Fans pick 62 books like Lovecraft Country

The only reason I don’t list Love in the Ruins as my favorite novel is because the shadow of this book looms large over every speculative novel I read.

Both books are extraordinarily funny, but Love in the Ruins has become more of a comfy read, while I still find Gravity’s Rainbow complex and challenging. It’s a cross between slapstick and mind f*ck. I would issue a trigger alert for readers who find occasional perverse sex and violence uncomfortable, but I personally believe reading uncomfortable books can make us grow into better readers and better writers.

I love a sprawling family saga set in a small town. My husband’s father came from a small town in South Georgia that was founded by one of his ancestors. My husband’s grandfather, after visiting Chicago and being impressed by the big department stores he saw there, decided that what his tiny little town needed was a huge department store of its own. He built one, and amazingly, it was a success for many years, with folks coming from all around to marvel at its architectural sophistication and its dazzling array of wares. Like the fictional town of Perdido, Alabama, where the action is centered in Blackwater, everyone there knows everybody else, and nothing secret stays hidden for long.

On Easter Sunday, 1919, a flood engulfs Perdido. Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of the town’s most influential family, discovers a stranger named Elinor Dammert waiting patiently inside a room on… show more.

Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout

As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.

This 2011 novel is set in the Ten Thousand Islands off the southwest coast of Florida. I am drawn to the novel’s peculiar backdrop: a shabby alligator-wrestling theme park in the swamp.

Along with the fantastical setting, the reader is quickly lured into this place by the vivid, precocious voice of the thirteen-year-old narrator, Ava Bigtree, who is on a quest to rescue her sister, whom Ava believes to have been stolen away into the Underworld by Bird Man, a mysterious gentleman claiming to possess magical gifts.

The action is set in the fictional east Texas town of New Long Lincoln, where Daniel Russell returns after a long absence. He was 13 when his father tried to kill them both by driving his car into Moon Lake. Now a drought has caused the lake to evaporate and the car’s been found, with the remains of Daniel’s father inside, as well as an extra body in the trunk. Daniel teams up with a childhood friend who’s become a police officer to untangle a web of old grudges and strange murders.

Drowned towns – ones that are deliberately submerged in order to build dams and reservoirs – fascinate me. There’s one in Sussex County, New Jersey, called Walpack. It was intended to be buried under a man-made lake in the nineteen-seventies, as part of a project to build a dam across the Delaware River. It was a cause célèbre… show more.

I read this book every year. In my opinion, Walker Percy, along with Flannery O’Connor, is the premiere southern novelist of the last half of the 20th Century. I consider it one of the finest novels written and an example of the plotting, character development, use of language, and religious parody to which young novelists should aspire.

Percy’s novel blends Southern Gothic, science fiction, and comedy to create a world in which the racial divide in New Orleans blossoms into an apocalypse with hilarious and unpredictable results.

I’ve reread this book almost as many times as Love in the Ruins. Although the book isn’t as well-known as some of the others I’m recommending, the title’s appropriate because reading these pages walloped my brain.

The novel within a novel written by a character who escapes from an asylum combines conspiracies, mind-control, flying sting rays, doppelgangers, and a delicious writing style. What keeps me engrossed is the love Spenser shows for his characters and his ability to craft a complex storyline from what is basically a fairy tale.

What if elevator inspectors had their own influential guild? Not science fiction, not fantasy, and not even alternative history. Just a riveting, delightful, challenging ‘what if’ that does not fit in a box. In a shaft. In a skyscraper. When I first heard about this book, I thought elevator inspection might be, let’s say, resistant to novel-sized interrogation.

To this, I now say, behold the umbrella that fits in the purse or the king-sized mattress that arrives in a toddler-sized box. This book unfolds and puffs up deliberately and warmly, and eventually, you find yourself curled up, reading about the very nature of thought. In a person. In a society. You don’t want to turn out the light and stop. 

This novel about an African American family struggling to survive in early 20th century America touches upon many things, including African American soldiers coming home from WWI, the Great Migration north, and the world of 1930s Harlem.

It’s historical literary fiction and a mystery, but it’s ultimately a stunning novel about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family. Holloway is emerita professor of English and Law at Duke University, and I loved talking to her about her retirement career as an author!

In the Dark Spaces is a stunning YA novel breathed into life by its main character, Tamara, a heroine who grabbed my heart from the first lines and didn’t let go. 

Tamara loves her family above everything else. And when she’s separated from them in a universe torn apart by war, she must draw on all her strength and smarts to survive. Her gift for languages and ability to adapt gives her an advantage when she’s captured by the enemy. But she’s also forced to do things that terrify her and break her heart. I love Tamara’s unique voice, and the way it expresses the deep bonds that tie us to friends and family made my heart sing. She’s truly a heroine that embodies the fighting spirit.