Here are 100 books that Let the Right One in fans have personally recommended if you like
Let the Right One in.
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I am passionate about this book list because it helped me get where I am today, a multiple-times bestselling author and an award-winning senior reporter. I began working as an overnight police round reporter before moving into sports, where I became one of Australia's best news-breaking rugby league journalists. I was then appointed News Corp Australia's Chief National Motorsports Writer and traveled the world chasing Formula 1 story, as well as covering Australia's V8 Supercar races. Everyone has to start somewhere, and for me, this list of books helped me begin and continue to grow to reach the level of success that I have.
Itâs 2005, and itâs my first day at The Daily Telegraph. I still couldnât believe they had hired me as a cadet journalist. The smile I was wearingâfrom ear to earâsuddenly vanished when the Chief of Staff walked over and said, âPhelpsy, a bus has just crashed in Egypt. We have been told that there may have been some Australian tourists on board. Punch out 500 words and give it to me in an hour.â
I turned to my computer screen, looked down at my keyboard, and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I was doing. Iâd never had any writing training, and my experience was limited to the gibber I had been submitting to the paper (for free) for the past year in the hope of landing a job. After ten minutes of writing a word or two, deleting them, and then doing it again, IâŠ
Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINEâS TOP 100 NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME
Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen Kingâs critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.
âLong live the Kingâ hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen Kingâs On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writerâs craft, comprising the basic tools of theâŠ
I am a young adult fantasy author and paranoid survivalist. I have spent years curating items for my end-of-days go-bag, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than hanging out in universes that are about to go bang!
Legends are made of powerful stuff, and nothing has greater power than a total flip in perspective. I still recall the gut-punch end to this book, though itâs been decades since I read it.
Robert Neville is a vampire hunter by day and a tormented man by night. As seemingly the only living human in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Robert faces depression, isolation, alcoholism, and his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, who appears outside Robertâs front door each night chanting, "Come out, Neville."
But when Robert is finally captured, and the truth of his situation is revealed, he gets a good look at the world through the eyes of the undead and is forced to ask himself, who am I? What have I become?
An acclaimed SF novel about vampires. The last man on earth is not alone ...Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this?
In the 1970s and '80s, I lived in New York, made noise in downtown bands, wrote incomprehensible texts. And obsessed about dinosaurs, ancient civilizations, Weimar, and medieval cults. The past became my drug (as I tapered off actual drugs). I couldnât cope with the present, so I swallowed the red pill and became a historian. Took refuge in archives, libraries and museums (my safe spaces), and the history of anatomy. Because it was about sex, death, and the Body and seemed obscure and irrelevant. Pure escapism. But escape is impossible. Anatomy seems a fact of nature, what we are. But its pastâand presentâare tangled up in politics, aesthetics, the market, gender, class, race and desire.
You know the movies, but maybe not Mary Shelleyâs novel. Published in 1818 and revised in 1821, itâs a disquieting story of things going very wrong between a negligent parent (Victor von Frankenstein) and his sensitive child (the monster he created).
I identify with both sides of the equation. I also take Shelley's Frankenstein as a rich historical document of Romantic fascination with anatomy and the illicit grave robbery that supplied bodies to the dissecting tables. And âgalvanism,â which Giovanni Aldini publicly demonstrated in 1803 by placing electrodes on the corpse of an executed criminal, causing his legs and arms to twitch spasmodically, seemingly making the dead man come alive.
Combine that with ambivalent meditations on the wilds of human and non-human Nature. And monsters and murder. And wow! The novel that invented gothic horror. (Donât worry about the florid old-fashioned prose. Once youâre in the flow, this book isâŠ
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the thirdâŠ
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: âAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?â Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itâŠ
I love to see complicated characters rising to the occasion. People in real life generally have a lot going on just handling the day-to-day, and they arenât waiting around for adventure, romance, or mystery to find them. It feels very human to me to see characters struggling with more mundane things like social situations, worrying about their appearance, or holding down a job, rather than only focusing on the plot arc, and thatâs the type of character I also focus on as a writer. My latest protagonist, Simon, definitely has enough problems without a missing-person case to solve, so he may be what got me thinking of this topic.
I have always loved literary thriller queen Daphne Du Maurier's complex and resilient characters, and Mary Yellan is no exception. Everythingâs looking pretty miserable for her after her motherâs death forces her to give up the family farm and her hometown to live in a creepy inn with her miserable aunt and aggressive drunk of an uncle.
So I really enjoy how brave and resourceful she is in getting past violence, danger, miserable living conditions, a desolate setting, and bad taste in men to find out whether something more sinister than smuggling is going on at the empty inn.
After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. The inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and Mary is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Before long she will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself.
Lately, the state of the world is a big factor of negativity and rumination for me. To keep from getting jaded, I have to take periodic breaks from reading the news and researching crime cases. Fiction works as an escape, especially horror, which might sound like ugly-adjacent, but itâs cathartic. The characters arenât real, so if anything happens to them, itâs not going to affect my psyche the way real families dealing with the murders of their loved ones does. Sometimes a perfectly-solved mystery or a revenge tale is a breath of fresh air compared to the unresolved loose ends of real life.
Itâs hard to pick a favorite, butThe Fireman has it allââa pandemic that causes its afflicted to spontaneously combust (called Dragonscale because Spinal-Tap Drummer Disease was too long), a plucky pregnant nurse determined to have a healthy baby in spite of the odds (which includes an unhinged husband and a blood-thirsty post-apocalyptic death squad), a commune that has figured out a way to live with the disease, and a lone wolf that wears a firemanâs jacket who has somehow learned how to control his fire.
The characters are so real they still live rent free in my head. I read it during the COVID lockdown and the parallels were both scary and hopeful.
Nobody knew where the virus came from. FOX News said it had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated it might've been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides. While every TV station debated the cause, the world burnt.
Pregnant school nurse, HARPER GRAYSON, had seen lots of people burn on TV, but the first person she saw burn for real was in theâŠ
As a writer, I consider myself lucky to be born and raised in the Deep South. Although I currently live near Los Angeles, I continue to draw upon the regionâs complex history, regional color, eccentric characters, and rich atmosphere for inspiration. I also love to read fiction set in the South, especially mysteries and thrillersâthe more atmospheric, the better!
Before her mega-hit Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn penned this diabolical noir set in the deep South. Itâs an edgy story, presenting a gallery of disturbed charactersâincluding the deeply troubled protagonist, a journalist who returns to her hometown to report on the murders of two young girls.
Some books I forget a week or two after reading, others just stick with me for a year or more, and some leave bootprints in my mind forever. This is one of the latter.
NOW AN HBOÂź LIMITED SERIES STARRING AMY ADAMS, NOMINATED FOR EIGHT EMMY AWARDS, INCLUDING OUTSTANDING LIMITED SERIES
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GONE GIRL
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille findsâŠ
Forsaking Home is a story about the life of a man who wants a better future for his children. He and his wife decide to join Earth's first off-world colony. This story is about risk takers and courageous settlers and what they would do for more freedom.
Iâve always been intrigued by the way night transforms familiar landscapes, creates a sense of loosened boundaries, and seems to be rich with almost magical potential. One of my most beloved books as a kid was The BFG, partly because of its magnificent passage about the witching hour, âthe special momentâŠwhen all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world to themselves.â Later, I discovered Hamletâs take on it and was equally charmed. Itâs no surprise that many of the key moments in my debut collection, Here in the Night, take place after dark. Here are my five favorite books that capture the beguiling power of nighttime.
This horror novel about a haunted IKEA-like store is playful and fun in every wayâfrom its inventive narrative structure to the bookâs mimicry of an IKEA catalogue, complete with a store map and advertisements for furniture that become increasingly deranged.
During daylight, Orsk is a regular furniture store in the suburbs of Cleveland, but when several employees attempt to stay overnight to find out why products keep getting damaged, the buildingâs dark history begins to bleed into the present. This book perfectly captures the uncanny way nighttime makes familiar landscapes, such as stores and schools, seem entirely unfamiliar, a phenomenon that has always fascinated me.
It's a classic old-fashioned haunted house story - set in a big box Swedish furniture superstore. Designed like a retail catalogue, Horrorstor offers a creepy read with mass appeal-perfect for Halloween tables! Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring wardrobes, shattered Bracken glassware, and vandalized Liripip sofabeds-clearly, someone or something is up to no good. To unravel the mystery, five young employees volunteer for a long dusk-til-dawn shift-and they encounter horrors that defy imagination. Along the way, author Grady Hendrix infuses sly social commentary on the natureâŠ
Like a caricature, satire lets you see reality better by exaggerating it. When satire is done right, every element, from the overall plot to the characters to paragraph-level details, is there to cast an exposing light on some part of our real world. They are books that exist on many levels, expose hubris and essential misunderstandings, and generally speak truth to power. They should leave the reader reassessing core assumptions about how the world works. Iâve written a best-selling nonfiction book about machine learning in the past, and I probably could have taken that approach again, but AI and American politics are both ripe for satire.
If I ever have to write a book to get past the censors, this book will be my model. Who knew that a mordant critique of a corrupt state could be so elegant, even whimsical?
The barbs are so oblique that the censor has a hard time finding something to pick on or even noticing it, and yet theyâre unmistakable to anyone living in a society with even a passing resemblance to Stalinâs Russiaâand after reading The Master and Margarita, I see those resemblances in every organization and every regime.
'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent
Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who willâŠ
Many of us were taught as children that life isnât fair. I never accepted this; shouldnât we do all we can to make life fair? I grew up to be a lifelong activist and a writer for social justice organizations. As a reader and writer, I love books about womenâs lives, especially women who realize that the world around them shapes their own experiences. Sometimes history is happening right here, right nowâand you know it. Those transformative moments spark the best stories, illuminating each book Iâve recommended.
What I loved most about this book is true of all Louise Erdrich novels: she creates such warm, complicated, fully human characters that I delight in their presence and grieve when I have to leave them at the bookâs end.
In this novel, history hit home in a devastating way when the U.S. government in the 1950s decided to solve its âIndian problemâ by simply reclassifying Native people as no longer Indianâa kind of paper genocide that wiped out Indigenous peopleâs cultural identity and tribal rights, such as land rights.
Sadly, this is all historical fact; the fiction comes in when Erdrich re-imagined in riveting detail the (also true) story of how one small tribe in North Dakota fought back.
It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an 'emancipation' bill; but it isn't about freedom - it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal?
Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, PixieâŠ
Forsaking Home is a story about the life of a man who wants a better future for his children. He and his wife decide to join Earth's first off-world colony. This story is about what risk takers and courageous settlers and what they would do for more freedom.
I am an Icelandic writer, best known for crime fiction although I have also written horror and childrenâs books. From a young age I have been a fan of creepiness and horror. My threshold for the macabre is thus high, maybe best witnessed by me noting that my first crime series featuring lawyer Thora was a cosy crime series, only to be reminded that in the first installment the eyes of a dead body were removed with a teaspoon, in the second a child was killed and the third featured decapitation. Whenever I need a reprise from writing crime I revert to horror, the best received of these being I Remember You.
Anyone obsessing over the disappearance of the Roanoke settlers will enjoy this book. As will those that have never heard of the incident or couldnât care less. It actually has nothing to do with Roanoke but at its core is the same type of mystery, the disappearance of the inhabitants of a whole town in the past. The pacing of the book is great and the creepiness is all-encompassing while you alternate between two timelines, accompanying a documentary crew in the present trying to make heads of what happened and the past events leading up to the mystery. To be corny, it is unputdownable.
Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed "The Lost Village," since she was a little girl. Her grandmother's entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the dead woman and abandoned baby have plagued her. She's gathered a small crew of filmmaking friends to spend a few days in the quiet village and make a film about what really happened.
There will be no turning back for them.
Not long after they've set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. PeopleâŠ