Books like The Last Days of Jack Sparks — picked by fans

This book revolutionized the possession subgenre.

I love how the story isn’t a typical paint-by-numbers possession and doesn’t go straight into the belief of a demonic presence. The author focuses on building the varying characters up before the exorcism begins, and I enjoy how Reagan is treated by doctors first, worried she’s ill due to family stress.

My favourite part of The Exorcist is how much focus is given to the exorcism once it starts. Plenty of other exorcism stories may only use the exorcism as a quick fix in the third act, but William Peter Blatty made it an integral part of the story.

A chilling horror in a small fictional English village.

I love The Woman in Black because it’s more than a ghost story; it’s also a story about love and the connection between family. I’ve read it twice and what I love the most about it is the ambience Susan Hill creates with her well-crafted sentence structure.

There’s a lot of focus on Arthur Kipps, the protagonist, and his life before and after the haunting of Eel Marsh, but it’s not only him the story cares about. The Woman in Black herself is a mystery and has a tragic backstory that turns her from a full-on villain to a sympathetic one.

This is my all-time favourite book.

I own two physical copies – one paperback and a special edition hardback that released for a recent anniversary. It’s Stephen King’s debut, but you wouldn’t know it since he was already so comfortable with his writing and understanding his voice. I love that the story isn’t told through conventional means but using news reports and journals.

Carrie White is a character I can relate to, not because I secretly have powers – I don’t, I promise – but because she is the oddball, the type of person who doesn’t fit in. She’s the exaggerated poster child of why bullying is bad, but the book holds one very special message at its core – what does it cost to be nice?

Carrie is shown throughout as this sweet and simple girl who longs for connection, and we see the slow breakdown of her character… show more.

This is one of the most controversial books of all time.

It was written by a nineteen-year-old and is shocking in all of the best ways. At first, I thought it was a slow read, but as I progressed through the story, it dawned on me that it was by design and the author focused on his character work above all else.

Without the focus on his characters, the ending would fall flat, but I love the last half of the book. It’s a fascinating concept that is even more fascinating to peel back. 

I wanted to be an astronaut. I was drawn to the adventure, excitement, and thrill of rockets. One of the most thrilling experiences of the American space program was the flight of Apollo XIII.

The commander of the flight, Jim Lovell, working with writer Jeffery Kluger, took me aboard this ill-fated flight, filling in all my questions about the flight and how to solve the challenges. I have often turned to this book throughout my flying career.

Being a pilot involves overcoming obstacles, although most are not as severe as those faced by the crew of Apollo XIII. Nevertheless, this book showed me that with focus, hard work, and an outstanding crew, there are a few challenges that can’t be overcome.

I enjoyed this book because it describes one of the very first Flight Directors; one that people don’t know much about; Glynn Lunney. He was a relatively quiet person but extremely intelligent and capable. He is best known for his leadership in the control center during the Apollo XIII mission and during the Apollo Soyuz mission. He also was the Flight Dynamics Branch Chief that included all of the "Trench" Flight Controllers. 

Haynes Manuals: they’re not just for cars anymore. Haynes also publishes books dedicated to the technical details of planes you’ll never own or service, and spacecraft you’ll never fly in. They’re detailed, they’re technical, and they’re geek gold. With a million color pictures and cutaway diagrams, and text crammed with comprehensive engineering details, the Haynes' Apollo 13 volume is a perfect companion to my Woods pick, or a great standalone in getting literally beneath the skin of the Apollo spacecraft and seeing exactly how all the moving parts worked. By all means buy the Haynes' Apollo 11 Manual too (I did), but I think this one has the edge in terms of technical depth–and you obviously get the full backstory of this aborted and almost disastrous Lost Moon mission too.

I enjoyed this book because I shared the author's life with him in both the Mercury and Mission Control Centers. I witnessed his intense management and leadership style first-hand.

Not only was he my direct supervisor, but he was my mentor and friend. His family was very close to mine; he was also my neighbor. Gene is one of the reasons the Space Program was so successful. He epitomizes "Tough and Competent."

This is a harder-SF book that deals with the near-term search for life in our solar system. What I found great about Landau’s writing is that everything seems incredibly realistic, well thought out, and researched. The life that is found is not a carbon copy of our own (hint, hint), and has come through an altogether different evolutionary pathway. This book made me want to go back to university and study anything that would get me into space.

Gene Kranz gave a precise and concise description of historic events around the creation of America’s manned space program and presented the key players at the forefront of NASA’s space exploration Missions. His participation in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission was dramatically documented in this book to my admiration. A fascinating firsthand account by a veteran mission controller of one of America’s greatest achievements, this book reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now.

I fell in love with this book because of the author’s personal involvement and perceptions in some of the Mission programs. The graphic description of different explorations kept me spellbound to read each exploration to the end. Again, the book was written with simple and easy-flowing English grammar… show more.