Here are 100 books that The Red Tree fans have personally recommended if you like
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I write horror and crime thrillers grounded in my unusual lived experience as an author and attorney who has also overcome poverty, incarceration, and violent crime. I feel most fulfilled when I read a book that both entertains and expands me in meaningful ways, immersing me in lives, cultures, and history I might not otherwise know. So I love Social Horror novels, which feature characters who face significant human adversity beyond my own experience and leave me questioning what was worse, the human or the supernatural.
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.
"Thrilling, literate, scary, immersive." -Stephen King
The Stoker, Mark Twain American Voice in Literature, Bradbury, Locus and Alex Award-winning, NYT-bestselling gothic horror about cultural identity, the price of tradition and revenge for fans of Adam Nevill's The Ritual.
Ricky, Gabe, Lewis and Cassidy are men bound to their heritage, bound by society, and trapped in the endless expanses of the landscape. Now, ten years after a fateful elk hunt, which remains a closely guarded secret between them, these men - and their children - must face a ferocious spirit that is coming for them, one at a time. A spirit…
I’ve been a horror fan since I first read The Fog by James Herbert at much too young an age. Being British-born and now Australian, the horror I write is almost always set outside America (and the UK more and more often), and I’m always on the lookout for good horror fiction set in different places. I’m fascinated by cultural folklore and mythology and how people create stories to understand the world. For three years, I was President of the Australasian Horror Writers Association.
Kaaron Warren has a unique style, and this is my favorite of her novels and one of my favorite novels of all time. I’m a sucker for grief horror and stories of people lost in urban decay, and I’m a sucker for ghost stories.
This is a ghost story unlike any other. I was moved by this book as much as I was disturbed. It’s a deeply emotional story that really dug under my skin. Some books stay with you; they leave a mark on your soul that you know you’ll never be able to remove, and this did that to me in the best way.
Winner, Best Horror Novel, 2016 Aurealis Awards Winner, Best Novel, 2016 Shadow Awards Winner, Best Novel, 2016 Ditmar Awards
There are many grief holes. There's the grief hole you fall into when a loved one dies. There's another grief hole in all of us; small or large, it determines how much we want to live. And there are the geographical grief holes, the buildings that attract sorrow and loss and are filled with ghosts. Theresa sees these ghosts better than most, but can she figure out how to close the holes?
Growing up in the seventies in the UK was a fertile time for lovers of the uncanny, with memorable children’s dramas like Children of the Stones, The Changes and Ace of Wands. Like many others, I keenly collected junkshop editions of Herbert Van Thal’s horror anthologies. Occultism was in the air in the troubled, economically stagnating Age of Aquarius, and though too young to see them, we schoolboys all knew of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Omen. A friend gave me a Lovecraft biography for my 18th birthday, and though I’d read none of his work, I went on to become fascinated by him and his Weird Tales compadres.
A friend complained about being saddled with reading this bible-thick book by a fellow creative writing student on his MA course. Never having heard of it, though I’ve since discovered it’s a major cult favorite, I flicked through it and quickly became intrigued by its faux academic footnotes and citations, quirky layout (pages might contain a single line of text as the narrative accelerates, for instance) and tale of paranormal investigation.
‘Postmodern’, though apt, makes it sound tedious; actually, it’s an intriguing, clever, and in places touching take on the psychic investigator genre, using a myriad of haunted house motifs from the trashy (The Amityville Horror; ‘Found footage’ movies) to the cerebral (cultural theory, references to Umberto Eco). While self-consciously ‘clever’, it delivers sincerely on the uncanniness I want from a haunted house tale.
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
Plants, man. Plants. Three thousand-yard stare. In another shining example of ‘Hey, you might want to listen to the locals,’ an intrepid group of young Americans decides to ignore warnings and explore an archeological dig on the Yucatan Peninsula.
What they find makes for not only a grisly horror read that I burned through, but it also shook any sense of complacency I had of our supposed dominion over the forces of nature. And as we exit a global pandemic that was on no one’s bingo card and find ourselves learning new terminology like ‘fire tornado,’ it also feels eerily prescient.
Craving an adventure to wake them from their lethargic Mexican holiday before they return home, four friends set off in search of one of their own who has travelled to the interior to investigate an archaeological dig in the Mayan ruins. After a long journey into the jungle, the group come across a partly camouflaged trail and a captivating hillside covered with red flowers. Lured by these, the group move closer until they happen across a gun-toting Mayan horseman who orders them away. In the midst of the confrontation, one of the group steps inadvertently backwards into the flowering vine.…
My name is Mia Dalia. I write dark speculative fiction across genres. A lot of it is psychological horror, which I love! My latest novel features a rather unique haunted house and a family who spend their summer vacation there. Hauntings are a theme I have visited before in shorter forms and were very excited to explore in full. My goal here was to deconstruct the myth of an all-American happy family within the frame of a classic may-or-may-not-be-haunted house. Those who have dared to stay in Haven have been profoundly unsettled. It is a hungry house, always looking for more visitors. I hope you’ll come for a stay!
It is impossible to talk about haunted house books and not mention the foremother of them all, The House of the Haunted Hill. I love everything about it from its brilliant use of setting as a character to its tone of creeping unease to the way the readers are slowly drawn into its madness.
This book is a UR-text in the genre and quite revolutionary for its time in many ways: being authored by a female writer, featuring a queer icon of Theodora, etc. But most of all, it’s just a really great read and a true classic. Granted, the characters in it are not exactly on vacation, but all the same, in the end they probably wish they had spent their summer in a different house.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
I’ve been fascinated by horror since childhood–when Scooby-Doo: Where Are You! and Doctor Who were my favorite TV shows. I specifically remember watching the Doctor Who serial, The Seeds of Doom, and the 1962 film Day of the Triffids–both about killer plants! As I finished graduate school and then took jobs in higher education, I gravitated back to horror and the gothic, which I am now fortunate enough to teach and research. I’ve written academically about all kinds of horror (most recently folk horror)–and in 2015, myself and two others founded a website, Horror Homeroom, where I write about horror for more popular audiences.
I came to Finney’s novel after watching both of the excellent (and, for the most part, faithful) film adaptations (1956 and 1978). Finney’s novel is worth a read for its own sake, not least because an incredibly interesting chapter (13) explicitly weaves race into the narrative that’s absent from both films. Finney’s book represents (rather literally) how we tend to see plant life–when we think about it at all–as alien.
Cue alien seed pods that end up on Earth and begin to proliferate wildly–another deep-seated fear we have about vegetation–that they’ll spread and take over. The seed pods colonize humans, rendering them indifferent and emotionless–exactly the view we’ve always had of plant life, symbol par excellence of encroaching impersonality.
After watching (more than once) the famous 1956 film adaptation, I started Finney’s novel primed to think about the conflict between communism and American individualism. But the novel is actually very…
Celebrate one of the earliest science fiction novels by rediscovering Jack Finney’s internationally acclaimed Invasion of the Body Snatchers—which Stephen King calls a story “to be read and savored for its own satisfactions,” now repackaged with a foreword by #1 New York Times bestselling author, Dean Koontz.
On a quiet fall evening in the peaceful town of Mill Valley, California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovers an insidious, horrifying plot. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien life-forms are taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, friends, family, the woman he loves, and the entire world as he knows it.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing…
I’ve loved reading alternative visions of Britain since I read a Strontium Dog saga in ‘2000AD’ as a boy. What was science fiction then has become closer to reality now. The idea of one event, such as a meteor shower in Triffids or a virus in ‘Grass,’ causing havoc worldwide is gripping. I prefer the British stories because they are closer to home. Many of these were written close to the Second World War, and their authors describe deprivation in unflinching detail. Recent political events have turned my mind to how human actions can cause dystopian futures, as in Orwell’s 1984.
Like H.G. Wells, Wyndham is excellent at depicting normal people who are dealing with an unusual event in normal locations. This creates a level of reality that makes the circumstances more horrific. I could imagine myself in those places, with those people.
The Triffids have never translated well to the screen because the plants look awkward. This isn’t the case in the book. This is my favorite of all the Wyndham books because of their journeys and their descriptions of the landscape around them.
When Bill Masen wakes up in his hospital bed, he has reason to be grateful for the bandages that covered his eyes the night before. For he finds a population rendered blind and helpless by the spectacular meteor shower that filled the night sky, the evening before. But his relief is short-lived as he realises that a newly-blinded population is now at the mercy of the Triffids.
Once, the Triffids were farmed for their oil, their uncanny ability to move and their carnivorous habits well controlled by their human keepers. But now, with humans so vulnerable, they are a potent…
I’m a weirdo, so of course I’m attracted to the idea that the universe may be weird, too. I like the idea that the universe is able to hold itself together ninety-nine percent of the time, but every once in a while it just has to let its freak flag fly. Even if paranormal experiences are nothing more than waking dreams, they may still be worth our attention (the same as any dream). Even if such experiences aren’t objectively “real”, they’re subjectively fascinating. I love exploring the line between reality and unreality. Like Fort, I don’t believe it to be as cut and dry as mainstream science would have us believe.
Charles Fort was the o.g. paranormal investigator. One hundred years ago, he made a sweeping study of all the weird stuff mainstream science refuses to examine. Even now we use the word “Fortean” to describe the study of ghosts, bigfoot, ufos, ESP, etc. Steinmeyer’s biography reveals the complicated man behind the adjective.
Was Fort a kook? Not really. Steinmeyer reveals him to be more of a gadfly, playfully thumbing his nose at science but never investing too much belief in his own eccentric theories, either. For Fort, the real and the unreal were two sides of the same coin. His quarrel was with those who insisted the quarter only had heads and refused to investigate the possible existence of tails.
'I am the first disciple of Charles Fort. Henceforth I am a Fortean'
Since Ben Hecht wrote this line in reviewing The Book of The Damned in 1919, Charles Fort - whose very name spawned an adjective, Fortean, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as 'relating to or denoting paranormal phenomena' - has so divided opinion that to Theodore Dreiser he was "the most fascinating literary figure since Poe;" to The New York Times he was "the enfant terrible of science;" and to HG Wells he was "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of…
I’m a weirdo, so of course I’m attracted to the idea that the universe may be weird, too. I like the idea that the universe is able to hold itself together ninety-nine percent of the time, but every once in a while it just has to let its freak flag fly. Even if paranormal experiences are nothing more than waking dreams, they may still be worth our attention (the same as any dream). Even if such experiences aren’t objectively “real”, they’re subjectively fascinating. I love exploring the line between reality and unreality. Like Fort, I don’t believe it to be as cut and dry as mainstream science would have us believe.
Stan Gordon has spent the last fifty years investigating the paranormal in Western Pennsylvania. He’s observed the locations where events allegedly occurred. He’s interviewed witnesses. And, in Silent Invasion, he documents some of his stranger cases.
How strange? Well, in the early seventies Gordon received reports of bigfoot being observed alongside landed UFOs. I love this book because it is so damned weird (but, at the same time, so well-documented). That’s not to say that I find all of Gordon’s anomalies anomalous. (The “metallic droppings” he found out in the woods in 1972 look to me to be Brillo pads.) But many of his other reports are not so easily dismissed.
Stan Gordon began his journey in field investigations of UFOs and other Paranormal encounters in Pennsylvania in 1965. During 1973 UFOs began to make widespread appearances in the sky across the Keystone State. It was during the summer of that year however when a mysterious wave of events began to unfold. Alarmed citizens over a widespread area reported close encounters with huge hairy Bigfoot-like creatures. Frightened residents called local authorities and media outlets reporting enormous footprints and terrified animals. As the pace of the abnormal encounters quickened through the following months, more eyewitness reports of other strange creatures, and a…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the…
I’m a weirdo, so of course I’m attracted to the idea that the universe may be weird, too. I like the idea that the universe is able to hold itself together ninety-nine percent of the time, but every once in a while it just has to let its freak flag fly. Even if paranormal experiences are nothing more than waking dreams, they may still be worth our attention (the same as any dream). Even if such experiences aren’t objectively “real”, they’re subjectively fascinating. I love exploring the line between reality and unreality. Like Fort, I don’t believe it to be as cut and dry as mainstream science would have us believe.
While many readers would cite John Keel’s The Mothman Propheciesas the definitive account of the late ‘60s cryptid sightings in West Virginia, I have a strong preference for Wamsley’s books on the subject. He has reprinted vintage newspaper articles (yes, Mothman sightings were the subject of mainstream local news articles back in the day). He also publishes transcripts of his interviews with witnesses, and photographs of these witnesses. You get to see them and read their accounts, in their own words. They sound credible.
He also makes sure to reprint news articles that offer natural explanations for the sightings. (Was the Mothman just an oversized bird, the sandhill crane? A giant owl? Experimental weather balloons released by a high school science club?)
Look deeper into the mystery of the Mothman legacy with the most extensive collection of data ever assembled. Research materials include: Firsthand eyewitness accounts, Rare documents and press archives, UFO/Men in Black encounters, Silver Bridge disaster, TNT Area archives, Illustrations, maps, and photos.
"Mothman goes under the microscope as Jeff Wamsley continues to dig for more clues to this complex mystery.ᅠ A required investigative resource for those who are searching for answers." - John A. Keel, Author, The Mothman Prophecies.
"More riveting than ever! Once again Jeff Wamsley has put together the definitive, absolutely must-have book on one of the…