The Best Beach Reads of Summer 2013

Have you been outside recently? With temperatures well over 90-degrees throughout the East Coast and numbers reaching beyond 110 in the west, this summer is a scorcher—get thee to the nearest beach!

It's that time of year when people of all body types, from supermodel fit to fast food flabby, put on swimwear, grab beach chairs, walk across sand that feels like a never-ending bed of hot coals, and cool off in the salty ocean. For many people, it's also the only time that they're finally able to dive into that new, shiny novel that's been resting by their bed for months, waiting to be read in the midst of workplace demands and social life commitments.

But what about those who haven't been able to peruse through Barnes & Noble or routinely read Publisher's Weekly? Are they stuck re-reading the same National Enquirer issue over and over again? Not anymore, thanks to our collection of the best beach reads of summer 2013, equipped with the latest and best hardcovers and paperbacks for book lovers of all kinds.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is one of 2013's biggest literary events. Why? Because it's British horror and fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman's first adult book since 2005's Anansi Boys, and anyone who's read Gaiman's seminal Sandman comics knows how brilliant the English author's edgier fare can be.

Initially, Gaiman set out to write a new short story, but his small idea quickly grew into The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and it's a doozy. It's a tale of innocence lost, centering on a lonely 7-year-old bookworm who discovers that his neighbors aren't normal, everyday humans—they're mythical beings in human forms. How Gaiman's unnamed narrator comes of age by befriending the next-door family's 11-year-old daughter is what powers The Ocean at the End of the Lane's emotional and, at times scary, underbelly.

No book has lit up the literary fiction scene quite like Rachel Kushner's second novel, The Flamethrowers. The unnamed narrator of this brisk, brainy novel moves from the west to New York in the 1970s, pursuing her interests in conceptual art and experimental filmmaking. After falling in with a group of artists, she becomes romantically involved with Sandro Valera, son of a wealthy Italian business magnate T.P. Valera.

Kushner alternates between the woman's story and the tale of T.P.'s youth, when he fought in the first World War and participated in the Futurist art movement. At the intersection of art and politics, speed and romance, revolution and self-realization, The Flamethrowers will transport you to a grim New York awaiting a blackout and an Italy on the brink of massive upheaval.

Stephen King's 2013 will really kick into overdrive come September, when his long-awaited sequel to The Shining, titled Dr. Sleep, hits bookstores nationwide and, like all his other novels, tops all best-seller lists.

Before then, however, the literary titan has quietly dropped a propulsive little coming-of-age novel, Joyland, about a college student who starts working in an amusement park that was once the site of a murder. Joyland's supernatural possibilities are only its hooks, though—it's really a poignant tale of friendship and self-discovery. King is saving the real, big scare for Dr. Sleep, no doubt.

Like he did with his excellent genre-tweaking novel Horns, Joe Hill—yes, son of Stephen King—has given horror fiction fans something original, bold, and unclassifiable in NOS4A2, his most ambitious book to date.

Not exactly a vampire story, NOS4A2 (whose title cleverly evokes F.W. Murnau's classic silent film Nosferatu) uses some of the traditional vamp storytelling tropes to create a new horror villain extraordinaire named Charles Manx, a slithery creeper who drives a 1938 Rolls Royce, abducts children, and brings them to a nightmarish fantasy world known as "Christmasland." Trust us, he's no Jolly Old St. Nick.

Since Owen King is the son of Stephen King and brother of Joe Hill, it's worth noting, right off the bat, that his debut novel, Double Feature, has nothing to do with horror. For that, it's an admirable and, frankly, ballsy move, one that has undoubtedly pissed a few Stephen King loyalists off, expecting something like Joe Hill's Horns and getting a literary dramedy.

Abandon those genre preconceptions, though, and you'll discover one of the year's best debuts. Double Feature follows young Sam Dolan, an aspiring movie director whose first film gets disastrously reshaped into an X-rated romp about a well-endowed janitor who has sex with trees by its producers and gives his father, a B-movie star, more ammo to use against his son, with whom he doesn't exactly have a cuddly rapport. Sam's path to redemption features run-ins and relationships with a large ensemble of colorful characters, the most interesting of whom work in the independent film community.

Owen King's novel may not be frightening like his father's best works, but there is one parallel to be made: Whereas Stephen King is great at scaring his readers, Owen's a pro at making them laugh. Seriously, Double Feature is funnier than any movie to come out this year not titled This Is the End.

In the pantheon of literature about supernaturally gifted twins, actor turned author Thomas Tryon's 1972 horror marvel The Other is in a class all its own. With the emotionally devastating Sisterland, though, Curtis Sittenfield has written a gem worthy of a place beside Tryon's classic.

Not that the two novels have much in common outside of the psychic twins element—Sisterland is rich family drama, not horror, about two young identical sisters who both possess the ability to see into the future. Now adults, the siblings don't see eye to eye about their talents, and when one of them predicts that a potentially catastrophic earthquake is about to destroy their home town, the other has to figure out if her sister's a legitimate doomsayer or a disturbed crackpot.

Though the following description of Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves might sound funny, take heed: Fowler's novel is an emotional workout.

Rosemary Cooke, the book's main character, suffered a profound tragedy as a kid—her sister Fern disappeared. And because of that, Rosemary's family fell apart, leading to her older brother, Lowell, running away from home. But Fern, you see, was a chimpanzee, taken in by the Cooke family as part of a scientific experiment. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves isn't monkey business—it's Project Nim in book form.

In May 2003, Afghanistan native Khaled Hosseini turned heads and enthralled readers with his debut, The Kite Runner, a coming-of-age novel of massive scope.

In his latest novel, And the Mountains Echoed, Hosseini reaches even further, crafting a family drama that stretches over 50 years, across war, death, and heartbreaks, and shifts locations from Afghanistan to France, Greece, and California.

There's nothing like a trip inside the mind of a raging psychopath to complement a hot, summer day on the beach. And for that, this season's best literary bet is Alissa Nutting debut novel Tampa, an uncomfortably comedic and audacious look at a female sexual deviant/pedophile.

Think American Psycho meets Notes on a Scandal, with Nutting's sharp, expertly deranged first-person writing in—the voice of Celeste Price, a 26-year-old eighth-grade English teacher who systematically lures one of her students to bed, and then some—presenting the sick thoughts and clever plotting of an unassuming sociopath who'd probably relish dinner reservations with Mr. Patrick Bateman.

Novels and movies about serial killers rarely offer anything new or creative, outside of the occasional inventive death scene. Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls, however, is as ambitious as it is original.

In 1930s Chicago, Harper Curtis is a homicidal maniac, but he's also reserved, patient, and the beneficiary of a special gift—the house in which he broke into can inexplicably send him traveling into the future. Which comes in handy, since all of his "shining girls" (the explanation behind that distinction is best left for you to read) haven't even been born yet. One of them is Kirby, a bright, plucky girl who gets her investigative Lisbeth Salander on after she barely survives Harper's efforts to brutally kill her.

Beukes owes as much to Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs as she does to Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tatto. With The Shining Girls, she's done both of those authors justice.

The Demonologist is a movie waiting to be made.

In Andrew Pyper's action-heavy Satanic thriller, a professor who specializes in demonic literature (particularly Andrew Milton's Paradise Lost) heads to Venice with his young daughter after his wife tells him that she's leaving him. He picks Venice because a creepy stranger known as Thin Woman tells him that something demonically special is afoot in the Italian city, and, obviously that seems like a smart thing to do. With your kid tagging along, too.

In Venice, the professor's daughter goes missing, and it's there where The Demonologist kicks into freaky high-gear, blending the intrigue of The Da Vinci Code with the occult horror of every The Exorcist knockoff you've ever seen. Except this one's damn good.

Admit it, True Blood kind of sucks these days, and its biggest offender is the werewolf storyline, with its lame transformations, one-dimensional characters, and Alcide's unconvincing alpha-male antics. Lycanthropes deserve much better.

And now they have something to be proud of in Benjamin Pearcy's novel Red Moon. Set in an America that resembles our own, except for the citizens that are secretly werewolves (a minor difference, of course), Red Moon isn't a horror story a la The Wolf Man. Rather, it's a socially conscious and politically minded thriller, in which a pair of young protagonists—one is a female lycan whose family has been slaughtered by government-sanctioned soldiers, the other the sole survivor of a lycan rampage on an airplane—provide gateways into Pearcy's inventive world that oppose one another (pro- and anti-lycan) but are equally sympathetic.

Consider this your chance to get the early jump on what could very well be a pop culture phenomenon later this year.

The first book in novelist Blake Crouch's planned trilogy (the second, Wayward, will be released in September), Pines is the best Twilight Zone episode Rod Serling never wrote, stretched to feature length. Ethan Burke is a Secret Service agent visiting Wayward Pines, Idaho, to investigate the disappearances of two colleagues, but he gets into a car accident. When he wakes, Burke's ID, cell phone, and briefcase are missing, and no one believes a word he says about himself, since, as far as the town's residents are concerned, Ethan Burke doesn't exist.

And that's all you're going to get out of us, other than this stern piece of advice: Read Pines now. Especially since M. Night Shayamalan is currently working on an Under the Dome-like one-season TV adaptation, and, if The Last Airbender and After Earth are any indication, that will be a disaster.

First off, isn't that cover awesome? It's the kind of eye-grabber that yells at you while you're casually browsing inside Barnes & Noble, screaming, "Pick me up!" Fortunately, Carl Hiassen's Bad Monkey has the internal literary goods to back its cover design up, too.

Bad Monkey, like Hiassen's previous novels, is set in Florida, guided by former Miami detective Andrew Yancy who just so happens to have a severed human arm stashed in his freezer. He's also stuck in a dead-end health inspector gig that's not unfamiliar with roaches. And there's that Bahamian voodoo witch named the Dragon Queen who keeps ruining his days.

What does it all mean? Funny, surreal, and at times thrilling, Bad Monkey is an oddball mystery waiting to be solved.

Imagine having an extensive, candid conversation with The Roots drummer, and all-around music expert, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson that when transcribed is 282 pages long. That's Mo' Meta Blues in a nutshell, and it's a true delight.

Co-written by New Yorker editor Ben Greeman, Questlove's hugely entertaining memoir is an all-access pass into the acclaimed musician's brain, complete with every humorous anecdote (there's a Prince encounter that rivals Chappelle's Show's Charlie Murphy segment), revealing backstory (he pulls no punches in recounting how he met Black Thought and the rest of The Roots), and painful memory (he refers to the 1995 Source Awards as "hip-hop's funeral").

We're living in what could very well go down in history as television's brightest golden age. And now, there's a defining book for this era.

Superbly written and reported by GQ correspondent Brett Martin, Difficult Men is a vibrant, revealing, and highly structured look at how showrunners like David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire), and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) changed the game by rewriting all of the rules. In their own unique, daring ways, these men shifted television into an era where complicated antiheroes (e.g., Tony Soprano, Don Draper) became likable protagonists.

And as the quotes from said showrunners that Martin gained via countless interviews reveal, the men who created them are just as fascinating and unconventional.

50 Cent once rapped, on Obie Trice's "We All Die One Day," "I watch gangsta flicks and root for the bad guy, and turn it off before it end 'cause the bad guy dies." Chuck Klosterman can relate.

A renown pop culture critic and New York Times columnist, Klosterman is one of modern-day journalism's sharpest and most unique voices—his 2004 book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto is a masterwork of scathing, hilarious pop-cult analyses. His latest book, I Wear the Black Hat, is a self-reflexive, no-holds-barred look at why we're all so fascinated by evil, particularly the villains in movies, TV, and history.

It's a sprawling investigation that's equal parts socially and politically intelligent. Look no further than Klosterman's discussion about how President Obama once called Omar his favorite character on The Wire.