Books like 'The Maxx: Maxximized Volume 1'
Readers who enjoyed The Maxx: Maxximized Volume 1 by Sam Kieth & William Messner-Loebs also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical fantasy action / adventure psychological dark fantasy comedy 20th-century historical super-powered dark
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Kaleidoscope by Dean Koontz
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsNameless is wrestling with more violent visions of the future when his next mission comes with the assurance, This one will be easy. It’s a promise that leaves Nameless dangerously unprepared.It seems straightforward enough: Get a foot in the door by posing as a potential investor in a lucrative underground business—then bring the place down from the inside. There’s more here than meets the eye... -
Snatched by the Sandman by Emily Shore
Rated: 4.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsIf you use TW's as a shopping list and love "WTF did I just read?" books that will give you trauma until you need therapy...or an exorcism, this book is for you.ZENYAA skeletal king saving me from faceless beings in another dimension is not the wildest part of my day. I follow the walking bone daddy into his fortress where I learn he is Nyxion, the God of Nightmares, and he has big plans for me... -
Dreams of the Dying by Nicolas Lietzau
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIf your mind is the enemy, where do you run?Years after a harrowing war experience, ex-mercenary Jespar Dal'Varek has taken to drifting. It's a lonely existence, but, barring the occasional bout of melancholia, he has found the closest thing to peace a man like him deserves. Life is "all right."Or so he believes... -
Vigor Mortis: Book 2 by Natalie Maher
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsAs Vita's humanity slowly drips away, monsters fallen from an island above spread throughout her home. While she fights fellow horrors outside the city's walls, her family suffers threats from within them. Yet surely, there's no problem enough power can't solve... and if there's one thing eating souls is good for, it's power... -
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Confessor by Terry Goodkind
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 47 ratingsDescending into darkness, about to be overwhelmed by evil, those people still free are powerless to stop the coming dawn of a savage new world, while Richard faces the guilt of knowing that he must let it happen. Alone, he must bear the weight of a sin he dare not confess to the one person he loves…and has lost... -
The Devil's Only Friend by Dan Wells
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsJohn Wayne Cleaver hunts demons: they've killed his neighbors, his family, and the girl he loves, but in the end he's always won. Now he works for a secret government kill team, using his gift to hunt and kill as many monsters as he can......but the monsters have noticed, and the quiet game of cat and mouse is about to erupt into a full scale supernatural war... -
Stormrage by Skye Knizley
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA man, hung from a light-post in the center of Death Alley. Nude, tortured, headless and left for half-vampire Detective Raven Storm to find, it's her most challenging case to date... -
Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsThe definitive English language translation of the internationally bestselling Ukrainian novel—a brilliant dark fantasy with "the potential to be a modern classic" (Lev Grossman), combining psychological suspense, enchantment, and terror that makes us consider human existence in a fresh and provocative way.Our life is brief . .Categorized as:
dark magical-realism 21st-century action-adventure audiobook boarding-school book classics -
The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsOne of the feature stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, H.P. Lovecraft's 'the Call of Cthulhu' is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world...Categorized as:
20th-century dark historical low-fantasy magical-realism action-adventure adult aliens -
Full Throttle by Joe Hill
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns...Categorized as:
dark magical-realism action-adventure adult anthologies audiobook contemporary crime -
A Wild Light by Marjorie M. Liu
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 23 ratingsView our feature on Marjorie Liu’s A Wild Light.For too long Maxine Kiss has felt an inexplicable darkness inside her-a force she channels into hunting the demons bent on destroying the human race. But when she finds herself covered in blood and crouched beside her grandfather's dead body with no memory of what happened, Maxine begins to fear that the darkness has finally consumed her... -
Deadly Little Games by Laurie Faria Stolarz
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsHigh school juniors Camelia and Ben have discovered a powerful bond: They both possess the power of psychometry, the ability to see the future through touch. For Ben, the gift is a frightening liability. When he senses a strong threat or betrayal, he risks losing control. Camelia's gift is more mysterious. When she works with clay, her hands sculpt messages her mind doesn't yet comprehend... -
Last Call by Tim Powers
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsTwenty years ago Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player and went into hiding, after a weird high-stakes game played with Tarot cards. But now the cards - and the supernatural powers behind them - have found him again.Crane's father killed gangster Bugsy Siegel in 1948 to become the Fisher King, and to keep that power he is determined to kill his son...Categorized as:
20th-century dark low-fantasy magical-realism action-adventure adult alternate-history arthurian -
Everville by Clive Barker
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsOn the borderland between this world and the world of Quiddity, the sea of our dreams, sits Everville. For years, it has lived in ignorance of the gleaming shore on which it lies. But its ignorance is not bliss... -
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Brother Odd by Dean Koontz
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 54 ratingsLoop me in, odd one.The words, spoken in the deep of night by a sleeping child, chill the young man watching over her. For this was a favorite phrase of Stormy Llewellyn, his lost love, and Stormy is dead, gone forever from this world. In the haunted halls of the isolated monastery where he had sought peace, Odd Thomas is stalking spirits of an infinitely darker nature... -
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 55 ratingsBeneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies the city of New Crobuzon, where the unsavory deal is stranger to no one--not even to Isaac, a gifted and eccentric scientist who has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research... -
The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsTwo sisters go missing on a remote Scottish island. Twenty years later, one is found--but she's still the same age as when she disappeared. The secrets of witches have reached across the centuries in this chilling Gothic thriller from the author of the acclaimed The Nesting... -
Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFaith shapes the landscape, defines the laws of physics, and makes a mockery of truth. Common knowledge isn't an axiom, it's a force of nature. What the masses believe is. But insanity is a weapon, conviction a shield. Delusions give birth to foul new gods.Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geisteskranken—men and women whose delusions manifest, twisting reality... -
Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz
Rated: 3.97 of 5 stars · 73 ratingsThe dead don't talk. I don't know why. But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Sometimes the silent souls who seek out Odd want justice. Occasionally their otherworldly tips help him prevent a crime. But this time it’s different... -
Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsYou might think that helping a friend's widow to stop a lawyer from stealing her husband's corpse would be the strangest thing on your To Do list. But life is rarely that simple for Felix Castor. A brutal murder in King's Cross bears all the hallmarks of a long-dead American serial killer, and it takes more good sense than Castor possesses not to get involved... -
Forever Odd by Dean Koontz
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 58 ratingsI see dead people. But then, by God, I do something about it.Odd Thomas never asked for his special ability. He's just an ordinary guy trying to live a quiet life in the small desert town of Pico Mundo. Yet he feels an obligation to do right by his otherworldly confidants, and that's why he's won hearts on both sides of the divide between life and death... -
An Old Friend of the Family by Fred Saberhagen
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Southerland family left the old world to start anew in America, but little did they know that a blood-feud, older than history itself, would follow them through the generations to come.Kate Southerland, the first born of the latest generation of Southerlands, has been murdered, but she is not dead. Her little brother, Johnny, has also vanished, a severed, bloody finger the only clue... -
Ghost by Carole Cummings
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsDwelling in the land of Ada and defending magic users called the Jin, Fen Jacin-rei is a trained assassin and an Untouchable, one whose mind hosts the Voices of the Ancestors, spirits of long-dead magicians. His fate should be one of madness and solitude, yet Fen Jacin-rei desperately clings to his sanity and ferociously protects the family he loves... -
Written in the Blood by Stephen Lloyd Jones
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"Chilling . . . A neo-gothic treat; original, richly imagined, and powerfully told." --The Guardian (UK) for The String Diaries See the girl. Leah Wilde is twenty-four, a runaway on a black motorbike, hunting for answers while changing her identity with each new Central European town... -
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Last Summer at Mars Hill by Elizabeth Hand
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThis is Elizabeth Hand's long-awaited collection of short stories, centered around her Nebula and World Fantasy Award-winning novella The Last Summer at Mars Hill. There are 12 pieces in all here, ranging from those first published in places like Interzone and Pulphouse to a two-page poem taken from the pages of Asimov's...Categorized as:
dark low-fantasy magical-realism action-adventure adult anthologies colonization contemporary -
The Night Inside by Nancy Baker
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsArdeth Alexander’s life is the wholly predictable one of a graduate student. She lives by schedules – for papers due, classes to attend, small jobs of research to complete for extra income. Ardeth is the responsible one – steady, dependable, maybe even a little boring.One day, when she is out for her customary early morning walk, all that changes... -
Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsTHE PAST... Caught behind the lines of Hitler’s Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp. Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face to face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazi’s themselves...THE PRESENT.. -
Alice by Christina Henry
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsA mind-bending new novel inspired by the twisted and wondrous works of Lewis Carroll... In a warren of crumbling buildings and desperate people called the Old City, there stands a hospital with cinderblock walls which echo the screams of the poor souls inside. In the hospital, there is a woman. Her hair, once blond, hangs in tangles down her back... -
Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsSixteen-year-old Blake and his younger brother, Quinn, are exact opposites. Blake is the responsible member of the family. He constantly has to keep an eye on the fearless Quinn, whose thrill-seeking sometimes goes too far. But the stakes get higher when Blake has to chase Quinn into a bizarre phantom carnival that traps its customers forever...Categorized as:
dark magical-realism action-adventure audiobook book children-books dark-fantasy dystopia -
Darker Things by Rob Cornell
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsCraig Lockman—no one had called him that in fifteen years.Not since his days at the Agency. Not since he was trained to kill creatures that were supposed to exist only in nightmares.Yet the teenage girl on his doorstep not only knows his real name, she claims she's his daughter.Before Lockman can learn how the girl found him, he's attacked by a black-ops team of assassins... -
American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSome places are too good to be true. Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map. In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things. After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother's home in Wink, New Mexico... -
The Mound by H.P. Lovecraft, Zelia Bishop
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"The Mound" is a horror/science fiction novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written by him as a ghostwriter from December 1929 to January 1930 after he was hired by Zealia Bishop to create a story about an Indian mound which is haunted by a headless ghost. Lovecraft expanded the story into a tale about a mound that conceals a gateway to a subterranean civilization, the realm of K'n-yan... -
Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King
Rated: 3.84 of 5 stars · 60 ratingsFive interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation...Categorized as:
20th-century dark drama historical magical-realism action-adventure adult anthologies -
Insomnia by Stephen King
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsRalph Roberts has a problem: he isn't sleeping so well these days. In fact, he's hardly sleeping at all. Each morning, the news conveyed by the bedside clock is a little worse: 3:15...3:02...2:45...2:15. The books call it "premature waking"; Ralph, who is still learning to be a widower, calls it a season in hell... -
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Gateway to Nifleheim by Glenn G. Thater
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWhen mad sorcerers open a gateway to the very pits of hell, releasing demons of darkest nightmare upon the world, only the intrepid knights of House Eotrus stand in their way. Claradon Eotrus takes up the mantle of his noble house to avenge his father and hold back the tide of chaos that threatens to engulf the world and destroy mankind... -
The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North
Rated: 3.64 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA hauntingly powerful novel about how the choices we make can stay with us forever, by the award-winning author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and 84K. South Africa in the 1880s. A young and naive English doctor by the name of William Abbey witnesses the lynching of a local boy by the white colonists. As the child dies, his mother curses William... -
The Academy, Book One by Chad Leito
Rated: 3.64 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsEvery six months, 450 fifteen-year-olds are kidnapped from their homes across the world. These kidnappings happen in the span of a week, as reliable as clockwork. The victims don’t know each other, or their kidnappers. The fifteen-year-olds either end up with a ‘missing persons’ file gathering dust in a filing cabinet, or they are assumed dead. No one ever discovers what happens to them... -
Through Dead Eyes by Chris Priestley
Rated: 3.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsAlex joins his father on a business trip to Amsterdam. During the day he hangs out with the daughter of a family friend. They visit the usual sights but also coffee shops and flea markets off the beaten track. At one of these markets Alex spots an ancient-looking mask. Before he knows what he's doing he buys it. Later, in his hotel room, he feels compelled to put the mask on... -
Black Light by Elizabeth Hand
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe privileged daughter of famous television actors, Charlotte, "Lit, " Moylan is ready to enjoy one last wild fling before college and adulthood. In fact, the whole idyllic hamlet of Kamensic, New York, is ready to party, for legendary avant-garde film director--and Lit's godfather--Alex Kern is coming back to reopen his fabulous mansion, Bolerium. But it won't be just any party... -
The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice
Rated: 3.74 of 5 stars · 62 ratingsIn a gripping feat of storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now-classic Interview with the Vampire. For centuries, Lestat—vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals—has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Now he is alone... -
The Pillars of Creation by Terry Goodkind
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 51 ratingsSequel to the New York Times bestselling Faith of the FallenNew York Times bestselling author Terry Goodkind has created his most lavish adventure yet. Tormented her entire life by inhuman voices, a young woman named Jennsen seeks to end her intolerable agony. She at last discovers a way to silence the voices. For everyone else, the torment is about to begin... -
Crawling Chaos: Selected Works 1920-1935 by H.P. Lovecraft
Rated: 3.45 of 5 stars · 11 ratingsAn indispensable collection of HP Lovecraft's best work from his distinctive collaborative pieces, prose-poems and early tales of the gruesome and bizarre, through to his later, more mature work: the Cthulhu Mythos. With an introduction by Colin Wilson, Crawling Chaos is must-have for every horror/ fantasy fan... -
Song of Kali by Dan Simmons
Rated: 3.61 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsCalcutta: a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, is clasped in the foetid embrace of an ancient cult. At its decaying core is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction... -
In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt, Anne-Laure Tissut
Rated: 3.32 of 5 stars · 30 ratings"Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods."In this ingenious horror story set in colonial New England, a woman goes missing. Or not missing–perhaps she has fled, abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes... -
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What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine
Rated: 3.26 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsIn this darkly funny, striking debut, a highly unusual young woman must venture into the woods at the edge of her home to remove a curse that has plagued the women in her family for millennia—an utterly original novel with all the mesmerizing power of The Tiger’s Wife, The Snow Child, and Swamplandia!Cursed...Categorized as:
dark low-fantasy magical-realism action-adventure audiobook bildungsroman book coming-of-age
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