Books like This Thing of Darkness — 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.

Brother Wolf represents one of the rarest of rare combinations: great horror, great humor, and a coherent Catholic metaphysics that underlies the fantasy. The daughter of a dull, disillusioned academic finds adventure in the company of a mysterious young woman who reads minds, a Breton nun, a Dominican vampire slayer, and an English gentleman-warrior who are in hot pursuit of a feral Franciscan werewolf. Murderous gypsies and demon goddesses dog their heels. With a cast of characters like that, how could any horror-lover resist? Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is truly one-of-a-kind, showcasing an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, mythology, and Catholic doctrine alongside her inimitable prose and rollicking sense of fun. You can’t go wrong with her books.

Part horror novel, part hard-boiled detective story, part Hollywood summer blockbuster, Whisper Music is an eclectic grab bag of a story that probably shouldn’t work, but it does. J.B. Toner has an unmatched ability to integrate soaring, lyrical prose with low-brow cop-speak in a book where a vampire does battle against the Virgin Mary. With both the blood of the Virgin and the blood of Satan in her veins, Danyaela Morrigan finds herself uniquely positioned to play both sides of a great spiritual battle, while at the same time being torn between them. Hold on to your hats. You’re in for a treat.

Tim Powers is an acknowledged modern master of the preternatural, but many readers probably don’t know he’s also a practicing Catholic. In Hide Me Among the Graves, his passion for the Romantic poets brings poor Christina Rossetti, her family, and others both historical and fictional under the sway of her vampire-uncle John Polidori, author of The Vampyre. Powers’s wild imagination casts the Thames River as Purgatory, songbirds as soul-catchers, and vampires as the ancient Biblical Nephilim. It’s a kitchen sink approach to fantasy that will keep readers guessing until the end.

Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning Eleanor Perry put her training as a psychiatric social worker to extraordinary use writing now-classic films including the hypnotic David and Lisa and The Diary of a Mad Housewife. She brought the same dramatic skills and insights to examining her own life as a writer at a time when women faced nearly impossible challenges in Hollywood. The result was this deeply felt, authentic, often autobiographical novel. My wife Loraine Despres, herself a highly regarded novelist and TV writer, gave it to me when I first confessed an interest in screenwriting. The book, now unjustly out of print but hopefully available from libraries and at a price from rare book dealers, has haunted me ever since.

Andrew Hook is a European slipstream author proficient in the literary weird. He certainly does not disappoint in his new collection of Hollywood’s living dead. Candescent Blooms rouses legends of the silver screen right there in your living room, and they are broken, unbroken, full of many secrets. And you know, you know—because history says so—that the actors and actresses are dead, yet living, right there on your page. Imbued with levity wrapped in anguish. Thimble-sized, you will not find a literary collection this superb in a long time.   

So many Hollywood novels focus primarily on the marquee names—the movie stars. This one explores the tortured romantic relationship between gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose stint as a scriptwriter was financially sustaining and artistically demoralizing, deepening his descent into alcoholism and despair over his failing marriage to Zelda. Sheilah could have been his creation, with her Gatsby-esque concealment of her background and reinvention of herself. Though this is a work of fiction, it results from meticulous research into the lives and careers of its fascinating and legendary main characters. As a writer myself, who has produced newspaper columns as well as more than a dozen novels, I fully appreciate the literary aspects of this story.

Tolkin doesn’t hit you with belly laughs so much as tickle the upper corners of your mind with his knowing take on the mores and follies of the Hollywood of the late 1980s. (Of special interest to me, as that’s the moment I arrived there to begin my own TV and film career.) The trenchant satire is exemplified by the crime at its center: studio exec Griffin Mill, badgered by threats from some anonymous screenwriter he’s mistreated, focuses his attention on a different C-list scribe and winds up strangling him to death. Get it? In a business full of writer-killing executives, Tolkin’s big-wig antihero literally kills a writer.

Biblical allegory is hard to do well. Bible stories themselves have infinite depths, but their allegories are often didactic, especially when author parallels the original story too closely. Stephanie Landem’s In a Far-Off Land is anything but didactic. Set in 1930s Hollywood, the novel is equal parts Prodigal Son retelling, romance, and murder mystery. By allowing the story to take on a life of its own, Landsem avoids the Sunday School vibe, and in the end, I understood the Prodigal Son archetypal characters better.

This book opens with an absolutely breathtaking passage, one of my favorite openings in any book ever. One imagines Niven narrating his memoir poolside, gripping a cigarette and a martini in the same fist, his pince-nez mustache dancing up and down while he describes, in sordid detail, old-school Hollywood at its most louche. If you want a book that brings alive the atmosphere of a bygone era, this is it.