This week we take our cue from the title of Stephen King’s new story collection, “You Like It Darker,” with books about a honeymoon gone wrong, an artist’s midlife crisis and the appeal of beautiful monsters (in a wild coming-of-age graphic novel) joining King’s own collection on our list of recommendations.
It’s not all darkness, though: We also recommend a biography of the groundbreaking Chinese cooking star Fu Pei-mei, a prismatic portrait of five Black ballerinas from the 1960s and ’70s, and Cristina Henriquez’s historical novel set during the construction of the Panama Canal. Happy reading.— Gregory Cowles
In 1971, this newspaper called Fu Pei-mei “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But, as King’s biography notes, it was really the other way around: The legendary Fu, who taught generations to cook dishes from all over China, preceded Child on TV by several years. King interviews women who learned from Fu’s cookbooks and show, making the case that she was a cultural force.
For those who believe that the narrative of Black prima ballerinas begins and ends with Misty Copeland, Valby’s rich, prismatic portrait of the five dancers who formed the core of the Dance Theater of Harlem’s inaugural 1969 class offers a joyful and spirited corrective.
Pantheon | $29
Thomas’s latest is a gothic tale about a honeymoon gone wrong. The novel follows a couple roiling with secrets while on their wedding getaway, but the narrative is full of mysterious distortions, gaps, omissions which hint that there is more to the story than just marital discontent.
Simon & Schuster | $27.99
Set in early-20th-century Panama during the canal-building era, Henriquez’s elegant thrill of a novel focuses not on outsiders intent on reshaping the landscape, but on local people whose lives were altered in the process. A desperate teenager and the son of a local fisherman are the central players, but the sweep of this story is as vast as the project it covers.
The master of horror returns with a new collection full of eerie tales. The book features a range of stories, from a crime novella to a yarn about a family that encounters two murders on a road, all delivered with King’s fine-tuned eye for terror.
Scribner | $30
A semi-famous artist’s midlife crisis takes a left turn in July’s second novel, when she impulsively abandons a cross-country road trip to check into a motel in a nearby suburb. Romance, redecorating and gaspingly graphic sex follows.
If you read Ferris’s original 2017 graphic novel, you can’t forget it: a beguiling, haunted hybrid of personal memoir, murder mystery and 20th-century time portal. This surreal and densely referential followup, drawn in Ferris’s signature cross-hatched style, continues to follow 10-year-old Karen Reyes in circa-1968 Chicago as she wrestles with loss, sexual identity and a host of secrets.
