Fans pick 100 books like The Red Tree

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.

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.

It’s a remarkable novel. 

This is a love-it or hate-it novel. Either you find it tiresome, or you give yourself over whole-heartedly to its unique madness. It has at its heart a film, The Navidson Record, a documentary about a photojournalist who moves his family into a pretty house and discovers that the house is bigger on the inside than the outside, and getting bigger.

As he and his friends try to explore the limits of the house, it rearranges itself around them. The film is described in the text by an old man, complete with a mountain of scholarly footnotes by a tattoo artist. But this book is also powered by a genuinely unsettling, often terrifying descent into hell. It’s a deranged funhouse of a novel that you will probably never forget. 

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.

Jackson’s Gothic horror flows like black chiffon over a yawing window. That’s how I felt reading about Hill House. I loved the way the house sneaks up with its psychological weights swinging and jarring. Eleanor possesses a dark ambiance. She desperately needed to belong to something or someone, and I couldn’t let go of that.

Her emotions and fears were right there with me. But it was the romantic underbelly that got me: Eleanor’s romance with Hill House. The statuesque gardens, the light, and shadows, all tempted her into its sinister realm. As it tempted me. I felt deeply for Eleanor, wanting to belong to something extraordinary to replace her dull life. Shirley Jackson is quoted as saying, “I delight in what I fear.” This book proves it.

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… show more.

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.

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.

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. 

While many readers would cite John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies as 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?) 

Good stuff!