10 books like City of the Beasts

With an equal mix of strangeness and enigmatic philosophies, this short novel barely sold a hundred copies when it was first published in 1920, but has since been recognized as a unique work by noted critic Colin Wilson. Once you’ve read it, you’ll find it both hard to categorize and understand, but it sticks to you like the remnants of a drugged-out fever dream. 

The story of a mysterious man named Maskull, who travels to a planet called Tormance, a world both wondrous and strange. Even though it’s written as a travelogue, the sheer originality invokes an atmosphere of hidden, yet unattainable knowledge for both the protagonist and the reader. The abrupt ending itself neither answers anything nor brings the story to a conclusion, and it’s an experience you won’t soon forget.

Again, I chose a book that is given in the first-person point of view. Rather than using a variety of first persons to tell a story, Martel takes the main character, Pi, and uses him in back-and-forth narrations from various ages – young and in the moment, and older, looking back. As well, he uses Pi as a general narrator overall in the storytelling. This gives the illusion that perhaps the other characters are not so important, or rather they are not the point of the story. 

The Silver Locusts (my preferred title) is a collection of linked short stories about Earthman’s destruction of a fragilely beautiful and ancient Martian civilisation. With profoundly poetic writing, there are real gems such as Night Meeting in which an Earthman and Martian meet up on a highway, neither seeing, nor believing in, the other’s world. The book is not pure fantasy, for it also reflects White Man’s destruction of the Native American civilisation, one that was in harmony with the natural world and which inspired my Eyes of Fire.

The stories of ageing, academic ex-spy, Lytton, merge with those of his young neighbour, Rosie, who, when searching for his cat in a basement enters another dimension where she embarks on a life-changing journey with young Jay, whilst in a dystopian future, scientist Angela Meerson, because of her latest invention, goes on the run from the corruptly controlling authorities. The reader just has to hang on there as past, present and future collide in a symphony of imaginative writing that challenges our concept of reality. And it all comes together in a brilliant conclusion.

I first came across this book in a communal library at a guest house I was staying at on Easter Island. The island is one of the most profoundly affecting places I have ever visited: even today the sense of remoteness is palpable: it’s four hours’ flight from the nearest airport, the island and its population are small, essential supplies such as mineral water and toilet paper come only once a month. And yet centuries ago a small group of would-be settlers from elsewhere in the Pacific landed and established a remarkable community, famous for its mo’ai (statues). They survived, and thrived, for a time, but it was always a precarious existence, and the natural environment has been altered forever as a result. The question of the extent to which the community is sustainable seems, to me, still to be there. It led me to think deeply about human beings… show more.

This is a beautiful book that encourages children to use their own imagination. It tells the story of a little girl, Nora, who explores her grandma’s garden  — and her imagination, to look for a tiger that supposedly lives there. The illustrations are colourful and detailed and hold hidden clues for the younger readers to look for.

An antique Chinese mirror transforms the lives’ of two women. Shay Garrett lives in the modern times and her grandmother lives in 1900. On the eve of their marriages, both women find themselves transported from one era to the other. I love this epic time-travel tale of suspense where one young woman contends with love, and identity, and knowing too much in a society far removed from the loud, freer modern times she grew up in, and another young woman deals with the confusion of a raucous world where decorum doesn’t exist, nothing makes sense, and her granddaughter's handsome fiancé is someone she hasn’t got the strength to resist.  

This book has truly beautiful art by Poonam Mistry. I find Indian and Hindu culture fascinating and this book brings it to you through the eyes of a child (or two children I should say as it’s about siblings). There is a glossary of Hindu terms in the back which I do appreciate. It is written almost as an Indian tribute to Goodnight Moon which is of course a classic.

I read all of Blackwood’s novels and stories when researching my first biography, on the life of Caroline Blackwood. This is the one that stayed with me, Blackwood’s semi-autobiographical novella of Dunmartin Manor, housing three generations of Websters and Dunmartins. From the cold cruelty of the narrator’s great grandmother, to the fairy-like madness of her grandmother, and the tragedy of her fun-loving but suicidal Aunt Lavinia, all seem like extensions of the mansion—a decaying, grand old house, freezing in the winter, sweltering in the summer, and given to flooding. Like the house itself, the characters are trapped by the weight of their own Anglo-Irish, aristocratic history. No conflagration here, except for the cremation of Great Granny Webster.

This author’s writing style and her great sense of humour will definitely be a big hit with the kids and also with grandparents. I love the twist Ellis puts on her book. She accomplishes this by telling a story that does not in any way match the illustrations. The reader’s attention is captured immediately because he realizes that something is different about this book, something isn’t quite right. The drawings are funny, exaggerated, and colourful, all the ingredients that kids love to see in a book. I’m a grandparent and I laughed right along with my grandchildren as we read the story. The ending is priceless. On the last page, the illustrations finally match the words. What an entertaining book for both the young and the young at heart.