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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 murder cover-up in the Classics department of an elite liberal arts college. Tartt reveals the murderer on the first page.The Secret Historyis 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.
'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.…
All of Eco’s novels defy easy description, this onemost 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 Pendulumis 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.
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
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.
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when her secret lover returns and starts asking questions she can’t answer without disaster following.
Bryce Day comes home to Alabama after he’s discharged from the First Alabama Cavalry USA with guilt weighing on his heart. His neighbors won’t cotton to his Unionist bent, and the woman of his heart likely…
One terrible lie, a desperate measure to save her past, just might destroy her future…
Award-winning author of historical fiction presents a new novel of love and lies, secrets and sensuality, and the hands of fate weaving it all together.
The American Civil War is finally over and Christmas beckons. Magnolia Merryweather, backyard horse breeder, is eager to celebrate for the first time since the war began even as she continues to grow her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after all the terror of the past four years. She’s preparing to follow in her mother’s matriarchal footsteps,…
