Fans pick 100 books like The Twilight Zone

Richard Matheson is a horror legend for good reason, and most casual viewers of genre films and TV would probably be surprised at how much of his work they’ve encountered in some form or another. The Will Smith movie I Am Legend is adapted from his work. Steven Spielberg’s first film, Duel, as well. The paranoid Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is best known as a classic Twilight Zone episode, referenced and parodied numerous times in the decades since, but Matheson’s original reflects everything that’s great about his work: a fairly practical, everyman sort of protagonist (for the 1960s anyway) undone by an impossible situation.

I don’t think most Lovecraft fans casual or devoted would single out The Music of Erich Zann, given the staying power of the Cthulhu mythos and everything associated with it. But what causes Lovecraft’s work to resonate so many decades later is his mastery over the disquieting, and this story about music channeled from a horrific place played on a street that doesn’t seem to exist by a violinist terrified and compelled to keep playing has stayed with me more than any of Lovecraft’s other stories in the years since I read it. Maybe it’s the musician in me, or maybe it’s the distortions of reality that tend to crop up in my own writing. Either way it’s striking, and a good introduction to the strangeness of H. P. Lovecraft.

Specifically, I'm recommending the short story "Sea Oak." In the expanse of horror fiction, it has to be said that there are very few stories about a kindly old woman who returns from the dead as a pissed-off, vulgar, rotting corpse demanding her nephew start showing his cock (Saunders’s phrasing, not mine) for extra money so that his family can stop being pushovers and start earning some cash. George Saunders, it should be noted, is not remotely a horror author—rather, one of the more offbeat, distinctive writers of short literary fiction of the last quarter century—and Pastoralia is determinedly not a horror collection. But it’s exactly this that makes “Sea Oak” the strangest, least likely zombie story, if you can call it that, that you’ll ever read.

"The One Who Waits," one of my favorite stories in this collection, would be regarded more commonly as science fiction, as it takes place during an Earth expedition to Mars. But Ray Bradbury’s story also pioneers the classic horror trope of a small group of people falling one by one to a mysterious creature they cannot see—and with a means of disguise highly imaginative, beautifully written, and fundamentally terrifying. Bradbury is a phenomenal writer and it’s difficult to recommend any one story without feeling certain you’ve dropped the ball in not recommending another--you really can't go wrong with this entire collection--but the quick, clever, nuanced "The One Who Waits" is one of the best sci-fi/horror hybrids ever written.

Wallis Eates is the master of picking scabs and upturning stones to see what scuttles beneath. And often among all the dirt and bugs, she finds such amazing treasure. In this book, she has such vivid and detailed memories I found myself staring into her wonderful pencil marks and time travelling back into the mind of my own little self and feeling all the fear and awe of those years. I was going to write, it's like happening upon someone’s secret diary, but it's so visceral, it's more like being Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap and suddenly, wonderfully finding yourself in someone else’s body for a minute.

Kid books are the most important books. They hook deep into the gray matter right as it’s branching off in all directions, and set the course for a whole new crop of writers. The imagery in this companion to the long-running Animorphs series was off the charts – for example, a moon-spanning hivemind organism that keeps thousands of victims tethered underwater, trepanned by tendrils that let it access their decaying brains. This one is dark, vivid, and capped off by a beautifully understated death. 

Rod Serling’s fantasy anthology (where he was narrator and chief writer) was a favorite of ours back then and still is. Despite a skimpy production budget, the show’s quality scripts, acting, and imaginative themes usually transcended the sparse settings.

Having seen most episodes several times, we still turn to Zicree’s handy book to refresh our memories of the show. This was one of the first of the “companion” books to document a memorable TV series, presenting each episode with cast and crew information, airdate, sample photo, the text of Serling’s intro and outro narration, plot summary and revealing analysis, and background details. The expanded 3rd edition (from 2018) also covers the various later revivals of the series.

The cover of this biography is J-O-S-H spelled out in huge theatrical lights—and Logan really was a Broadway legend as a director/producer/writer.  The book chronicles his successes and failures, and he analyzes each show he worked on with an unsentimental and critical eye. He astutely argues for what audiences want to see, and what they reject. Particularly compelling are his personal portraits of Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II.

I love this book because it explores a new way of understanding human emotions. When you laugh, cry, or scowl with anger, you often assume that the emotions you're feeling are the same as everyone else’s. Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that this is not necessarily the case, according to the new science of emotion.

She clearly describes the research, including her own, that shows that emotions are not hard-wired at birth but are constructed by our brains and our bodies as we go through life. It means that we can be the architects of our emotional lives, and the implications for society are profound. Reading this book has excited me and given me a great deal of hope and optimism about how we can have more agency over our emotional lives. 

V. S. Ramachandran is a gifted experimentalist and writer who does not hesitate to pursue deep and important questions about our minds. Rather than employing expensive imaging or large sample sizes, he is more likely to use a cardboard box, an old stereopticon, or a rubber hand in his experiments. 

His creativity in finding concrete ways to test seemingly vague but interesting claims about our minds has led to several breakthroughs, in our understanding of phantom limbs and our ability to treat phantom pain, and also in our study of synesthesia—cases in which people see numbers as having colors, for example.

As I can attest, he is able to transmit to his students the idea that pursuing scientific questions can be thrilling, fulfilling, and so much fun that you can’t wait to get to work in the morning.