Here are 66 books that The Shadow of the Torturer fans have personally recommended if you like
The Shadow of the Torturer.
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Iâve always loved the darker side of fantasy. While heroes, knights, and handsome kings can occasionally be enjoyable, I want to know the other characters who have suffered, hurt, lost, grieved, and been hardened by grim circumstances and cruel fate. Those characters demonstrate the resilience of human nature and how goodness truly can exist even in the harshest environment. I love using this darkness in my own novels to show that even the tiniest spark can shine immensely brightâa true testament to the indefatigability of our spirits. Â
I love the cunning, wit, and charm of the one-and-only Vlad Taltos. Though heâs an assassin, heâs never cruel or wicked; he merely does what he needs to appease the âmafia-feelingâ organization he works for. Heâs almost more a swashbuckling rogue than a killer.
In his interactions with his familiar, Loiosh, you see his more nuanced side, the morality beneath the magic and swordplay. And few fantasy worlds Iâve ever visited have been as rich and colorful as those created in the Vlad Taltos series.Â
The first three fantastical adventures of assassin Vlad Taltosânow in one volume.
A welcome addition to any fantasy fan's library, The Book of Jhereg follows the antics of the wise-cracking Vlad Taltos and his dragon-like companion through their first three adventuresâJhereg, Yendi, and Teckla.
There are many ways for a young man with quick wits and a quick sword to advance in the world. Vlad Taltos chose the route of assassin. From his rookie days to his selfless feats of heroism, the dauntless Vlad will hold readers spellboundâand The Book of Jhereg will take its place among the classic compilationsâŚ
Mother of Trees is the first book in an epic fantasy series about a dying goddess, a broken world, and a young elf born without magic in a society ruled by it.
When the ancient being that anchors the worldâs power begins to fail, the consequences ripple outwardâthrough prophecy, politics,âŚ
Iâve been drawn to LGBT+ characters and themes long before I knew that was a thing that a person could beâand longer still before I realized that it was something that might apply to me. Science fiction and fantasy helped me to explore identities and ways of existing within the world that were fundamentally different from my own and that instilled a love of the genre that Iâll always treasure.
Confession time: I tend to be picky about mermaid stories because life under the sea is such a dramatic difference from our reality that itâs often hard to really reflect that difference. In this book, you never forget that these people arenât human, and you never lose their connection to the sea. Itâs everywhere, from the way they think about distances to their relationships with the other creatures around them to the way Yetuâs disabilities are handled.
In the same way, the trauma that created their people was always lingering at the forefront of my mind as I read, even when it wasnât the subject at hand. This is another one where my experience was elevated even further by the audiobook, as narrated by Daveed Diggs.Â
WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY LGBTQ SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY/HORROR AWARD
The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society-and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award-nominated song "The Deep" from Daveed Diggs's rap group clipping.
Yetu holds the memories for her people-water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners-who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one-the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed onâŚ
Iâm a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. Iâm interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. Iâd like to think my books fall into this category, or at least thatâs what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books Iâve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Attanasio can run hot and cold, but when heâs hot heâs on fire! This book may have the most ambitious plot of any novel Iâve ever read and is almost impossible to describe. It spans galaxies, has a truly bizarre vibe, and yet rings true, with a love story thrown in. Â
Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life has become extinct, alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind's re-animator, and the zĹtl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.
The resurrected children of Earth are told: "You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way." Yet,âŚ
Olivia Thrift, a.k.a. the superheroine Captain Fantastic, is excited to be meeting fellow Canadian superheroines for the first time. However, when their gathering is violently interrupted, it quickly becomes a savage fight against evil.
And, when Olivia suddenly loses her powers, will she be able to set things right whenâŚ
As an autistic person, I was a deeply unhappy and anxious child, so naturally I grew up to be a goth, with scary stories becoming a way for me to manage my constant fear. The Gothic became one of my special interests, and something Iâve always enjoyed studying. Additionally, Iâve always loved imaginative, fantastical tales that helped me feel like I was escaping from the real world I hated (and honestly, still hate) so much. As a result, thereâs a special place in my heart for books that combine the weird Gothic trappings I hold so dear with the action and magic of a fantastical adventure novel.
This book is horrifying, weird as shit, and absolutely beautiful, from China Mievilleâs stunning prose to the grotesque splendor of his imagery.
Mievilleâs follow-up to Perdido Street Station is a Melvillian Gothic that takes its characters on a sprawling, twisted naval journey that incorporates such horrors as giant mosquito monsters, a symbiotic pair of dictators known as the Lovers, and a Frankensteinian punishment system where bio-thaumaturgists graft foreign limbs or organs onto their victimsâ bodies.
The Scar blew my mind when I first read it in college, and made me rethink what a novel could be. Its creativity and depth feel endless, with layers of philosophical and thematic depth. Itâs the kind of book that makes you feel like you could read it a hundred times, and still find fresh meaning.
The Scarâs final act also perfectly captures the feeling that youâre beholding something beyond your capacity to fathomâandâŚ
A human cargo bound for servitude in exile... A pirate city hauled across the oceans... A hidden miracle about be revealed... This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.From the author of Perdido Street Station, another colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, which was acclaimed in The Times Literary Supplement as: 'An astonishing novel, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jadedâŚ
As a former librarian I have long been fascinated with Borgesâs view of books: their metaphysical shape and their tendency to open into the uncanny and the infinite. Illness early in life drove me to books, to their particular isolation. Since then, Iâve found that worlds can open almost anywhere in literature by way of a mood, a patina of language, a vision, a set of images completely beyond the control of the writer. Now, I read these books to remind me of what fiction can do, the places it can go, the worlds it will open.
Samuel R. Delaneyâs masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.
A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero â Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) â gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.
Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping.Â
This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgrenanswers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.
I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didnât last in prison.
Nebula Award Finalist: Reality unravels in a Midwestern town in this sci-fi epic by the acclaimed author of Babel-17. Includes a foreword by William Gibson.
A young halfâNative American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellonaâonly something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound.  So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delanyâs masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction couldâŚ
Quoting Aristotle when writing about yourself probably comes off as pretentious, but looking back at how I became a writer, his idea of how good stories must be âsurprising yet inevitableâ rings true: from a childhood split in rural Bavaria, where dark German fairytales sparked my love for books to experiments with lucid dreaming that ended in a loss of reality, my ending up as a game writer and novelist focused on the mind and dreams does sound somewhat inevitableâeven if it took me some detours and distractions to get there. Now, I couldnât be happier. đ
From the strange title to the premise of a futuristic television star who suddenly no one remembers, this book, is the essence of why PKD remains one of my favorite authors: futurism, psychology, and existential angst distilled into a mind-bending cocktail whose characters somehow still feel perfectly grounded and believable.Â
Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?
The Cave of Past and Present is an archaeological descent into a living labyrinthâpart ruin, part machine, part prophecy.
When Moria Chione follows a vanished colleague into the empireâs wild fringes, she uncovers a sentient subterranean archive that reshapes itself around intruders and rewrites their memories as easily as stone.âŚ
Iâm a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. Iâm interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. Iâd like to think my books fall into this category, or at least thatâs what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books Iâve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Handâs sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.
The âsensuous and evocativeâ debut of the Nebula Awardâwinning author of Waking the Moon: A dystopian journey through a world unburdened by moral taboos (Library Journal).  Set in the surreal, post-apocalyptic City of Trees, Winterlong centers on Wendy Wanders, a girl who can tap into the dreams and emotions of the people around her, and her long-lost twin brother, Raphael, a seductive, sacred courtesan to the Cityâs decadent elite. During their voyage, they encounter man-made and godlike monstrositiesâboth hideous and gorgeousâin their effort to stop an ancient power from consuming all. Blending science fiction and fantasy, Winterlong is a darkâŚ
Science fiction is rightly famous for experimenting with new and strange social worlds, but fantasy tends to fall back on the usual feudal tropes: the whims of kings, the valor of knights, the always-temporary powerlessness of farm boys, the technicalities of succession. Which is a shame, because fantasy provides just as much opportunity to reimagine what society could look like. Thatâs what I try to do in my books, and at my job, where Iâm working to bring 21st-century data literacy and quantitative reasoning to a state government stuck resolutely in the â90s. When I think of books that have done what Iâm trying to do, these five are at the front of my mind.
Monstress is an awful lot of things: An epic fantasy that confronts the horrors of modern war; a work of fusion that marries Western and Eastern aesthetics and the epic scale of George R. R. Martin with the cosmic and body horror of Junji Ito; an incredible trove of beautiful visual art; a stage for women of all kinds, young and old, beautiful and monstrous, weak and powerful, with and without shark heads; and a story about a girl coming to grips with a dark family legacy and what it means for her place in a bloody, painful world.
More than anything else, itâs about what happens when people use each other. For my money, the best epic fantasy currently being published in any form.
2018 Eisner Award winner, Best Writer 2018 Eisner Award winner, Best Painter/Multimedia Artist 2018 Eisner Award winner, Best Continuing Series 2018 Eisner Award winner, Best Publication for Teens 2018 Eisner Award winner, Best Cover Artist 2018 Harvey Award winner, Book of the Year 2018 Hugo Award winner, Best Graphic Story 2018 British Fantasy Award winner, Best Comic/Graphic Novel 2018, 2016, 2015 Entertainment Weekly's The Best Comic Books of the Year 2018, Newsweek's Best Comic Books of the Year 2018, The Washington Post's 10 Best Graphic Novels of the Year 2018, Barnes & Noble's Best Books of the Year 2018, YALSA'sâŚ
Iâve spent a lifetime reading horror, I was probably in third grade when I stumbled across a battered collection of short stories by Saki in the adult section of the libraryâwhere I wasnât supposed to be. I snuck the book back to the childrenâs section, started reading, and I was hooked. Then it was Edgar Allan Poe, and from Poe until now, itâs been every horror novel or short story I could find. The best of them have never left me. And they make up my list, The Most Terrifying Novels You Canât Escape From.
When I think of the ultimate, inescapable trap, I think of Harlan Ellisonâs I Have No MouthandI Must Scream.
To me, the terror is not only unbearable, itâs unchangeable. Of all these worlds, this may be the one most devoid of hope. With no possibility of relief and no chance of escape. There is, in fact, no place to escape to.
And like every book on this list, I donât have to reread I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, because itâs always with me. In the best and most terrifying way.
A Harrowing dystopian short story by Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a sentient supercomputer, AM, has destroyed humanity except for five people it keeps alive to torture for the rest of their lives. As AM manipulates the characters' deepest fears and desires, they are held captive in an underground complex and subjected to interminable psychological and physical torture. The narrative is told by one of the captives, Ted, and deals with themes of despair, dehumanization, and the terrifying effects of technological power going unchecked. The story by EllisonâŚ
Tom and Katie have drunk a love potion and were devoted to one another when Tom embarked on the voyage that would make his fortune. But then Deirdre, Queen of the Witches, struck a blow meant to destroy the civilizationâŚ
My first two lessons as a geophysicist were confusing opposites. My supervisor told me that I must carry my investigations to professional conclusions, while the very best physicists showed me that good scientists are the most parsimonious about what they conclude. It's a battle between humility and the need to tell a story. We human beings crave a nice, neat ending, and we often only get one in fantasy, for the real world is complex. It was this insight that led me to start every story I ever wrote with at least a concept for the ending. If we are going to go anywhere with our narratives, we better first consider where that is.
Sometimes we think we are reading fiction as an exercise in entertainment, and fantasy as a guilty pleasure. Abercrombie is a favorite writer of mine because his work does all that, but he also surprises with sharp insight every single time. Last Argument of Kings ends his First Law Trilogy with the most surprising reveal of allâthat the moral center does not exist. Not at all. All the blood and death that his characters have dealt out and survived are not in service to some higher good. More than just an exercise in cynicism or a service to violence, this story shines a light on power, politics and the people who stand atop the heap. And somehow Abercrombie does this all while making you laugh and shake your head in amazement.
Logen Ninefingers might only have one more fight in him - but it's going to be a big one. Battle rages across the North, the King of the Northmen still stands firm, and there's only one man who can stop him. His oldest friend, and his oldest enemy. It's past time for the Bloody-Nine to come home.
With too many masters and too little time, Superior Glokta is fighting a different kind of war. A secret struggle in which no-one is safe, and no-one can be trusted. His days with a sword are far behind him.âŚ
