50 books like The People in the Trees

This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.

The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.

I’m fascinated by the in-depth character development and details in this book. The film is a classic, but I think the book is even better. Many people think of Hannibal Lecter as the obvious villain of Silence of the Lambs, forgetting that Clarice and the FBI were seeking his guidance to find “Buffalo Bill,” a fictional serial killer attacking women.

Buffalo Bill is an amalgamation of real serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Gary Heidnik. By cherry-picking the methods and traits of real killers, I think Harris created a truly terrifying villain. I find the characters, and especially the villain, to be rooted in reality, making them stick in your mind long after the last page.

At the beginning of this book, I recognized the ingredients that make up popular erotic novels. The main character, Edie, a Black woman and struggling artist, is beginning a relationship with an older, wealthy, successful white man in an open marriage. There’s a power imbalance. To a certain extent, this excites Edie, and in this way, the book fits neatly into the parameters of the genre.

However, the relationship becomes messy, and Edie’s life, both with and away from Eric, is fraught with bad decisions. Race, wealth, and gender intersect with sex in a complex and uncomfortable milieu. Through all of this, and with the guidance of Eric’s wife, Edie begins to make progressive, less destructive choices, and as she does, her art progresses.

Another alien novel, but one of the strangest and most profound I’ve read. Isserly drives around in her van in the wilds of Scotland, picking up hitchhikers. But she is no ordinary woman; in fact, she isn’t human at all, but a modified alien tasked with finding humans to be turned into fast food for an alien world.

It is a darkly ironic, strange, and disturbing novel that asks questions about how we treat animals, cleverly reversing its language to refer to humans as aliens and aliens as humans. It felt to me that this book was able to touch on many of the evils of capitalism, not just mass farming but also the treatment of women and women’s bodies. But it doesn’t do this in an obvious way.

It’s an alien novel that’s low on overt science fiction; it’s gritty and real, emotional and lonely. I wasn’t the same… show more.

When a wife finds a letter addressed to her from her husband stating that it can only be opened once he is dead because it contains his darkest secret, she decides to open it while he is alive.

What ensues is a journey through deception, shocking truths, and the fallout of the secret being exposed.

With the secret revealed, finishing the novel leaves you wondering if you can truly trust anyone, even the ones closest to you. 

A lot of books by Herman Koch deal with the failures of adulthood and the inexplainable violence of men (i.e., The Dinner).

However, Summer House with Swimming Pool is littered with masculine rage and revenge as the story takes you through a doctor’s recount of the summer that changes his life – and how that affects his future procedures.

The complexity of emotion written into Dr. Marc Schlosser’s character is quite a feat, as well as the sharp dry humor throughout the book that deals with serious dark topics. 

This thriller is a compulsively readable novel.

In dueling POVs of a gay couple, Vernon explores their relationship, with its power imbalances and manipulations, in all its messiness. Neither narrator is being honest with the other, and the novel is set in motion when Oliver decides to visit a bathhouse where a would-be trick attacks him, making him fear for his life.

The rest of the novel ping-pongs between the narrators, both of whom are concealing so much from each other for very different reasons. 

Don’t be fooled by the fact that this is a tiny book – a novella, really, and a short one at that. It is no less creepy or affecting than the others on my list.

This is the story of a small French town gripped, briefly, by an illogical and insurmountable hysteria, and the way that played out for one very unfortunate man. Eat Him If You Like is both graphic and incredibly horrible, but the growing creepiness of the story comes from the fact that it is based on a real and brutal occurrence in nineteenth-century France.

You will be unable to turn away from how this unfolds, but those without strong stomachs – approach with caution!

This is a great riff on Hammer Horror, Dracula, psychedelia, the sixties, and Jane Eyre. Yes, I said Jane Eyre!

Take Mina, Bertha Mason, throw them into the middle of the 1960s Sunset Strip, and you have yourself a rocket of a novel. It starts with the voice of Dracula coming from his urns, his ashes speaking to Mina, and her just so sick of his nonsense, and only gets better from there.

This series is very elegantly written, but that’s not what makes it the most unique on this list. For a start, the protagonist is a skinny womanising drug-addict immortal with enormous wings. Yes, you read that right. He can fly, he drinks coffee, and when he overdoses he trips into a parallel universe. Several, actually. What else inhabits these strange worlds? Giant ants. And it’s these horse-sized monsters that the people of the Fourlands are embroiled in bitter conflict with. They pour through dimensional tears in waves, and the fighting is frenetic, bloody, and gruesome. Swainston has an almost forensic approach to the description of violence in these books, and it adds a dash of realism to an otherwise wildly fantastical setting and premise. A criminally underappreciated series.