Books like When I Arrived at the Castle

This book is unhinged in the best way. I love Gideon’s unique voice. Around her is a deadly-serious necromancer murder mystery with interplanetary stakes, and she cares more about cracking dirty jokes and finally eating some warm food. Her relationship with her arch-nemesis/only friend Harrow leaps off the page.

I love the scene where they get into a pool so Harrow can finally confess to Gideon her darkest secret—so hot and so disturbing all at the same time. While this book isn’t technically a romance and the genre feels more like a horror fantasy set in space, I couldn’t resist putting it on the list. As Gideon says to Harrow, “One flesh, one end, bitch.”

The Merry Spinster falls into my big bucket of fairytale retelling faves, but it hardly sticks to tradition: rather than simply following old plots, Lavery draws on the tone and style of classic fairy tales to create a gender-warped world where daughters use he/him pronouns and mermaids are sort of, but distinctly not, girls. Even better, the playful attitude towards gender now seems to foreshadow Lavery’s own coming out and transition, both occurring after he published this book—something that fills me with a special kind of trans-author love. Reading this for the first time, I had the sensation of slipping pleasantly into an utter dreamworld of gender/sexuality beauty, like a warm bath: I recommend you fall in, too.

As a friend sputtered to me over a voice call: “I don’t understand. It’s free to read online; where is everybody?!” 

I agree wholeheartedly. O Human Star is that rare breed: a webcomic taken up over a decade ago, thoroughly plotted from the start, executed with masterful grace and gravitas by an author who loved it enough to do it justice. While executing this story of gay and trans self-understanding, Delliquanti themself realized they were trans, so the pronouns in my (signed!!) copies are different based on when they came out. Finding even a well-written cis gay man was hard in 2012, let alone such a deeply loving story about the entire LGBT community—and all that is to say nothing of the robots. Trans robots FTW!

This final book is the catalyst for my own: the book that, resting in my hands at the library, made me realize that I could just do this. If I loved reading short stories so much, if I so deeply enjoyed reading about gay girls with horses and game show contestants going to Mars, why couldn’t someone love my own body of work, transsexually languishing in my Google Drive? There can never be enough praise for The Dark, which delivers tonally consistent and individually unique stories that glue me to my seat every time. A big thank you to Deborah Willis, and to whoever put her book on hold that day I was volunteering at the library: I loved her work, and it inspired me to put mine out there. 

This book is an obvious choice perhaps, but one that can't be omitted. The tragicomic frustration of the surveyor who can't complete the job he's been sent to do no matter how hard he tries is massively influential for a number of very good reasons. Also, the way that the castle is both a literal place and a potent metaphor is crucial—as ever in Kafka, it's never just a metaphor, just as it's never just a dream, but rather a dream or a metaphor that also develops out of and into a very concrete situation. This is crucial writing advice for anyone interested in working with dreamlike or surreal elements.

Mysterious victorian missionaries with dark secrets in the land of the fae. I truly do not know how to sell this book any better. I tend to recommend gothic literature for historical fiction newbies, since the emotional stakes are always so high and the plots often bend close to horror or fantasy, and this one is no different. The worldbuilding is spectacular, and it plays on the tropes of classic gothic novels in a way that’s knowing, clever, and never dry or stilted. No wonder Ng won the Hugo for best new author when she released this book—it deserves it.

“When K looked at the castle he sometimes thought he saw someone sitting quietly there, looking into space, (…) as if he were alone and no one was observing him…” 

It seems that castles are watching us, with some kind of emotional detachment. This impression is described in this famous Kafka novel featuring a traveler stranded in a remote Mitteleuropa village who despite his tenacity fails to reach the castle that overlooks the place. Apart from the usual kafkaesque absurdity, this unfinished novel brings to mind the feeling of oddness that someone often goes through when approaching a castle, facing its uncanny presence. Even more, it conveys the strange fact that the path that leads to them, probably because of their unusual scale, seems always endless.

This book describes and shows what life was like in a 14th-century castle. If you have ever wondered how hundreds of people lived and worked in a castle then this is the book. The mind-boggling detail in the illustrations keeps me poring over them for ages. Each page reveals a cut-away of the castle interior from turrets to dungeons! All the books in this series are incredible in their detail and knowledge.

A pregnant noblewoman fleeing a less than happy happily-ever-after finds her way to Castle Waiting, an overgrown castle that’s become a haven for forgotten figures from fairy tales, folklore, and myth. Much of this unbelievably absorbing comic is spent simply exploring the castle and following the residents in their day-to-day lives. And what better way is there to spend one’s time? Linda Medley’s immersive artwork, with its flavor of old-fashioned woodcuts and classical book illustrations, makes Castle Waiting look like the perfect place to rest between adventures, or maybe stay and become one of the long-term residents.

I picked this up as an adult thinking it was straight historical fiction. After all, we meet the imprisoned Princess Elizabeth of England in the first chapter. However, when the main character is relocated to a remote castle and discovers the underground world of the fairy folk, the story takes a delightful turn into the realm of myth and legend. It pays homage to the Scottish myth of Tam Lin, the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, and several Arthurian legends, while remaining firmly grounded in Elizabethan England. The added twist of the fairy realm was so deftly accomplished that I finished the book thinking that perhaps, if I lived in Elizabethan England, I too might have stumbled upon the land of the Fairy Folk.