100 books like The Historian

I can’t get enough of this supernatural classic, which is made all the more vivid by the way its story unfolds through letters, telegrams, diary entries, and newspaper clippings. It is the found-footage horror story of its era.

Like Frankenstein, it has been adapted hundreds of times, officially and unofficially, into nearly every medium, yet the original novel is unparalleled for holding the reader in its icy grip. Stoker brought his own fears to the page, and I am always surprised at how, in just a few pages, they become my fears, as well.

No one has ever captured the darkly lush and sensual atmosphere of New Orleans quite like Anne Rice.

I am in awe of this accomplishment, even as I suspect she came to it from a dark place of her own. Born in New Orleans, she moved away for a time, married, and had a daughter. This child died young, a tragedy from which Anne never fully recovered. Returning to the city afterward, she bought a home in the historic Garden District.

There, she wrote this incredible tale with its tortured protagonist, a story imbued with the tragedy of being ever an outsider, with the fascination for death and immortality she found within herself and in the city that surrounded her. 

I love books about books, so I was thrilled when Oxford's Bodleian Library and a bewitched alchemical manuscript turned up as the linchpin of this enchanting love story between a vampire and a reluctant witch.

While this story was made into a television series, do yourself a favor and read the entire trilogy. Harkness creates a compelling framework of history and heroics, love and loss, and friendship and betrayal for her underworld creatures to inhabit. And these are not your typical creatures of the night, but accomplished scholars, physicians, and scientists.

This book is one of those rare novels I wish I could read again for the first time and fall under its magical and mesmerizing spell anew.

There are two reasons I picked up this book. Firstly, that title. I’m a happy sucker for oxymorons. Secondly, and embarrassingly, more importantly, someone I really fancied recommended this book to me. And I have no regrets. 

Anyone with a more sensitive constitution is easily offended and can’t find humour in darker subject matters is kindly invited to stay away. This book hilariously tackles the moral quandary of how to deal with someone you -- and the world -- thought dead. Worse still when they are an awful roommate who you desperately want out of your house.

I love Pratchett’s work so much in general that it’s really hard to pick just one. His work was side-splittingly funny but also the very best kind of satire. He had pointed things to say about society while also making you care deeply about his characters and making you laugh until your face hurts. Do you know how hard that is?

In this book, the protagonist is a con man forced into trying to resuscitate a dying postal service. He’s petty evil, the kind of selfish who has never thought about what happens to his victims. By the end, you can’t help but root for him to triumph over the much less petty but equally hidden evil of systems and big money. But you also can’t look away from the chaos of ravening stamp collectors, hapless wizards, and a literal avalanche of dead letters.

Being someone who often ponders life's "what ifs," I was quick to snap this novel up. The plot revolves around a suicidal woman, Nora Seed, who finds herself in a mysterious library between life and death, where each book serves as a portal to a different version of her life had she made alternative choices.

Though the story shares thematic elements with traditional time travel narratives—such as the exploration of alternate realities—it’s not time travel in the strictest sense. Instead, it has a dreamlike quality that offers a clever means to explore the deeply personal and relatable concept of self-discovery.

As Nora samples all the different lives she could’ve lived, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own life choices and the paths I didn't take…and be grateful for the ones I did.

Lemony Snicket is no stranger to unfortunate events, but this standalone book contains perhaps the worst of all: the news that he, the author, has consumed poison while eating the first meal of the day. Of course, this being a Snicket story, there’s more going on. This book is a bit mystery, and a bit philosophy (or is it the other way around?). More importantly, it is also a meditation on the wonderfulness of books and reading, a part of life that remains important even if one is quite sure one has been poisoned and now has an indeterminate amount of time to discover the truth of what happened.

I must admit this book appealed to me first because it was co-written by the great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker. I also loved that a young Bram Stoker was a main character. I won’t offer any spoilers but it’s a fascinating tale about how Stoker was inspired to write his book, Dracula. If you’re looking for a horror tale, this book supplies plenty of terror and like most books that feature Dracula as a character, you will find yourself in locations all over Europe. This book offers yet another fine example of the enduring spell Count Dracula casts on our imaginations.

This Icelandic Dracula remained hidden from the world-at-large as merely a translation of the original for more than a century before Hans Corneel de Roos translated the Icelandic back into English. What he discovered is that Asmundsson took the liberty of making Dracula his own book. A Nordic spin on the vampire is reason enough to discover this interesting take on Stoker’s Dracula. Two-thirds of the book takes place at the Count’s castle in Transylvania where the notorious vampire is given much more depth and voice. Nordic lore spices this story up as well as a very seductive vampiress. The book is also much shorter than Stoker’s, which makes it an easy read.

I love that this book is set in an alternative Victorian-era Britain where vampires are citizens rubbing shoulders with humankind. At the heart of the book is the Jack the Ripper mystery with vampire, rather than human, prostitutes.

The crimes are investigated by Charles Beauregard, assisted by one of Newman’s original creations – a 400-year-old female vampire, Geneviève Dieudonné.

Along the way, the pair encounter other monsters – with humans as monstrous as the undead – as well as popular 19th-century literary figures and political events like the growth of communism/socialism.

I loved the main characters and unique mystery but also the fascinating cast Newman spiced and seasoned the story with – figures taken from the literature of Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Alexander Dumas among others.