More like The Step
but
- Elephantasm
Tanith Leestandalone novel1993
similar bycolonialism+1 more
Synopsis - Annie Ember lives in hopeless poverty with her sister Rose and her wicked brother-in-law...until the day that Annie discovers the mysterious exotic shop where she buys, for one penny, a tiny and ancient ivory elephant. Soon afterwards a grisly murder leaves Annie without home or family, but employment is found for her in a country house far away. Sir Hampton Smolte made his fortune out in India, and has brought back not only his wealth but also an obsessive hatred towards that conquered land where he once commanded a mercenary army. His mansion is fanciful and extraordinary, all scarlet and gold, like a fairy tale raja’s palace set down in green English parkland. There Annie is to become a drudge – a scullery maid in this house full of stuffed animals, eccentric servants, and the even more peculiar Smolte family. But soon she catches the eye of the handsome Rupert who, like his father, retains a fascination with India. Entranced, she succumbs to his attentions – till one night she learns in disgust and terror just what his lovemaking entails... Annie’s fear and helpless fury provide the catalyst which will turn this dream house into a place of panic and the impossible – letting in all the power of the jungle, and unlocking the darkest secrets of Hampton Smolte’s beginnings.
- New Crobuzon
series4 books2000
similar by+1 more
The New Crobuzon books are three standalone novels by China Miéville set in and around New Crobuzon, a vast, corrupt industrial city in his invented world of Bas-Lag where magic, biopunk technology, and several sentient species coexist. Perdido Street Station follows a renegade scientist and his lover after an experiment unleashes something monstrous on the city, while The Scar and Iron Council return to the same setting with different casts and only loose continuity between books.
- The Island of Dr. Moreau
series12 books1896
similar by+1 more
H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau follows a shipwrecked man stranded on a remote island where a reclusive scientist creates human-animal hybrids through vivisection, using the scenario to probe questions of cruelty, control, and what separates humanity from the beasts it experiments on. The premise has drawn later reimaginings gathered alongside it here, including Brian Aldiss's Moreau's Other Island and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, each transplanting Wells's central idea into a new setting and voice. Taken together, the group traces one unsettling premise across more than a century of speculative fiction rather than forming a single ongoing story.
- Exorcist
series6 books1971
similar byhorror+1 more
William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) follows two Catholic priests trying to save a twelve-year-old girl from a violent demonic possession, and became the basis of the acclaimed 1973 film. Blatty returned to the story in 1983 with Legion, in which police detective Bill Kinderman's investigation of a string of ritual murders leads him back to the aftermath of that exorcism and the fate of Father Karras; Legion was later filmed as The Exorcist III. Other Exorcist books are tie-in and franchise material rather than further novels by Blatty himself.
- Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthystandalone novel1985
similar by+2 more
"Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen." (cited from the OCLC entry for the first edition)
- Arabesk
series3 books2001
similar bymiddle east+1 more
The Arabesk trilogy is a sequence of alternate history novels by the British author Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
- Childhood's End
Arthur C. Clarkestandalone novel1953
similar by+1 more
Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke. The story follows a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.
- The Arabian Nightmare
Robert Irwinstandalone novel1983
similar byhorrormiddle east
The Arabian Nightmare is a novel by Robert Irwin published in 1983. The Arabian Nightmare was inspired by The Arabian Nights, as well as the novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki.
- Dracula
universe144 books1897
Start hereDracula · Start here
similar byhorror
"Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring" — so the Count greets his guest at the threshold of the Carpathians, and the great door shuts behind. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is the wellspring of the modern vampire: the account of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman who quits his crumbling castle for the crowded lodging-houses of London, and the handful of ordinary people — a young solicitor, a doctor of the mad, a professor of stranger learning — who must piece together what he is before he makes the whole city his fold. It is told wholly in fragments: journal entries, letters, telegrams, ships' logs, phonograph cylinders, each hand recording only its own sliver of the dark. Around that single novel a whole crypt of continuations has grown, raised by many writers across a century. Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Sequence hands the Count the microphone, retelling the old events from his own wry, aggrieved lips and following him into later intrigues. Robert Lory's brisk 1970s Dracula Horror Series revives him as a reluctant weapon turned against fouler things; Peter Tremayne's trilogy reaches back along his bloodline; and further sequels, a Quincey Morris spin-off, and Dracula's Children carry the shadow onward. This is a loose shared world built upon a public-domain figure, not one governed continuity — each author remakes him as villain, antihero, or sympathetic narrator. Begin, always, with Stoker's original; the letters and the mounting dread stand entirely on their own. From there follow whichever door tempts you — Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape for the monster's own confession, Lory or Tremayne for tales that never glance back at the Borgo Pass again.
- Roma Eterna
series11 books1989
similar by+1 more
Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna imagines an alternate history in which the Roman Empire never fell and endures into the present day, tracing its long, uneven survival through a sequence of pivotal moments across two millennia. Rather than one continuous plot, the book is a fix-up of ten linked stories, most first published in Asimov's Science Fiction over a fourteen-year span, each set in a different era of this unbroken Rome. It reads as the chronicle of a civilization rather than a story following a single cast of characters.
- The Vampire Chronicles
series15 books1976
completed
similar byhorror
The Vampire Chronicles is a series of Gothic vampire novels and a media franchise, created by American author Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.
- This Immortal
series2 books1966
similar bycolonialism
This Immortal is a single science fiction novel by Roger Zelazny, expanded from his 1965 serial ...And Call Me Conrad. In a depopulated future Earth largely toured by an alien race, its long-lived, secretive protagonist Conrad Nomikos is assigned to guide and protect a visiting alien across the ruins of Greece and Egypt, uncovering old grudges and assassination plots along the way. The novel shared the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel with Frank Herbert's Dune.
- The Devourers
Indrapramit Dasstandalone novel2015
similar byhorror+1 more
The Devourers is a 2015 debut novel by Indian writer, artist, and editor Indra Das. It takes place in Kolkata, India, where Das grew up, and is considered South Asian speculative fiction and dark fantasy, incorporating aspects of historical fiction, fantasy, and horror. It was originally published by Penguin India in 2015, followed by release in North America by Ballantine Del Rey of Penguin Random House in July 2016.
- The Tel Aviv Dossier
Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yanivstandalone novel2009
similar byhorrormiddle east
Through a city torn apart by a violence they cannot comprehend, three disparate people—a documentary film-maker, a yeshiva student, and a psychotic fireman—must try to survive, and try to find meaning: even if it means being lost themselves. As Tel Aviv is consumed, a strange mountain rises at the heart of the city, and shows the outline of what may be another, alien world beyond. Can there be redemption there? Can the fevered rumours of a coming messiah be true? As the city loses contact with the outside world and closes in on itself, as the few surviving children play and scavenge in the ruins, can innocence survive, and is it possible for hope to spring amid such chaos? A potent mixture of biblical allusions, Lovecraftian echoes, and contemporary culture, The Tel Aviv Dossier is part supernatural thriller, part meditation on the nature of belief—an original and involving novel painted on a vast canvas in which, beneath the despair, humour is never absent. Experience the last days of Tel Aviv...
- The Years of Rice and Salt
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2002
similar bycolonialism
What if the Black Death had killed nearly everyone in Europe instead of a third of it? Kim Stanley Robinson opens on that premise with a Mongol scout named Bold, who finds a Hungarian city emptied by plague and only narrowly escapes execution meant to contain the contagion; sold into slavery, he ends up serving aboard a Chinese treasure fleet alongside a young African companion. From there the novel follows a recurring cast of souls, reincarnated across centuries and identifiable book to book by the first letter of their names, through an alternate history in which Islamic and Chinese civilizations, not a devastated Europe, shape the world's future.
- Downward to the Earth
Robert Silverbergstandalone novel1969
similar bycolonialism
Edmund Gunderson was the Terran administrator of the colony world of Belzagor, and he returns to it after it has gained independence, feeling a sense of guilt for the way he has treated its dominant species, the elephant-like nildoror, whose animalistic appearance had kept Gunderson from taking them seriously as sentient beings. On his return, he feels a new sense of kinship with the natives, perhaps more than for the Terran tourists. The nildoror undergo a process of rebirth, and Gunderson's greatest guilt comes from having denied rebirth to seven nildoror to make them help him repair flood damage.(From Wikipedia)
- Bioterror
Tim Curranstandalone novel2021
similar byhorrormiddle east
● "Six years ago – Nkudbkah, Iraq. A small Republican Guard mechanized infantry unit and the isolated village near it is chosen by the CIA for a dreadful purpose: to test the potential of Project BioGenesis—a genetically modified organism designed to be a viable method of biological warfare. It was an unmitigated failure. When the team sent in for reconnaissance is attacked and eventually infected by the weaponized parasites, only one plan exists for such a result—utter annihilation of all infected organisms under a blanket of napalm and phosphorus, burning it with a cleansing fire...or so they thought." ― quoted from this book's Amazon product page as of 2021-05-16.
