The best books of 2024

This list is part of the best books of 2024.

Join 737 readers and share your 3 favorite reads of the year.

My favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Supernatural Entertainments

Michael E. Heyes ❤️ loved this book because...

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Teach 🥈 Thoughts
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Simone Natale,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Supernatural Entertainments as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism's rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.

Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders…


Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

My 2nd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of Hostage to the Devil

Michael E. Heyes ❤️ loved this book because...

though the book is not in the least bit an accurate recounting of anything, the book and its author are formative for contemporary understandings of the demonic.

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Emotions 🥈 Writing
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐇 I couldn't put it down

By Malachi Martin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Hostage to the Devil as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One On One With Satan

A chilling and highly convincing account of possession and exorcism in modern America, hailed by NBC Radio as "one of the most stirring books on the contemporary scene."


My 3rd favorite read in 2024

Book cover of War Is All Hell

Michael E. Heyes ❤️ loved this book because...

  • Loved Most

    🥇 Teach 🥈 Outlook
  • Writing style

    ❤️ Loved it
  • Pace

    🐕 Good, steady pace

By Edward J. Blum, John H. Matsui,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked War Is All Hell as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

During his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln expressed hope that the "better angels of our nature" would prevail as war loomed. He was wrong. The better angels did not, but for many Americans, the evil ones did. War Is All Hell peers into the world of devils, demons, Satan, and hell during the era of the American Civil War. It charts how African Americans and abolitionists compared slavery to hell, how Unionists rendered Confederate secession illegal by linking it to Satan, and how many Civil War soldiers came to understand themselves as living in hellish circumstances.
War Is All Hell…


Don‘t forget about my book 😀

Demons in the USA

By Michael E. Heyes,

Book cover of Demons in the USA

What is my book about?

Demons in the USA argues that the discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century continues to exert a powerful hold over the American spiritual imagination.

The book begins by tracing the conservative Christian encounter with Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and the mode of thinking about the demonic which developed. As Spiritualism’s core principles reappeared in the New Age, Christian interlocutors once more drew on this "anti-Spiritualist" paradigm to condemn the movement. This condemnation is absorbed by and amplified through the film The Exorcist. The author considers how the success of the film disseminates the anti-Spiritualist paradigm in surprising ways, entangling it with entertainment, science, and politics such that it influences psychology, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the contemporary QAnon movement. This entanglement points to the broader argument of the work: While we may wish to think of a film as "entertainment" (and thus, having no bearing on "reality") or demonic material as "religious" (and thus exempt from categories like "politics" or "science"), the truth is that categories are not so easily separated. The author contends that the need to enforce the boundaries of such categories (and the failure to do so) is a hallmark of the intellectual construct of modernity, and that those who believe in demons in the contemporary United States are surprisingly modern in their views. The book grounds the importance of media to the twentieth-and twenty-first- century religious experience, arguing that the United States of today would not be possible without The Exorcist and its products.

Demons in the USA will be of particular interest to scholars dealing with religion in America, those with a focus on religion and film, or those involved with contemporary demonology.

My book recommendation list