Love The Thread That Binds the Bones? Readers share 88 books like The Thread That Binds the Bones...

As a general rule, I don’t like time-travel novels, but I love this one. In Anubis Gates, Tim creates a perfect looping paradox in which our literary historian protagonist finds himself traveling back to the period of his expertise and discovering that every critical beat of his subject matter is both exactly as he learned it and a complete surprise that could only have happened through his own direct intervention.

Talking plot would spoil a beautiful and perfectly constructed puzzle full of mystery and revelation. Tim is a master of interweaving actual historical research with the fantastic, illuminating and personalizing the former while rendering the latter unreasonably plausible. Tim’s writing is always beautiful and clever, and that shows in both the prose and the clockwork precision of the plot.

Weird touches every paragraph of this book from the stilt-walking evil harlequin, Horabin, through the spoon-size boys in their eggshell fleet,… show more.

When I read this at 17, I bounced off it, surprising since I'd loved every previous Zelazny. It wasn’t until a reread in my thirties that it finally clicked, becoming a favorite book by a favorite author. In retrospect, I didn’t yet have the depth of experience to see beneath the surface simplicity to the brilliantly conceived complexity visible to the reader with a bit more knowledge and breadth of literary background.

Wit shines on every page, from dialogue to description to an offbeat chapter-a-day structure highlighting each night in a most singular October.

The wild includes plenty of murder and mayhem as a cast of sorcerers that includes Dracula, Rasputin, and Burke & Hare are all colliding in a struggle for the power to shape the world through the once-a-century Lonesome October.

The weird stretches from the story of a most sympathetic serial killer to the way it's told… show more.

I read this straight through the day I found it, staying up way past my 13-year-old bedtime. The next day I sweet-talked my grandmother into taking me back to the bookstore to get the sequels. Morgon is an unlikely hero, gentle, practical, a farmer, and a master of riddles…wait a second.

Maybe he’s not so unlikely after all. The book begins with a family argument about the crown under his bed. It turns out Morgon won it in a murderous riddle game with a dead king. He's a man who can't stop asking questions and seeking the answers, no matter the cost, and that very bad habit leads him across the realm in a wild and deadly game of riddles against unknown and ancient enemies. McKillip's prose is witty and beautiful, and so is this book.

I stumbled on a used paperback copy of Martha Wells’ first book shortly after it came out in 1993. I was hooked on page one, which begins with a group of musketeers breaking into the home of a foreign sorcerer. From the moment of our main protagonist’s second line, “The point of it is to go and be killed where you’re told,” I knew I was going to adore this book.

The witty: Basically, everything from the banter to the convoluted court politics. The weird: brilliant use of magic that runs from wallpaper that tries to murder our heroes to one of the best faerie castles ever written and beyond. The wild: Constant action filled with double crosses, family drama of the murderous sort, and affairs of state and the more sordid kind. In recent years, Martha has received well-deserved attention for her Murderbot works, and I am incredibly happy… show more.

I love this amazing fantasy book series because of the profound morality and love of the earth that pervades the world of the story, even though the civilization it portrays is struggling for its life against an implacable and ruthless enemy.

Magic is woven into the fabric of the world, not in the form of chanting and spells, but rather as part of the structure of reality itself. The language of the novel is lyrical and immersive, and the descriptions of nature are unforgettable. When I read, I hear the wind whistling through the empty backcountry; I feel the spray of the mountain streams and the biting cold of the winter mornings. 

I love this book because even though it’s fictional, it delves into phenomena that actually happen to people in real life. There is such a thing as having repeated nightmares that are linked to a real-life incident and/or person, mainly when it directly happens to someone. Still, it also happens to people who either witnessed something and/or have an item with energy attached to it.

A lot of people refuse to believe in stuff like this. It’s like having a dream of a ghost or an entity one night, just to later figure out it was the thing haunting your house or it’s something that attached itself to you.

This book by real-life ghost hunter Peter Underwood is an amazing attempt to demystify some of the most famous haunted sites across the globe, seeking out evidence, personal and witness experiences in an attempt to explain the inexplicable. In many cases he comes up with possible answers, often using the excuse of mental instability in those witnesses to prove his argument. For me, many of his conclusions were not convincing enough, this paucity of believable truth inspiring my own research and desire to debunk the whole concept of ghosts and hauntings. From it, I have learned that though most occurrences can be explained away, there is still much in this world that defies rational logic.   

This book had a very dramatic “reveal” that would make HGTV jealous.

I liked not immediately guessing the doer of bad things and blaming others only to learn I was wrong and also when Mother Nature threw obstacles. I could identify with the husband and wife who are building a new future and a new house for themselves after teaching. I also liked the interplay between the locals and the land and the use of research to get to the heart of the problem.

Most of all, I loved the ending with a twist, and I vowed to read more books by McMahon. 

What I love best about this novel is how adept the author is at combining the traditional elements of a serial killer story with those of supernatural tales such as Peter Straub’s terrifying Ghost Story. And trust me, the combination works. If you’re in the mood to be scared, then touched by the tortured yet loyal and loving Trinity LeDoux, I suggest you stop what you’re doing and acquire The Curse She Wore.

The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood features the author’s scariest tales, including “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”. Blackwood piles detail after detail atop one another until the reader nearly suffocates from the gloom and terror they create! He also squeezes much fear from isolated places like Canada and the Danube River.