100 Books Like Twilight

As someone who considers her brother her creative muse, I would describe this novel as one interested in siblings.

Between Leonie and Given, and Jojo and Kayla is an indescribable, utterly unique bond, held within and beyond both family and friendship. 

I was utterly consumed by this heartbreaking novel. From the opening scene where Pop and Jojo kill and skin a goat, to the heat in Leonie’s car and the scene of Jojo’s police cuffing, Ward delivers a pace, language, and viscerality that means you can’t look away. 

Somewhat surprisingly, I was even compelled by the book’s ghostly elements. I found they enhanced the magnitude of the characters’ burdens, especially for thirteen-year-old Jojo, who already shoulders so much.

I highly recommend this book, as a pleasure and as a duty to your fellow human beings. 

I grew up with and write horror stories, so it’s very difficult for a book to unnerve me; this is one of the only books I can think of that earns the honor. It is half an ecological text and half a horror story, with its romantic prose balanced by intense natural research to create a surreal, unnerving description of the natural world.

This book made me hyper-aware of everything from the grass outside my window to the cells that make up my body, and I love how it uses both existential horror and the real, biological horror of being a living creature to leave a lasting unease. Are you aware you’re breathing? Can you feel your tongue in your mouth? Your heart’s nonstop beating? You can, now.

This book haunted me for days after I finished reading it. I felt like someone I loved had died. Few works of art have stuck with me the way O’Connnor’s book did. Its main characters—Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery—are the epitome of outsiders. I grew up in a religious family in Kentucky, so I can understand Motes’ struggle with faith. The way that Motes and Emery are so severely separated from the rest of humanity is affecting them.

The book caused me to passionately take their side, rooting for them and their cause, sharing in their anger towards the rest of mankind. This book had such a powerful emotional impact and influence on me, leaving me with a palpable feeling of hopelessness and catharsis over several weeks—unlike I’ve experienced with any other work of art. 

I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.” This is the funniest, wittiest book I’ve read in a long time. 

Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout

As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.

This is the most beautiful book I have ever read. Seriously. Line to line, nothing beats it! I’m never not thinking of Russell’s work. One sister quests for love with the ghost of a dead canal bargeman in the Florida Everglades, while her younger, alligator-wrestling sister follows her with the Bird Man, hoping to rescue her from a tragic fate.

I thought it was hilarious that while this epic quest is going on, their third sibling is working at a trashy amusement park to financially support their family. It sounds like a lot jammed together, but Russell doesn’t make a single misstep. I was wondering the whole time what was real and what was fantasy, and the truth is one of the most devastating reveals in all of fiction.  

Truman Capote’s 1948 debut novel holds a special place with me because it was my introduction to Southern Gothic when I was thirteen. A coming-of-age tale, it takes place at Scully’s Landing, a decaying mansion in Mississippi.

Rich with place and atmosphere, the book follows lonesome thirteen-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, who travels to live with his father, an emotionally unavailable presence who abandoned the boy at birth. Replete with a cast of the peculiar and grotesque, this book holds firm with literary merit and thematical relevance. 

This 2002 novel follows young Harriet Cleve Dufresnes in 1970s Mississippi during the aftermath of the death of her nine-year-old brother, who was killed by hanging in the shadow of unexplained circumstances. I am particularly enamored by the novel’s focus on the customs and dynamics of Harriet’s extended Southern family.

Tartt best describes in her own words why I love this novel: It is “a frightening, scary book about children coming into contact with the world of adults frighteningly.”  

In 2018, Danny Jefferson was selected “Funeral Director of the Year” by his colleagues. That honor was more than just the culmination of many years of hard work. It was especially gratifying for Jefferson, whose success was hard-won. Hearing impaired since birth, he not only became licensed as a funeral director, but also realized his dream of owning a funeral home. In his book, Jefferson writes candidly about the unique challenges he faced, and overcame, along the way in both his personal and professional life. He hopes that by sharing his story, it will inspire others not to let their own challenges, whatever they are, hold them back from achieving their goals. His friend, and co-author Raymond Reid, a noted artist, helped choose the book's title and also created the cover.

As I said before, I love history, and Puckle’s book gives the reader a great look into the why of our funeral customs. As in: why do we send funeral flowers? (To which Puckle offers the glib answer, “the half sovereign he paid for it save him from the mental exercise of composing a suitable letter of condolence” before offering a serious explanation). Sure, the book was published almost a century ago, but that has no bearing on the contents. It’s an evergreen book and a highly recommended read for serious funereal scholars or those considering a career in funeral service.