Here are 67 books that The Tommyknockers fans have personally recommended if you like
The Tommyknockers.
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I’ve been a nerd for the morbid for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I tore through all the books on the shelves in my house, whether they were appropriate for my age group or not. I started tearing into Stephen King books at 8 or so. I remember vividly copying language out of Christine when I was about 10 on the playground and getting in a lot of trouble for it. But I turned out okay. I really do believe that kids have a fascination for things above their age range, and adults enjoy it, too, and I still love all of these.
There’s something deliciously attractive about this book.
The language Bradbury uses draws me in every time I visit it, and it keeps me hooked. This was another book I found as a kid, and it left its hooks in me from when I was young.
Is it morbid? There are definitely morbid parts to it. And it deals with life-and-death situations, but it’s just so good. I never wanted it to end.
One of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.
For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all…
It wasn’t until high school when I read Stephen King’s Night Shift that illuminated the genre for me—horror. My first short story was The Dark Shadow, and it fit me like a glove. My writing is inspired by the books I like to read, as I’m sure it is with all writers, and I write characters that I know and in settings I am familiar with for authenticity. The years of experience have honed my craft, and my books are a culmination of my favorite things—supernatural horror, suspense, heart, drama, westerns, and action.
When this book caused me to pull over, park, and listen to the last hour, making me late to my work appointment, I knew I was reading (listening) to the most intense, suspenseful, tightly written novel.
As much as I love horror and the supernatural, none of it thrills me unless it is accompanied by suspense, and no one cranks them out better than Koontz.
If you delight in the suspense of Stephen King and Harlan Coben, you'll love Intensity - a classic thriller by Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz.
Edgler Vess is a sociopath intent on murder. He lives for one purpose only: to satisfy all appetites as they arise, seeking ever more outrageous experience. To live with intensity.
When he attacks her friend, Laura, Chyna Shepherd is saved by the instincts developed during a dark and turbulent childhood. Not knowing Laura is already dead, Chyna follows, hoping to save her friend, as Vess carries her body to his…
As a writer or horror and suspense books myself, I’ve always sought out exceptional works in the genre that are able to scare me and keep me on the edge of my seat. As a student of the horror film genre as well, a number of the books recommended on my list were made into thrilling movies as well, including Phantoms, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Tommyknockers.
Phantomsis an exceptional book. When two sisters discover that their hometown of Snowfield, CA is deserted, the reader is instantly pulled into the mystery. Koontz’s powerful description of finding homes deserted without warning, with dinner still on the table in some cases, is uncanny and unsettling. A masterful storyteller, Koontz adds special touches to increase a sense of the supernatural – voices coming from drain pipes, streetlights shattering, and even random bursts of music being heard over loudspeakers by the handful of survivors. The terror reaches a cosmic scale when Dr. Timothy Flyte recognizes the source of the supernatural events as humanity’s “ancient enemy” – a cunning being of massive size that has been feeding on mankind for centuries. I highly recommend this book if you need to stay awake all night!
"Phantoms is gruesome and unrelenting...It's well realized, intelligent, and humane."-Stephen King
They found the town silent, apparently abandoned. Then they found the first body, strangely swollen and still warm. One hundred fifty were dead, 350 missing. But the terror had only begun in the tiny mountain town of Snowfield, California.
At first they thought it was the work of a maniac. Or terrorists. Or toxic contamination. Or a bizarre new disease.
But then they found the truth. And they saw it in the flesh. And it was worse than anything any of them had ever imagined...
In 1662, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. Awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it.
Over four centuries later, Faith and James move to the country to start a new life and a family. They discover their village lives under the curse uttered by the hanged man. Could their arrival be connected? They fear their choice of new home is no coincidence. Unexplained events hint at threats or warnings to leave. They become convinced the village remains cursed despite their friends’ denials. Who can they trust, and who are potential enemies?
In 1660, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. While awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it. Over four centuries later, Faith and James move to the country to start a new life and a family. They learn that their village lives under the curse uttered by the hanged man. Could their arrival be connected? Faith and James fear that their choice of a new home is…
As a writer or horror and suspense books myself, I’ve always sought out exceptional works in the genre that are able to scare me and keep me on the edge of my seat. As a student of the horror film genre as well, a number of the books recommended on my list were made into thrilling movies as well, including Phantoms, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Tommyknockers.
If you’re awake at night due to paranoia, thenThe Servants of Twilightcomes highly recommended. The book creates an atmosphere of paranoia much like the movieThe Invasion of the Body Snatchers.In the book single mother Christine Scavello tries to save her son from cult members of “The Twilight,” a cult led by the evil and delusional Grace Spivey. Grace accuses Joey of being the antichrist after bumping into him at a local mall. Christine enlists the help of Private Detective Charlie Harrison to protect her and Joey from the cult. However, Grace’s followers are everywhere. Even police officers follow Grace’s orders to destroy the young boy, forcing Charlie, Christine, and Joey to run for their lives against a seemingly unbeatable foe.
To his mother, Joey seems an ordinary six-year-old boy - special to her, but to no one else. To the Servants of Twilight, he is an evil presence who must be destroyed - an Anti-Christ who must die.
The terrifying ordeal for Joey and his mother begins in the supermarket car park where an old woman accosts them and pursues them with her terrible threats. Christine's world is turned into a nightmare of terror. Only her love for her child, and the support of the one man who believes her, gives her the chance to survive the Servants of Twilight...…
I was Site Supervisor at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My fondness for the people involved with the archaeological excavations is only rivaled by my love for the subject matter that involves the collision of cultures as Chesapeake Algonquians, Spanish Jesuits, and English colonists first encountered one another during the 16th and 17th centuries. Though I have been fortunate to write many books, my first book was on Jamestown, and this topic will always hold a special place in my scholarly heart (there is such a thing, I swear!).
Acclaimed crime novelist Patricia Cornwell came and dug with us at Jamestown while doing research for The Last Precinct. For weeks, she immersed herself in every detail of our archaeological excavations and then produced this inspired murder mystery that transcends time. The novel is fun, thrilling, and has its roots deep in the clay subsoil of the Tidewater.
Physically and psychologically bruised by her encounter with the killer Chandonne, Dr Kay Scarpetta has to leave her home in the hands of the police team investigating the attack. She finds shelter with an old friend, Anna Zenner, but it is not the haven of security she needs when she discovers that Anna has been sub-poenaed to appear before a Grand Jury which is investigating Scarpetta for murder. Kay knows she is being framed and she also knows she can trust no-one. Meanwhile it appears that Chandonne killed a woman in New York before his murderous spree in Virginia, but…
I love mysteries, especially series with a female sleuth. I discovered Miss Marple when I was a midwifery student and was instantly hooked. Over the years, I have sought out mysteries with women Sherlocks and am always thrilled to find a series. I was so enchanted that I wanted to add to the genre and now write the Modern Midwife Mysteries featuring Maeve O’Reilly Kensington, a modern nurse midwife. Try any of the books I’ve recommended. You’re in for a treat!
I would love to meet the iconic Dr. Kay Scarpetta in real life. She is amazing.
Patricia Cornwell has written twenty-seven brilliant novels about this intriguing chief medical examiner. In this debut work, Dr. Scarpetta has to track down a serial killer.
Attention to detail, tight plotlines, and friendship and family drama had me locked in from the start. I was instantly transported to Dr. Scarpetta’s universe. It’s a great one.
The first book in the Kay Scarpetta series, from No. 1 bestselling author Patricia Cornwell.
'America's most chilling writer of crime fiction' The Times
A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond, Virginia. Three women have died, brutalised and strangled in their own bedroom. There is no pattern: the killer appears to strike at random - but always early on Saturday mornings.
So when Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical officer, is awakened at 2.33 am, she knows the news is bad: there is a fourth victim. And she fears now for those that will follow unless she can dig…
Years ago, I wrote mystery novels featuring women investigators when that was new in the genre. Now, I discover stories of real-life women whose lives have a natural story arc that can engage the reader from start to finish. Like gambling and prostitution, abortion, when it was illegal in the US, as it is now again in many places, was simultaneously in your face and undercover. It was also largely practiced by women, which is why I’m fascinated by books about it.
I thought I had nothing left to learn about Madame Restell, the unapologetic 19th-century abortion provider until I saw how this book was organized. While keeping the narrative flowing, Syrett helpfully organizes Restell’s career into phases defined by changes in the law, her trials, and the emergence of one male adversary after another.
I loved learning that, even after Restell met her Waterloo, her loving grandchildren profited from her legacy. As told by Syrett, a gender-norm-defying woman who was literally hounded to death somehow managed to have the last laugh.
The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century-and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights
For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, "Madame Restell," the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. "Restellism" became the term her detractors used to indict her.
When you write a book, it’s natural to put yourself in it. You’re the avenger, the rookie agent, the hard-drinking detective. But how many of us volunteer to be the corpse? I sit here every day in the cancer unit at a public Thai hospital and smile at folks who won’t be around much longer. I wrote fifteen books in a series about a coroner. I painted the victims colorfully when they were still alive but how much respect did I show them once they were chunks of slowly decaying meat? From now on my treatment of the souls that smile back at me will take on a new life.
You don’t necessarily have to like an author to admire their grasp of the subject matter and few writers have a better slab-side manner than Cornwell. She knows her stuff and you can perhaps forgive her the smartarsery that she can’t resist. But she does go out of her way to give the victims and their families closure.
In this #1 New York Times bestseller Dr. Kay Scarpetta is on a deadly mission that will pull her in two opposite directions: toward protecting her career or toward the truth...
Remains were all that was left of the stowaway. He arrived in Richmond's Deep Water Terminal-the ghastly cargo of a ship from Belgium. The decomposed body gives Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta no clues to its identity-or the cause of death. But an odd tattoo soon leads her on an international search to Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, France-and towards a confrontation with one of the most savage killers…
Ever since great-grandma told me she envied me, being born when women could choose any profession, I developed a deep respect for the women throughout history who have held unconventional roles. I am drawn to books featuring powerful women characters who show a zeal for making their mark on the world in roles like surveyors, ranchers, telephone operators, historians, horse trainers, and more, long before their choices became socially acceptable. As a woman software engineer (and now part-time author), I’ve gained an appreciation for all the women who paved the way for the modern woman.
Even though authors frequently write about women doctors during the Gilded Age, Dr. Josephine (Jo) is one of my favorites. She is one of the few who had the full support of her father and was his favorite child, more so than her younger brother. What made this story so memorable for me was the lifelike way the author portrayed Dr. Jo and her struggle to be accepted in a man’s profession. The author paired her up with a traditional cavalryman, which added just the right amount of tension to their attraction. I loved everything about this story, from the rich characters to the action to the faith woven throughout. One of my top five favorites of all time.
Haunted by the horrors of war, ex-cavalry officer Matthew Hanger leads a band of mercenaries known as Hanger's Horsemen who have become legends in 1890s Texas. They defend the innocent and obtain justice for the oppressed. But when a rustler's bullet leaves one of them at death's door, they're the ones in need of saving.
Dr. Josephine Burkett is used to men taking one look at her skirts and discounting her medical skills. What she's not used to is having a man change his mind in a heartbeat and offer to assist her in surgery. Matthew Hanger's dedication to his…
I love the combination of action and romance and suspense. It’s a real juggle as an author to balance the two main elements (suspense and romance mostly), give each depth and page time, and make us care about the people both in love and in peril. I’ve always been drawn to suspense, even as a kid. But I gotta have the relationships, too. I used to direct plays with my childhood friends, and there were always bad guys and the romance—and this was long before I was thinking of having a real romance!
Suzanne was one of the early military romance superstars, at least for me. Her books aren’t always just a simple chronological storyline. Here we meet a few couples or couples-to-be, plus there’s a flashback story as well. This is the first of the Troubleshooters series, and it was great to see how it started with a SEAL hero whose sighting of a terrorist in his hometown wasn’t believed because he’d had a head injury in combat. Tracking him down, while finding himself around a lost love, makes for a satisfying read.
The new Suzanne Brockmann novel from Headline and the first book in the Troubleshooters series. Troubleshooters: Danger can be addictive. After a near-fatal head injury, US Navy SEAL Lieutenant Tom Paoletti is forced to take a leave of absence from his Seal team, the Troubleshooters. Being out of the action is so far out of character that he thinks a visit home to New England may be the answer. So much the better if that means he can see Dr Kelly Ashton again. Then the unthinkable happens as Tom catches a terrifying glimpse of an international terrorist in his hometown.…
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