100 books like The Creep

I loved Margaret Atwood’s book, a cautionary story that shows how the extreme distortion of religious ideologies can lead to devastating outcomes. Offred endures unimaginable hardship under the guise of religious piety, but the reality is much more twisted.

Her determination to survive in such harrowing circumstances is inspiring and challenges us to reflect on our views and norms. 

I loved this book because I worked in hotels before I became a butler, and the protagonist is a maid. You can walk into many situations in a hotel room, so a murder mystery is no big stretch. I love hotel or rich home dramas, especially if they portray the staff correctly. Domestic staff are generally likable, meticulous, quiet, and honest. This is a really nice, cozy murder mystery.

This book sticks the reader in the middle of a maternity ward in poverty and flu-stricken Dublin circa 1918. I was totally rooting for nurse Julia Powers, an experienced maternity nurse who works long, thankless shifts trying to keep women and their babies alive.

The lack of medicine, staffing, and money is appalling as women enter the hospital to give birth. Yet through empathy, determinism, and quick thinking, Julia, her trainee, and her patients find ways to help each other. It’s a tour de force in female friendship, intelligence, and problem-solving and an indictment of the medical incompetency of male physicians.

It illuminates a cross-section of Dublin citizens struggling with poverty, the Great Flu, and the aftermath of a horrendous war. I found the story moving, gripping, and somehow hopeful.

I like that a female teenager and an old woman are the heartbeat of this book. In a post-apocalyptic world, an Anishinabek tribe is cut off from humanity, unaware if others are alive after a blackout has destroyed the world. As the tribe scouts their way to a new location, it is a young woman, Nangohns, a skilled hunter, who becomes the quiet leader of the group.

I like how the tribe honors the experience of the old but encourages the young to find the gift they can offer the world. I really enjoyed watching the tribe reconnect with the land and their heritage. It was touching to see the respect they had for the environment and each other despite many harsh conditions and losses. And the female elder adds hilarity laced with wisdom as the group's matriarch, leading them into an unknown future.

In the comic books (and films) Batman and Joker are locked together in the eternal battle between good and evil. Except, as The Killing Joke so brilliantly explores, that’s not quite how Joker sees it. For Joker, they are both sides of the same coin. If Joker is seen as evil incarnate, then why, he asks, is Batman considered the opposite? The story has since been disowned by writer Moore, possibly because of the interminable number of nihilistic-styled super-hero stories that followed in its wake. But sometimes I think the writer’s dissonance from the subject matter adds to the sense of unease and chaos at play. And there is undeniable power at the root of the story, taken entirely from Joker’s impeccably flawed point of view. That it only takes ‘one bad day’ to turn an ordinary joe into one or the other, Joker or Batman.

From the get-go the reader is introduced to Lauren Fielding, a teenager living with a condition that makes her believe everything she is told. When the opportunity for her to surgically correct this comes up, she takes it and sets much of the plot in motion. What I love is the narrative style; a set of journal entries, scenes, and supporting materials which serve to present the events as Lauren and the people around her see it. This is a classic coming-of-age speculative fiction story with sprinkles of a possibly unreliable narrator, leaving the reader to follow along with the events and create their own conclusions about what is happening. Laura and the pacing her story provides are both memorable and noteworthy.

I love this book because nothing is as it seems, especially Autumn, the unreliable narrator, who is searching for her missing twin sister, Summer, who disappeared in a way that defies all reason.

It kept me guessing until the very end. And even though the answer Autumn uncovers about what happened to Summer is completely unexpected, given the circumstances of Autumn’s life experiences, it made perfect sense. I thought about this book for a long time after reading it.

This book expertly navigates the topics of mental health and sexual violence, as well as the plight of missing black women, which largely go unnoticed and underreported by the media. 

Kit Quinn is a psychologist who is brutally attacked by a prisoner while working. The same prisoner is under suspicion of murder and Kit is called in.

She, however doesn’t think they have the culprit. So ensues a fast-paced race to solve the case. This was one of the first psychological thrillers I ever read and served as a fantastic intro to the genre. It probably pushes the boundaries of believability but it remains one of my favourite books

This early American novel starts off with an episode of human spontaneous combustion, followed by repeated episodes of characters hearing disembodied voices.

Brown’s novel uses these Gothic devices and a couple of real-life murder cases to explore religious and political issues that preoccupied Americans in the years after the Revolution. How do we know whether we’re really being guided by reason? What is the basis of authority?

Most editions of Wieland include Brown’s prequel Memoirs of Carwin, which complicates the story by placing one of the main characters in an Illuminati-like organization. American Gothic literature pretty much starts here.  

After reading Darby Kane’s Pretty Little Wife, I knew I had to pick up The Replacement Wife, and boy, am I glad I did. The main character in this book is also a mom and wife, but unlike a lot of other domestic thrillers, Elisa Wright is happy with her life. The problem isn’t her suspiciously-acting husband, but her brother-in-law, who was going to marry her good friend…until that friend went missing. The dips and swerves in this book had me convinced I knew what was going to come next, but I did not! I’ll admit, I do love an unreliable narrator, but you’ve got to find a way to make me believe and relate, and Kane turned that trope upside down and spun it around.