Need something new for your reading list? This week, we recommend checking out The Dorians, a novel by Nick Cutter, and Lorenzo De Felici’s comic series, Red Roots.

The Dorians

Gallery Books

It should become clear pretty quickly that the title here is a nod to one of this book’s major influences, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Five people on their deathbeds are interrupted by a mysterious person offering a second chance at life: an experimental treatment that could give them back their youth. This sort of thing always goes really well for everyone involved, right?

“The remarkable secret lies in the high-tech harnessing of an ancient and extraordinary biological agent…one with no conscience, yet possessed with a single-minded purpose that has helped it persist for eons: the will to survive,” per the book’s description. A lot about The Dorians at the beginning reminded me of Alien: Earth. A young genius with bad people skills unlocks the secret to enduring youth, giving way to moral and literal catastrophe as the reality unfolds into something no one is prepared for. It’s a pretty thrilling ride, and there’s some real shudder-inducing body horror in here.

Red Roots

Image Comics

Reading the first two issues of Lorenzo De Felici’s Red Roots, it felt like every time I turned the page I found myself looking at something new that made me say, “wtf is going on?!” I mean that in a good way. I truly had no idea where this was taking me at any step of the way with the first issue, and the second issue, which came out this week, only amplified that. At the start, we’re introduced to two characters whose stories seem unrelated: a teacher who makes a horrifying discovery in her home one day, and a guy who is on a killing rampage. When their worlds collide, things only get stranger.

Red Roots is a really bizarre, really good time so far, and I have a feeling that things are only going to get weirder.