What to Read While You’re Waiting for Wicker
The Nighttable Series
What to Read While You’re Waiting for Wicker
Strange love. Old magic. Hungry women. Dangerous forests. And men who may or may not technically be human.
There are movies you casually add to your watchlist.
And then there are movies that release a trailer and immediately make you think:
Well. I guess this is part of my personality now.
Wicker falls firmly into the second category.
A lonely woman living on the outskirts of a deeply conventional village asks a basketmaker to build her a husband.
Out of wicker.
And then he comes to life.
The whole thing feels strange, sensual, folkloric, darkly funny and completely uninterested in behaving itself.
Which means, naturally, I need more of that immediately.
So while we wait for Wicker, I pulled together books that live somewhere in the same deliciously strange universe: women with inconvenient appetites, unconventional lovers, beautiful monsters, ancient magic, haunted forests and desire that makes polite society deeply uncomfortable.
These aren't necessarily books that mirror the plot of Wicker.
They're books that scratch the same itch.
01 / Start Here
The Wicker Husband
Obviously, we start with the story responsible for all of this.
A woman mocked and ostracized by her village asks a basketmaker to create a husband for her. He does.
And suddenly everyone has a lot of feelings about the fact that the woman they dismissed has found happiness in a form they don't understand.
Which might be the most interesting part of the story.
Not simply that she gets the love she wants.
But how uncomfortable everyone becomes when she does.
Read this if: you want to meet the wonderfully strange story behind Wicker.
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02 / Blood & Desire
A Dowry of Blood
If what interests you about Wicker is desire colliding with something dark, ancient and not entirely human, come closer.
A Dowry of Blood reimagines Dracula's brides through the eyes of Constanta and turns the story into something lush, intimate, obsessive and hungry.
Beneath all the velvet, immortality and blood is a woman slowly learning the difference between being desired and actually belonging to herself.
Read this if: you like your love stories beautiful, dangerous and dripping in gothic atmosphere.
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03 / The Bargain
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
A woman makes a bargain with a dark god because the life prescribed for her feels worse than the consequences.
Already, we're speaking my language.
Addie refuses the future she's supposed to want and chooses something enormous, lonely and complicated instead.
Then there is Luc.
Dark, magnetic, impossible Luc.
This isn't simply a romance. It's centuries of longing, power, loneliness and the almost unbearable desire to be known.
Read this if: the words woman refuses the life everyone else chose for her immediately get your attention.
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04 / Old Magic
The Wolf and the Woodsman
Dark forests. Old magic. Religious oppression. Pagan mythology. Blood.
Romance is threaded through a much larger story here, but the atmosphere is exactly where I want to live while waiting for Wicker.
It's earthy and brutal and beautiful, with a heroine navigating a world determined to tell her what she should believe, who she should be and where she belongs.
Naturally, she has other ideas.
Read this if: you want your fantasy covered in dirt, blood and old-world magic.
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05 / Into the Woods
For the Wolf
A girl is sent into an ancient forest as a sacrifice to the Wolf.
Except the Wolf isn't exactly the monster everyone told her he was.
You know where this is going.
There is something endlessly compelling about stories where the supposedly dangerous thing in the woods turns out to be far more complicated than the respectable world outside it.
Forests. Magic. Sacrifice. A mysterious man. Forbidden attraction.
Yes, please.
Read this if: you're susceptible to ominous forests and men everyone warns you about.
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06 / Gothic Rot
Starling House
A decaying mansion.
A strange heir.
A town full of secrets.
And a woman who keeps being pulled toward something everyone else thinks she should stay away from.
Starling House feels like a fairy tale that grew teeth.
It's gothic without becoming precious about it, romantic without forgetting to be unsettling, and full of the sense that the house, the land and everyone living on it knows something you don't.
Read this if: you want your romance wrapped in gothic rot.
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07 / Fairy Tale With Teeth
Nettle & Bone
This one is for anyone drawn to the dark-fairy-tale absurdity of Wicker.
A princess decides to rescue her sister from an abusive prince.
Naturally, this involves impossible tasks, dark magic, a dust-wife, a dog made of bones and a demon-possessed chicken.
As one does.
It's strange and funny and macabre, but underneath all the peculiar magic is a story about women deciding they're done accepting the circumstances handed to them.
Read this if: you want your fairy tales darker, weirder and populated by women who have had enough.
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08 / Folklore
The Bear and the Nightingale
If the folkloric world of Wicker is what has you enchanted, go here next.
Set against a wintry medieval Russian landscape, this novel is filled with household spirits, forests, old gods and a heroine who refuses to shrink herself into the narrow life expected of her.
It feels ancient in the best possible way.
Snow underfoot. Firelight. Things watching from the forest.
And a girl who can see what everyone else has decided isn't real.
Read this if: you want to disappear into an old folk tale for several hundred pages.
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09 / Gods & Women
The Witch's Heart
Angrboda is a witch.
Loki finds her.
You can imagine that this does not result in a quiet little cottage and a sensible retirement plan.
This is mythology told through a woman's interior world: love, motherhood, prophecy, heartbreak and the terrifying vulnerability of caring deeply when you already know how the story might end.
It's tender and strange and quietly devastating.
Read this if: you want mythology where the woman isn't merely standing beside the legend. She is the story.
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10 / Wild Magic
Uprooted
A young woman is chosen to live with a powerful wizard known as the Dragon.
He's difficult.
She's stubborn.
The forest is extremely haunted.
Excellent.
But the real seduction of Uprooted isn't simply the relationship. It's the wild, tangled magic of the story itself.
Magic that feels grown rather than invented, with roots and rot and something ancient breathing beneath everything.
Read this if: you want a fairy tale with dirt beneath its fingernails.
Shop the BookApparently We Like Our Romance a Little Strange
Maybe that's what makes Wicker so intriguing.
Underneath the wonderfully absurd premise of a woman falling in love with a man made of woven sticks is something surprisingly familiar:
What happens when a woman stops asking the world for permission to want what she wants?
Not what looks respectable.
Not what makes sense to everyone else.
Not the life she's been told should be enough.
What she actually wants.
And perhaps that's why stories about monsters, gods, wolves, ghosts and impossible men keep finding their way into our bookshelves.
Sometimes fantasy gives us permission to explore desires we're still learning how to name in real life.
So until Wicker arrives, I'll be reading about women wandering into forests, bargaining with gods, falling for monsters and generally making choices that would horrify the village council.
As one should.
Which one are you reading first?
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