Eight novels that capture the drama & intrigue of filmmaking

Joanna Howard is the author of the novel Porthole (2025) and the memoir Rerun Era (2019). Other works include Foreign Correspondent (2013), On the Winding Stair(2009), and In the Colorless Round, a prose collaboration with artist Rikki Ducornet (2006). She co-wrote Field Glass, a speculative novel, with Joanna Ruocco (2017). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Verse, Bomb, and parts elsewhere. She lives in Denver and Providence and teaches at University of Denver.

At Electric Lit Howard tagged eight novels that "offer some compelling explorations of the drama and intrigue of filmmaking." One title on the list:

The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg

This magnificent story of a woman in search of her dead or presumed dead or walking-dead husband is set to the backdrop of a horror film festival in Cuba and is reminiscent of Brian De Palma at his high point. As the protagonist of The Third Hotel follows a ghost through the streets of Havana in her own kind of horror story, Van Den Berg investigates the horrors behind horror film history, the cultural inheritance of gendered violence in the genre, and the mixed bag of seduction and dread inherent in the form.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Third Hotel is among Jae-Yeon Yoo's eleven top fictional hotels for your fictional vacation and Katie Yee's twenty books that are laced with sinister magic.

--Marshal Zeringue