Kyle Winkler is the author of The Ship of Death, out now from Avon and Harper Voyager. Below, he recommends three books that influenced his writing about games and gaming in horror.

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler: Let it be known: No one does body horror in the way that Octavia E. Butler does (see also the story “Bloodchild”). The book is about Lilith, who is taken in by aliens off a dying Earth. They keep her on their worldship and slowly habituate her and other humans to their race, the Oankali. Most of the book is composed of scenes of trial and error where the Oankali—who are covered in moving cilia-like feelers—attempt to get closer to Lilith and earn her trust. The book is rife and ripe with scenes of human anatomy and alien anatomy in close proximity, blending, engaging. The horror comes from the loss of bodily agency and the ultimate control that a more sophisticated and powerful being has over you.

Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith: For my money, Smith is the best of the Weird Tales Three, beating out H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. He had such an idiosyncratic mind. The collection I’m thinking of is the Ballantine collection from the 1970s, edited by Lin Carter. Zothique was a world that Smith set much of his weird sword and sorcery in. It very much influenced big sections of The Ship of Death. I even named a sea after it!

True Crime by Samantha Kolesnik: I rep this book every chance I get. It’s rough, grimy, emotionally exhaustive. But it’s also a stunner. A brother and sister, after suffering much abuse from their mother, kill her and then take off on a cross-country murder spree. I’m not usually prone to this kind of story. But the characters are so well-drawn and complex, and the dialogue so sharp, that it’s hard to put down. There’s a scene between the main character Suzy and a guy at a one-hour photo booth that still is seared into my brain years later. Kolesnik is a preternatural talent, but this is not for the weak of heart, shallow stomachs, or fly-by-night horror readers. It’s heavy.

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