100 books like The Ones That Got Away

Blending sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man takes readers to places they’ve likely only seen in their dreams or, more likely, their nightmares.

From heartbreaking tales of space disasters (“Kaleidoscope”) to frightening tales of a VR nursery gone wild (“The Veldt”), the strength of Bradbury’s legendary fiction is found in the way he brought humanity to even the wildest, most out-of-this-world premise. In addition, his immaculate prose is as much a joy to appreciate on the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence levels, as it is on the story level.

The Illustrated Man was one of the first short story collections I ever read. The fact that so many of the tales included within its pages still stick with me to this day is proof of its power and legacy.

While trending more toward the fantasy side, then the previous picks on the list here, Link still manages to pull out some of the most unsettling moments in a short story that I’ve ever read.

When I finished her story “Some Zombie Contingency Plans,” I found myself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the story and reading it fresh. Link is masterful when it comes to weaving together narrative threads, playing literary sleight of hand. While the collection and one of the stories within are called “Magic for Beginners,” she’s very much an expert.

The cross-genre blending is very much following in the footsteps of Bradbury, giving a more fantasy-style focus where his work trends toward science fiction.

While his stories might be some of the shortest word-count-wise from the tales featured in these listed collections, Brian Evenson’s prose does not lack for the weird and terrifying.

With many pieces going no further than the flash fiction of 1000 or so words, Evenson’s writing has taught me that it’s not about how many words you use, but how you use them.

In this collection, he adds Westerns to the mix of genres where horror and the weird can take seed and bloom into something mind-bendingly unsettling. “Black Bark” is one such story. At first, it seems to be a tale of two Wild West bandits on the run but as the nightmarish end arrives, readers will find they’ve been reading a very different tale all along.

When I first read this compendium edition collecting the three volumes of Barker’s ground-breaking debut short-story collections my interest in horror and dark fantasy was only recently reignited. Stories like “Fear” and “In the Hills, The Cities” (one of my favorite short stories of all time) opened my mind to the possibilities of fear and phantasmagoria that one could achieve in a brief span of time.

Barker’s prose and characters are lurid, provocative, and unashamed of who/what they are. Not only was he taking risks in crafting these stories, he was also inviting subsequent generations of writers to express themselves fearlessly. While Stephen King’s impact on contemporary mainstream horror and thriller writing is well known, Barker’s hand in shaping the more literary and plain weird side of horror should not be overlooked.

SGJ has such a unique voice, it’s hard to deny this collection its props. Here you have a wide range of themes and unique characterization, and I think there’s a lot to be learned from a collection such as this. Dialogue, character building, tension; this is like a guide to writing good fiction.

This is a more modern pick that is very quickly becoming a cult classic. Told entirely through emails and message board postings, it lays out a very dark story of psychological manipulation between two women. I love found footage horror movies, and this book gives you that same feeling of discovering something you aren’t meant to see (or read).

There are many negatives about this book that told me to stay away. For me, the subject that deserved to be highlighted is forgiveness. The way the author weaved it into this story was perfect. The topic does not fit with the genre, and though paranormal and suspenseful, forgiveness ties it over for me.

Our Trespasses’ negative was the paranormal side of the book. I’m not a big fan of the genre but once my interest was piqued, I really enjoyed the book. In the end, it wasn’t that big negative, but it made me hesitant to read at first.

After a “massacre” of a herd of elk on a protected reservation forest—a scene which spoke more of frenzied bloodlust than hunting for sustenance—four Blackfoot men become the prey of a creature bent on revenge.

Jones’s narrative satisfied my thirst for wholly original horror while exploring the clash of Native American traditional and contemporary culture. The story touches on the characters’ drive to assimilate, guilt and sense of identity, and the need to move beyond resentments to create a life worth living.

I loved the originality of the beast, the slice of reservation life, and the endearing, flawed characters, all rendered with gorgeous precision.

This book isn’t nearly as well known as the others except to real aficionados of the genre. But it’s one of the scariest evil house novels ever written, in part because of the surprising twist at the end. A young couple decides to get out of the city for the summer and rent a house in upstate New York. Right away, there’s something odd: an elderly woman lives in the house, and she stays locked in her room all the time. As the days go by, it becomes obvious that something weird and terrifying is happening in the house, and there’s a reason the couple got it for such a cheap price. And by the time they discover the truth, it might be too late.

Water, water everywhere—but not in the American West. I first read Reisner’s book soon after its publication in 1986, when it presented a haunting, frightening future for the western United States that is being realized today. The book reveals the inadequacy of the management of water in the western states that began as soon as there was settlement, and it takes an especially hard look at the treaties surrounding the Colorado River, which has all but disappeared in the past few years, causing panic at the Hoover Dam and in Las Vegas, Arizona, and Mexico. Reisner amply demonstrates why major cities should not be built in semi-arid and arid climes—and still, the western states’ populations continue to explode.