Books like Three Parts Dead — picked by fans

Full disclosure: I am a fantasy world nerd! I treasure my visits to these imaginary places, and I love imagining how the world goes on after the last page. I’ve spent hours pondering what would happen in Narnia after the invention of the internal combustion engine, or in Middle Earth when populations reach levels requiring building codes and infrastructure planning. (I told you I was a nerd!) Advancing fantasy technologies creates new problems, new solutions, and new parallels to our own time. The books on this list redefine our assumptions of what a fantasy world is, and what stories they have to share.

I’ve always loved a good crime drama/suspense thriller novel–the way they keep you glued to the pages, and you think you’ll just sit down for a quick couple of chapters before dinner, and the next thing you realize, it's 12am, and you’re on the last chapter. The depth of the character studies that you get with this genre is the other reason I enjoy it so much, there’s nothing worse than having main characters that are one dimensional and unreachable as a reader. I have always tried to create this kind of character depth and gripping narrative in my own books.

Full disclosure: I am a fantasy world nerd! I treasure my visits to these imaginary places, and I love imagining how the world goes on after the last page. I’ve spent hours pondering what would happen in Narnia after the invention of the internal combustion engine, or in Middle Earth when populations reach levels requiring building codes and infrastructure planning. (I told you I was a nerd!) Advancing fantasy technologies creates new problems, new solutions, and new parallels to our own time. The books on this list redefine our assumptions of what a fantasy world is, and what stories they have to share.

As a stage combat choreographer myself, fight sequences are always important to me: they have to be believable but exciting, they have to keep up the pace so the reader is experiencing the action at the same speed as the characters—but most importantly, they have to tell a story. Action just for the sake of action always feels empty, but great fight scenes that are both exhilarating and bound to the forward momentum of the plot and emotion will stay with me for a long time. Here’s some that I still remember long after I finished the book.

Wolves are magickal to me. Their spirituality, their raw wild power, so fierce and brave, and yet there’s a gentleness present. I find them inspiring. Reading the wolf classics like Call of the Wild and White Fang gave me a foundation. Recently, I toured a wolf conservation in New York State and fell in love with a white wolf there. She pranced like a princess and had the eyes of an angel. Afterward, I became passionate about wolves and their mystery. Reading and writing about wolves sparked me into exploring them at a deeper level. I have a wandering notion that I was a wolf in a past life.

I’m a Korean, Japanese, Scottish American writer born and raised in Hawaii who likes to create badass sci-fi characters of mixed backgrounds while blending cultures and genres as well. I also lean on tropes like sniper, detective, scientist, and genetically modified or cybernetically enhanced individuals, but I try to build symbolism or meaning into each archetype—for example, a sniper who is myopic in general, or a scientist whose life work is creating a new religion. I suppose I enjoy characters full of contradictions. When it comes to the badasses I like, it’s practically a requirement. 

I’ve always had a wild imagination and have been creative and expressive through various art forms since I was young. After a series of crazy and vivid dreams, I decided to turn them into a story. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had over 20 projects, each with a different style but all with my voice. I grew up in Cheshire and studied digital media at the University of Bradford, but moved to my paternal home in Spain in 2009, where I now teach English and moonlight as a fantasy author.

I’m a Canadian writer with a degree in Mediaeval Studies. Even as a child, I wrote stories about characters who weren’t entirely human; they were also always people lurking on the edges of things—families, cultures, places, ways of being, even people existing only on the edges of becoming themselves. Those have always been where I found my stories and as an adult I haven’t lost this fascination and the need to tell such tales. Gods, assassins, devils, demons, shapeshifters, immortal wanderers, and ordinary people caught up in their history, vast, deep worlds, and complex characters—that’s what I do. 

My name is Polly Schattel, and I’m a novelist, screenwriter, and film director. I wrote and directed the films Sinkhole, Alison, and Quiet River, and my written work includes The Occultists, Shadowdays, and the novella 8:59:29. I grew up loving fantasy—Tolkien, Moorcock, Zelazny—but phased out of it somewhat when I discovered writers like Raymond Carver, EL Doctorow, and Denis Johnson. Their books seemed more adult and more complex, not to mention the prose itself was absolutely transporting. In comparison, the fantasy I’d read often felt quite rushed and thin, with get-it-done prose. I drifted away from genre fiction a bit, but dove back to it with my first novel, the historical dark fantasy The Occultists.

I’ve loved epic fantasy ever since discovering The Hobbit and David Eddings as a teenager. I’ve also always loved a good old-fashioned slow burn and/or antagonistic romance. As I’ve grown (much) older, I’ve come to understand that the sweet spot for me is a perfect blend of world-building and a complex romance that makes sense in the context of that world.