98 books like The Revisionaries

I love how weird and dark this book is. Carolyn and her siblings were raised by their abusive, adopted father, who trained them each in a single portfolio of magic.

When their father goes missing, Carolyn and her allies explore the truth of his disappearance. I was with Carolyn every step of the way of her journey to claw back her identity from her abusive past. And I can’t stop thinking about the explosive ending, even years after I first read the book.

Quite simply, Erin Morgenstern’s book is the finest example of urban fantasy I have ever read. Besides a plot rich in sorcery and romance, with a circus (think Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes) that appears mysteriously, vanishing just as suddenly and the shadowy game of two great sorcerers playing out their competitiveness through the lives of their young apprentices, this is a beautifully written book. The writing is elegant, rounded, and rich. What a writer! The imagery is transporting without clobbering the reader over the head. The characters are each fully drawn, but in slow increments as the story steams inexorably ahead like the mysterious train that carries the circus from locale to locale. 

This book showed me that you do not need blazing dragons or drooling werewolves to create menace, sinister characters, and mystery. Morgenstern places this world of circus magic just out of reach but so… show more.

This book is my favorite indie sci-fi novel. It starts with a broken and jumpy storyline that coalesces inwardly as the characters fight a cataclysmic horror. The premise is there are ideas, like those randomly generated passwords, that are simply very hard for a person to remember.

I read this during the COVID craziness. It was precisely why I write, as an escape from the media trying to drag you down with infinite worry. Rest, relax, and enjoy a fun story of someone else’s trials.

This is indie sci-fi at its best. It was a major inspiration and may have gotten a nod in my novel (I can’t remember.) What is great is that the second read-through differed from the first but was still just as enjoyable. 

My new book features a solitary time traveler in a key supporting role, so I feel well-equipped to say that Man in the Empty Suit is the pièce de resistance of absurdly trippy time travel stories.

A time traveler celebrates his birthday every year at an abandoned hotel in the year 2100 or so, with all his fellow time-traveling past and future selves in attendance – nobody else is ever invited. This year, however, he discovers the murdered corpse of next year’s instance of himself.

This makes him the lead detective in the case of his own murder, which ideally he’d like to prevent; and the only suspects are either younger versions of himself, although you’d expect him to remember committing the crime, or elder versions of himself, who somehow managed to survive the murder of their younger self – for the time being, anyway.

Twisty and mind-bendy goodness.

Set in 19th century England, this novel is aimed at Young Adult readers and is a reminder that a good read is simply good, whatever age bracket it’s aimed at. It resonated with my own teenage struggles to break free of restrictive expectations – even though mine were trifling compared to what the heroine Louisa has to go through! She resists the restrictions of Victorian society and the limited choices available to women, and is locked up in an asylum. It prompted me to read more about the era and discovered the shocking truth of how this really happened to women who stepped out of line…

The prose style in the memoir, Girl, Interrupted, is clean, concise, and unembellished. The spare writing leaves no room for self-pity, yet still tells a vivid story of mental unraveling and convalescence concurrently. Kaysen meets a cast of vulnerable characters during her nearly year-long commitment in a psychiatric hospital. They form unlikely friendships, and we get to know all of their various neuroses in a stifling environment that is at once a cage and a path to self-discovery and health. 

I was reminded of my own two commitments to psychiatric hospitals, how strange and austere the world became in those weeks, how time became irrelevant with the breakfast, lunch and dinner announcements, medication time, nightly bed checks, and the ironic “fresh air breaks,” on the back steps of the ward where I and my own unlikely cast of characters smoked cigarettes and commiserated about our unique predicaments. 

I was… show more.

Oh, this book was just magical. And the ending – wow! Everything comes together and how. The writing is just beautiful and the story is enchanting. This book transported me and wowed me - truly I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I did. I cried so much while reading this book – the language is so poetic and lyrical. It is a story about stories and it is a masterpiece in my opinion. 

Faces in the Water was first published in 1961, though it received far less attention and acclaim. The “story,” such as it is, is narrated by Istina Mavet, a shy, introverted young woman (again, based closely on the author) who, like the author, spends ten years in a New Zealand psychiatric hospital. Faces in the Water recounts long, dull years of cruelty and suffering. But don’t let this put you off—Frame’s style is marvelously poetic. The narrative is abstract in places and was at first difficult for me to get into, but once I began to see things from Istina’s perspective, the story came to life, and I found it brutally beautiful. 

This is a recent reissue of a book first published in 1974 and long out of print. Bette Howland gives us a vivid and honest account of her time in Ward 3 of a Chicago psychiatric hospital after a serious suicide attempt in her late twenties. I was moved by the moments of communion, camaraderie and even comedy the narrator shares with her fellow patients. Having said that, Ward 3 is a terrible place. The “treatments” are also punishments. The narrator confronts the ward’s alienation with clear, unsentimental detachment. I was absorbed by her struggle to retain an element of dignity in the face of the hospital’s fatally indifferent bureaucracy. 

This story is a twist on a familiar Lewis Carroll tale.

It is unsettling in a dementia-like way, spinning the reader from the known into the unknown with just enough of the old story to keep them from tipping completely off balance, hope and dark humor always alive. 

This book helped me with the twisting of fact and fiction in my own books, where I used many of my own family incidents (and fears), but gave them to fictional characters with their own generational slant.