Fans pick 87 books like Bent Heavens

Some writers make me feel like they’ve seen a glimpse of the future or at least a version of the future. I’m not talking one hundred years ahead; more like a year or two.

This book kicks off with a brutal, bloody scene in a classroom that lets us know something’s not quite right in the (fictional) eastern Oregon town of Turner Falls. Interspersed with the rantings of a conspiratorial radio DJ (think Coast to Coast), we follow a group of high school students contending with something way over their heads.

I love this book not just for the plot and characters but for the prose. Johnson brings a ruthless energy and generous heart to his sentences, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that turns my dials. Plus, I have a feeling if Mulder and Scully had been called in at some point during the story, things could have… show more.

This book damn near ticked every single box I have when it comes to what I love in a novel. 

A complex and conflicted addict as the main character? Check. Regrets? Check. Deep childhood friendships? Check. An evil magician and a creepy carnival? Check and check.

Black Mouth is dark and intense, and even though it plunges straight into the supernatural, it’s very much grounded in the real world. A world full of pain, heartache, loss, and broken people. 

It also features a character with a disability, and he’s drawn with such love and tenderness that I can’t help but think more novels would benefit from disability representation. The character of Dennis is often seen most clearly in the way others interact with him, revealing much about the kindness or cruelty of the other characters. 

A special book that I didn’t so much read as live inside. 

Is it cheating to pick a short story collection? Nah. Of course not!

Fracassi is one of my favorite writers. And if you want to know why, just check out his incredible novel Boys in the Valley. But a novel (usually) is a single story, and all the ideas therein serve that story. What a joy it is to see a writer unleash his full power, his idea machine, in a collection of short stories.

You get a little boy’s birthday wish that backfires in a horrifying way. A story written from the perspective of a haunted house. Yes, you read that right! The world’s most dangerous beach, along with eleven other stories that are pulpy, literary, chilling, and terrifying. 

I love that Fracassi completely leans into the pulpy nature of these stories, giving us all the shocks and scares that we used to get from the “monster of… show more.

Whether it’s the short story, the novella, or the novel, Burke never fails to go for the throat in wonderfully unexpected ways. This book falls into that niche sub-genre of horror often referred to as “Arctic horror,” although that often just means cold, with lots of snow. 

The staff at a seaside hotel take in a group from a nearby retirement community just as a massive snowstorm strands them all in a hotel that feels like an East Coast version of the Overlook. A combination of John Carpenter’s The Thing and The Shining, Burke finds the terror in small moments that string together into something much larger and horrifying than I anticipated.

I read this book at night just as snowflakes started falling outside the office window. One of those stories (like several of Burke’s themed collections that might be best read at a certain time of year, in… show more.

I really enjoyed this book because it challenged my normal reading. I’m not a huge fan of reverse harem but with alien-looking aliens and a really tough heroine of color it was hard to pass up. The book is 700 plus pages and covers some of my favorite sci-fi romance tropes: alien abduction, space opera, and alien gladiator. 

Aguirre is one of my auto-buy authors because she writes smart, complex characters and pulls off compelling plots with panache. Strange Love’s hero is truly an alien, not a muscled humanoid with green skin and horns. The human heroine works at a children’s daycare center, which surprisingly turns out to give her the skills to handle almost anything life throws at her. Don't let the "abduction" part of subtitle put you off (it was an accident), and the romance pushes all the right buttons. So why is this in my list? Don't tell my cats, but the heroine gets abducted with her d-o-g. And thanks to alien technology, Snaps can now talk. He's everything you'd want in a pet—entertainer, defender, and boon companion.

Fuller’s book captures the story of Betty and Barney Hill, who became the first nationally covered case of an alien abduction.

The book tells their tale and shares the hypnosis sessions they underwent to recall the many bizarre details of their experience. Fuller’s interviews with the Hills, along with the documented transcripts, make for a remarkable read. 

It’s the post-modern apotheosis of all conspiracy theories: convince enough people something is true, it becomes true. Doesn’t matter how far-fetched – the Earth is flat, the world is overcome with Bigfoots, shape-changing lizardmen are secretly controlling everything – convince enough people, and it happens.  Except, who’s trying to convince people? And who’s trying to stop them? And are either of them on our side? It’s really a bottomless hole in the most enjoyable way (if paranoid fables are your thing): no matter how bad you realize it is, it’s actually worse. But wait, it’s even worse than that. And even worse than that. This is an ongoing comic series (even the art makes reality seem haunted and insubstantial), so while there are already several collected editions, there’s no end in sight.

This is the real-life account of a professor who gets caught up in “The Phenomena,” a term used to describe the appearance and interaction with extraterrestrial activity and encounters.

Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies who is researching the similarities between encounters with angels and demons, which are very similar in description to encounters with aliens and UFOs. Professor Pasulka is blindfolded and driven by a NASA scientist to a desert in New Mexico, where she is shown a secret  “UFO crash site.”  She doesn’t believe any of it. She says the ground is covered for miles by deteriorating aluminum cans that the government placed there over fifty years ago to obscure the UFO crash site and hide it. Later, her friend, Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford University scientist, verifies the objects from the crash site are not from this “universe.” 

I love this book because it is… show more.

Over the thirty-odd years since its publication, Strieber’s haunting story of his own encounters with strange creatures—perhaps from outer space, perhaps from another layer of reality, perhaps from his own mind—has become the most popular and profound first-person account of alien encounters in modern American culture. 

This is in part due to Strieber’s prose, both fevered and fiercely precise. He was a successful horror novelist before producing this book, and whether one believes he is simply continuing his trade here or not, his story is compelling, terrifying, philosophical, and deeply disorienting.