Here are 33 books that Eyes in the Dust fans have personally recommended if you like
Eyes in the Dust.
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I am an astrophysicist with a passion for narratives that stare unflinchingly at the inherent hostility of outer space. Professionally, I study graduate astrophysics and research the ways high-energy celestial objects impact cosmic evolution. Creatively, I use my training to write science fiction horror exploring the spookiest things the universe has to offer. I particularly love stories that throw wrenches in the best-laid plans of star-faring protagonists, and will never get tired of a good old space mission gone terribly and tragically awry.
Deep space can be scary, but I consider deep caves to be much more terrifying.
The Luminous Dead has an eerie mission to the depths of a cave on a distant exoplanet—the worst of both worlds! This book follows a non-regulation diver on a dangerous job shrouded in secrets and the enigmatic, untrustworthy voice in her helmet guiding her through the darkness.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for the characters to descend into antagonism and uncertainty about whether the other things lurking in the cave are figments of paranoia or dangerously real. If you like feeling queasy, secondhand claustrophobia, The Luminous Dead is for you.
"This claustrophobic, horror-leaning tour de force is highly recommended for fans of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation and Andy Weir's The Martian." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A thrilling, atmospheric debut with the intensive drive of The Martian and Gravity and the creeping dread of Annihilation, in which a caver on a foreign planet finds herself on a terrifying psychological and emotional journey for survival.
When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she'd be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She…
At university, I studied Classical Studies, which leans heavily into archaeology. As I went on more site visits, I became much more aware of the worlds and lives which exist below our feet. Later, when working as a teacher in Poland, I had the chance to visit one of Europe’s deepest active coal mines. The experience surprised me in so many ways, not least the oppressive heat and the darkness—something you feel you can almost touch. From that moment onward—especially as a horror writer—I’ve found myself wondering about the nightmares lurking below our world, as well as above, and beyond.
As someone who has explored the tombs of Egypt in real life, this story dug its claws right into me.
As well as all the claustrophobia, the darkness, and the sense there’s no way out, Moreland confronts you with ancient gods and monsters so terrifying you’ll be testing the walls for a secret passage out of there every step of the way.
"The suspense of the story, aided by sly hints from the author, and the atmosphere of a dark, claustrophobic tomb work together to create a scary story. The characters' fear invites the reader into the world to experience the fright themselves."
- Booklist Starred Review
Deep inside the tomb exists a hidden world of wonder and terror.
In 1935, British archaeologists vanished inside an Egyptian cave. A year later, one man returned covered in mysterious scars.
Egyptologist Imogen Riley desperately wants to know what happened to the ill-fated expedition led by her grandfather. On a quest for answers, she joins…
At university, I studied Classical Studies, which leans heavily into archaeology. As I went on more site visits, I became much more aware of the worlds and lives which exist below our feet. Later, when working as a teacher in Poland, I had the chance to visit one of Europe’s deepest active coal mines. The experience surprised me in so many ways, not least the oppressive heat and the darkness—something you feel you can almost touch. From that moment onward—especially as a horror writer—I’ve found myself wondering about the nightmares lurking below our world, as well as above, and beyond.
In this novella, Curran taps into that sense of what’s below our feet as another world.
A world from a past so distant from ours that we’ve forgotten what lurks there. The reader follows Boyd down into the depths and understands his reasons for taking the job in the bowels of the mine, even as things take turn after turn for the worse.
Curran knows exactly when to paint the horror vividly and when to hold back, or lean into the unsettling and the uncanny.
With a kid on the way, Boyd needed the job bad. But the idea of going underground at the Hobart Mine, down into the dark labyrinth of tunnels to get at the raw ore, left him with a brooding sense of unease. Maybe it was the fact that his father had died down in the mines or maybe it was something much worse. Digging a new drift down in Level #8, the lowest level of the mine, an immense shaft opens up. Boyd and a few others volunteer to explore it. Some 400 feet down, they find a passage that…
At university, I studied Classical Studies, which leans heavily into archaeology. As I went on more site visits, I became much more aware of the worlds and lives which exist below our feet. Later, when working as a teacher in Poland, I had the chance to visit one of Europe’s deepest active coal mines. The experience surprised me in so many ways, not least the oppressive heat and the darkness—something you feel you can almost touch. From that moment onward—especially as a horror writer—I’ve found myself wondering about the nightmares lurking below our world, as well as above, and beyond.
This book leans heavily into old English folklore, has terrifying creatures and believable characters.
Above and beyond all that, though, is the atmosphere the author creates in the rabbit warren of the Chislehurst Caves. It’s no secret that Budd is a veteran visitor to this terrifying complex of tunnels and caverns, and it really shows in this book. Even the “quiet” moments in Enter the Darkness had me shuddering.
I have loved science since I was young. I was obsessed with watching videos and reading books by scientists like Michio Kaku and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, where they explored concepts like time travel, black holes, and the quantum realm. In college, I majored in environmental studies, mostly because of my love for both natural science and policy. In addition to basic biology and ecology, I learned about what is hurting the Earth and the consequences of not acting fast. I contributed to a white paper on “Ecocide,” or deliberate destruction of the natural environment, by the Russians in Ukraine. I also contributed to the Journal of Science and Technology Law.
I love this book because it is deeply scientific with a good plot. I always appreciate books that attempt to make things as scientifically accurate as possible. I understand that science fiction books must take some liberties for the sake of the plot—in fact, I believe that they should. But the liberties should be believable.
Also, who doesn’t love a great book about an explanation for the origins of humanity? With what scientists can do with genetics now, it’s really fun to think about what studying the human genome can teach us.
For eons, the truth about human evolution has remained hidden.Until now...Geophysicist Jack Greer believes he may finally have found the resting place of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. A few miles off the Yucatán coast, Jack and a team of scientists tow an aging drilling platform over the impact crater with the aim of securing a sample. But buried deep beneath the earth lies a shocking discovery that threatens to shatter everything we think we know about our species.A world away, geneticist Dr. Mia Ward receives a mysterious delivery from her former boss and…
My final high school year in Tasmania added a new topic, geology. I and my school friends knew little about it but signed up. In the first lesson, the teacher pointed at the adjacent sunlit river gorge saying “There is your laboratory.” We were hooked and most of us became professional geologists. I started off in museums where mineral, rock, and fossil collections were a font of knowledge and generated field collecting, research, and educational activities. This led to MSc and PhD degrees from universities at both ends of Australia. A base at the Australian Museum led to travel around Australia and visits to many overseas institutions and meetings.
Here, a seasoned geologist gathers several themes of his research interests, poses critical questions on apparent anomalies within them, and considers their resolution. He does this by giving free rein to informed lateral thinking on these topics. This produces an unusual book in the annals of geological writing, presenting thought-provoking and rewarding reading.
The thematic chapters are written in a fluent expression of the concepts involved, reinforced through a range of illustrative means. There are superb photographs of gems, minerals, and rocks as specimens and rockyexposures from many sources. Geological diagrams underpin explanations, superimposed maps highlight large-scale geological structures, and even images of paintings, historical scenes, postcards, and stamps reinforce particular points. The closing sections enter the realms of life on Earth, seen as coordinated biological and geological evolution.
How did the Earth get its gemstones? · How did the Earth get its oil and gas? · What happened to the Earth's moonlike impact craters? · Why did it take 80% of the Earth's history for complex animals to emerge? · Do Darwinian principles apply to absolutely all creatures?
One way I bring lightness and wonder to my life is through the joy of observing something new around me in this world. The new thing might be the forty Heavenly Blue morning glories that bloomed one morning for my father and me, finding an ancient fossil shell in a skirt of fallen shale at the bottom of a cliff or hearing Balinese gamelan music for the first time. But each time one of these wonders lights up my day, I am reminded of how limited our ability to observe is. Each of these books gave me a view into a world I had not even dreamed about.
All my life I’ve loved looking closely at the natural world to see as much as possible: Why is that leaf broken? Was a chipmunk digging here? Is that a different kind of mushroom? But no matter how closely I looked, I was unaware of the overwhelming complexities and sophistication of the fungal world.
Sheldrake shows the interconnections, not metaphysical ones but actual physical and chemical connections, between fungi, plants, and even living, moving animals. If that chapter about ants doesn’t change how you see the world, I don’t know what will. Fungi own the world, and we are just lucky to live in it.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
From the time I was introduced to Depeche Mode, I quickly realized there was an underground scene dissecting the darker realms of human nature. It’s no easy task translating emotion into tangible products like film, books, and music, so if an artist can fixate an audience by getting them to interpret themselves and, the world, more effectively, there’s great value in that. If it hadn’t been for that, I probably wouldn’t have achieved things like being an award-winning author, a paralegal from the University of Texas at Austin, manage workshops via Airbnb Experiences, or receive academic certificates thru Coursera like the Science of Well-Being from Yale and Managing the Company of the Future from London Business School.
Released in the early ‘90s, Frisk was adapted into a film in the mid-90s by Todd Verow. Both received mixed reviews due its transgressive content about madness and bizarre sexual aesthetic. Frisk leaves little to the imagination as the narrator explores taboo photography and sexual deviance while traveling through Holland. Critics and fans found this breakthrough novel deeply polarizing because it involves a gay character obsessed with annihilation. Nevertheless, the overall theme is about victimization, and a culture obsessed with objectification. Despite the novel’s punk prose and hypnotic pacing, there’s something to be said when humanity has a tendency to destroy what society deems perfect. Cooper definitely explores how human desire can become just as fanatical as a religious zealot. A must read for fans of cinematic gore.
When Dennis is thirteen, he sees a series of photographs of a boy apparently unimaginably mutilated. Dennis is not shocked, but stunned by their mystery and their power; their glimpse at the reality of death. Some years later, Dennis meets the boy who posed for the photographs. He did it for love.
Surrounded by images of violence, the celebrity of horror, news of disease, a wasteland of sex, Dennis flies to Europe, having discovered some clues about the photographs: “I see these criminals on the news who’ve killed someone methodically, and they’re free. They know something amazing. You can just…
From the time I was introduced to Depeche Mode, I quickly realized there was an underground scene dissecting the darker realms of human nature. It’s no easy task translating emotion into tangible products like film, books, and music, so if an artist can fixate an audience by getting them to interpret themselves and, the world, more effectively, there’s great value in that. If it hadn’t been for that, I probably wouldn’t have achieved things like being an award-winning author, a paralegal from the University of Texas at Austin, manage workshops via Airbnb Experiences, or receive academic certificates thru Coursera like the Science of Well-Being from Yale and Managing the Company of the Future from London Business School.
Simenon is a master storyteller and father of the noir genre. He quit school as a teenager and never attended a writing program. Dirty Snow is filled with psychological insight and hard facts about life. The main character, Frank Friedmaier, is a brawny young man who lives in his mother’s brothel in France under German occupation. A horrible crime, along with heinous acts, are committed because he cares about nothing and does things without reason. His life is deprived of a father and that void quickly becomes occupied by whores that facilitate a man without optimism. Simenon vividly takes us on a trip into the mind of a creature that can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. This is yet another dark classic about an anti-hero challenged by the notion that he is a man like any other.
Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snowopens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go.
Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly…
My abiding interest is in how people find meaning in their lives in a post-church, secular world, and what happens when they fail. I have concluded that life needs to be seen as an arc leading to significant end; it needs to be experienced as a coherent story. The vital role of culture here is in providing archetypal stories, usually from a long time ago, but ones constantly retold and brought up to date, which provides background shapes to identify with, armatures as it were. I've explored these challenges in a series of books: Ego and Soul, The Western Dreaming, The Existential Jesus, and soon to appear, The Saviour Syndrome.
Nietzsche was the master diagnostician of the challenge of living in a secular world, once God was dead. The Birth of Tragedydevelops a powerful theory of culture, its necessity for human wellbeing, and how it works.
The basic assumption is that human life is lived on the surface, driven by a substratum of demonic instincts, nightmare fears, and a barbaric will to lust and sadism. Culture’s task is to transform these unconscious drives into harmonious and beautiful images that capture the mind and give an orderly direction to how humans conduct their lives.
But for culture to have that commanding power it needs to be founded on a fixed and primordial sacred site. Without that, the modern problems rise: nihilism, rancour, and depression.
"The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism" by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (translated by William A. Haussmann). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
