The most recommended sea monster books

Impeccable artwork, precision storytelling, and singularly unique invention are all packed into this amazing book experience. The basic concept is brilliant and mind-bending, and actually maybe even a little bit mind-melting. On top of that is an additional treat of wonderful and whimsical glimpses into a magical undersea world, obviously painted with true passion for the subject matter.

Another of my cheat picks, but I feel they are both following the spirit of the list (and, more importantly, my own enthusiasm).

Here is a maritime fantasy set in a blustery region much colder than the tropical Caribbean. No, this is grim-up-north fiction – and I wasn’t surprised one bit to find the author is from Yorkshire.

The Tide Child series is a uniquely fascinating one, set in a dark, matriarchal world, dense with rotting pink and purple plants, where the “corpselights” of sacrificed children hang from ships built from the bones of sea dragons, where slavery is rife, and the faces of crews are scoured by wind and freezing brine.
Don’t expect a great deal of joy in these books. But they are nonetheless adventurous, fantastical, and exciting. I just wish they’d get a bit warmer... brrrrr.

What was it that stood out for me reading this book? Quite simply, Hawthorne brings something new to the top of the food chain (don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you).

Before Kronos Rising, it was all sharks and krakens, which is ironic because those two creatures feature heavily in the sequels. As they say, variety is the spice of life. But more than that, I found Hawthorne to be a breath of fresh air in a genre that can sometimes grow a little stale.

So, if you are looking for a great sea monster book that doesn’t feature one of the usual suspects, then Kronos Rising is my recommendation to you. Or the first one, at least.

Creative and deeply layered, this book has so much on offer: multiple universes, a boy who can talk to fish, a city built of rafts, sea monsters, and wonderfully clever and well-drawn characters. An absolutely beautiful and emotionally engaging story of escaped slaves and refugees fleeing for their lives seeking a new home and freedom. I was totally swept away.

This book has this soft slow kind of magic that would be wonderful for winding down right before bedtime. The images flow through the book and guide you down into the colorful glowing depths where a family of mermaids guard the secrets of the sea. The message is lovely as well. Little Pearl the mermaid discovers that even the smallest of responsibilities, when nurtured properly, can grow to be hugely impactful.

When a tiny sea serpent suddenly drops out of the faucet and into a girl’s bath, an immediate and playful friendship begins. As the sea serpent grows bigger, he tells the tale of how he was carried by a tornado over jungles and silvery cities until he landed in a lake and was whooshed up by a pipe. He sings fanciful songs about the deep blue sea and fish-shaped like guitars. Eventually, he grows so big that the little girl knows it’s time he returns to the sea. So, she helps the sea serpent, now big as a whale, overcome his fear of being left on his own, reminding him that he won’t be lonely, and will have new adventures with newfound friends. Catia Chien’s gorgeous illustrations are very expressive and a beautiful compliment to this lovely story of learning to let go and do what’s right. 

This book had everything I could ever desire in an escape—monsters, magic, and mayhem. Brine Seaborne, a very precocious girl, gets wrapped up in the adventures of pirates as they head out on a quest to find the Magical North. Intertwined with the creative, beguiling magic are conversations that resonated deeply for me, ones about what makes a person a monster and who gets to hold positions of power (I actually stopped and jotted down a couple quotes while reading! Those notes are still in my phone today!). Voyage to the Magical North sits on my “favorites” shelf because of the thoughtful questions that are buried just beneath the surface of the quest Brine and her companions embark on.

When I think about the arctic, and horror, I immediately think of Dan Simmons and The Terror.

It’s an expansive, tense, visceral book that feels historical. The authority and details make this feel like fact when we know this is fiction. It’s also quite lyrical and haunting—the setting as a backdrop, the weather, and senses brutalized by this expedition, and the events that slowly unfold. Madness, mutiny, and cannibalism? Yes, please. There are so many ways you can die out here in the cold—starvation, hypothermia, scurvy, exposure, etc.

Whether you came to his work via this book, Carrion Comfort, or (like I did) with Song of Kali, this may be his best work to date. And the television series is worth a gander as well. Immersive, unsettling, gripping, and bleak this is one of my favorite Arctic horror novels to date.

I absolutely loved this quiet, lyrical novella with a sapphic sea monster romance and an underlying paranormal mystery that needs to be solved. The characters were flawed and real to me, and, like the rest of this novella, they were fully fleshed out despite the relatively few pages they have together.

The language is stunning, the pacing is perfect, and the sea monster lady is scaly and incredibly cool. I will be thinking about the impact this book left on me—and the way it proved to me that indie books can be very high quality—for years.

This Dark Fantasy story about gods of the sea interacting with souls of the dead has everything a good sea monster story has to offer and more.

A ship captain, who is also a god, tries to rescue the souls of drowned sailors before his sister sends her creatures to eat them, losing their souls to the world forever.