55 Books Like Yragaël

I’ve read Crawlspace a number of times, and the art never fails to give me a brain buzz. It’s a visual drug that always delivers. The story follows suburban teens who find they can leave their black-and-white world and enter an alternate reality through the door of a dryer. That reality is one of intricate, geometric patterns whose lines are filled with vibrating rainbow colors.

This hypnotically beautiful world has a quality at once entrancing and sinister as the teens encounter the strange creatures who inhabit it and begin to take on its colorful patterns themselves.

I love the look of late-1960s psychedelic art, which I associate with Peter Max and the animated movie Yellow Submarine. The style is one of simple linework filled with intense colors, to which are added decorative elements and optical effects.

A French cartoonist, Caza, brings this style to Kris Kool, his 1970 erotic science-fiction graphic novel. Like a male version of Barbarella, space traveler Kris Kool experiences bizarre and surreal adventures, many of them sexual. The plot is well constructed and carried me along with its surprising turns. There is no depiction of drug use, but the fantasies and imagery make reading it as trippy an experience as one can find between the covers of a book.

I treasure this book for the artwork. The rather simple story tells of Albert Hofmann’s creation of LSD 25 on April 19, 1943, in a Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. That day is known as Bicycle Day because after accidentally ingesting the chemical, Hofmann had a powerful psychedelic experience as he rode his bicycle home.

This trip is vividly depicted in a lengthy series of full- and double-page spreads, which become increasingly bizarre and hallucinatory as they go along. Blomerth’s cartoony but precise style is warm and whimsical, and he adds striking graphic effects to it. The art is presented to its best advantage on matte ivory stock that sets off the intense colors, which include Day-Glo colors. 

I was fascinated and appalled to learn of the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra, a long-running program in which the CIA dosed unwitting victims with LSD to study its effects and potential as a mind-control weapon. The subject has been covered in other books, but this graphic novel, illustrated by Stewart Kenneth Moore, brings this alarming tale to life visually.

His garish colors and mind-warping graphics depict the hallucinatory experiences in a sometimes appealing but more often terrifying manner. Moore’s art also gives the straight narrative elements of the story a warped, dreamy quality, imbuing even mundane reality with the disturbing quality of an acid flashback.

Two words. Bisexual representation. The queer community may tend to forget about us bisexuals out here, but Katee Robert certainly did not.

It’s not very often that you see books that focus on an MMF relationship in which the woman is the most recent addition. The loving relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is incredible to begin with. However, when you add the extra dimension of Helen of Troy, the relationship grows and changes into something much more.

Dealing with serious relationship dynamic conflicts, like jealousy, Wicked Beauty shows us that sometimes working through our learned emotional reactions can create something truly beautiful.

Dianna and Liam, two immortals, struggle to free themselves from their past and the expectations of their future. But when they join forces, they realise their future might be the same.

This book was amazingly written with the perfect balance of a great story and complex, morally grey characters. I especially love how Dianna does bad things to protect the one she loves and has an excuse for everything.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Wilson’s debut work, is another wonder among wonders.

It feels like an epic fantasy, but instead of following more Viking-blonde heroes with their magical swords, we’re following hired mercenaries to escort a caravan through dangerous lands.

And instead of the usual fantasy worlds descended from the Western European Middle Ages, we’re in one influenced by re-colonial Africa.

There are magical jungles and magical tigers, and violence and death, and an LGBT love story between smart, dedicated men.

It’s a character study worthy of a literary novel, but the love of words, and the masterful inclusion of various dialects, particularly a kind of medieval hip-hop slang, makes this a truly fascinating read.

I love how weird and dark this book is. Carolyn and her siblings were raised by their abusive, adopted father, who trained them each in a single portfolio of magic.

When their father goes missing, Carolyn and her allies explore the truth of his disappearance. I was with Carolyn every step of the way of her journey to claw back her identity from her abusive past. And I can’t stop thinking about the explosive ending, even years after I first read the book.

I’m drawn to fantasy stories set in modern-day analogues because I’m fascinated to see the ways that having magic and monsters as a fact of life would shape a world from the ground up. I’m particularly interested in the impact on more mundane matters like legal contracts and labor disputes. Perhaps no one dives into this topic with as much gusto as Max Gladstone. In Three Parts Dead, we meet necromantic lawyers and witness the legal and practical repercussions of a god’s death. In lesser hands, this could easily slump into tedious details, or the intricacies might be forgotten in an attempt to ramp up the action. But Gladstone finds the perfect balance, keeping abstract concepts engaging while presenting action scenes that carry true consequences. The city of Alt Coulumb is one of my favorite fantasy settings, and the entire Craft Sequence is well-worth reading.

The prose in this book felt like a wolf bite. Stories of destiny and power are juicy, and this has it in abundance. A young woman, Red, sacrifices herself for the good of all to the Wolf of the Wood. The woods are magickal, with haunted trees and shadows, creating an intense atmosphere that held me throughout. So moody! Murderous realms, too, which I sunk into easily.

Not quite like "Little Red Riding Hood," but the suspense certainly had me turning the pages. I admired how the author weaved in the emotional elements among the empowerment and disempowerment themes. The myth and folklore elements brought me back to my childhood nostalgia of curling up in bed, secretly turning the pages without regard for bedtime.