Are There Books Like Pack Darling?

My favorite way to look at the Luna is that she’s not naturally dominant, perhaps even an omega or a human character thrown into the Luna role. She leads based off of her unique way of thinking to solve problems that the dominant Alphas are too proud or stuck in their ways to see. It flips the typical story of the Luna being dominant and instead leadership is based on the cleverest, most empathetic or most adaptable member of the pack. This allows for stories that explore different forms of intelligence and how a pack of physically powerful individuals can evolve and have their traditions modified by a Luna from outside their pack. It’s fun to follow the character who is a catalyst for modernization in an ancient system of pack dynamics.

The fanfiction world is full of amazing novel-length stories, including many that are coffee shop AUs or artist AUs of existing characters. I talked about building a small business and slow-burn romance in those. You can find a lot of these stories on sites like Archive of Our Own. They have lots of filters, so you can search for your favorite fandom and then add tags like ‘fluff’ or ‘slice of life’ or ‘bakery AU’ or ‘bookshop AU’. I find some of the best character-driven, low-conflict storytelling on Archive of Our Own, and it’s all free.

I'll try making up a scenario for Damon Darling. He has a hit webcomic with 500,000 monthly viewers on Webtoon. It pays a very low CPM for ads but he’s got a great model for his Fast Passes, and his 2,000 Patreon subscribers at $5/month each bring in $10,000 per month. He sells some merch too, and he managed to score a print volume deal with a publisher. Using $150k to $200k as an estimate for his current yearly income before heaping on taxes, then bulldozing through the host of expenses associated with his lifestyle (which hopefully has changed given the increase in income over the past few years and all), he should find himself to be in the low hundreds of thousands of net worth by the end of 2025. But again, this is all a house of cards, made of several variables. Take one away and the whole thing collapses. Why do I always come back to this? Oh yes, because real finance experts do not speculate on the annual income of webcomic creators.

For readers who fell for the unapologetic messiness of Sour Heart, a new-to-you book might be Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, a wild ride that follows a Nigerian woman who is host to multiple spirits. Although immigrant-centric in theme, the book’s fragmented, visceral prose and its exploration of a disjointed identity are going to speak to fans of Zhang’s unflinching work. Also recommended is The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, a dystopian novel written in raw, bodily prose by a fierce rebel of a writer. Zhang’s book isn’t easily matchable, but these two are offbeat enough to feel like kindred spirits.

I just finished reading ‘Hunt Me, Darling’ over a weekend and I am totally hooked by this book! The novel is at its core a romantic cat-and-mouse game, well wrapped up in a thriller’s skin. The main hunter is a very cold, very precise professional who has been trained to hunt down, capture or kill his targets. His current mark is unusual in that he or she is not at all what he or she seems to be. The hunter’s contract is straight forward enough: follow, corner and complete his mission. But the longer he is around his current mark the more he finds himself torn between his duty and his desire for this enigmatic person. For me, this novel was a chase structured in three acts: (1) the hunt, where the two leads engage in high-stakes surveillance, racing across rooftops, tailing each other through dark, deserted streets and hidden alleyways; (2) the unraveling, as the Hunter learns to see the Target in a new light, with all their complicated secrets and pain, and the two of them work to uncover the truth of the Hunter’s elusive contract and the mysterious mastermind or organization behind it all; and (3) the violent confrontation in which both characters are forced to make choices about their allegiances, with huge consequences for both of them. I love the chemistry and tension between the characters, both morally ambiguous in their own ways. The hunter is not a simple anti-hero. There is much that has driven them to this point in their life and you get a glimpse into their past which explains their current way of life but does not excuse it. The target is equally complex and clever. They have a principle to their nature but are in no way perfect. They have their own flaws and can sometimes be uncomfortably cuddly, sometimes puncturing the hunter’s armor with a single comment or action that takes you by surprise. Dialogue is fabulous, full of humor, sarcasm and emotion, and the internal monologues are truthful without being overly mawkish. I was surprised by a few twist and turns, and there were a couple of moments of moral ambiguity that had me thinking about my heroes and the choices that they made throughout the book. It deals with some dark themes: violence, trauma, and manipulation, but it’s also got a lot of heart and that’s what makes it work so well. The pace is fast and fun, and I loved how the main characters’ story developed in lovely, quiet moments of introspection where the two could sort out their trust of each other and grapple with the possibility of a brand new start. While there are scenes of action, I never once felt I was being spoon-fed or told what to feel, which was really terrific. All in all, a really great read, and I can see why this would be a really popular and highly-recommended enemies-to-lovers novel, especially of the sort of thriller-with-heart type that fans of yours might enjoy.

I’ve read recently – with much pleasure – The Pisces by Melissa Broder. As I said earlier, Notes on Heartbreak is a deeply emotional read and whilst The Pisces is a vastly different book, it also deals with the depths of heartbreak and the journey of the person left to pick up the pieces after. The book is wild and crazy and at times surreal, but it’s also very real and is a very humorous take on the typical heartbreak stories that we read about. Annie Lord is another author who tackles tough subject matters with honesty and Unflinching courage in her writing. For an even more twisted take on relationships, you have to read Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. The book is a smart and quirky dissection of the stresses of dating in your 30s and follows a protagonist as conflicted and as stuck in limbo as the narrator of Notes on Heartbreak. It’s fun and often laugh-out-loud and the dry humor has got me reading passages aloud to my flatmates to get their take. Even more, though, it’s good to have this sort of relatable take on a series of relationships, whole from the really bad to the just plain stumped. If you are looking for something a little more lyrical but equally painful, I highly recommend Graham Greene’s classic The End of the Affair. The story is of a man whose obsessive love of a woman that ended in an affair culminates in her unexpected death, and in the years that follow, he struggles with his jealousy, anger and conflicts with his Christian faith. As with Notes on Heartbreak, the novel is intense and leaves its reader shaken. It is a stunning exploration of love, and is written with incredible precision and beauty. Finally, I picked How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs because it’s different but also explores themes of love. This is a collection of short stories that follow a variety of characters, all dealing with love and relationships in different ways, from identities of families and cultures to how people are dealing with being diasporic. I find that this book is similar to Notes on Heartbreak in that the emotional range of the stories goes from extreme love to extreme hate, and in between there is a lot of love and it is so beautiful and relatable that it will make you feel all the emotions and hopefully see a little bit of yourself in the characters. Like with Notes on Heartbreak, reading How to Love a Jamaican will leave you feeling wrecked but better in the end.

Audiobooks can actually make a huge difference in the «Possessive» genre, and make lines that would sound cheesey on paper sound very visceral and even commanding instead. For example, “It Ain’t Me, Babe” by Tillie Cole is a Possessive book, and I listened to it on audio with multiple narrators. The audiobook really drove home the possessive culture of the MC club in the book, and you could really hear the grit and threat in the narrators’ voices. If you’ve read a book in this genre before and thought the dialogue was a bit over-the-top, you might be converted to loving audiobooks of this genre.

One should not underestimate the sheer amount of output this man is producing. While typical authors could only dream of publishing one book every two years, ‘Eclipse of the Divine’ was pumped out on a 5-chapter-per-week schedule throughout the entire first run. And that is a mountain of IP to license. The entire story, the universe, the characters, the locations, the magical artifacts, it’s all just waiting to be plundered for content in guidebooks, comic books, video games and to be plastered on t-shirts, mugs and other merchandise. And all of this has a far greater valuation than the single book which initially prompted the publisher’s interest. A publisher might license the rights to a guidebook, or a game studio might license the setting for a mobile RPG, and in each case they would have access to dozens of characters, hundreds of locations and scores of magical artifacts to include or to use as basis for their own creativity. The creator’s massive output of writing also keeps a massive fandom engaged in spending, in many cases 24/7/365. Every author has “down years,” where for one reason or another, interest in their work wanes. But not this creator. The constant stream of work from main story chapters, side stories, even chapters from the alternate POV of a minor character in a story—all of this keeps the readers engaged and powers the many revenue streams to pay the creator’s growing wealth. The strategy is, to be frank, merciless. But if you can sustain it, the wealth creation is nothing short of incredible, translating creative output directly into multiple parallel revenue streams a week at a time.

Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone is another amazing story of mental health and finding your people, all in a really moving way. Another book that deals with personal struggles in the face of really big issues for society is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. While very different from It Happens All the Time in terms of story, the personal struggles are balanced with the bigger issues of the story in a really similar way to this book. If you want something with a little bit of a thriller twist, Sadie by Courtney Summers is amazing. It’s part of mystery and part of podcast, basically a heart breaking story of a girl and her experience with trauma and how she deals with it. I Have Lost My Way by Gayle Forman is also a great book and very similar to the emotional depth that it provides to its readers. It’s about three strangers whose lives intersect with each other in unexpected ways. Together, these books can evoke emotions of anger, sadness, and hope.

The next book I wanted to read after Falling Upward was another book on transformation. Even though The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is mostly fiction and an allegory, it is another very good book on transformation. Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor is another book that portrays darkness as a place of transformation, and ways that we can grow there. Like Rohr, she shows how we can transform our messy lives into something beautiful.