Books like This Thing Between Us

I’ve always loved mysteries and the detectives that solved them. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot were heroes to me, but as I grew older and the world grew more complex, I started reading novels where it was not so easy to separate the good guys from the bad. The world was not black and white anymore, and justice was not so simple. Characters who had to work around the law or took matters into their own hands to earn justice became my new heroes. Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade, while not saints themselves, did whatever they had to in order to serve justice, and I admired them for it.

In middle school, I wrote my first novel called Children of the House. It pulled inspiration from the likes of Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and Leo Tolstoy. I was attempting to explore family dynamics while also describing bloody stains on the hallway carpet that would never quite go away. When I read, I would travel from literary fiction to horror with ease until I began to realize the distinction was unimportant. Horror reflects the struggles of the every day in a heightened fashion. Books of this genre often have more freedom to explore the deepest issues that plague us and to do so in a way that will reach a wider audience.

As a writer who grew up on a steady diet of horror—from Dean Koontz to Peter Straub to Stephen King—I never knew what amazing diversity there actually was in the genre, until I became a horror writer myself! In the last few years, I’ve met an incredible range of talented writers whose books are sometimes overshadowed on the horror shelves by a certain King, and I think it’s high time we all knew more about these hardworking, creative, and gifted authors. So if you read horror and are hungry for new books by writers whose work you may not know, here are five incredible voices to whisper tales of terror in your ear.

I've often lived around the fringes of nature, from late-night cross-country road trips through forested backwoods, to living off-grid in New Mexico's high desert. As much as I've lived in the shadow of mountains and extreme environments, I've never dared to venture up into them – and I'm endlessly fascinated by the people who do. What is it that drives people toward extreme sports and outdoor challenges, even understanding the risks? Why do people risk life and limb to venture into places where man isn't meant to be? It's a question I don't think I'll ever stop finding fascinating. 

I have been writing for several years now, but my undergraduate degree is in geochemistry and I have always had a keen interest in science. For me, writing and science go hand-in-hand because both represent an attempt to describe our world in different ways. Throughout my time studying science and spending time with other scientists, I became fascinated with the culture of academia and the competition that pushes people to compromise in the name of progress. We know far less than we don’t know about the universe, and speculative fiction makes a creative effort to fill in this gaping lack of knowledge while presenting us with important thought experiments. 

Besides my studies of history and philosophy and my work as a theatre writer, I have been active in the global justice movement for a long time, opposing neoliberal assaults on social rights and the biosphere. However, I felt that neoliberalism was just the most recent phase of a much older system, which is, by its very structure, incompatible with the survival of humanity, as it is based on eternal growth and accumulation – an impossibility on a finite planet. So I set out to dig deeper and explore the fundamental institutions and structures of the Megamachine that we must overcome in order to allow for a decent human life in the future. We need a shift from an economy based on private profit to an economy for the common good, a shift from the paradigm of control, domination, and exploitation of nature to new forms of cooperation with complex living systems.

I’m a philosopher, writer, and illustrator from Wales, UK. I grew up on ’70s sci-fi—Star Wars (the original trilogy!), Battlestar Galactica (the original series!), The Black Hole (Remember that?! No? Oh well…). Space travel, flying cars, sassy computers you could banter with, cute robots who would be your best friend—it was a time when the future seemed just around the corner. But now, as these things finally start to arrive, I feel I’ve been mis-sold. Data theft? Mass surveillance? Killer drones? Election manipulation? Social media bot farms? This isn’t the future I signed up for! Or maybe I should have read the terms and conditions…

I’m an avid reader of fiction and kind of a nerd, too, so I love books with science in them. I’m a scientist myself, now retired from a career in environmental and engineering geology. I am fascinated by the Earth and the geologic processes that shape it, from the seemingly mundane (like erosion) to the remarkable (like earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions). As a writer, I try to translate that wonder for non-scientist readers, all wrapped up in a compelling story. Each book on this list sure does that, weaving science into the fabric of a gripping narrative. I hope you’ll love them as much as I do.

Leadership is the key ingredient that moves the needle. Each of us has the right—and duty—to be a leader of our life and family, organization and society, and to inspire others for something bigger than ourselves, something that has not been done before. But why am I so passionate about leadership? Why is it the focus of my books, my teaching, my company? It all started in my youth: The defining moment came after my sister’s death to a heroin overdose. I stood at my sister’s grave and decided I would never be a victim of circumstances—I would pursue self-determination. Leadership is the exact opposite of victimhood. 

As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.