology of the New World and got the feeling there was a lot of untapped potential there. So, I started studying Mesoamerican and Native American peoples, as well as picking up alternate history fantasies set in America. So of course, I had to write my own.
I love a noir detective story. Set that story in a fantastical, blood-drenched Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, and I’m totally sold.
The story follows Acatl, who is a high priest of the dead, as he, I kid you not, tries to solve what appears to be a murder case. Except he’s not walking the streets of some modern city – his journey takes him through the fascinating world of a familiar yet unique Aztec empire where human sacrifice is the only thing keeping the world spinning in its proper order.
Having familiar conflicts, including family issues, makes this one a unique standout. Acatl sounds like people I know. Following his determined efforts to bring a specific evil to heel – all while in a society that seemingly glories in bloodshed – is awesome.
The first book in the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy:
Year One-Knife, Tenochtitlan the capital of the Aztecs. Human sacrifice and the magic of the living blood are the only things keeping the sun in the sky and the earth fertile.
A Priestess disappears from an empty room drenched in blood. It should be a usual investigation for Acatl, High Priest of the Dead--except that his estranged brother is involved, and the the more he digs, the deeper he is drawn into the political and magical intrigues of noblemen, soldiers, and priests-and of the gods themselves...
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 with a serious passion for mythology and fairy tales. By the time I reached college, I knew that would be my path in life: honoring the Old Deities, honoring the earth, and writing new myths and fairy tales. To that end, I have published numerous short stories, novellas, and poems (the majority with a Pagan focus), serve on the board of directors of a Pagan publisher and a Pagan non-profit organization, and edit a Pagan literary ezine.
This is hands down one of my favorite science fiction books ever, and it is very atypical for science fiction. No big space battles, no hungry aliens. Just three people trying to figure out their lives and how they work together, all while humanity prepares to launch our first expeditions beyond the solar system.Of Kindred and Stardust features a diverse cast (in terms of ethnicity and gender), a polyamorous romance, and a polytheistic protagonist who keeps an altar for the Goddess and ancestors in his room and who looks forward to attending his family’s solstice celebration. This is what the future might actually look like, with polytheism (and polyamory) fully accepted into society.
After four years in the Alpha Centauri solar system, astrobiologist Dath Bellin is relieved to be back at ECHO-Crosspoint Space Station. His next mission: return to Earth and take a vacation. There's family to see, R&R to catch up on, and Imbolc to celebrate with his Druid grove—everything he could hope for from a Canadian winter. Unfortunately, everything goes wrong before he can even leave the station. There's also the matter of his exes, whom he can't have back no matter how much he wants them, not after his horrible mistake.
For the past four years, Mack Ainsley Tsallis and…
PoppyHarp has at its heart the mystery of a forgotten children’s TV show from the 70s, so I wanted to share books that explore a similar idea–the fiction in fiction–be it an invented book, movie, or TV show that drives the narrative in some way. These five books all feature the enigmatic quality of something lost or some kind of age-old mystery waiting to be unraveled by its protagonists. They are also five books that I absolutely adore.
I’ve loved this book since the day I unwrapped it in that bookstore I used to work at in 1992. Over the years I’ve re-read it several times and found it reveals more of itself the older I get. Harrison’s writing is hugely influential for a lot of writers, not only for his exquisite way with prose but also because he uncovers complex truths and epiphanies hiding inside ordinary people who find themselves occasionally touched by the fantastical.
The heart of this novel is a fictional book—the imaginary memoirs of a travel writer traversing Europe in pursuit of a magical realm. Everything revolves around it, and this exquisite book is like a puzzle box that the years have only served to slowly unlock for me.
John M. Harrison delivers an extraordinary, genre-bending novel that weaves together mythology, sexuality, and the troubled past and present of Eastern Europe. It begins on a hot May night, when three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Years later, none of the participants can remember what exactly transpired; but their clouded memories can't rid them of an overwhelming sense of dread. Pam Stuyvesant is an epileptic haunted by strange sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The seemingly least…
My PhD work was in developmental robotics, which is about how a robot could wake up and learn about the world the way a human child does. The robot in my thesis work does this by building models, and, more generally, society as a whole advances when science builds ever better causal models about how the world works. The books in this collection are about what could happen when we are 5, 10, and 100 years ahead in the causal model-building process, and they look at what happens when those models are built by robots instead of humans.
I love how this book conveys the wonder of discovery as they travel the universe. You can skip over some of the early math passages without missing anything. The book is about a civilization of software agents, and the description of how their understanding of physics advances is great.
If you like this one, check out Permutation City by Egen, which explores what it is like to live forever in a simulation. You live for so long that you can load passions for hobbies into your brain to pass the time. A character has an intense desire for woodwork and all the materials a woodworker would dream of.
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive…
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…
I was ten. Every Sunday morning, I sat in front of the TV with a notepad to take notes while watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. As a teen, I devoured every of Kafka’s books. The wonder of science and the strangeness of our existence have co-habited within me since then. Today, I’m a professional physicist and theoretical chemist. But I’m also a fiction writer. My fiction allows me to spill my science background into topics that wouldn’t be welcome in technical writing. For instance, wondering how life could re-emerge in the far future after all stars burned.
Your older self writes a diary and sends it back in time to you. It reveals that between two pathways, you will take a right. You arrive at that crossroads, and no matter how willing you are to defy your unveiled fate, you can’t avoid choosing right again. I often find this type of super-deterministic scenario in science fiction, invariably raising philosophical questions about free will. Nevertheless, Egan is the only author to offer a satisfactory psychological solution to why the protagonist can’t change their fate. And this is just the first of the short stories in this collection. Axiomatic is hard SciFi stretching scientific concepts into their ethical and human limits.
"Wonderful, mind-expanding stuff, and well written too."-The Guardian
Axiomatic is a wonderful collection of eighteen short stories by Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan. The stories in this collection have appeared in such science fiction magazines as Interzone and Asimov's between 1989 and 1992.
From junkies who drink at the time-stream to love affairs in time-reversed galaxies; from gene-altered dolphins that converse only in limericks to the program that allows you to design your own child; from the brain implants called axiomatics to the strange attractors that spin off new religions; from bioengineering to the new physics; and from cyberpunk to…
Tamel Wino is a Canadian fiction writer from resplendent British Columbia whose works focus largely on the degeneration of sanity and morality. He studied Health Sciences and Psychology, which only furthered his interest in human nature. With inspirations including Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Clive Barker, Margaret Atwood, and Edgar Allan Poe; Tamel’s expositions are strongly grounded in traditions of dark fiction. Yet, with his bold narrative voice and incisive plot construction, Wino is paving a new movement within the space.
Barron is undeniably a genius and proficient. Pick whichever book of his and it’ll blow you away. With a superior command of language and an impressive understanding of what frightens us, the author pulls no punches and peels back the layers to reveal the vileness that prowls in the dark.
Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, nine stories of cosmic horror from the heir apparent to Lovecraft's throne.
Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner…
I believe that H.P. Lovecraft, only now appreciated at his full stature, has spawned a whole generation of equally brilliant writers who make modern weird horror the most vibrant, confrontational, and relevant of all current genres. He looms over today’s literature and pop culture like Cthulhu looms over the sea, and his heirs include some of the best writers of their generation. As a much-travelled Scottish writer, I’ve needed tools to tackle the chaotic, disorienting contemporary experience, as well as the darkest, most imaginative strains of my own Celtic legacy. Lovecraftian horror—through HPL’s explicit mythos or simply his implicit sensibility—served up the palette I needed to do that.
Laird Barron may be the Robert E. Howard of modern horror and weird fiction—or its Dashiell Hammett. So hard-boiled you could break rocks with it, his prose is ferociously energetic, brutally unsettling, and consummately capable of crafting its own phantasmagoric world. If Melville was resurrected and took to writing plots for Quentin Tarantino, the result might be Laird Barron. The Imago Sequence is among his best collections, but almost any of them is equally strong.
To the long tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with rare intensity and astonishing craftsmanship.
Collected here for the first time are nine terrifying tales of cosmic horror, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella "The Imago Sequence," the International Horror Guild Award-nominated "Proboscis," and the never-before-published "Procession of the Black Sloth." Together, these stories, each a masterstroke of craft and imaginative irony, form a shocking cycle of distorted evolution, encroaching chaos, and…
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…
Novels are my medium and my first love, but I’m a huge fan of comic books too. Even though visual arts have never been my strength, I adore how many different things are possible in superhero stories. Sci-fi and epic fantasy and all different kinds of horror coexist in these enormous fictional universes. You’ve got comedic, child-friendly mysteries and pitch-black serial killer thrillers and deep meditations on love and family all going on at once. Comic book tropes and general disregard for genre boundaries definitely inform my writing style, and I love when I discover other novelists who incorporate comic book inspiration in various ways.
Almost Infamouswas the precursor to Pinnacle City. It’s by my partner, Matt Carter, and I’m so, so happy to have gotten to play in this universe, because this book is a gloriously nerdy yet pretty cutting take on a whole lot of corners of superhero comics. It’s about this disgruntled upper middle-class high school boy who decides to become a supervillain, and ends up drafted into Project Kayfabe, a forced league of supervillains controlled by the so-called superheroes to push the public narrative in whatever direction the “heroes” want. Thankfully, Project Kayfabe is made up of all sorts of villains who ended up there for all sorts of reasons, so they’re able to learn from each other, become better people, and come together to foil the heroes’ plot.
Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn't a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn't. He's unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn't want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.
However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half…
