100 books like The Salt God's Daughter

I will always find an excuse to read a classic literary tome about an unreliable narrator by the British seashore, partly because I know I’m in for a gut-punch of a landscape description. Even better when it’s garnished with a few—not too many, just enough—of those ultra-evocative lines that stop you in your tracks and make you go, “That’s exactly what that’s like!” But that’s not even the best part of this five-course meal of a book.

The story becomes increasingly surreal and disturbing. At each stage, Murdoch’s descriptions of the ocean landscape shift and change with the narrative, so the water increasingly looms in the background like a living character, apparently impersonal and even more deliciously horrible for it. 

I blame a 90’s childhood spent devouring Bruce Coville and O.R. Melling, but I am obsessed with stories where our hero tumbles, slides, or wanders into another world. That’s why, even as an adult, I drink up the scene(s) in a speculative book where I get that first delicious glimmer of an uncanny separate world beneath “normal” life.

When it’s done well, it’s everything, and Sasha’s way-too-early morning swims in Vita Nostra evoke that feeling pitch-perfectly. I love how the authors describe the visceral discomfort of cold water, I love the industrial incongruity of the buoy she swims to, and mostly I love how they use the disorienting sensation of sneaking out to swim in wild and dangerous waters, to set the mood for the weirdness to come.

This made me feel like I was watching Sailor Moon and reading The Dark Tower again for the first time. 

This book is claustrophobic, unflinching, and horrifying, so I can’t watch videos from seafloor subs, drones, or observatories. I’m used to sci-fi that takes place in the cold black isolation of a spaceship, but here we have the cold black isolation of the seabed, which triggers all the thalassophobia. Add the meticulous routines of a crew surviving in a place where humans shouldn’t be and, above all, the awful psychological pull of the void, and you get deliciously potent nightmare fuel.

But maybe more than that, I love that Watts is one of those authors, like Richard Morgan, who creates spec-fic characters with questionable morality, who can and do alarm the reader. Everyone I know who’s ever read this book has never forgotten it, shudders when I mention it and knows who Lenie Clark is. 

It has been years, and I cannot stop thinking about the visual this book left me with: a young woman sleeping in a makeshift plastic bubble under the sea's surface, tethered to a walkway across the Indian Ocean. I love when a speculative fiction book dives deep into exactly how a futuristic technology looks, feels, smells, integrates into life, and doesn’t just fill a plot point—which is probably why I was left with such a vivid image of this tent-bubble-habitat-material.

I am also an avid camper and know what it’s like to trust techy material in inhospitable circumstances. Take that feeling of trying to sleep while rain pours on a tent you hope is as waterproof as advertised. Now multiply it by 100 and add a violently undulating walkway across the Indian Ocean, and you get why I love this book. 

If you’ve ever wondered how on Earth Mark Zuckerberg ended up betting his Facebook empire on the unproven technology of Virtual Reality (VR), this is the recent history book for you. 

Blake Harris starts with Palmer Luckey, a homeschooled teenager who shrugged off the received wisdom of all of his elders, and just went ahead and built the first commercially viable VR headset. (That’s an amazing story in itself.) And then he got Mark Zuckerberg so excited about this new experience that, yes, Zuckerberg ended up buying Luckey’s company – and eventually forcing him out.

The History of the Future is about technology, business, the consequences of acting on visionary thinking, and, above all, about how technology is ultimately created and developed by human beings. 

The Mermaid of Black Conch takes a mythological creature and gives her extraordinary life, as a very real, young woman, called Aycayia.

She is caught – hooked like a prize fish - by greedy anglers, and hauled from the sea, bringing with her an already fascinating and tragic history of injustice and misunderstanding. But, she is also an object of love.

Not all fishermen are commercial opportunists… Not all men are eager to exploit beautiful and unusual women, and so begins an extraordinary rescue, and a life-affirming relationship, with many unpredictable, literally magical, and truly remarkable twists.

This enchanting book, written with breath-taking originality, is likely to spell-bind you – permanently. You’ll never again think of mermaids in the same way.

I picked up this book for its Scottish setting and gothic vibes (which did not disappoint!), but I devoured the book because of the characters who I was rooting for from page one.

It’s such a surprise and pleasure to read a large cast of (queer) women, each uniquely-drawn and with their own distinct desires and personalities. The setting of the book is brilliant as well–I cannot resist a book set in a Scottish forest. The story is threaded through with folklore, adding another layer to the gothic atmosphere. 

Daniyal Mueenuddin derives the marvelous from the depiction of wealthy and poor Pakistani characters surviving as gracefully or gracelessly as humanly possible.

Reading at times like social anthropology, at times like magical realism, the stories are folk tales with inspections of and lessons about human foibles. Characters come to life with large and small schemes, machinations, and quasi-unconscious action that arises from a combination of tradition, desperation, and privilege.

The underlying humor, both dark and loving, is something the writer shares with the reader.  

The first time I saw Pretty Deadly on the shelves at my local comic book store, I was fascinated and chilled by the cover art, and the story within did not disappoint. This Eisner-Award-nominated graphic novel by Captain Marvel writer Kelly Sue DeConnick melds Western and horror genres for a macabre tale about Death’s daughter, Deathface Ginny, riding a horse made of smoke and wind across the harsh and unrelenting landscapes of a brutal Wild West, doling out retribution. I love me some grim reaping, and the same dark, evocative imager. I love me some grim reaping, and I wanted the same dark, evocative imagery to come through on my pages and through Hettie’s own journey with the cursed gun Diablo at her side.   

This is quite literally the book that made me decide to become a writer.

It draws on two Scottish ballads (“Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer”), but rather than retelling them straight, it uses them as a springboard for its own original plot. The relationship between the two main characters and the story they are telling together instilled in me a burning desire to tell my own stories for other people to read, and it also sent me off down a lifelong path of reading about the folklore that underpins the novels I pick up.