100 books like The Wild

As a child, all I wanted to read were books about adventure. I also had an adventurous childhood, growing up in the Louisiana swamps with a father who actually hunted alligators and took me with him. As I came of age, I longed to tell stories, and, as they say, it’s best to write about what you know. To date, I’ve penned six novels, all set in the exotic wetlands of Cajun, Louisiana. I feel missionary about this—that my writing gifts allow me to decode my homeplace in a way that makes it easier for outsiders to see the singular niche it occupies on the American landscape. 

I’m a writer with a passion for nature and the great outdoors. As a child, my family vacations centered around camping in various locations around the U.S. We spent plenty of time hiking, swimming, exploring caves, and sitting around a campfire. My mom and I also frequently camped with our horses, sometimes even sleeping in the back of our horse trailer. Those are some of the best memories of my life. To this day, my family and I still enjoy exploring the great outdoors. Some of our favorite destinations include the Grand Canyon, the beaches of Key West, the Pacific Northwest, the Redwood forests, and Yellowstone National Park.

As a child, I received an electronic typewriter as a gift and immediately got to work on a story about a family living on an island. Even at ten, I recognized the power of islands, with their built-in problems of isolation and rich possibilities for metaphors. So it only made sense I’d one day publish a book set on one. If you’re like me and can’t resist books with island settings, you’ll love these book recommendations. Each island in this collection has its own personality that becomes a character of its own, and none of these books could exist in the same way without their unique settings. 

I’m a writer with a passion for nature and the great outdoors. As a child, my family vacations centered around camping in various locations around the U.S. We spent plenty of time hiking, swimming, exploring caves, and sitting around a campfire. My mom and I also frequently camped with our horses, sometimes even sleeping in the back of our horse trailer. Those are some of the best memories of my life. To this day, my family and I still enjoy exploring the great outdoors. Some of our favorite destinations include the Grand Canyon, the beaches of Key West, the Pacific Northwest, the Redwood forests, and Yellowstone National Park.

I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.

I worked as an industrial electrician for over two decades. At one point during a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a question was posed about the delivery time of a specific piece of equipment. When the answer was given that it would be about a year away, it got me thinking: what if a specialized piece of equipment—critical to the grid and with an equally long lead time—was destroyed, how would the grid survive? More importantly; how would we survive? That single statement was the spark that ignited the fire in me to learn all about the grid, and to write Dark State.   

I’ve always admired epistolary novels—stories told in the form of diaries, letters, or other mass media. They seem so real and so much more believable than plain narratives. When dealing with fantastic subjects, like paranormal phenomena, any technique that can draw the weird back into the real world helps me become more invested as a reader. It’s a quality I’ve also tried to capture as a horror writer. Moreover, the epistolary format pairs well with unreliable narrators, often filtering stories so as to make them more ambiguous and disturbing. From the many epistolary works I’ve read over the years, here are my picks for the most compelling—and creepy.

My name is Alister Dray Penborn. I am a lifelong mystery lover, all the way back to my favorite childhood cartoon, Scooby-Doo, and my favorite anime, Detective Conan, or Case Closed as it was called in the US at the time of airing. It's a passion that grew over the years as I was exposed to even more great mysteries. One of the most appealing aspects is the investigation process, where a character sees the inconsistencies of crime scenes, analyzes and makes sense of events, and collects and relies on the slightest clues to act as puzzle pieces to the full picture.

When I was eleven, I picked up a book about a girl and a boy who get lost on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada. It’s the first book I can remember reading over and over and over again. I wanted to be in that tent and in that forest figuring out how to survive. Since then, I’ve been hooked on books about people facing grueling physical challenges, surviving in the wilderness, and finding out what they’re made of. They’re urgent and compelling and the stakes are high, and I’ll never stop loving the thrill of reading about people being pushed to their physical and mental limits.

As an avid reader, I read a wide variety of books. Of the fiction genre mystery and suspense remain my favorite. From the classics to the gritty, a well-told mystery is a literary gem. As my mystery palette has aged—like my taste in wine—so are my demands of what makes a good mystery novel. The best mysteries for me contain more than a serpentine journey toward the hidden truth. They have intriguing characters, crisp dialogue, interesting settings, formidable foes, and of course indispensable heroes or anti-heroes. My writing goal is aimed at achieving the same level of literary penmanship of the mysteries I enjoy reading so much.