100 books like Burn Down, Rise Up

Gabino Iglesias has become a phenomenon in horror through a lot of hustle and plain hard work. His 2022 novel cemented his reputation as the king of border horror.

This novel follows the fate of Mario, a man broken by debt due to his family’s crushing medical bills. With a failing marriage, he reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, agreeing to do one last job hijacking a cartel’s cash shipment before it can reach Mexico.

Mario reluctantly works with his meth-addicted friend and a cartel insider. To make this dangerous endeavor worse, enter supernatural horrors that shocked me—and I am not easily shocked.

Is there blood? Of course! Gore? Plenty! Monsters and demons? Yes! You are guaranteed to lose sleep after reading this novel.

This YA Horror novel is technically the sequel to Cardinal’s smash hit Five Midnights, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, but I liked it even more than the original.

Category Five takes place in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and it dives into the real-life struggle with real estate developers trying to gobble up cheap, devasted properties. It also exposes the ghostly history left on nearby Vieques Island after the last Cat 5 storm that hit way back in 1926.

The book features a mixture of spooky and historical with an endearing cast of found family that make it a quick, fun read.

Winner of the International Latino Book Awards, and a Bram Stoker Finalist, this adult horror novels tackles the history of Chicago, highlighting the local Latin community.

Children of Chicago twists the story of the Pied Piper, with clean prose and a quick pace. I especially loved the main character, a female Puerto Rican detective who breaks all the stereotypes of both cops and women in fiction.

It’s a supernatural horror tale for adults that will make you want to read the rest of Pelayo’s impressive work.

V. (Violet) Castro’s debut novel, released in 2021, put her on the horror map, and for good reason.

I loved how she blended Mexican legend and culture to tell a supernatural horror story that is rich in detail, dialogue, and dark humor. The setting is a Texas wedding held on a renovated farm.

But very bad things start to happen, all seemingly tied to a legend of a 1950s murder of a Mexican farmworker. But—so people say—the woman’s death piqued the interest of the Aztec Goddess of Death, who pledges herself to the murdered woman.

Castro’s expert storytelling upends classic tropes to make this book an exhilarating and frightening literary ride that is smart and timely.

Booth is an extraordinary writer and Tyrell is her signature story. Tyrell is a young man living under incredible pressure with a family that needs him to have both feet on the ground. But he's always on the verge of going the wrong way. Will the need for fast money put him in prison like his father? Booth is in complete command of her characters, story and pacing here. A marvelous book that will make you grateful for your own choices in life.

Random Family is a family saga; the story of two couples and their friends and families struggling to survive in the Bronx and upstate New York.

The author, Adrian Nicole LeBanc, spent years living alongside her subjects, which allowed her to paint an extraordinarily intimate portrait of the web of gangs, drugs, parenthood, poverty, and prison that dominated their lives.

I play a small role in the story, as I represented one of the people depicted in the book in a lawsuit brought against a prison guard.

Reading the book was, therefore, a personal revelation—illuminating the rich and complex context of her life, and the many ways it was shaped by the criminal justice system.

New York City includes all five boroughs. When it was first published in the early 1990s, this creative book that weaves the stories of four Dominican sisters through the decades backwards from the 1980s to the 1960s was a real gamechanger.

It’s about a family that’s been taken down a few notches—having once lived as upper-class citizens with house servants in the Dominican Republic—as they adjust to New York City culture, and specifically, life in the 1960s and 1970s Bronx, and unpack the truth about their father’s reasons for relocating the family in the first place.

Part of the narrative also serves as a relatable coming-of-age story about teenage girls, their sisterhoods, and friendships. Think Judy Blume, but Dominican, with more house parties, food, and drinking. 

Order a Martini (straight up, or with ice chiming against the glass), then settle with this charming book and the “quintessential cocktail” that merits its own chapter in the imbiber’s US history tour. Grimes wears learning lightly while pointing out the cultural vagaries over four centuries of pleasurable distillation, brewing, and fermentation. Who knew the American Revolution was first fomented in 1700s village taverns? Or that the familiar Gilded Age “Bronx” (named by the Waldorf-Astoria’s master mixologist) was the very first cocktail to use fruit juice?

Author Grimes chides the 1960s Yuppies (a.k.a. young urban professionals) for purist insistence on “imported beer” and “the rarest of single-malt Scotches,” but concludes the country and the cocktail survived and are all the better for it. He gets no argument from me!

My friend and co-author Aubrey Fox recommended this book to me not long after we met. 

I liked it so much that I think it is actually one of the reasons we became friends in the first place. Tilting at Mils is the story of an innovative effort by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental nonprofit, to create a paper mill in the Bronx in the 1990s. 

The initiative attracted millions of dollars and high-level political support, both in New York City and Washington DC. But the project never happened.

Tilting at Mills is a gripping story of failure, not due to malfeasance or incompetence, but because achieving anything is difficult and lots of things can go wrong, including rotten luck and bad timing. 

Fischer’s Miracle Moments in New York Yankees History is aptly divided into five parts, the first of which—“Birth of a Dynasty”—is the most relevant for the current topic. It covers the “Hilltop Highlander” years (1903-1913), the Yankees’ decade at the Polo Grounds as tenants of their arch-rival, the National League’s New York Giants (1913-1922), the sale of the Yankees to Ruppert and Huston (1914-1915), the acquisition of Babe Ruth (1919-1920), and their move to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and their first World Series title (1923). But Fischer’s Miracle Moments has much more to offer than these early days as it provides a panoramic view of the entire Yankees’ franchise from 1903 to the present.