The Dark Dark is the second book by Samantha Hunt that I’ve read, and it lives up the imagination and lyrical promise of Mr. Splitfoot. It’s a collection of magically realistic short stories linked by the slender threads of motif: swimming pools, deer women, motherhood. Hunt’s characters are complex individuals just trying to survive their lives, as they are forced to choose between confronting or ignoring the quiet strangeness of their world. Her plots meander at times, but she makes up for it with a clever and careful use of language. The crown jewel of this book is “The Story of Of,” which at first appears to be a repetition of an earlier story. It starts with an infertile woman in a restaurant and ends shattering every rule of the writing world. Hunt gently mocks the ridiculous mechanics of literature while simultaneously making a magnificent contribute to it.

Julia Fine’s What Should Be Wild is many things: a feminist fairy tale, a novel of supernatural horror, a sweet romance, a magically realistic family drama, an examination of mythology, a coming-of-age story, an ode to natural and human complexity, a literary acid trip. At its heart, however, it’s the story of trapped women. Our heroine, Maisie, is trapped in a body that grants her uncontrollable power over life and death, driving others to fear control her. Meanwhile, several of her female ancestors remain trapped in an ageless forest that offered them security from a harsh world and now refuses to let them go. Their struggles to free themselves will challenge the very nature of their reality. Fine has a funny, free-spirited voice, and characters are constructed with all the care and imagination as houses in the wood. The climax may be a touch overwhelming, but FIne’s overwhelming story is nothing short of beautiful.

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a series of short stories, all linked to a single great quest: man’s journey to Mars. We begin with humanity’s first bizarre encounters with the telepathic Martian natives, who are later wiped out by the point of extinction by chicken pox. Man soon sweeps across Mars, trying to replicate their home world on a foreign land, with all the wonders and horror that entails. However, the settlers’ bond to a war-torn Earth ultimately creates a new path for the human race. Although this story is based on science fiction, Bradbury’s massive, elaborately designed cast of characters are very much grounded in reality. Through their eyes, he examines history’s determination to repeat itself, the horrors of prejudice in all of its forms, the strange potentials of technology, and the complexities of family. Overall, this book is a brilliant tribute to humanity–the new Martians–as a strange, fallible, yet ultimately redemptive race.

Eve Ensler’s The Apology is the book equivalent into injecting acid (the devouring kind, not the trippy kind) into one’s veins. It tears you up inside and never quite goes away. She attempts to confront a childhood of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by detailing it through the eyes of her chief abuser–her dead father. For this is his apology, a brilliant and terrifying self-indictment that Ensler never got from him in real life. We are hearing him from the afterlife, as he meditates on his sins in a strange, empty hell. He showers her with the long-withheld compliments and support that she so richly deserves, while building a careful explanation–certainly not a justification–of his sins as part of his apology. This book is not just a description of a single set of horrors, but an overarching meditation on the impact of abuse and the forces that inspire it. To have not only survived such a devastating childhood, but to have flourished and recover in such an innovative fashion, reveals Ensler to be an extraordinary human being. She looks a demon in the face, and manages to see something worth understanding. I salute her as a real-world superhero. With all my heart, I hope that she and other damaged women find what they need in this glorious piece of work.

The premise of Munmun by Jesse Andrews is deceptively simple. In this world, size is directly proportionate to one’s bank account. Big people flourish, little ones die fast. Our hero, Warner, is trying to stay alive and get some money (munmun) for himself and the people he loves. However, his story is revealed to be a brilliantly deranged satire of horror, humor, and heartbreak. There are no limits on the characters’ morality or the writer’s imagination: communal dreams are weaponized, bombs are sold at the mall, people are permanently crippled by cats or eat entire mammoths for lunch. The dreamlike insanity contrasts with the painful truths that Andrews is trying to get across. We do live in a society where crushing poverty, double standards, peer pressure, incompetent officials, drug addiction, street violence, sexual assault, brutal educational demands, and parasitical debt flourish. These demons are given strange new faces by Andrews, creating terrifying obstacles for Warner to fight. The story of his battle to get big is laid out with magnificent writing and held together by a unique dialect of Jesse’s creation. This book is sometime depressing and always bizarre, but it’s a great read–and a necessary one–all the same.

The Only Plane In The Sky by Garrett Graff is an oral history of 9/11, built almost entirely from the testimony of those whose lives were changed together by one terrible day. Graff shares the stories of victims struggling to survive, first responders facing a threat like no other, politicians overcoming fear in order to protect their country, family members facing unbelievable terror and grief, and ordinary Americans reeling from a permanent loss of security. This book is no less well-written, tense, and often heartbreaking for being nonfiction. I was born after 9/11, so I especially appreciate Graff for breathing life into an event that hand’t seemed entirely real to me before I started reading. The Only Plane In The Sky sometimes exciting, sometimes hopeful, and always necessary. I think it’s a vital source of education from my generation, not to mention an opportunity for preceding ones to see how their own trauma and healing have been shared across the generations. No one was alone on 9/11, no matter how badly they felt, and Graff reminds us of that valuable truth.

Glorious. That is Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot in a word. The writer’s lyrical prose (an overused compliment, but the only one who fits) threw me for a loop. The imagery is lush and imaginative; what kind of genius can picture a tree sprouting from a pregnant woman’s navel? Hunt takes seemingly familiar themes–abuse, family, faith, the supernatural–and makes them entirely new. Our characters, Ruth and Cora Sykes, are two women separated by time and bound by blood. Telling their story in alternating chapters, they work together and apart to build a life for themselves in the sometimes cruel, sometimes beautiful wilds (urban and natural) of New York. Their journey crosses the boundary between life and death in more ways than one, with new depths emerging in every exquisite page. You should stop reading this right now and go order this book from your local library. I’d promise that you’ll devour it, but the truth is that Mr. Splitfoot will probably devour you instead.

When I first heard of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, I thought of long-winded declarations of love and droopy-eyed girls swooping across the moor–sort of like Gone With The Wind with a touch less racism. Instead, what I found was a deeply complex about how dysfunction and trauma reverberate through the ages. The author is trying to show is the different ways that people can be damaged by abusive experiences and painful loss, leading to redirect their pain onto others. Cruelty spreads through the book like a disease, although some characters summon the courage to fight it with love. I find this idea a remarkably brave and progressive form of thinking, especially considering the fact that this book was written in a time when domestic violence was often covered up. Not to mention that this book is very well-written and placed in a beautiful setting populated with complex, carefully developed characters. For those of you who like action, there’s a surprising amount of that, too.

Tim O’Brien’s In The Lake of The Woods is a shattered story about a shattered man. Our hero/antihero/villain, John Wade, is confronting the latest of a litany of traumas: the loss of his wife, Kathy. How she died–and whether John played a role–is unclear to everyone, including him. But this story is far from a run-of-the-mill thriller; it’s a complex fable of damage and disintegration. O’Brien switches between various times and places in order to build his plot. We see the rise and fall of a politician’s marriage, the quiet misery in John’s childhood, a search for Kathy that brings out painful emotions from family and strangers alike. Most intense of all, however, is John’s memories of his past tour in Vietnam, where he encountered Nazi-level atrocities at My Lai. Filling in the cracks are gatherings of “evidence,” which ranges from fictional statements from the less important characters to quotes from the nonfiction on which O’Brien builds his story. There is little resolution here, but there is beauty. The author has spun a lush, well-written web that readers can’t help being snared in. You’ll what he has to show you, but In The Lake of The Woods is worth it.

Gary Paulsen’s The Rifle is a small book with a big message. It starts with the creation of a truly magnificent rifle at the dawn of the Revolutionary War, when guns really were a vital source of protection or currency. However, its careful construction fails to save its creation or its buyer from death, causing the rifle to go unnoticed for centuries. When it finally emerges, the rifle falls into the hands of people who are unaware of how its complex mechanism can go dangerously wrong, leading to what threatens to be the first of several tragedies. Paulsen’s message is desperately hammered home: guns have been mythologized by a world that no longer needs or fully understands them. He shows a surprising amount of deep, balanced thinking on the issue of gun use. These ruminations are wrapped in a well-written, genuinely interesting story that puts the right amount of pressure on your mind and your heart. I recommend The Rifle to readers of all ages and from all fields of interest.