10 books like The Fall of the House of Usher

I write science fiction mostly. I’ve recently turned my attention to history. The shared interest is in the changing ground of human interaction. In a way, we are all aliens to each other (which is one of the chief fascinations with fiction to begin with, the psychologies involved). After 30-plus years as a writer, I am more and more drawn to work that reveals the differences and the similarities. Unique contexts throws all this into stark relief.

I have always loved novels and stories in which houses have a strong presence, beginning with Nathanial Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the Houses of Usher, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In tales like these, the family home — whether a birthright or an accidental place of abode — not only provides a shivery, Gothic atmosphere but also stands as a metaphor for the sicknesses that can sometimes fester in families -- paranoia, isolation, emotional incest. Belle Reve, Blanche, and Stella's decaying and sold-off ancestral home, hovers over “A Streetcar Named Desire.” My favorite house-themed books begin with two works by the incomparable Shirley Jackson.

I have always loved novels and stories in which houses have a strong presence, beginning with Nathanial Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the Houses of Usher, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In tales like these, the family home — whether a birthright or an accidental place of abode — not only provides a shivery, Gothic atmosphere but also stands as a metaphor for the sicknesses that can sometimes fester in families -- paranoia, isolation, emotional incest. Belle Reve, Blanche, and Stella's decaying and sold-off ancestral home, hovers over “A Streetcar Named Desire.” My favorite house-themed books begin with two works by the incomparable Shirley Jackson.

I have always loved novels and stories in which houses have a strong presence, beginning with Nathanial Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the Houses of Usher, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In tales like these, the family home — whether a birthright or an accidental place of abode — not only provides a shivery, Gothic atmosphere but also stands as a metaphor for the sicknesses that can sometimes fester in families -- paranoia, isolation, emotional incest. Belle Reve, Blanche, and Stella's decaying and sold-off ancestral home, hovers over “A Streetcar Named Desire.” My favorite house-themed books begin with two works by the incomparable Shirley Jackson.

I’ve been fascinated with the future ever since I watched 2001 Space Odyssey. An amazing spaceship that could help us explore other planets! Then all that weird stuff about an A.I. gone crazy and apes banging sticks around monoliths. What the…? That curiosity smashed into a major concern at the age of fifteen on a canoe trip where I was trying to work out how to live and work closely with other humans - and failing. It turns out humans are crazy creatures. We love being together, and doing amazing things together, but that can be really hard. So leadership and the future fused into a lifelong passionate pursuit.

I’m mostly known for my zombie/post-apocalypse novels and being a prepper. So why did I choose the revenge topic and what qualifies me as an expert? Zombies and apocalypse storytelling were never my first love. My first has always been reading stories of revenge both true-life and fictional. This helped inspire and drive me as a writer in my early days in this genre. The stories by the authors I have listed here not only influenced me in my writing style but also fueled me to write my own revenge story anthology. But mostly, I have a very twisted mind!

I’ve always been inspired by the setting as character. Place is powerful, especially when that place is touched by the natural world. Between growing up in the rural American South and doing fieldwork with biologists, nature has wormed its way into the majority of my work. And as a queer horror writer, I deeply value horror stories that have us in the protagonist’s role. I’ve curated this list to reflect all of that at once: queer protagonists trying to survive in environments that would love to eat them alive. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

I am the author of the Byzantine Trilogy (in 4 parts). These books depict the difficult beginning, decadent apogee, and sad end of the Byzantine empire. I think it is important to make historical fiction vivid, to immerse the reader in a distant time and place, with all its sights, smells, sounds, and tastes, as experienced by someone who was really there. I am also interested in what people believed, and why. For that reason, my historical novels are all first-person narratives, stories told by the people who lived through them. Here are some of the fictional memoirs that inspired me to start writing.

Throughout my career as a historian I’ve been interested in the expansion of the Iberian world and its consequences for societies and cultures in Spain as well as Spanish America, especially Mexico. I knew that the Caribbean, the first site of European activity in the Americas, played an important role in that story, yet paradoxically it didn’t seem to receive much attention from historians, at least in the U.S. When I finally decided to focus my research on the period immediately following Columbus’s first voyages, I entered into a complex and dynamic world of danger, ambition, exploitation, and novelty. I hope to open that world to others in my book.

I’m a writer and an editor with eclectic interests. I’ve published two books of popular history—Da Vinci's Ghost (2012), about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), about the map that gave America its name. I’ve also written extensively for national publications on such topics as the sociology of new religious movements, privacy protection in the Internet age, the Voynich manuscript, the revisionist study of the Qur’an, the revival of ancient Greek music, and alphabet reform in Azerbaijan. I’m presently a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. From 1988-1990, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.