Here are 74 books that Old Cold Cannibal fans have personally recommended if you like
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Growing up, I’d always been fascinated by science fiction narratives, having been suckered in by Star Warsat a very young age. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon The Hitchhiker’s GuideTo The Galaxy that I realized stories didn’t have to take everything so seriously. This pivoted to an obsession with comedy, leading me to write skits for the stage and screen in my late 20s as a fun side-gig along with my own comedic sci-fi novel series. I’ve always appreciated stories that lean into the lighter side of things. Reality is grim and dark enough as it is, our escapism doesn’t need to double down on that.
The Hike is a completely bizarre, surrealist masterpiece by former Deadspin Columnist Drew Magary. While it’s impossible to describe the plot, I personally recommend this book if you don’t mind being taken on a strange, strange journey filled with fantastical creatures, a bit of horror, and some mind-bending introspection. You might not know where you’re going to end up, but part of the fun is strapping in and enjoying the crazy ride. Fans of animation like Infinity Trainor Adventure Timemight enjoy this if they’re looking for something with a grittier, adult edge to it.
“The Hike just works. It’s like early, good Chuck Palahniuk. . . . Magary underhands a twist in at the end that hits you like a sharp jab at the bell. . . . It’s just that good.” —NPR.org
From the author of The Night the Lights Went Out and The Postmortal, a fantasy saga unlike any you’ve read before, weaving elements of folk tales and video games into a riveting, unforgettable adventure of what a man will endure to return to his family
Growing up, I’d always been fascinated by science fiction narratives, having been suckered in by Star Warsat a very young age. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon The Hitchhiker’s GuideTo The Galaxy that I realized stories didn’t have to take everything so seriously. This pivoted to an obsession with comedy, leading me to write skits for the stage and screen in my late 20s as a fun side-gig along with my own comedic sci-fi novel series. I’ve always appreciated stories that lean into the lighter side of things. Reality is grim and dark enough as it is, our escapism doesn’t need to double down on that.
Carmen Loup's The Audacity is the successor to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I've been looking for for a long time. Loup takes strands of Hitchhiker's Guide DNA lovingly engineers it into its own unique tale filled with bright, colorful, and snarky characters and a fun, insightful (and, indeed, inciteful) voice that rings incredibly true to an Americanized Douglas Adams (that is, lacking in British poise and restraint). The Audacity is simply an amazing sci-fi comedy from start to finish and feels like a love letter to The Hitchhiker's Guide and, indeed, to all its fans. Plus, the entire first trilogy is available now (with more to come!).
Rocket racing can be deadly, but working in food service is worse.
May’s humdrum life is flung into hyperdrive when she’s abducted, but not all aliens are out to probe her. She’s inadvertently rescued by Xan, an “I Love Lucy” obsessed alien with the orangest rocket ship in the universe.
But you still have to eat in space, and rocket racing is a quick, if life-threatening, way to make a living.
Finally, May has a career she loves and a friend to share her winnings with. Until a Chaos goddess possessing Xan’s ex decides to start a cult on Earth…
Growing up, I’d always been fascinated by science fiction narratives, having been suckered in by Star Warsat a very young age. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon The Hitchhiker’s GuideTo The Galaxy that I realized stories didn’t have to take everything so seriously. This pivoted to an obsession with comedy, leading me to write skits for the stage and screen in my late 20s as a fun side-gig along with my own comedic sci-fi novel series. I’ve always appreciated stories that lean into the lighter side of things. Reality is grim and dark enough as it is, our escapism doesn’t need to double down on that.
Lingeriais a sarcastic, humor-infused take on the portal fantasy, which forces the author of a beloved fantasy series into the world that he's written - and come to despise.
It's a solidly entertaining book that appropriately skewers a lot of the tropes of fantasy fiction and the associated fandom.
I enjoyed the world of Lingeria and it's definitely a fun read for people seeking to scratch that Discworlditch.
LINGERIA: A wondrous world of centaurs, goblins, elves, knights, bounty hunters, giant centipedes, angry bookies, four-armed Yetis, and a single wizard. There is just one problem – Lingeria shouldn’t exist. It is the product of acclaimed, and depressed, author Norman Halliday
So, how did Norman come to be sleeping on the couch of one of his fiction characters? And why are Norman’s novels revered as Lingerian scripture? Also, why does all of Lingeria believe Norman to be God? Actually, a better question is … Who s this cruel wizard, about whom Norman never wrote, that seized power over the land?…
Growing up, I’d always been fascinated by science fiction narratives, having been suckered in by Star Warsat a very young age. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon The Hitchhiker’s GuideTo The Galaxy that I realized stories didn’t have to take everything so seriously. This pivoted to an obsession with comedy, leading me to write skits for the stage and screen in my late 20s as a fun side-gig along with my own comedic sci-fi novel series. I’ve always appreciated stories that lean into the lighter side of things. Reality is grim and dark enough as it is, our escapism doesn’t need to double down on that.
World Enough (And Time)is an absolute gem of a book that reads like Fawlty Towers set on Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic (if you’re old enough to remember that game!). It reads like a drawn-out comedy of errors that balances madcap situations and multiple outlandish characters into a brilliant narrative that – albeit a bit long at times – dovetails nicely with the protagonist's emotional journey. This is one to pick up if you enjoy character-driven stories told with wit and a bit of poignancy.
In the 24th century, companies offer deep-space cruises on luxury ships, but no one takes a deep-space cruise for pleasure. Because the ships travel at nearly the speed of light, 20 years pass on Earth during a standard cruise, while the passengers age only two years. Most passengers are sufferers of degenerative diseases who hope that, during those extra Earth years, medical science will catch up with their maladies. Many of these passengers are elderly; nearly all are fantastically rich. And then there's Jeremiah Brown. 31 years old and in the pink of health, Jeremiah is "rich" only through his…
Having known families affected by substance abuse, I’ve long been fascinated by the resiliency of addicts’ relatives and close friends. Equally compelling to me, as a one-time wannabe psychologist, was how living with substance abusers shaped people’s characters and lives. But while the search for a recovering addict drives Beyond Billicombe’s plot, the book is also an ode of sorts to North Devon, the area of England where I spent three of the happiest years of my life. Though I now live outside New York City, I haven’t given up hope on being able to move back there someday.
Dealing with an addicted child or sibling is traumatic enough; when the addict is your parent, the person who is supposed to protect and support you, the fear and betrayal are ramped up to an unbearable level. One of the Boys captures this in all its harrowing detail. Two barely teenaged boys move with their father from Kansas to New Mexico, where the father’s descent into meth addiction obliterates any sense of responsibility, affection, and decency he might once have possessed. Narrated by the younger son, One of the Boys is more than a realistic depiction of addiction; it also shows how far children will go to gain or retain a parent’s love, which is what makes the story so devastating.
A father and his boys have won 'the war': the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave Kansas and drive through the night to their new apartment in Albuquerque. Settled in new schools, the brothers join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. Soon his missteps - the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late-night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters - become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching him transform into someone they no longer recognize.
I was born and raised in New Mexico and it’s a part of me. New Mexicans will tell you that it’s impossible to describe its uniqueness, that you must experience it for yourself. That may be partially true, but writers have done a great job incorporating the majesty of the landscape, the earthiness of the people, the eclectic nature of its values, and ultimately the spell it casts. I’ve set quite a few books in New Mexico and have tried to show how these layers fit together for me. Ultimately, it’s called The Land of Enchantment for many reasons and we do our best to share them with our readers.
This is a nonfiction book and typical of New Mexico, as there are whole chapters of its history nobody really knows about. The (probably) first white American woman to come into the territory was a Jewish woman who accompanied her merchant husband and brothers. Even more interesting, merchants and traders weren’t even the first Jewish people - “Crypto-Jews” who were fleeing the inquisition came to New Mexico long before it was part of the US and kept their identity secret to assimilate. This is depicted with a character in Alburquerque and that perfectly encapsulates one of the overriding things about New Mexico and its tales – a deep sense of connectedness, across people, across the land.
In this first history of the Jews in New Mexico--from the colonial period to the present day--the author continuously ties the Jewish experience to the evolution of the societies in which they lived and worked. The book begins with one of the least known but most fascinating aspects of New Mexico Jewry--the crypto-Jews who came north to escape the Mexican Inquisition. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the story is more familiar: German merchants settling in Las Vegas and Santa Fe and then coming to Albuquerque after the railroad arrived. To these accounts the author adds considerable nuance and detail,…
When I make a snarky remark during a party, chances are one person will catch my eye with the amused look that says, “I saw what you did there.” Everyone else will keep right on talking. But in a book, the reader is right there in the character’s head, which lets your audience catch those subtle humorous comments. In my mystery series, The Accidental Detective, Kate shares witty observations about life with the reader – making Kate funnier than I am. I don’t do as much slapstick and joking (in life or in fiction), but I enjoy writers who pull off those forms of humor well. Humor makes life’s challenges bearable
Matilda moves to the small New Mexico town of Goodnight after inheriting a house, a small newspaper, and two dogs. She learns just how odd the town is when she starts investigating the murder of a reporter. The town of Goodnight is pretty bizarre, but speaking as someone who lives in a small town in New Mexico, Goodnight is more believable than it might seem to an outsider. I prefer books where weirdness is something to celebrate, and here the characters embrace their crazy with enthusiastic joy. This story is part screwball comedy and part mystery, and both work.
Matilda Dare can’t sleep. Her insomnia is one more reason to move to the quirky small town of Goodnight, New Mexico after she inherits a house, a small newspaper, and two old dogs there. But despite the Goodnight name, Matilda still spends hers wide awake, and she has good reason after a reporter is murdered. With a mystery to solve, she begins to investigate the town and uncovers more suspects than she knows what to do with.
Meanwhile, the hottie cowboy sheriff is doing his own investigation into Matilda, and the mysterious, handsome stranger, who just happens to live with…
For me, writing novels is an attempt in metaphor to clear the ledger of unfinished business in my crazy, contradictory, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and always messy mind. All the books I've written have long and often intensely personal backstories. All of us live two lives, a life in the world of things, relationships, and time (needs), and a life in the world we create in our minds (wants). When needs and wants come into conflict we have the elements that make a novel. I see my job as a novelist to provide an exciting story and plot that carries a reader through the material world.
I read Death Comes for the Archbishop when I was fifteen. It was my first encounter with literary prose that was not assigned by a teacher, and it changed my life for the better by giving me a better understanding of myself and the human drama. I thought at the time: This is the best book I ever read. I re-read the novel in 2017 and thought: This is the best book I ever read. There’s no sex in it, but it’s a love story between two men. Cather’s novel has guided my work as a writer for more than sixty-five years.
From one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century—"a truly remarkable book" (The New York Times),an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape,…
Sometimes I have to take a trip back to my reading "roots": gothic mystery and suspense. This list is a deep dive into some of my very favorite vintage gothic authors and ones that I consider to be icons of the genre. These writers formed the foundation not only for my reading tastes but also for who I have become as a writer. The memories of my younger self come flooding back when I revisit these authors and their works as I have done with this list. Some of these novels are hard to come by now but, in my opinion, the older and more beat-up paperback, the better.
It’s so tough to choose just one novel from Phyllis Whitney’s voluminous stack.
She is quite arguably the queen of the gothic suspense genre. With this pick published in 1974, I am highlighting my very first read by her.
Why do I love it? It rocked my world and, to this day, draws me right into its web.
With all her books, she depicts unique settings that allow for “armchair travel”. This one is set in what was a completely exotic location to my younger self, the American Southwest.
I also learned about the element of suspense from this novel mixed together with gothic details. The mask and how it fits into this mystery is so chilling that I have never forgotten it.
A young woman returns to her grandfather's house in New Mexico in hopes of obtaining information about her mother whose death remains surrounded by mystery
Deserts are inherently mysterious places. This likely explains why so many good mystery novels have been set in them. We spent better than forty years doing field work in the American Southwest, and we have found mystery novels based in this region among the very best. All good mystery novels must have strong plots and memorable characters, but to us an equally important component is setting. Jane is a botanist with expertise in the use of plant evidence in solving murder cases. Carl is a vertebrate zoologist and conservation biologist. Upon retirement we began writing mysteries. Some are set in the desert grasslands of Arizona, and all are inspired by the southwestern authors we have selected as our favorites.
Bill Gastner is the sort of detective you’d expect to find working the mean streets of an inner city: a rumpled overweight insomniac addicted to coffee and cigarettes. Instead his beat is the Chihuahan Desert of a fictitious county on the border between New and Old Mexico. In Heartshot, Undersheriff Gastner must solve multiple murders related to the illegal drug trade, including the loss of a fellow officer. The killer turns out to be somebody nearly as surprising and dangerous as the place where Gastner finds him. In his first book in the Posadas County series, author Havill skillfully brings to life both the rewards and challenges of life in a harsh yet beautiful place, where the people of two cultures are trying to figure out ways to live with one another.
First book in the Posadas County Mystery Series When a series of crimes disrupts the tranquil community in Posadas County, New Mexico, a group of small-town cops will have to fight for their lives to keep the county safe Posadas County, New Mexico, has very few mean streets and no city-slick cop shop. But it has an earnest, elected County Sheriff and his aging Undersheriff-William C. Gastner. Pushing sixty, widower Bill has no other life than in law enforcement-and doesn't want one, even if he's being nudged gently toward retirement. Then big time trouble strikes. A car full of teens,…
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