Why am I passionate about this?

I’m not a genre purist. I adore combining classic forms in new and exciting ways to make stories that have never been told before. The novels on this list are like that. They refuse to obey genre rules. Detective fiction suggests our questions have answers. The truth is rational and we can discover it. The supernatural elements of occult fiction say otherwise. Human consciousness cannot comprehend the nature of reality. Our investigations fail to understand our lives—the best we can do is explain them away. When these perspectives collide, it can result in interesting ways to see the world, familiar but fresh, as we have never known it before. 


I wrote

Book cover of The Crow's Head: The Chemical Marriage

What is my book about?

An orphan chases destiny. An heiress flees her fate. Will an occult mystery destroy the world? Or can love redeem…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Land of Dreams

Adrian Stumpp Why did I love this book?

Superficially, The Minnesota Trilogy is a murder mystery. When two Norwegian tourists are slaughtered in a national forest, it seems like an open and shut case. All the evidence points in one direction, but park ranger Lance Hansen is not convinced. He suspects his own brother. Hansen’s amateur investigation accidentally uncovers a second mystery involving his ancestor and the death (murder?) of a nineteenth-century Ojibwe medicine man. Sundstøl’s depiction of contemporary rural Minnesota is as full of magic, menace, and intrigue as the best fantasy world-building. The American Midwest becomes a land of prophetic dreams and roaming ghosts. The clash of cultures is less political than mythic, and the stakes are spiritual. History is still happening. Family is deeper than blood. These books open my imagination and tear my heart in half.

By Vidar Sundstøl, Tiina Nunnally (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Land of Dreams as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel and named by Dagbladet as one of the top twenty-five Norwegian crime novels of all time, The Land of Dreams is the chilling first installment in Vidar Sundstol's critically acclaimed Minnesota Trilogy, set on the rugged north shore of Lake Superior and in the region's small towns and deep forests.

The grandson of Norwegian immigrants, Lance Hansen is a U.S. Forest Service officer and has a nearly all-consuming passion for local genealogy and history. But his quiet routines are shattered one morning when he comes upon a Norwegian tourist brutally…


Book cover of Experimental Film

Adrian Stumpp Why did I love this book?

Lois Cairns, unemployed film historian, discovers a cache of haunted movies on silver-nitrate film stock. She might’ve discovered Canada’s first female filmmaker, a woman who disappeared under mysterious circumstances nearly a century earlier. This is a novel about obsession, history, art, love, and things that go bump in the night. Files utilizes tropes from weird horror tales, Victorian ghost stories, Slavic folklore, and experimental film theory, and includes an excellent depiction of the agonies and ecstasies of raising an autistic child. She ties all of this together without becoming pretentious or pedantic. Quite the opposite—Experimental Film is intelligent and hip, jaded and compassionate, laced with ever-present crawling dread. I read it curled up in a big chair with a glass of scotch and an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I recommend you do the same.

By Gemma Files,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Experimental Film as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The award-winning author of the Hexslinger Series "explores the world of film and horror in a way that will leave you reeling" (Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy).

Former film teacher Lois Cairns is struggling to raise her autistic son while freelancing as a critic when, at a screening, she happens upon a sampled piece of silver nitrate silent footage. She is able to connect it to the early work of Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, the spiritualist and collector of fairy tales who mysteriously disappeared from a train compartment in 1918.

Hoping to make her own mark on…


Book cover of Tropic of Night

Adrian Stumpp Why did I love this book?

I love the Jimmy Paz novels. I wish there were more of them. Gruber’s are the most conventional crime plots on my list—tightly-crafted, intricate, and intelligent. His detective is the archetypal hero: smart, resourceful, big-hearted, brave. But in this world, science and rational deduction are insufficient to solve the crime because reality is not just unknown. It is unknowable. This is the cardinal sin of the detective genre. Even worse, Gruber completely gets away with it. With forays into Siberian Shamanism and Santeria, Tropic of Night is as much an investigation of consciousness and perception as it is the hunt for a murderous warlock. When the orishas finally arrive for the climax, my hands trembled. I got some small inkling of what it means for the fear of god to be the beginning of wisdom.

By Michael Gruber,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Jane Doe had been a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she is nothing, a shadow. After faking her own suicide, she is living under an assumed identity in Miami, with a traumatised little girl to protect. Everyone thinks Jane is dead - or so she hopes.

Then the killings start: a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies the entire city. The investigating detective, Jimmy Paz, locates the witnesses to these events but they can recall almost nothing, as though their memories have been erased. As if a spell has been cast on them...

A bizarre string of clues…


Book cover of The Secret History

Adrian Stumpp Why did I love this book?

A murder cover-up in the Classics department of an elite liberal arts college. Tartt reveals the murderer on the first page. The Secret History is riveting crime fiction because it understands the most compelling element isn’t “whodunnit”, but “why?” What follows is Greek tragedy, at once immersive and compulsively readable. I wish it would never end because it’s not the kind of novel you read to find out what happens. You read it because you want to live in its world forever. For the way it comes to aesthetics with awe and terror. The supernatural crashes in only briefly, in the form of a pagan god come to teach us beauty isn’t about pretty things or pleasant feelings. It’s not sexy. Beauty disturbs and threatens. It doesn’t offer amusements. It compels us to worship.   

By Donna Tartt,

Why should I read it?

18 authors picked The Secret History as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE BESTSELLER THAT DEFINED AN AGE

'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries.…


Book cover of Foucault's Pendulum

Adrian Stumpp Why did I love this book?

All of Eco’s novels defy easy description, this one most of all. It is a post-modern dystopia masquerading as supernatural suspense. A conspiracy thriller that feels more like an epic quest fantasy. Cosmic horror in which the greatest monster of all is the human imagination. It starts with an occult conspiracy designed by artificial intelligence. Casaubon knows it’s fiction, but that doesn’t stop the conspirators from hunting him. The Knights Templar, Comte de Sainte-Germaine, ritual spirit possession, the alchemical homunculus, witches, spiritualist mediums, and the King of the World, all make appearances. Eco is a wizard disguised as a troubadour pretending to be a scholar, and Foucault’s Pendulum is his masterpiece. He will show you how he does the trick, but the illusion he casts is so complete, you will believe in it anyway. 

By Umberto Eco,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Foucault's Pendulum as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of The Crow's Head: The Chemical Marriage

What is my book about?

An orphan chases destiny. An heiress flees her fate. Will an occult mystery destroy the world? Or can love redeem the philosopher’s stone? 

Master counterfeiter Damian Lancaster has one goal: get rich and retire by his thirtieth birthday. But when a routine drop goes wrong, Damian is rescued from gangsters by Nathalie Jevali, the woman who has haunted his nightmares all his life. And she dreams of him as well. Plunged into a mysterious world of occultists, alchemists, magicians, and scholars, pursued by international criminals, Damian and Nathalie must learn to trust each other if they hope to solve the mystery. Their only clues are an obscure fifteenth century wedding invitation, their recurring dreams of one another, and two words: Lapis exillis. A code name for the philosopher’s stone.

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Girl of Light

By Elana Gomel,

Book cover of Girl of Light

Elana Gomel Author Of Nine Levels

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I always want to be where I am not. This was why I read sci-fi and fantasy as a child. This was why I left the country of my birth and became a professional nomad. This is why I am spellbound by mountains I will never climb and oceans I will never dive into. Imagination can take you everywhere. It took me to the academy, where speculative literature became my scholarly field, and to the publishing world, where I am now getting ready for the launch of my eighth novel. When you are at home nowhere, you are at home everywhere–including on the summits of impossible mountains.

Elana's book list on mountain climbing for non-climbers

What is my book about?

A girl of Light in a world of darkness.

In Svetlana's country, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow Light. The Voice protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading army of wolf-headed men on their borders and the infectious, ever-evolving, zombie-like Enemy that plagues them at home. When Svetlana meets Andrei, a traumatized and amnesiac soldier from another war, she embarks on a harrowing journey of adventure and self-discovery that leads her to question everything she was taught to…

Girl of Light

By Elana Gomel,

What is this book about?

A voice through Svetlana's mirror guides her beloved MotherLand from behind its' electric tower. The war with Wulfstan is not going as well as Sveta and her parents hope, but Sveta trusts the Voice. When her best friend Tattie goes missing, and Sveta saves Andrei, a soldier in summer uniform in the dead of winter, it takes Sveta through a crucible of Light, doubt, and back to the altar of true belief. Girl of Light unravels Sveta's beloved MotherLand in a war-torn adventure through monsters, missing eyes and broken mirrors.

Girl of Light is a dark fantasy with a Slavic…


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Interested in film, Africa, and Vermont?

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