Here are 17 books that The Siege of Burning Grass fans have personally recommended if you like
The Siege of Burning Grass.
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I found Emily Wilde and her world simply delightful! The atmosphere (real and faerie) is gorgeous, and the characters wonderful, funny, and romantic. All in all it's a delightful escape!
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series.
“A darkly gorgeous fantasy that sparkles with snow and magic.”—Sangu Mandanna, author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world’s first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is…
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…
This collection of short stories spans Khaw's early career. You can see them learning how to a write a short story. The early work is mostly "vibes," dark and romantic and melancholy and rageful. The later work is fully realized, ambitious, nuanced. It's all worth reading. All of it. Khaw's language is deeply interesting. It's visceral. It feels everything. It's also horror, so... CW for guts.
Cassandra Khaw's dynamic and vibrant debut collection, Breakable Things, explores the fragile and nebulous bonds that weave love and grief into our existence. This exquisite and cutting collection of stories showcases a bloody fusion of horrors from cosmic to psychological to body traumas. “Khaw (Nothing but Blackened Teeth) packs a gruesome punch with the 23 bite-size horror stories ... the distinctive authorial voice and uncanny atmospherics will surely find some fans.”
Publishers Weekly
“A delicious bowl of razor blades. With coiled prose and whetted instinct, Khaw’s stories put a finger on the dark pulse of being human.”
Rich Larson, author…
My debut novel,The Sleepless, is a sci-fi noir story born out of my passion for both speculative fiction and crime fiction. I grew up devouring Marvel comics and Ray Bradbury and Agatha Christie, and those were some of my strongest influences when I finally decided to write my own stories. As a queer immigrant and a person of color, I was also influenced by the lives of people who live these identities, as much as I was influenced by my career as a lawyer in the immigration, criminal, and civil rights fields.
Noir can sometimes be hard to identify, but most readers are familiar with the tropes: the put-upon private investigator, the case that he can’t walk away from, the hunt for leads, the twists and double-crosses. With Hammers on Bone, we get all the aesthetics of a hardboiled detective story but also: Lovecraftian monsters. Noir stories lay bare individual and collective moral failings, and in adding eldritch horrors, the book further externalizes those ills, showing how monstrous humans can be.
Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw is a novella that melds the hardboiled detective novel with Lovecraftian monsters. Our private dick, John Persons, is hired by a ten-year-old kid to off his abusive stepfather. From this classic noir setup, to the character voice and dialect, to the shady characters, to the twists and reversals, this book really keys into the strengths of the genre, and amplifies them even further with…
Cassandra Khaw bursts onto the scene with Hammers on Bone, a hard-boiled horror show that Charles Stross calls "possibly the most promising horror debut of 2016." A finalist for the British Fantasy award and the Locus Award for Best Novella!
John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He’s been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid’s stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.
He’s also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he’s hunted gods and…
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’ve always been attracted to strange things. When I was a kid, I loved to picnic in graveyards and make up stories about the people buried there. I think I gravitate toward the strange because it’s an escape from the gray every day. The best horror writing fills readers with wonder, opens the door to that magical question, ‘what if?’ But being truly engaged depends on caring about what happens to the characters in a book. That’s why I chose Horror with A Heart as my theme. I like horror with well-developed characters, people that matter to me. People who I could imagine as my friends.
I was already writing stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft but I wasn’t sure I had a place in the genre. Then Victor LaValle took one of Lovecraft’s most racist works, The Horror At Red Hook, and produced an alternate version.
Black Tomtouches on the events of Lovecraft’s original story but tells the tale from the point of view of a black musician named Tommy Tester. LaValle’s reimagining of Lovecraft is a revelation.
He showed me that I didn’t have to be like Lovecraft to write in his world. And LaValle perfectly captures the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a world that Lovecraft’s racism prevented him from seeing, even though he lived in New York City at the time.
People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.
Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic…
I wouldn't call myself a cosmic horror expert, but I've read quite a few of the expected authors--Dunsany, Machen, Lovecraft, Blackwood, Howard, etc--and I've written novels and short fiction in the genre and have been asked to panel and talk about it for years at professional events. How can a fictional narrative contain villains so powerful that human beings have no way to understand, let alone resist them? I like exploring that impossibility in my own writing, and I feel compelled to subvert its historical legacy of colonialism and racism where I can. It is not a genre that needs reclaiming but rewriting, and it is rife with possibilities.
This book of poems is a truly unexpected combination of current pop culture, social commentary, and cosmic horror--and a hugely enjoyable read. It deals with the themes of sacrifice, thoughtless loyalty, collusion, survival, colonialism, and the very idea of the monstrous. How do we know when the forces around us are asking too much of us? How can we trust what we will get in return? How do our personal histories inform how we will respond to the void when it comes knocking? A lively, thoughtful read.
#1 New Release in Caribbean & Latin American Poetry Cthulhu meets hip-hop in this book of horror poems that flips the eldritch genre upside down. Lovecraftian-inspired nightmares are reversed as O'Brien asks readers to see Blackness as radically significant. Can You Sign My Tentacle? explores the monsters we know and the ones that hide behind racism, sexism, and violence, resulting in poems that are both comic and cosmic.
I’m a horror and speculative fiction author who reads everything but who is tired of strict genre definitions and loves introducing people to work they might not have considered—especially the spooky stuff, and especially when I’m asked about horror recommendations for non-horror lovers. I think dark fiction gives us a way to process painful emotions in a safe space; it offers catharsis for being alive in a difficult world; it can definitely be a lot of fun while also giving you a way to empathize with people outside your own direct experience. I’ve tried to hit on all of that in this list!
I am one of those people who were really into Lovecraft until they discovered he was a huge racist and homophobe, among other things; the contemporary reclamation of Lovecraft’s iconic mythology is delicious, and this book is a wonderfully eerie, weird entry into the new canon.
This book checks a lot of my personal boxes, like secretive government experiments, shady, half-revealed lore, and lyrical writing. I’m a huge fan of stories where you know just enough about what’s going on to keep up, and the characters are so sympathetic that you’ll follow the mystery for their sake alone.
Two decades ago the U.S. government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to a desert prison, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god, Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, emerging without a past or a future.
Now it's 1949, and the government that stole Aphra's life needs her help. FBI Agent Ron Spector believes that Communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets from Miskatonic University, secrets that could turn the Cold War hot in an instant and hasten the end of the human race.
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…
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
You don’t have to travel far for very bad things to happen to you, as the main characters in this book discover when they ignore local warnings about fishing in a nearby creek. I consider this a masterwork in any genre, and I’m actually re-reading it right now, even though it kinda broke me the first time.
It’s a Lovecraftian, cosmic horror story that also creates a kind of allegory for grief. Having lost my parents in my late twenties, it felt like a fantastical yet unnervingly accurate reflection of the experience.
In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's…
I’m primarily a science fiction writer and reader, but mystery is my first literary love, and I was the editor-in-chief of the mystery magazine, Plan B. So, I doubly love it when a mystery story takes place in a science fictional world. In my own work, certain themes keep showing up even when I don’t intend them to because I love them as much as I love a juicy mystery: using technology to change our bodies and environments, the struggle that wealth and corporate greed create, how we can learn to understand someone who is radically different from ourselves. These five books hit all those marks for me.
I don’t care about baseball at all, but I love stories with cybernetic implants, reluctant detectives, and corporate machinations and this book has all of those… plus cyborg baseball. I loved Kobo, the down-on-his-luck baseball scout barely scraping by on his implant maintenance fees, and the mystery he’s sucked into when his childhood best friend (and major league baseball star) dies in the middle of a game. This is the best kind of onion mystery, with layers upon layers of twists and turns, and it’s full of the brain-busting science fictional ideas I love—biological and technological augmentation and their consequences.
Hong Kong society is often regarded as politically apathetic. Yet throughout its history, Hong Kong experienced periodic waves of social movement activity. In part, the perception of an apathetic populace stems from the colonial government's laissez-faire policies, the society's concentration on economic development, the maintenance of traditional Chinese culture, and a consensus that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese sovereignty. Since Hong Kong was a colony, instead of evolving into a democratic government, Great Britain instituted a system of elite consultation and absorption of the masses' political problems through indirect participation. Butenhoff addresses the question of why social movements emerged…
I’m primarily a science fiction writer and reader, but mystery is my first literary love, and I was the editor-in-chief of the mystery magazine, Plan B. So, I doubly love it when a mystery story takes place in a science fictional world. In my own work, certain themes keep showing up even when I don’t intend them to because I love them as much as I love a juicy mystery: using technology to change our bodies and environments, the struggle that wealth and corporate greed create, how we can learn to understand someone who is radically different from ourselves. These five books hit all those marks for me.
I was hooked from the start by the notion that when the Earth has been ravaged by climate change, the rich descend under the sea to lush habitats, complete with staff. The tension between those who pay to live in luxury and those who make their lives luxurious is at the heart of this contemporary cyberpunk murder mystery—and there’s a sapient octopus stripper to boot! I loved the snarky main character—Marrow Nightingale, private eye—and her investigation of her murdered sibling Rocket sets the stage for a fast-paced, fun, and flirty story. I inhaled this book in an afternoon. The characters are great, the atmosphere is fantastic, and the mystery goes to all kinds of science-fictional places.
Marrow Nightingale is a professional pain in the ass. As Electric Blue Moon's only licensed private investigator, she's the one who snoops the closets of the elite who think the laws don't apply to them. But when the son of a wealthy family turns up dead, it's Marrow's closet that everyone is suddenly interested in. That dead playboy in the foyer? It's her adoptive sibling, Rocket Nightingale.
Now, Marrow's dodging gossip columnists who smell blood in the water, renegade corporate IP with minds of their own, and badge-wearing bone-breakers who would love nothing more than to ship her back to…
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 primarily a science fiction writer and reader, but mystery is my first literary love, and I was the editor-in-chief of the mystery magazine, Plan B. So, I doubly love it when a mystery story takes place in a science fictional world. In my own work, certain themes keep showing up even when I don’t intend them to because I love them as much as I love a juicy mystery: using technology to change our bodies and environments, the struggle that wealth and corporate greed create, how we can learn to understand someone who is radically different from ourselves. These five books hit all those marks for me.
This book treads ground common to books I love to read and write—vivid characters living in a world that is bisected by wealth—in a lushly atmospheric, but emotionally brutal, short read. Jewel is not a detective by trade—she is a courtesan working in one of the high-end houses. When her friend Winfield is murdered by a rich and powerful client, but mysteriously comes back to life—only different—Jewel needs answers. I loved the complex relationships between the characters and their society, and especially loved how the feeling of the world is prioritized, making the setting and its inhabitants richer.
In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel's world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.
