14 books like Dark Star

Oh, what’s not to love? Space travel, poetry writing aliens, a criminal galactic president, the end of the world, a depressed robot … this book has it all, and I reread it (and the other 4 volumes in the trilogy, yes, trilogy) every year or so.

This is a fun escape, I discovered this volume as a kid, fell in love with it, and it’s my favorite book still to this day all these centuries later.

I first read this when I was a teenager because I loved the TV show. But though the book has a lot of cleverly mad humour, there is more of a melancholy undercurrent here. The science fiction ideas are creatively insane, but they are always brought down to Earth by the palpably flawed characters, which give the whole book a reality it would otherwise lack. This elevates it from whimsical science fantasy to something solid and substantial. For smeg’s sake, give it a read!

If you’ve gone through life thinking that a sprout can’t be funny, this book will convince you otherwise. Barry the Sprout is the star of the show, lodged in the head of lead character Will Starling. But the whole book is a joy. Highly inventive and very funny. It involves time travel, weird conspiracy theories, Queen Victoria, the Elephant Man, Jack the Ripper, the Brentford Snail Boy, and many more. 

Here's a little-known gem that is clever and witty, packed with funny incidents and terrible puns. It’s about downsizing consultant Graham Paint who owns the eponymous insect. Much to his inconvenience, the caterpillar (which, like its namesake cat, exists in a state of quantum uncertainty) starts spawning alternative realities, each with their own copy of Graham – causing havoc for him, and the police. The storyline has echoes of the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, but is much funnier and smarter. Oh, and check out the book’s trailer on YouTube.

This list would not be complete if I did not include one of Lovecraft’s books, as he is a true icon of the macabre, having created his own pantheon of Gods. He inspired Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and Stephen King to name a few. His stories are unique, entrenching, groundbreaking, and stay embedded within you long after you’ve read them. Horror fans know him well, but to most people who aren’t familiar with his name, they actually inadvertently know about his work. John Carpenter’s The Thing is based on Lovecraft’s In the Mountains of Madness. The character Pennywise from It is based on Lovecraft’s ideas of “outer gods” and evil beings that exist in dimensions outside of normal human experience. 

The Lurker at the Threshold remains my favorite story because it encompasses everything Lovecraft wrote about – unspeakable revelations, fractured characters, and boundaries of space and time. To me,… show more.

The story is set in the Warhammer 40’000 universe, but anyone can read it without feeling lost. I love the way the author subverts the reader’s expectation from a story of “military squad Vs. monster” to “military squad Vs. everything-on-the-planet.”

A fantastic blend of (John Carpenter’s) The Thing and Predator. An enjoyable and easy-to-read tale of claustrophobic, slow-burning tension and Hollywood 80s action hero. I loved the ever-increasing sense of paranoia they endure by gradually discovering that absolutely everything wants to kill them.

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.

Take the body horror nightmare of John Carpenter’s The Thing and substitute the remoteness of that film’s Antarctic setting for the densely populated familiarity of the UK. When a deadly infection strikes, four friends must cross a chaotic, war-torn England to reach their families. The infection turns people into vile, cannibalistic monsters that are almost Lovecraftian in their grotesqueness. There’s something about the juxtaposition of the normality of UK life and the unrelenting horror of the infection that really hits home. This is a vicious book that pulls no punches and spares no one. Beautifully written, and bleak as hell.

“You never really succeed,” Andrew W. Marlowe tells the editors of Tales from the Script, “You always fail at a higher level.” So: first you can’t finish your script, then you can’t get it read, then you can’t sell it, then you can’t get it made, then it’s made – but badly. Or, in Marlowe’s case, it’s made into Air Force One and you’re asked to repeat the trick. “Even when you get to the top there’s this realization: ‘Okay, the view is great, but tomorrow I gotta get up and start climbing the mountain again.’” If you find that depressing, don’t be a screenwriter. If you see it as a challenge, read on…

I wish I could be there, in the back seat of Steinbeck’s pickup truck…with a 10-year-old French poodle named Charlie.

Steinbeck's travelogue is a farewell to the America he knew and an observation of a country that is changing before his eyes. What a joy it could have been to join this great writer (and the poodle) if only for a part of his 10,000-mile road trip across the USA at the beginning of the 60s.