87 Books Like The Right Hand of Evil

Like the other books on the list, The Shining felt personal, more like something that was happening to me than a story I was reading.

Like Jack, I could feel myself hanging on while the menace around me grew more real, more concrete. And more overwhelming. Even today, I can feel the terror of losing control, of becoming part of the menace, part of the threat to everything of meaning and value. Snowbound with horror, and Spring will never come.

I’ve read this book as a child, I was probably around 10 years old. I loved that a regular person was able to conquer the world given the right tools. I was also intrigued by the occult and mystical elements in this book. I found all the geographical and cultural references fascinating and I loved that it had a happy ending.

Having read this as a teenager, I found the intricate plot mesmerizing and I was intrigued by the deeper themes approached in the book. I read it in my mother tongue, Romanian. Humanity, religion, good and evil, smoke and mirrors. Everything is wrapped up in a science fiction context and a multi-layered fantasy filled with spirituality and insight.

I don't want to give any spoilers, but I loved how one person, fairly regular, always becomes the Messiah, no matter how many times the experiment is repeated.

Call me a sucker for some Stephen King and you’d be right! While I could go on and on all day about different Stephen King novels, Cell in particular was one of my favorites. This novel jumps right into the action, bombarding the reader with the chaos of what is essentially a zombie outbreak caused by a mysterious cell phone pulse. I always love King’s attention to character in his novels and his ability to weave that characterization in with the story while not bringing the plot to a total standstill. Throw in some mystery when the zombies start operating as though they’re part of a hive-mind and this novel kept me turning the pages.

No matter where I visit, I always try to buy a book about the town.

I never come home from a trip to New Orleans with one. It doesn’t matter whether it’s non-fiction or fiction, novels or short stories. French Quarter Fiction is a collection of short stories featuring my favorite part of the city, The French Quarter.

The variety of authors and stories is incredible and features such different views and aspects of this amazing neighborhood.

Jefferson's Louisiana is an absorbing study of a clash of cultures that helped to shape America's legal empire as it moved westward. Louisiana, governed by Spain and France under civil law codes for nearly a century before it became part of the United States, was a crossroads at which English law (dominant elsewhere in the new nation) and European law collided. Prof. Dargo first describes the uneasy cultural accommodation that French and Spanish settlers made with American immigrants at the turn of the nineteenth century, an accommodation made more challenging by Aaron Burr's simultaneous efforts to foment revolution in the trans-Appalachian West. Dargo then tells the story of how American and old-settler jurists collaborated to shape a new Louisiana code amalgamating common and civil law. 

Kate Stone was 20 years old when the Civil War came, living as a cherished daughter in a large, loving, wealthy Louisiana family headed by her indomitable widowed mother. The war up-ended Kate’s world. Beloved brothers joined the Confederate Army. First luxuries and then necessities dried up. Union forces helped themselves to Kate’s favorite horse. Neighbors and relations died or left. Eventually Kate and her family did, too, “refugeeing” to Texas where they did not always mingle smoothly with the locals. Meanwhile, the same forces that shattered Kate’s world opened the doors to a new one for the many enslaved people on whom Kate and her family relied. Kate’s marvelously eloquent diary offers readers a front-row seat into the drama of the Confederate homefront as a young woman on the cusp of adulthood experienced it, and from the corner of the reader’s eye, we also see glimpses of enslaved people… show more.

I discovered and used The World That Made New Orleans as a source for my book.

Upon opening the book, I was gleefully surprised to discover what an informative, interesting, and fun read it is. Sublette describes the French origins of the city in the early 1700s which involved wild parties, debauchery, tragic exploratory expeditions, and a massive Ponzi scheme that used Louisiana and the fictional gold mines there to defraud most every rich person in France, eventually crashing the entire French economy.

He then took me on a thrilling journey through the Spanish and early American periods to quadroon balls, Congo Square, and so many other fascinating places. I knew the city’s history was interesting, but reading The World That Made New Orleans blew me away. 

It comes as a surprise to many, but no Acadians were deported to Louisiana. It was a French colony in 1755, and those making the decisions about where the deportees were to go did not want to strengthen any French colony. They chose the Anglo-American colonies so there could be assimilation. The reason so many Acadians—renamed Cajuns—ended up in Louisiana was because of later migrations; voluntary migrations, not forced deportations. This book examines the growth, evolution, and political involvement of Louisiana's large Acadian community between the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and 1877, the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana. It’s a study that offers a good introduction to the Acadians (Cajuns) of that state.

I have to admit, this book is a bit of a personal indulgence. I’ve always been fascinated by the swamps of Louisiana and the mysteries that hide in those murky waters. Add a human arm in the mouth of an alligator and you’ve definitely gotten my attention. Some day I’m going to write a book that is set there—I just haven’t figured out a storyline yet—but when I do, I hope it’s half as good as BJ Bourg’s first book in his Clint Wolf series. I know it’s a cliché, but this book really did grab me from the start and, I guarantee, the end of the first chapter will haunt you, just as it haunts Clint Wolf.