When it comes to science fiction, sometimes the best subject matter isn’t just speculation on what might be coming in the future, but rather on what might have been. Alternate history is a subgenre that’s provided rich fodder for great sci-fi writers to go back to key junctures in time and simply imagine how the world would be different today if things had gone differently during some of history’s biggest turning points. Whether its something as simple as different types of technology being developed at different time periods, or something as Earth-shattering as the opposite side winning a World War, alternate history novels can not only provide vividly imaginative escapism, but can also provide incisive social or political commentary and tackle some heavy philosophical questions.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The name Philip K. Dick is virtually synonymous with science fiction, and one of his greatest achievements was the alternate history masterpiece The Man in the High Castle. This book asks the question of what the world might look like had the Axis Powers prevailed in World War II. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have cleaved the former United States in two. Now engaged in a Cold War as the uncontested superpowers of the world, Germany controls the East Coast and Japan the West Coast, and the two territories are separated from each other by a Rocky Mountain buffer zone. With Hitler succumbing to syphilis, Americans have a whole new set of dictators to worry about.  This electrifying book follows a loose collection of characters as they live under the iron fist of the various totalitarian overlords.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

An alternate version of World War II also plays a role in Michael Chabon’s critically acclaimed novel, though in a far different fashion. In this world, the fledgling state of Israel is destroyed shortly after its establishment in 1948. This followed a temporary establishment of Jewish refugees that was set up in Sitka, Alaska in 1941, during World War II. Set in the alternate present day, Sitka is now a thriving metropolis where the primary language is Yiddish. The book’s setting is based on the Slattery Report from 1940, which would have authorized the formation of European Jewish refugee settlement in the then-territory of Alaska if it would have won support and been authorized.

1632 by Eric Flint

You likely won’t find a more elaborate alternate history project than Eric Flint’s 1632 book series. In this story, a small fictional town and its hillbilly inhabitants are transported through a rift in space-time from West Virginia in the year 2000 to Germany in the year 1631. Suddenly, these modern era townsfolk find themselves inexplicably thrust into the center of the Thirty Years’ War. Ultimately, this novel kicked off a series that would involve the collaboration of dozens of writers and hundreds of other contributors. The film is about more than just a disturbance in the space-time continuum, as the modern-day townsfolk have to deal with issues ranging from a language barrier to more social, political and class conflicts.

The Alteration by Kingsley Amis

The divergence point in Kingsley Amis’ alternate history novel took place at the Protestant Reformation. Namely, in this book, the Reformation never occurred. Unfortunately for 10-year-old Hubert Anvil, the “alteration” of the title also applies to the fact that, blessed with a remarkable singing voice, the even more powerful Pope has decreed that the child be subjected to castration rather than undergo the voice-changing ravages of puberty. This sets into motion a series of events that cross paths with alternate versions of well-known cultural and political figures. One other interesting aspect of this alternate world is that it refers to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson’s classic tale of a doctor who discovers a way to transform himself so he may indulge his vices without fear of reprisal is such a staple of pop culture at large that “Jekyll and Hyde” has become a common term in modern society. While that term is often used to describe someone who seemingly has a “split personality” or can act very differently from one situation to the next, Stevenson’s Jekyll could actually physically transform into the ugly, nearly disfigured Hyde, who would than wreak havoc, even committing murder. Given how popular transformations have become in horror and sci-fi, Stevenson was way ahead of his time when he published this classic in 1886.

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

Though Cthulhu may be his most famous, Lovecraft conjured up many other monsters. In this horror novella, geologist William Dyer heads an expedition to Antarctica where, in a mountain range higher than the Himalayas, he discovers remnants of fourteen different ancient life forms that look completely alien to anything else on Earth. There’s also a lost civilization that was once built by Lovecraft staples, the Elder Things. These ancient creatures created shape-shifting beasts known as “Shoggoths” to help build their civilization. However, these black, oozing masses ultimately destroyed the Elder Things, and Dyer must flee for his life as the creatures are still alive in tunnels under the ruined city, living for eons off enormous blind penguins that were once bred to feed them.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Long before there were vampires that sparkled, there was Anne Rice. She developed her classic 1976 novel off a short story she’d written during the previous decade. She also used the recent death of her daughter as inspiration for the child vampire. In this book, a vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac sits down with a journalist and recounts his 200-year life story. As a young man, and in the wake of his brother’s death, Louis chose to allow the vampire Lestat to make him undead. The two dwell together, with Louis feeding only on animals rather than to murder humans for food. Ultimately, he bends under his vampire nature and begins feeding on humans, including the young plague-infected girl Claudia, whom Lestat turns into a child-vampire to keep Louis from leaving. It’s her eventual death that leaves Louis exhausted with the rigors of immortality, and leads him to sit down for the interview.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Much like Frankenstein’s monster, this book is a sewn-together creation. A mashup of Jane Austen’s classic novel and the kind of zombie fiction popular in the modern day, this book may be a parody but that doesn’t make it any less effective as a monster story. Grahame-Smith manages to follow the same plot as Pride and Prejudice, but places the setting in a version of Regency-era England that’s set in an alternate universe. In this parallel world, zombies shamble around the countryside. The stuffiness of that era’s affluent class is paired with the everyday threat of couriers being eaten or discussion of whether it’s too “un-ladylike” to carry a musket for protection.

Horror can take many forms. While ghosts and monsters can be frightening (whether or not they exist solely within one’s psyche), there’s few stories that can strike more fear in people than those about psychopathic murderers. A human being bereft of empathy and driven solely by sadistic impulse may just be the scariest of all monsters.

Books about psychopaths are so popular that many have already made their way into other “Best” lists on this site. You can’t have a list about fictional serial killers without including the frightening Dr. Hannibal Lecter, but The Silence of the Lambs, was already featured on our Best Thrillers list. The Killer Inside Me would also be a contender for this list if we hadn’t already included it in our selection for Best Crime Novels. There’s all sorts of crazy going on in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but we’ve already got that covered in Best Mystery Books. And American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman (who may or may not have acted out the extreme violence that took place within his mind) already made it into our picks for Most Controversial Books.

But any list that includes masters of dark prose like Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy has no shortage of twisted characters or murderous mayhem. You’d be hard-pressed to find four books about psychopaths as unnervingly spellbinding as these.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

If you’re going to write a story from the perspective of a deranged serial killer, basing the material on cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer is a good place to start. Joyce Carol Oates did just that in her novel about a young man named Quentin P. who seeks out male victims in order to attempt to lobotomize them and re-wire their brains so they will be totally under his control. Told in a first-person narrative, the prose is written in a disturbing and blunt vernacular, often injecting all caps and other symbols to ramp up the mania. Reading the diary of a serial killer (even a fictional one) can be even more frightening then seeing their actions acted on the silver screen. Zombie is a ghastly and engrossing book, one that plumbs the depths of human depravity yet still is identifiably human.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy describes his disturbingly isolated and horrifyingly deviant character Lester Ballard as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps.” McCarthy crafts a tale of a murderous loner gone feral, reduced to a shadow of man who stows away corpses in caves for his personal use. But he never makes Ballard a complete monster. Much like Zombie‘s Quentin P., there’s an identifiable humanity under a fearsome character otherwise bathed in grime and blood and the stink of death. James Franco’s recent film adaptation of this unsettling novel only focuses on the darkness and the ugliness, but McCarthy’s novel is a transcendent, albeit stomach-churning, take on the depths of human perversity.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Alex is a very troubled young man. Growing up in a slightly futuristic Britain, he and his “droogs” enjoy far too much of the old “ultraviolence.” Going around the urban landscape picking fights with rival gangs, breaking into residences, and assaulting random people, Alex has no empathy for those he hurts. Despite a team of state authorities intent on reforming him before it’s too late, Alex ultimately takes his ultraviolence too far and commits murder. This opens up an whole new can of worms when, from prison, he seeks out a controversial new treatment method to cure psychopaths of their violent behavior. Narrated by using an abrasive dialect that Anthony Burgess invented, A Clockwork Orange both shocks and hooks and the reader.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Though technically a non-fiction book, this list would not be complete without The Devil in the White City. Presented in a novelistic style, this book chronicles the murderous exploits of America’s first documented serial killer, H.H. Holmes. Operating roughly around the same time as Britain’s Jack the Ripper, Holmes lured many an unsuspecting victim back from the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago to his “murder castle.” Elaborately designed to both entrap his victims and conceal their bodies, Holmes’ murder castle is one of the more ghastly entries into American history and this book does a spellbinding job of laying the secretive serial killer’s heinous and intricately-planned spree bare. 

Time travel has been of primary interest to science-fiction fans for almost as long as sci-fi has existed. Sure, wars of the worlds or journeys to the center of the Earth are incredibly captivating science-fiction scenarios, but if the rules of physics as we know them could be bent in any imaginable way, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to travel through time? As modern inventions like electricity and powered transportation began to take hold, changing the technological landscape, writers’ imaginations began to run wild with fantastical stories of things that may have been impossible, but might not always be so.

So we’ve compiled a list of the Best Time Travel Books, though you’ll notice a few big titles are missing. Kurt Vonnegut’s magnum opus Slaughterhouse-Five, and its protagonist who has come “unstuck in time,” certainly deserves a place here, but we’ve already covered that book in our Best Novels list. And this list wouldn’t be complete without mention of Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling The Time Traveler’s Wife, but that book was already touched upon in our list of Best Romance Novels. But that still leaves us with four titles that changed the way we think about that nature of time—books that deserve a few hours of yours.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Our modern fascination with the concept of time travel was jump-started in 1895 by the fantastic mind of H.G. Wells. An author who also gave us such classics as The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G. Wells was the first to write about the use of a piloted vehicle in order to travel through time. “Time machine” is now a common term within science-fiction, and it was all thanks to Wells and his novella about an English inventor who comes to understand that time is simply a fourth dimension, and who is able to develop a means to transport himself into brave new worlds from other points in time.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Who says science and religion don’t mix? Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal winning science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time combines her religious views on battles between good and evil with a time travel story for the ages. When high school-aged girl Meg Murry’s scientist father is held prisoner by evil entities from another planet, she teams up with her younger brother and friend to travel through time and space to rescue him. The book was so unlike anything of its era (it was released in 1962), that few publishers wanted to take a chance on it, and despite its subsequent popularity it has been frequently challenged. Yet A Wrinkle in Time remains a classic of young adult fiction, and sci-fi in general.

Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

Albert Einstein changed what we thought we knew about time and space. Imagine what the dreams of such a brilliant mind must have been like! Author Alan Lightman does just that in his 1992 novel. Each of his book’s 30 chapters explores one of a fictionalized Einstein’s dreams as he struggles with developing his theory of relativity. Each dream delves into a different concept of time, with some of them hinged in reality (such as relativity) and other consisting of wildly imaginative renderings by the author. The book is otherworldly and vivid and one of the more unique reads on the subject of time travel you’re likely to encounter.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five may forever be his most remembered time travel book, but his final novel, Timequake, did an equally fine job of both bending our concept of reality and in providing a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s life. Vonnegut uses the imagined phenomenon of a “timequake” to ruminate on determinism and craft a story about free will being a fantasy. In the book, the timequake thrusts the entire world back from the year 2001 to 1991, with everyone forced to act out the same actions over that 10 year period with no hope of deviation. The book focuses on the sadness experience by people who are forced to watch themselves repeat mistakes and relive the consequences of bad choices over and over again.

People love lurid tales. Crime novels are chock full of bad behavior and intrigue, and they have, throughout the years, been both a best-selling genre and a rich resource for movie adaptations. Not only are crimes and misdemeanors interesting subject matter, but the criminals and innocents caught up in deceptive webs are often some of more the compelling characters you’ll find in print. When backs are pressed against walls, there’s no telling what may happen next.

Some heavy-hitters from the crime genre have already been covered in previous lists on the site, so we’ll leave them off here. We already touched upon The Maltese Falcon in our Best Mystery Novels list, and we featured Along Came a Spider and The Silence of the Lambs with our Best Thrillers. Meanwhile, Crime and Punishment is so good it made our list for Best Books of All Time. And while it seems wrong to have list of best crime novels that doesn’t include anything with Sherlock Holmes, the bulk of his detective work took place in short stories. And Agatha Christie’s work was already discussed in our coverage of the Best Selling Authors of All Time.

With that said, these four fascinating crime novels have earned their spots among the very best in the genre.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

There’s few better settings for a gritty, hard-boiled crime novel than 1930s Los Angeles. That’s where Raymond Chandler’s dynamic gumshoe Philip Marlowe hangs his hat in The Big Sleep. Marlowe is no sleuthing genius; he’s grizzled and deeply flawed. But the very fact that he struggles to get by as a detective, and frequently turns to the comforts of strong drink, makes him all the more realistic and intriguing. Chandler’s book contains a notoriously complicated plot, one involving blackmail, millionaire generals, disappearances, murder, and beautiful women. As a quintessential crime novel, it’s no wonder this 1939 book has twice been adapted into a feature film.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

When Frank, a young drifter, happens upon a small town California diner, his life takes an interesting turn. He’s instantly drawn to Cora, a femme fatale who runs the diner, and the two strike up a passionate affair. Cora is unhappily married to a much older man, and she ropes Frank into hatching a murder plot with her. The pair concoct a scheme to make Cora’s husband’s death look like an accidental fall in the bath tub, but things don’t go as planned. From there, they work together to finish the job, while staying one step ahead of the law as it begins to close in on them. The book was so popular that it was adapted into seven films, two plays, and an opera.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Most of us have seen Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal mafia movie derived from Puzo’s novel, but the book itself remains a must-read to this day. In Puzo’s story, fictional New York mafia family the Corleones wage mob war with five other prominent families. When Corleone patriarch Don Vito Corleone is shot by rivals, his two sons, Santino and Michael, must take over the day-to-day of the family business. When more violence breaks out against the Corleone family, the mafia tensions in NYC escalate to the point of a full-on mob war. In addition to Coppola’s original adaptation, there were two sequel films based on Puzo’s work (though only one of them was good idea).

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Pubished in 1952, The Killer Inside Me has been described by an anthology as “one of the most blistering and uncompromising crime novels ever written.” The book is told from the perspective of Lou Ford, a small-town police officer who is hiding a ink black secret. His predilection for sadistic sexual acts, and a tendency toward antisocial personality traits in general, are relatively kept in check until he begins a sadomasochistic interaction with a prostitute. This unlocks a darkness within him that he’s kept secret, and he’s soon compelled to violence in order to cover up past evils. As pressure mounts, he begins to crack, making for one of the best crime novels you’ll ever read. It’s twice been adapted for the silver screen.