Here are 100 books that I Shall Wear Midnight fans have personally recommended if you like
I Shall Wear Midnight.
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With every book we read, we engage in a complex act of telepathy and empathy. We are entering another human’s thoughts, interpreting them with our own, and come out changed from this colossal encounter. These five books I mentioned, with their extraordinary kindness, insight, humor, wisdom, warmth, compassion, and wholeness—many of them fantasies, many of them focusing on communities—have informed the writer I am today: a World Fantasy Award Winner. But I wouldn’t be without all the books that helped make me. These books are some of the best that built me, and keep building in me: the kind of books I try to write myself.
My editor wrote to me a few years ago (mostly all-caps and !!!s) about a book called The Goblin Emperor, and had I read it, and didn’t she think I’d adore it? She was so convincing that I ordered a copy from my favorite indie bookstore right away and read it in a sitting. I almost cried when I realized Addison had written only one other book at that point—until a friend told me she was also the author Sarah Monette. I spent the next month reading everything in her oeuvre. But none I adored with my whole body being like I did The Goblin Emperor: its deep kindness, its gentleness, its world-building and warmth, its high stakes and heightened language, its arc of grace and growth.
The youngest half-goblin son of the Emperor lived his life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court. But when his father and the three sons in line for the throne die in an "accident," he must take his place as the only surviving heir. Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any time. Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naive new emperor, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to…
With every book we read, we engage in a complex act of telepathy and empathy. We are entering another human’s thoughts, interpreting them with our own, and come out changed from this colossal encounter. These five books I mentioned, with their extraordinary kindness, insight, humor, wisdom, warmth, compassion, and wholeness—many of them fantasies, many of them focusing on communities—have informed the writer I am today: a World Fantasy Award Winner. But I wouldn’t be without all the books that helped make me. These books are some of the best that built me, and keep building in me: the kind of books I try to write myself.
I used to say there were certain characters I wanted to be when I grew up, but that isn’t exactly true. It’s more like I want to be the book as a whole: its wisdom, humor, intricacy, plot, its ability to transport me utterly, to inhabit my mind with new, lifelong friends (or enemies), and to teach me—not only a single lesson upon the first reading, but many different lessons through the years. Cordelia’s Honor (sometimes sold separately as Shards of Honor and Barrayar) is one of those books. It’s the first book of the mighty Vorkosigan Saga by Bujold, which I have read. But if I’d never read the rest, this book alone would still gleam in my mind as something necessary, generous, and strangely infinite.
When Enemies Become More than
Friends THEY WIN In her
first trial by fire, Cordelia Naismith captained a throwaway ship of the Betan
Expeditionary Force on a mission to destroy
With every book we read, we engage in a complex act of telepathy and empathy. We are entering another human’s thoughts, interpreting them with our own, and come out changed from this colossal encounter. These five books I mentioned, with their extraordinary kindness, insight, humor, wisdom, warmth, compassion, and wholeness—many of them fantasies, many of them focusing on communities—have informed the writer I am today: a World Fantasy Award Winner. But I wouldn’t be without all the books that helped make me. These books are some of the best that built me, and keep building in me: the kind of books I try to write myself.
Here If You Need Me is a non-fiction memoir I read years ago on a whim. It still sticks with me. A woman with four children is happily married to a State trooper training to be a minister. When he dies suddenly, she goes on to become a minister herself, working with search and rescue missions in the Maine woods while raising her children. Her intimate knowledge of grief, her vulnerability, and compassion, coupled with a life of service and family, moved me so deeply that I often call upon the memory of this book in my life to metaphorically “get down on the floor with those who weep, and give them tea if they want it.”
HERE IF YOU NEED ME is the story Kate Braestrup's remarkable journey from grief to faith to happiness - as she holds her family together in the wake of her husband's death, pursues his dream of becoming a minister, and ultimately finds her calling as a chaplain to search-and-rescue workers. It is dramatic, funny, deeply moving, and simply unforgettable--an uplifting account offinding God through helping others, and of the small miracles that happen every day when a heart is grateful and love isrestored.
India Muerte and the Ship of the Dead
by
Set Sytes,
After a night of misadventure, a roguish street lad from Mexico Island wakes up aboard a legendary ship crewed by skeletons. In search of the father he’s never met—a great mound of treasure would be nice, too—India sails the fantastical Caribbean on the Ship of the Dead, exploring the colonial…
With every book we read, we engage in a complex act of telepathy and empathy. We are entering another human’s thoughts, interpreting them with our own, and come out changed from this colossal encounter. These five books I mentioned, with their extraordinary kindness, insight, humor, wisdom, warmth, compassion, and wholeness—many of them fantasies, many of them focusing on communities—have informed the writer I am today: a World Fantasy Award Winner. But I wouldn’t be without all the books that helped make me. These books are some of the best that built me, and keep building in me: the kind of books I try to write myself.
Ah, The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardrydelighted me and made me laugh from the first page. It’s radically funny and inexorably inventive. Best of all, it follows a protagonist who doesn’t know how great she is—who thinks she’s kind of terrible, really—and it takes a newfound community of friends and fellow wizard ladies to reflect back to her a new opinion of herself. The language is Dickensian (only better!) in its wit and flexibility. It abounds in amazing female characters. And while there’s a fun romance, it’s the friendships that get me in my sticking place. I just wanted to hug this book when I finished. I wanted to have written it. I’m glad Waggoner did instead.
Sparks fly in this enchanting fantasy novel from the author of Unnatural Magic when a down-and-out fire witch and a young gentlewoman join forces against a deadly conspiracy.
Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly…
Although I was a little scared of Halloween as a kid, I’ve grown to love the silly side of spookiness. Growing up with Pee-Wee’s Playhouse every Saturday morning, I learned that silliness is a superpower. Now, when working on kids books, my ultimate goal is to put work into the world that will delight kids, and won’t make the parents groan and say, “that one again?” Finding the sweet spot of being fun to read, fun to hear, and fun to look at is what I love most about creating kids books. I hope you and your little ghouls and goblins enjoy my spooky board Boooook list!
I love that the little girl (actually a little witch) in Ghosts in the House! is confident and capable every step of the way as she deals with her haunted house.
Ghosts are not something to be afraid of – they can be useful! Kazuno Kohara’s linocut illustrations are a perfect pairing to her words – simple and refreshing.
Ghosts in the House! by author-illustrator Kazuno Kohara is just the right mix of sweet and scary for the youngest trick-or treaters
At the edge of town lives a clever girl with a spooky problem: Her house is haunted! Luckily, she happens to be a witch and knows a little something about taking care of ghosts. She catches them, puts them in the washing machine, airs them out to dry, and gives them new lives as sofa covers, table cloths, and, of course, bed sheets to cozy up under. Fresh and charming illustrations in dynamic orange, black and white bring…
When I was five my dad had to carry me, crying, out of the Salem Witch’s Dungeon. You’d think that would put a damper on my love of spooky things, but it absolutely did not! Bela Lugosi was my first crush. I set up Haunted Houses in my garage and read every single book my local library had on the Salem Witch Trials. I made my way from Bunnicula and The Halloween Tree, to books by Stephen King and Anne Rice. Halloween and horror will always have a special place in my heart, and yet…I still don’t let my legs dangle off my bed, lest the monsters get me.
Every day is Halloween when you live in the seventh most haunted town in America, so ghosts and witches are nothing new to Evie Von Rathe. But when Aunt Des disappears, Evie knows she’ll do anything to get her back, even if it means playing a deadly game against a serial killer with a creature called The Clackity.
Watching Evie overcome her anxiety is a struggle kids will relate to and makes her an easy character to root for. The Clackity has such a perfect spooky Grimm’s Fairy tale vibe, that I was immediately sucked in. Nothing is more Halloween than a dark trip through the woods, and the twisted Alice in Wonderland feel of this book lives and breathes Halloween.
Reminiscent of Doll Bones and Small Spaces, this "delightfully eerie" (Erin A. Craig, New York Times bestselling author of House of Salt and Sorrows) middle grade novel tells the story of a girl who must rescue her aunt by entering a world of ghosts, witches, and monsters to play a game with deadly consequences.
Evie Von Rathe lives in Blight Harbor-the seventh-most haunted town in America-with her Aunt Desdemona, the local paranormal expert. Des doesn't have many rules except one: Stay out of the abandoned slaughterhouse at the edge of town. But when her aunt disappears into the building, Evie…
Constance is a wild, stubborn young girl growing up poor in a small industrial town in the late 1800's. Beneath her thread-worn exterior beats the heart of a dreamer and a wordsmith. But at age twelve, she’s orphaned. Running away to join the circus—like kids do in adventure books—seems like…
I’ve always been intrigued with books containing paranormal twists—I’m talking ghosts, mysticism, time travel. I also have, what I like to call, a healthy curiosity about spirits. Having gone on ghost tours in York (England), Salem (MA), and New Orleans, I’ve yet to spot one. But I know what some of you may be saying—be careful what you wish for! My writing career began later in life, when I realized the stories in my head demanded to be released into the world. From the start I attempted writing a straight-up mystery, but paranormal aspects crept into my chapters, and I decided to let them stay.
I enjoyed the sassy main character, Pepper, who suddenly acquires the ability to interact with the dead. The first book in a series, her current project, an entertaining mafia don, tasks her to solve his thirty-year-old murder. His persistence made me chuckle at his refusal to leave until Pepper helped him. While struggling with life in general, mainly rich girl turned pauper, she finds herself in sticky situations. Her job as a cemetery tour guide adds its own comedy to the story.
Beautiful, smart, and chic, Pepper Martin never had to work a day in her life -- until her surgeon daddy was convicted of fraud, her wealthy fiancé took a powder, and the family fortune ran bone dry.
Suddenly desperate, the inexperienced ex-rich girl was forced to take the only job she could get: as a tour guide in a cemetery. But a grave situation took a turn for the worse when a head-on collision with a headstone left her with an unwanted ability to communicate with the disgruntled deceased . . . and now Pepper has…
I’m the sort of writer who constantly asks “what kind of story could I set here?” A quiet copse, a busy mall, a shabby wedding venue, all locations have their own stories to tell in addition to those of the characters who inhabit them. Stories work best when the location is the pivot around which everything else happens. This is doubly true for secondary world fantasy because, when you’re creatinga world, you don’t just tease the story out of its locations—you can weave it into the fabric of the place. Which is how I created the world of Queen Of Clouds, down to its very motes.
This wonderful novel begins with the inheritance of an ancestral pile in rural England and slowly, by twists and turns, reveals the story of the once ornate house and gardens down the centuries. Ladies and lords of the manor, gardeners and servants, painters, photographers, and WWII land girls all flit fleetingly through its pages, but the novel’s heart is the mysterious walled garden whose secrets only a very few get to witness.
American owner of a failing gallery, Toni, is unexpectedly called to England when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter…
I used to be the caretaker for the last home of Edgar Allan Poe, and during my four-year tenure, I tried to read everything Poe ever wrote, as well as literature inspired by his work. The key word there is “tried.” It’s an impossible task. Poe’s influence is vast and evergreen. The traditional ghost story was not his specialty, but nevertheless, I associate him with spirits and phantoms since one of his primary obsessions was the potential oblivion of the afterlife. I share these obsessions, and I doubt I would have taken the job if I wasn’t already drawn to stories that imagine what lies beyond the veil.
I love it when a story taps into my dream life when the author imagines a landscape that tickles my subconscious. Since the experience is so deeply personal, it obviously cannot be planned or market-tested, which makes it all the more thrilling when it happens.
That was my experience reading this book. As a boy, I often dreamed about my small town turning into a neighborhood full of ghosts overnight (Don’t ask me why. I was a strange child). This happens to be the exact premise of Velkwood. In Kiste’s narrative, a living woman must enter this literal ghost town at her own peril to uncover the secret behind a family tragedy, and the results are both philosophical and beautiful.
From Bram Stoker Award -winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a chilling novel about three childhood friends who miraculously survive the night everyone in their suburban hometown turned into ghosts-perfect for fans of Yellowjackets.
The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter-and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.
Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never…
This is a multicultural epic fantasy with a diverse cast of characters. Sickly fifteen-year-old Prince Psal, the son of warrior-king Nahas, should have been named Crown Prince of all Wheel Clan lands. But his clan disdains the disabled.
When the mysterious self-moving towers that keep humans safe from the Creator's…
I write adventure and mystery stories for children aged 9 - 13, involving battles with mythical creatures, dangerous pacts with demons, and other supernatural chills. My first book, Ante’s Inferno, won the People’s Book Prize and a Silver Wishing Shelf Award. For The Fall of a Sparrow, I drew on my love of ghost stories, not just for their scariness but also for their emotional complexity: ghosts don’t haunt just for the sake of it. They need something only the main character can give. Friendship, perhaps, a companion in their loneliness… or something much darker. Here’s my choice of classic stories in which ghosts pursue a wide – and sometimes terrifying – variety of agendas.
What I love about the ghost story genre is how it can lend itself to comedy as well as spookiness. Here the plight of poor James, moving to a new house only to find himself seized on as Apprentice to ghostly 17th century apothecary Thomas Kempe, is irresistibly funny. No one will believe it’s not him scrawling advertisements for ‘Sorcerie, Astrologie, Geomancie, Alchemie, Recoverie of Goodes Loste and Physicke’ on notice boards outside his house and all over the village. Lively’s accurate use of 17th century English heightens both the humour and historical realism in this beautifully written book.
The classic ghost story from Penelope Lively, one of the modern greats of British fiction for adults and children alike.
James is fed up. His family has moved to a new cottage - with grounds that are great for excavations, and trees that are perfect for climbing - and stuff is happening. Stuff that is normally the kind of thing he does. And he's getting blamed for it. But it's not him who's writing strange things on shopping lists and fences. It's not him who smashes bottles and pours tea in the Vicar's lap. It's a ghost - honestly. Thomas…
