Here are 75 books that The Shadow of the Torturer fans have personally recommended if you like
The Shadow of the Torturer.
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I’ve always loved the darker side of fantasy. While heroes, knights, and handsome kings can occasionally be enjoyable, I want to know the other characters who have suffered, hurt, lost, grieved, and been hardened by grim circumstances and cruel fate. Those characters demonstrate the resilience of human nature and how goodness truly can exist even in the harshest environment. I love using this darkness in my own novels to show that even the tiniest spark can shine immensely bright—a true testament to the indefatigability of our spirits.
I love the cunning, wit, and charm of the one-and-only Vlad Taltos. Though he’s an assassin, he’s never cruel or wicked; he merely does what he needs to appease the “mafia-feeling” organization he works for. He’s almost more a swashbuckling rogue than a killer.
In his interactions with his familiar, Loiosh, you see his more nuanced side, the morality beneath the magic and swordplay. And few fantasy worlds I’ve ever visited have been as rich and colorful as those created in the Vlad Taltos series.
The first three fantastical adventures of assassin Vlad Taltos—now in one volume.
A welcome addition to any fantasy fan's library, The Book of Jhereg follows the antics of the wise-cracking Vlad Taltos and his dragon-like companion through their first three adventures—Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla.
There are many ways for a young man with quick wits and a quick sword to advance in the world. Vlad Taltos chose the route of assassin. From his rookie days to his selfless feats of heroism, the dauntless Vlad will hold readers spellbound—and The Book of Jhereg will take its place among the classic compilations…
Science fiction is rightly famous for experimenting with new and strange social worlds, but fantasy tends to fall back on the usual feudal tropes: the whims of kings, the valor of knights, the always-temporary powerlessness of farm boys, the technicalities of succession. Which is a shame, because fantasy provides just as much opportunity to reimagine what society could look like. That’s what I try to do in my books, and at my job, where I’m working to bring 21st-century data literacy and quantitative reasoning to a state government stuck resolutely in the ’90s. When I think of books that have done what I’m trying to do, these five are at the front of my mind.
This book is about how trauma can force you to choose between memory and sanity… and how this problem gets worse when you live in a society of telepaths.
Said telepaths are the mer-person descendants of enslaved Africans who threw themselves off the boats from Africa to the Americas, but the emotional core of the book makes the deep weirdness of the premise pretty much an afterthought.
WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY LGBTQ SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY/HORROR AWARD
The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society-and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award-nominated song "The Deep" from Daveed Diggs's rap group clipping.
Yetu holds the memories for her people-water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners-who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one-the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on…
I’m a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. I’m interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. I’d like to think my books fall into this category, or at least that’s what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books I’ve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Attanasio can run hot and cold, but when he’s hot he’s on fire! This book may have the most ambitious plot of any novel I’ve ever read and is almost impossible to describe. It spans galaxies, has a truly bizarre vibe, and yet rings true, with a love story thrown in.
Seven billion years from now, long after the Sun has died and human life has become extinct, alien beings reconstruct homo sapiens from our fossilized DNA drifting as debris in deep space. We are reborn to serve as bait in a battle to the death between the Rimstalker, humankind's re-animator, and the zōtl, horrific creatures who feed vampire-like on the suffering of intelligent lifeforms.
The resurrected children of Earth are told: "You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect it to guide you or benefit you in any way." Yet,…
I’m a writer of epic fantasy and paranormal romance, and my obsession is writing about the fashion, food, language, and social politics of the worlds I create. World building is vital if you intend to create a lived-in backdrop for your story, but intricate, elaborate world building will only take you so far. You (the author) must have a cast of characters equally well developed. I’ve tried to take lessons away from every book I’ve read and every author I’ve interviewed and worked to balance characters to fall in love with against places that feel absolutely alive. Their joy/terror/love/hate/experience becomes the readers. It’s that combination that makes a book unforgettable.
Although The Scar is the second book in the Bas Lag series, I prefer it to Perdido Street Station (which is also glorious.) The Scar takes to the seas, a place I always prefer to be, in the form of the floating, roving city of Armada.
We come aboard (as it were) and experience life on Armada—its precincts, villages, towns, secrets, and its people—swordsmen and librarians and vampires and the mysterious pair who run the place—The Lovers (that’s the only name we get) through the eyes of Bellis Coldwine, a prickly, difficult, but fascinating woman who would literally rather be anywhere else.
I get where she’s coming from but I would absolutely book a cruise on Armada!
A human cargo bound for servitude in exile... A pirate city hauled across the oceans... A hidden miracle about be revealed... This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.From the author of Perdido Street Station, another colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, which was acclaimed in The Times Literary Supplement as: 'An astonishing novel, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded…
As a former librarian I have long been fascinated with Borges’s view of books: their metaphysical shape and their tendency to open into the uncanny and the infinite. Illness early in life drove me to books, to their particular isolation. Since then, I’ve found that worlds can open almost anywhere in literature by way of a mood, a patina of language, a vision, a set of images completely beyond the control of the writer. Now, I read these books to remind me of what fiction can do, the places it can go, the worlds it will open.
Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.
A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.
Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping.
This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgrenanswers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.
I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.
Nebula Award Finalist: Reality unravels in a Midwestern town in this sci-fi epic by the acclaimed author of Babel-17. Includes a foreword by William Gibson.
A young half–Native American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellona—only something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound.
So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean.…
Quoting Aristotle when writing about yourself probably comes off as pretentious, but looking back at how I became a writer, his idea of how good stories must be “surprising yet inevitable” rings true: from a childhood split in rural Bavaria, where dark German fairytales sparked my love for books to experiments with lucid dreaming that ended in a loss of reality, my ending up as a game writer and novelist focused on the mind and dreams does sound somewhat inevitable—even if it took me some detours and distractions to get there. Now, I couldn’t be happier. 😊
From the strange title to the premise of a futuristic television star who suddenly no one remembers, this book, is the essence of why PKD remains one of my favorite authors: futurism, psychology, and existential angst distilled into a mind-bending cocktail whose characters somehow still feel perfectly grounded and believable.
Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?
I’m a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. I’m interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. I’d like to think my books fall into this category, or at least that’s what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books I’ve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.
The “sensuous and evocative” debut of the Nebula Award–winning author of Waking the Moon: A dystopian journey through a world unburdened by moral taboos (Library Journal). Set in the surreal, post-apocalyptic City of Trees, Winterlong centers on Wendy Wanders, a girl who can tap into the dreams and emotions of the people around her, and her long-lost twin brother, Raphael, a seductive, sacred courtesan to the City’s decadent elite. During their voyage, they encounter man-made and godlike monstrosities—both hideous and gorgeous—in their effort to stop an ancient power from consuming all. Blending science fiction and fantasy, Winterlong is a dark…
Science fiction is rightly famous for experimenting with new and strange social worlds, but fantasy tends to fall back on the usual feudal tropes: the whims of kings, the valor of knights, the always-temporary powerlessness of farm boys, the technicalities of succession. Which is a shame, because fantasy provides just as much opportunity to reimagine what society could look like. That’s what I try to do in my books, and at my job, where I’m working to bring 21st-century data literacy and quantitative reasoning to a state government stuck resolutely in the ’90s. When I think of books that have done what I’m trying to do, these five are at the front of my mind.
Monstress is an awful lot of things: An epic fantasy that confronts the horrors of modern war; a work of fusion that marries Western and Eastern aesthetics and the epic scale of George R. R. Martin with the cosmic and body horror of Junji Ito; an incredible trove of beautiful visual art; a stage for women of all kinds, young and old, beautiful and monstrous, weak and powerful, with and without shark heads; and a story about a girl coming to grips with a dark family legacy and what it means for her place in a bloody, painful world.
More than anything else, it’s about what happens when people use each other. For my money, the best epic fantasy currently being published in any form.
2018 Eisner Award winner, Best
Writer 2018 Eisner Award winner, Best
Painter/Multimedia Artist 2018 Eisner
Award winner, Best Continuing Series 2018
Eisner Award winner, Best Publication for
Teens 2018 Eisner Award winner, Best Cover
Artist 2018 Harvey Award winner, Book of
the Year 2018 Hugo Award winner, Best
Graphic Story 2018 British Fantasy Award
winner, Best Comic/Graphic Novel 2018,
2016, 2015 Entertainment Weekly's The Best Comic Books of the
Year 2018, Newsweek's Best Comic
Books of the Year 2018, The Washington
Post's 10 Best Graphic Novels of the
Year 2018, Barnes & Noble's Best Books
of the Year 2018, YALSA's…
I studied psychology in college and am fascinated with the human mind. The psyche holds so many joys, wonders, and the deepest horrors imaginable, all compact and functioning within our skulls. My love for psychology grew into the horror realm, where I read and watched anything revolving around the character study of an individual driven to the brink. Now, I write stories about the morality of actions taken by those who have found themselves in a peculiar position. I believe there is more to the clean-cut view of right versus wrong regarding the decision-making of one’s self-preservation.
I could not predict this book. I love how dark and disturbing it was. It led me down a path of psychological vertigo. By the end, I had exhausted all possible predictions and guessed wrong.
The shock of the twist wrung me out dry. I’m a big fan of books that can take you on a turbulent journey and then deposit you onto uneven ground, leaving you to question your own reality. Was it all real, or was it a part of some awful, waking dream?
NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL FILM DIRECTED BY CHARLIE KAUFMAN AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the best debut novels I’ve ever read. Iain Reid has crafted a tight, ferocious little book, with a persistent tenor of suspense that tightens and mounts toward its visionary, harrowing final pages” (Scott Heim, award-winning author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear).
I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.
Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an…
I have been fascinated by this topic ever since the first newspaper stories exposing American involvement in torture began to appear in the early years of the so-called War on Terror. This fascination has persisted up to the present, as it remains clear – given recent accounts of Ron DeSantis’ time at Guantanamo – that this story refuses to die. Equally fascinating to me have been accounts revealing the extent to which this story can be traced back to the origins of the Cold War, to the birth of the National Security State, and to the alliance between that state and the professions (psychology and behavioral science) that spawned “enhanced interrogation.”
One of the first accounts to connect the dots between the torture scandal that arose out the war on terror and the beginnings of the Cold War, when the United States first devised the interrogation techniques that became codified in the CIA’s interrogation manual KUBARK (1963), which provided the playbook for the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere.
"An indispensable and riveting account" of the CIA's development and use of torture, from the cold war to Abu Ghraib and beyond (Naomi Klein, The Nation)
In this revelatory account of the CIA's fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy locates the deep roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in a long-standing, covert program of interrogation. A Question of Torture investigates the CIA's practice of "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain," in which techniques including isolation, hooding, hours of standing, and manipulation of time assault the victim's senses and destroy the basis of…
