Here are 100 books that Tales of Horror and the Supernatural fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was a child, my father and older brother read Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comic books. I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted by the astonishing adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. These illustrated tales of lost civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. Later, I learned that Scrooge’s creator was Carl Barks, a comic artist who was heavily inspired by H. Rider Haggard. It is now clear that Carl Barks inculcated in me, when I was eight years old, my Victorian/Edwardian adventure literary tastes. But it was twenty years later that my literary tastes finally became dedicated to turn-of-the-19th-century literary styles and themes.
When I was 28 I chanced upon H. Rider Haggard’s book when it was republished by Ballantine’s iconic Adult Fantasy Series. The story is about Leonard Outram, who, in an attempt to restore his family's fortune, commits to a perilous journey to Africa, where he discovers a lost city and is tempted by its treasures.
This was my first encounter with Haggard, and it affected me deeply; there was a mysterious something permeating that novel that I found refreshing and illuminating. It seemed to me that the story did not come alive due to characterizations or plot developments so much as it did to turnings of fate. I collected all 68 of his books. Thereafter, 80 percent of all my own writing has emulated Rider Haggard.
The People of the Mist is a classic lost race fantasy novel written by H. Rider Haggard. It is the tale of a British adventurer seeking wealth in the wilds of Africa, finding romance, and discovering a lost race and its monstrous god.
When I was a child, my father and older brother read Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comic books. I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted by the astonishing adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. These illustrated tales of lost civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. Later, I learned that Scrooge’s creator was Carl Barks, a comic artist who was heavily inspired by H. Rider Haggard. It is now clear that Carl Barks inculcated in me, when I was eight years old, my Victorian/Edwardian adventure literary tastes. But it was twenty years later that my literary tastes finally became dedicated to turn-of-the-19th-century literary styles and themes.
When I read the novel, I was amazed because it was difficult for me to get my head around the idea that the tale was virtually perfect and that it was created by a mere human being.
The story follows David Fairchild, a young antiquary studying ancient manuscripts at Cambridge. Central to the novel is the obscure Cambridge library, where the mysterious Westchurch manuscripts are preserved and sequestered away from the world at large.
I found this book both wildly entertaining and wildly thought-provoking about the mechanics of the universe, the persistence of spirits, and the drama inherent in cosmic astronomy. Thereafter, I recommended the book for 40 years. This epigraph describes the book perfectly: There was logic and coherence enough in the whole affair to persuade me that what I'd stumbled onto—of all the preposterous perils of scholarship!—was a haunted manuscript.
American scholar and lettered medievalist, David Fairchild, swings a plum sabbatical at Cambridge University, where he is given full access to a rare manuscript written by a mad monk of shameful repute—Geoffrey Gervaise. The Westchurch Manuscript has lain neglected in the University vaults for centuries . . . or has it? A shadowy nefarious cabal has had an interest in the manuscript for a very long time and sharpens its claws anytime anyone probes its secrets. Expecting a pleasant year pursuing his passion for medieval literature, Fairchild quickly finds himself entangled in the centuries old curse that surrounds the manuscript…
When I was a child, my father and older brother read Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comic books. I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted by the astonishing adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. These illustrated tales of lost civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. Later, I learned that Scrooge’s creator was Carl Barks, a comic artist who was heavily inspired by H. Rider Haggard. It is now clear that Carl Barks inculcated in me, when I was eight years old, my Victorian/Edwardian adventure literary tastes. But it was twenty years later that my literary tastes finally became dedicated to turn-of-the-19th-century literary styles and themes.
I flat-out love Michael Crichton’s 1980 jungle-adventure novel Congo, which uses for inspiration H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 breakout adventure King Solomon’s Mines, the protagonist of which is hunter/trader Allan Quatermain. King Solomon’s Mines was about seeking diamonds in central Africa, as is Congo.
The main character in the book is Karen Ross who is asked by her high-tech company to learn why the previous diamond-seeking expedition vanished. Beyond that, the book perfectly exemplifies the technical thriller Crichton invented in the 1960s with Andromeda Strain, written on two levels at once, the action and adventure layer meshing seamlessly with the layer explaining the world’s most up-to-the-minute sophisticated technology.
Note that the last sentence of Congo reads: “The projected intersection point now marked a field of black quatermain lava with an average depth of eight hundred meters.” The name “Quatermain” is sufficiently close to the geological term “quaternary”…
The search for diamonds, a crucial scientific breakthrough and a mythical ruined city set off this adventure into the heart of the Congolese jungle.
The American expedition is led by Karen Ross, desperate to find her husband and recover the data he found before he disappeared. But there are other teams trying to get there first, and the way is strewn with life-threatening dangers -- plane crashes, civil wars and a dormant volcano awoken by dormant explosives.
In the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, Congo is a novel of high adventure from the master of the…
When I was a child, my father and older brother read Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comic books. I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted by the astonishing adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. These illustrated tales of lost civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. Later, I learned that Scrooge’s creator was Carl Barks, a comic artist who was heavily inspired by H. Rider Haggard. It is now clear that Carl Barks inculcated in me, when I was eight years old, my Victorian/Edwardian adventure literary tastes. But it was twenty years later that my literary tastes finally became dedicated to turn-of-the-19th-century literary styles and themes.
To my mind, this is the finest of all Christmas stories. Written by Seabury Quinn in 1938, it successfully combines two supremely different sorts of Christmas stories. One style is religious and involves the Nativity and the infant Jesus. The other type, of course, is tales of Santa Claus, often explaining his origin.
I cannot recall any fiction that combines these two motifs, a type of story that is sadly missing from our culture except for this book, which blends the true meaning of Christmas with the Santa Claus narrative and does it to perfection.
Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, for almost two centuries, has been the touchstone Christmas tale, successfully engendering joy and rebirth in countless readers and viewers. Yet, nowhere in that short novel is Jesus or his birth mentioned, no iconic Nativity moments or words mentioned at all. Quinn quite simply brought together the Nativity and…
Drawing upon the original Christian legends that coalesced over centuries into the familiar, jolly form of Saint Nicholas, pulp fiction pioneer Seabury Quinn weaves a spellbinding new origin for this most beloved of children’s icons in his classic novella Roads.“I have not tried to paint the portrait of a man, but merely to present a personality and hazard a guess as to the motivation that makes Santa Claus the wondrous figure he is — a figure who more than any other exemplifies the beauty of selflessness.” — Seabury Quinn
I have the expertise for this topic because I was raised in a loving home with a mother who struggled with bipolar disorder. At times my life was hilariously adventurous or heart-wrenchingly sad. Given little direction, I married an alcoholic and then went on to work at a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center. I have fallen on hard times, but at the age of thirty-two, as a single mother collecting welfare, I managed to grief, heal and dig myself out, creating a rewarding life. I am optimistic, and I try to find humour in all things, especially after the tears and healing have subsided. My writing has brought me tremendous healing and joy.
A harrowing and beautiful tale of two sisters growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother. The author describes a fine line between gentle artistic creativity and debilitating mental illness. The reader will come away with a better understanding of how deeply children are affected growing up in a dysfunctional and traumatic environment. A mother's love and a journey to forgiveness teach us the complex meaning of love.
In the tradition of The Glass Castle, two sisters confront schizophrenia in this New York Times bestselling poignant memoir about family and mental illness. Through stunning prose and original art, The Memory Palace captures the love between mother and daughter, the complex meaning of truth, and one family’s capacity for forgiveness.
*A Washington Post Best Book of the Year * *The National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Best Autobiography*
“People have abandoned their loved ones for much less than you’ve been through,” Mira Bartók is told at her mother’s memorial service. It is a poignant observation about the relationship…
I’d been writing for forty years before I could write about the biggest story in my life. My 25 non-fiction books about the American West—landscape, Native peoples, conservation—are a joy to research, photograph, and create. But I had unfinished emotional business: my mentally ill brother who left home when I was six, never to return. After everyone in my family was gone, it was finally safe. I began to recreate my brother’s life, reveling in research. I know how to do that. Opening myself emotionally to the heart of my family story took far longer. Empathy is a choice, and I’ve made my choice.
Robert Whitaker’s books inform my work. Both Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic provided crucial policy background as I searched for my brother's personhood. Whitaker’s deep research and ferocious insistence that we rethink psychiatric care guided me into the world of mental illness, the history of treatment, and the controversy over forcing medication on unwilling people. I sympathize with Whitaker and the people who believe anti-psychotics make things worse. But I also meet many with diagnoses who believe in the mantra, “take your meds.” Best practices cannot be one-size (pill)-fits all. I end my own book by imagining the best possible world for mental health treatment—guided both by Whitaker and his most vehement critic, E. Fuller Torrey.
Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs. In what is perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, Mad in America examines how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies to prove that…
According to my mother, my first words were, “what’s that?” and I believe that’s indicative of the level of curiosity with which I try to approach life. That curiosity led me to write books about how we can better love ourselves and each other when depression is gumming up the works. Talking about mental illness is hard, and I aim to make it easier. I’m not a doctor or therapist. I am best described as a “sex writer with a theatre degree” and I like to say my work focuses on sex, mental health, and how none of us are broken.
It can be incredibly frustrating to try to talk about how broken the mental healthcare system is (especially in the United States). Most people have no frame of reference for it.
Similarly the impact mental illness can have on family and loved ones is, for many, uncharted territory. Enter No One Care About Crazy People.
Powers expertly weaves the history of mental healthcare in America together with the story of his family’s battles with schizophrenia. The result is a heartbreaking and beautiful and horrifying and eye-opening book that leaves you better equipped to have those frustrating conversations.
I’m not going to lie to you, this is a hard one to read. It hurts. That said, it is one of my all-time favorite books.
"Extraordinary and courageous . . . No doubt if everyone were to read this book, the world would change."---New York Times Book Review
New York Times-bestselling author Ron Powers' critically acclaimed narrative of the social history of mental illness in America paired with the deeply personal story of his two sons' battles with schizophrenia.
From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the infamous eugenics era to the follies of the anti-psychiatry movement to the current landscape in which too many families struggle alone to manage afflicted love ones, Powers limns our fears and myths about mental…
Long before I trained to be a clinical psychologist, I was drawn to questions about how the human mind works and what it means to suffer and to heal. Even now, after having digested countless academic papers and books on these subjects, I continue to gravitate toward fiction, memoir, and popular nonfiction that grapples with the complexities of mental illness and psychotherapy without the jargon and insularity of many professional texts. These are some of my favorites—I hope you find them as illuminating as I did.
When a friend first handed me her copy of Esmé Weijun Wang’s book, I imagined it would sit unread on my shelf for a long time. Given how much time I spend in my professional life working with people with severe mental illness, I assumed Wang’s personal account of her struggle to find a diagnosis and effective, compassionate treatment would be redundant for me.
I was so, so, so wrong. I read nearly the entire essay collection in one sitting—it is stunning, somehow scholarly and deeply personal at the same time. The book is required reading for anyone who wants to better understand one of the least understood diagnoses in the history of psychiatry.
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esme Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of…
When my older sister died, I felt a pressing need to tell her story. Rachel was a strong, courageous woman, who endured decades in a psychiatric system that failed her. She was a survivor, but the stigma of severe mental illness made her an outcast from most of society. Even so, her enduring passion for poetry inspired me to write about her. I sought out other people’s stories. I enrolled in workshops and therapy. I devoured books and blogs by survivors, advocates, and family members. Everything I read pointed to a troubling rift between the dominant medical model and more humane, less damaging ones. This list represents a slice of my learning.
Before my sister became so ill, people used to say we looked alike. But ours was just a resemblance. In this novel, Dominick looks exactly like his brother, who has schizophrenia. Dominick encounters his identical twin every time he looks in a mirror. And he is terrified.
I first read this book 25 years ago and inhaled every one of the intertwined subplots in its 900 + pages. Recently, I re-read the “story within the story,” a memoir by Dominick’s grandfather. I became fascinated by his story about the Sicilian market where one chicken transforms into two whole ones—a bit of magical realism about twinning, schizophrenia, and hope. I too excavated old family documents to understand why my sibling suffered so much.
#1 New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection
"Thoughtful . . . heart-wrenching . . . . An exercise in soul-baring storytelling—with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget." — USA Today
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself—a journey…
One of the reasons I wanted to write about and explore mental health was because I was always fascinated by how the mind works and how it can turn on you without provocation. How and why some people can power through dark times, while others struggle is a topic that, within the African American community, isn't frequently discussed. Often the advice given to someone about how to get through depression or anxiety is to pray or just dig deep and power through. It is the idea that because our ancestors suffered so much, those of us living in "easier" times should have nothing to be sad about that seems to prevent us from asking for help or getting therapy.
Lily’s mom has schizophrenia and Lily is terrified that she might get it too. Lily gets personally involved in a story at her newspaper internship about an abandoned elephant calf. Feeling a kinship with the elephant, Lily goes through extraordinary lengths to make sure the calf finds a safe home, while at the same time, realizing that she has begun to show signs of mental illness. Fischer combines mental illness, family, friendship, and animal welfare into a riveting, thought-provoking book. I loved how she showed the reader how a character can live with the early stages of schizophrenia without losing her sense of self and purpose.
"Nancy Richardson Fischer deserves high praise for her well-researched and endearing novel. Her imagination, craft, and effort has resulted in her writing a piece of fiction that is worthy of winning a prize. This really is an outstanding piece of fiction that cannot be recommended enough.” –New York Journal of Books
A Parade Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2018! A YA Books Central Buzzworthy Books of Fall 2018! A Publishers Lunch Fall Buzz Book!
Don’t miss one of the most heartwarming young adult novels of the year. Perfect for fans of Water for Elephants, Wonder and All the Bright Places,…
