Books like Wolf at the Door — picked by fans

When I first read Interview with the Vampire (I was 12), I was struck by how Anne Rice made darkness beautiful. The mood, the grief, the sensuality—it all felt so rich and strange and alive.

I didn’t just want to read about Louis and Lestat; I wanted to live inside that shadowed world, however painful. The power of her vampires was alluring, even as their sadness confused me. How could being immortal be such a torment?

This book taught me that supernatural fiction could be poetic, philosophical, even transcendent. There’s a reason this novel endures.

It made me want to write stories where beauty and horror dance together in candlelight.

It’s quite possibly the scariest book ever written. Much scarier than most adult horror books. Adult horror books rely on cheap shock value to elicit cheaper scares. It provides the same (or greater) level of unease without resorting to the gratuitous.

I cannot fathom how this book managed to pull that off. But I can say that this book has more to offer adults than it can give to children. An adult can see the subtext of a story where a child disappears because a stranger offers them candy and toys, as well as the implication that such strangers may not be entirely human.

And I can’t tell you what makes it so great without spoiling the whole story. I was so engrossed in this story that it practically kidnapped me. I can’t recommend it enough.

I can’t talk Mythic Fiction without a shout-out to the man who penned the phrase. It’s beyond Urban Fantasy—mythic archetypes, mystery, magic, and toe-curling mayhem. When Celtic fiddler, Lizzie Mahone, gets stranded on a lonely country road at midnight, she has no idea how her life will change. Widdershins is a dark dip into the faerie realm that brings us face-to-face with freakish Bogans—nasty-pants faeries with sewer-mouths—faerie courts in shopping malls, and gripping psychological terror when Jilly Coppercorn gets trapped in a sinister world with her childhood abuser. Politics is rampant. At its core is the conflict between the settler fae and the Indigenous animal people. Behind it lurks love and hope. 

I read this book twice, cover-to-cover and back-to-back. First, to find out what happens to our feisty Métis hero, Joan of Arcand, and then again to savor Dimaline’s lyrical writing. When Mere (her grandmother) is murdered by a wolfish shape-shifting creature—a rogarou—we find ourselves trapped in a mythic Métis world. “A dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig.” Carrying a ground-up salt bone for protection, Joan ventures into the Empire of Wild to slay the rogarou who killed Mere and reclaim her husband. Like her hero, Dimaline is brave and fearless, pouring history, politics, and religion into her cauldron, then stirring with a branch of magic realism and psychological terror. Dimaline is my hero.

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.

This non-fiction book helped to reshape my reading of historical and mythological women and to understand representation and the voice of the ‘other’. Hall explores the power and (ab)use of language and how feminine myths and symbols are important to be unveiled and celebrated. Her Jungian perspective introduced me to archetypes, especially in mythology, and remains an inspiration to both my theatre work and my writing. 

Schurman-Kauflin is not an armchair quarterback. She is the real deal. Schurman-Kauflin carefully gathered the facts she presents in this book. A skilled criminal profiler, she interviewed female serial killers (FSKs) herself, and she presented some of the clearest evidence I have ever encountered on FSKs’ backgrounds, crimes, and motives. Her work, although published a while ago, has withstood the test of time, as her findings have been replicated. In my own career, I have used her work as a source many times over.

As we learn in another classic, Primed to Perform by Doshi and McGregor, play is the most motivating activity there is.

I read this book for the first time during a dark period early in my career – where I did not feel inspired, engagement nor fulfilled. This book provided me with the framework to find meaningful activities – those where I was both skilled yet challenged to improve. Those activities where I would lose myself – where time would stand still.

Better yet, this book, framework, and philosophy have better helped me coach others to find play, engagement, and meaning in their activities at work and in life. 

In my view, this is the finest book on consciousness ever written. William James was one of the leading minds of late 19th and early 20th century America. His book, published in 1890, was written as a textbook for his psychology class at Harvard. At that time “psychology” was understood to be the study of consciousness. Here James introduces consciousness as a “stream of thought,” an idea that later influenced many 20th century thinkers, including American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and early quantum physicist Niels Bohr. It is written with an elegance and clarity of style to match that of his brother, the writer Henry James.

James’ broad interests in consciousness, seen in this book, is consistent with the fact that he was an original co-founder of The American Society for Psychical Research, and was deeply interested in mediumship and questions regarding mind beyond the brain.

This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.