Books-

Lovecraft

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Stephen King

Brandon Sanderson

Scripts-

Meh, I don’t really like films all that much tbh.

Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett

Scripts: Tarrintino The Coens Charlie Kaufman

Douglas Adams for Comedy

Chuck Palahniuk for odd novels

Hunter S. Thompson for Gonzo

• Patrick O’Brian
• Hilary Mantel
• Shirley Jackson
• Peter Straub
• Donna Tartt
• Douglas Adams
• Jane Austen
• Mary Shelley
• Sylvia Plath (poetry, fiction not so much)
• Richard Matheson
• Ursula K Le Guin
• Connie Willis

George Orwell - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four Adam Kay - Kay’s Anatomy Carl Sagan - Contact

Isaac Asimov

Books: Craig Alanson, Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Brandon Sanderson, and so many more.

Scripts: Aaron Sorkin, Brett Goldstein

Roger Zelazny

Neil Gaiman

Gregory Bateson

Dan O’Brien

Terrence McKenna

Alan Moore

Ken Kesey

Albert Camus

David Mamet - his scripts are outstanding because they are written just as actual real life conversations.

Karen Rose. She uses the change in perspectives between scenes to really show the dichotomy between internal monologues and how others see people, and the resulting characters, even smaller roles that don’t ever lead a scene, feel much more real as a result. She also does an excellent job of keeping track of who knows what and using that information to shape character’s internal dialogues and the way each scene is presented. The psychology of both good and bad guys appear reasonably well based in actual evidence and how different people respond to adverse or traumatic events.

Don’t reject her outright for the “romance” label. There is a somewhat involved romance plot in each book (including explicit sex scenes), but they’re built around the suspense plot and the difficult events in the characters’ pasts. They add a lot of depth to the characters. The actual “mystery/suspense” are my outright favorites among anything of my long reading history, enough that I tend to listen to all ~30 books 2-3 times per year.

(CONTENT WARNING: there are children as victims of sexual crime, sadists who take pleasure in hurting people, people buying/selling humans. Cincinnati and San Diego are the most direct cases of children being directly at risk/victims, but it’s touched at least the past in many other arcs. It’s almost all off screen, though there is one scene with some detail of watching a video in Cold Blooded Liar. [The actual sexual part is not described.] It’s far from the only media out there with villains as dark, but because some people have reason to be more sensitive to that type of content, and because the characters are so life like, I feel I should acknowledge it.)

If you decide to read her, her works are broken into series, mostly by city. (Baltimore, Sacramento, Cincinatti, etc.) Each book is self contained enough that you don’t have to read them in order, but I would highly recommend it. There are reasonably strong city arcs. You really don’t need to start from her first book and read the series from start to finish. There are some spoilers in terms of characters who you might suspect in one book (or see as potentially dying) who you know is involved in a future book if you read out of order, but I wouldn’t worry about it.

If I was nitpicking, sometimes she goes a little far in her effort to show her tolerance (it’s good that everyone is fine with the character being gay; it can feel a little forced when too many characters explicitly have a mental dialogue about the fact that they’re OK with it). There’s also a touch of judgment to some “bad guys” who made bad decisions in impossible situations, in some cases not much different than tough choices her characters made and were completely absolved of. But this only really shows when you read all the books (and maybe only repeatedly).

I have other favorite authors, but if I had to pick one, it’s her.

Honorable mentions: Brandon Sanderson, Lee Child, CJ Archer, Janet Evanovich, Bobbi Holmes, David Baldacci, Cleo Coyle, Jana DeLeon, Tom Clancy