100 books like The Lovely Bones

I love suspense thrillers with a strong opening hook, and this spell-binding and intoxicating adventure into a Greek Heart of Darkness kept me guessing up to the last page and beyond (everyone disagrees about the enigmatic ending).

An almost Faust-like adventure, set in, to me, the most intoxicating landscape on the planet. I found it an utterly mind-bending mystery that blended reality with fantasy, love, and fear like no other. It made me want to move to Greece.

I could not put this down. This book immediately drew me in and never let me go.

The way the characters were written made me feel like I intimately knew each person, and the many mysteries and secrets among and between each family member made me want to know more. The undeniable effect of how we deal–or don’t deal–with grief is a thread throughout the book, one that I definitely connected with.

But, it was how each family member pursued, put down, or attempted to pass down their hopes and dreams that made me think about the dynamics within my own family.

I was first drawn to Capote’s book because it’s an amazing hybrid—a page-turning, true crime story about the Clutter family murders in Kansas that reads like fiction. Capote and I are both products of the Deep South, so I knew to expect lyrical writing and rich details, two elements I treasure in a novel.

When I drive from my home to visit my son in Florida, I go through Monroeville, Alabama, where Capote grew up next door to Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), and I think of how she helped him interview friends of the victims and watched him almost lose his soul as he interviewed the killers.

Those interviews are the beating heart that sucked me into the story and ensured this novel would become a classic.  

I honestly think this is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.

In writing about haunting, I always confront the question of what pins ghosts to the living world. I loved the poignancy of Saunders’s ghosts and the desperate denial of their own deaths that they cling to.

I have a special love of books written in a multiplicity of voices; the way Saunders writes his ghostly chorus is so virtuosic it took my breath away. 

This book is a longtime favorite of mine. Toni Morrison was a master at blending the personal story and the political, and in this book, she blends the true story of a mother who kills her child to prevent slave catchers from returning the baby to life as a slave.

Morrison’s fictional Sethe is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed and the memories of her difficult life as a slave. This is one of the novels I return to time after time, both for the beauty of the writing and the portrayal of a mother’s love, guilt, and the lingering impact of slavery.

Reading this book made me stop writing my own Southern gothic ghost book in the middle, rethink it completely, and start over again from scratch, and I wasn’t even mad about it. It’s just that good. It’s about thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family—his much-loved and very much dying grandmother, his strong, silent, and protective grandfather, his wild child mother, Leonie, his baby sister, Kayla, who looks to Jojo to keep her safe, and his white father, Michael, who just got out of jail. Everybody has secrets, and everybody sees ghosts. This literary novel won the National Book Award, but I promise you, horror readers, it will scare you silly and break your heart. 

I always try to find reasons to read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the painfully sad story of a family hauling their mother’s body to her hometown in order to bury her. Addie Bundren’s life has been sad and dreary, but the path to her resting place is even more so, replete with flood and fire, as well as a post-death monologue that contains one of the most psychologically complete rationalizations in literary history. Every time I read this book, I understand each of the Bundren family members more deeply, and have greater sympathy for the yoke their circumstance has harnessed them to.

Before I Fall is Mean Girls meets Groundhog Day, with the popular and pretty protagonist, Sam, forced to relive February 12th (her beloved “Cupid’s Day”) over and over. In the beginning, I had no love for Sam and was appalled by her and her friend’s nasty behavior, but Sam’s character growth throughout the novel is inspirational. The time-turning in the novel is handled flawlessly with repeated events never growing dull, and each new loop offering another layer to Sam’s redemption. Admittedly the book didn’t end the way I wanted (I’m a fan of fairy tale endings, even if unrealistic), but watching Sam evolve from a shallow mean girl to a beautiful soul was a moving experience and made the book worth the read.

I think Atticus Finch represents the best qualities in a father and a man. If he is idealized, as many have said, it is an ideal all fathers can aspire to.

I first read this in high school, and I’m not sure I was mature enough to appreciate it. Later, it was a selection in the book discussion group I was in, where we focused less on the characters and more on the themes. When I read it a third time on my own, as an adult and father, I came to appreciate how Atticus Finch models the behavior he wants to see in the world, and that, I think, is the most effective form of fathering.

I expected to be swept away by this book in the way most psychological thrillers impact me–my heart quickening with the pace, my chest aching for resolution, and a rush of relief when the novel ends, followed by a craving for more. That happened. Sure. But the twist in this book comes in the middle of the book with a buildup of suspense and a major resolution that satisfied all my expectations of a thriller.

After that, the novel thrust me into a whole new reading experience, almost another genre, one marked by a different kind of intensity and suspense. Still, it did not feel like two books in one. It felt like one story told through two necessarily different genres. It felt right.