by Jay Wilburn
One of my favorite things is giving book recommendations. It helps the readers, it helps the authors, and maybe makes the world a better place. Looking over the last month, I did a non-scientific survey of all the books I shared on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, in private messages, through e-mail, by text, in person, and everywhere else. From that, I organized the ten books I recommended the most regardless of genre.
This is not to say other books weren’t as good or that these authors don’t have more books just as good or better than these. As I tried to match readers’ interests to a recommendation, these are the books that came up the most often in the past month. A different set of readers will probably create different recommendations in the coming month. These books appealed to a number of readers for different reasons and as such, I think you might like them, too.
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10
The Time Machine Girls by Ernestine Tito Jones
This is a great young reader series for kids on their own or read with parents. I stumbled across it while writing my own time travel series for middle grades readers. These books are for a younger elementary audience. Fun, paced well, and pitch perfect for the audience.
9
The Walking Dead Typhoon by Wesley Chu
There are a few great zombie books out right now. I came upon another great one by Daniel Kraus which I’m sure will hit next month’s list. Typhoon is set in Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead universe, but this novel stands on its own. It is set in China and has its own stakes with characters unique as individuals and within their own culture. Great zombie action and creative peril.
8
Bella’s Boys by Thomas R Clark
I have recommended Good Boy, a marvelous apocalyptic survival tale, by this same author. Bella’s Boys: A Tale of Cosmic Horror is great. I expected a story similar to Good Boy. What I got was a great story on an entirely different stage showing me that this author is striving for the furthest reaches of his potential with everything he’s got. We, as the readers, benefit from his efforts. You should read both these books.
7
Dust by Chris Miller
This is a splatter western written for the run of books of the same name by Death’s Head Press. I wrote an article for LitReactor about this subgenre’s recent emergence. I’ve recommended other splatter westerns from this same run of books and will likely have another on next month’s list as yet another superior work has come out from this series. Each book is a standalone novel by a different author mixing westerns with all manner of horror and gore. The stories are excellent and artfully bloody. Dust leans into cosmic horror and stands on its own among other excellent books.
6
Murmur by Patrick Frievald
This novel is on its own level. The tropes of demons, sexual obsession, descending into madness and more don’t sufficiently describe what the author was able to do with this concepts within a unique story. The storytelling rises above other books that play with the same ideas. There is elegance and low horror weaved together in amazing ways. I believe a number of readers have recognized that Frievald has achieved something more than before with this work.
5
Rose Madder by Stephen King
A sleeping with the enemy style plot, Rose Madder may be one of Stephen King’s most underrated books. I have found a few King readers who didn’t like it and more who were only peripherally aware of the novel. King uses some of his familiar beats and style in this story. There is something subtle and bold about the supernatural elements in this novel though. The character work and pacing were good. The whole of the story I think sets it apart even from other better-known Stephen King novels. You can also follow along with my #StephenKingRevisited reading and corresponding posts here.
4
Slaves to Gravity by Wesley Southard and Somer Canon
If this had come out earlier in the month, it would probably be number one because I have recommended it a lot recently. It is the kind of story a wide range of readers can connect with. I have recommended work from both of these authors separately. I wondered what they would be like as a combination. Amazing. A transcendent story that takes you to big highs emotionally with the characters and the action, but pulls no punches with the peril.
3
The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime is a darkly fun book. It explores how murder as a concept became the sensationalized entertainment of an era in several forms of fiction that are commonplace now and how people of the time became obsessed with true crime stories that unfolded in their midst.
2
The Scarlet Plague by Jack London
Years before the 1918 pandemic, Jack London, who wrote Call of the Wild among other classic stories, wrote a post-apocalyptic novel set in 2070. A plague that wiped out most of humanity and civilization half a century earlier leaves one old man who remembers the world as it was among younger men who have gone feral and tribal. The main character tries to explain what society used to be, how it fell, and what humanity might be again to an audience incapable of understanding. It has an old gothic style of a story within a story. The discussions of the technology and the reactions of people to the plague are well-written and also inadvertently strange in that they were written over a hundred years ago, creating an unusual reading experience in a genre that is common today.
1
The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall
A man fights to solve the mystery of himself. Using the strange clues around him and stranger people, he needs to find out who he is and what he is meant to do. It is a well-written and an engrossing thriller.
If you read all of those and are looking for something more, maybe you’ll enjoy Vampire Christ. It’s political and religious satire of current events within a vampire story. Everything happening today makes sense, if you believe in vampires.
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