17 Epistolary Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels to Write Home About

Magic is fraught with peril, so maybe Kate and Cecelia should avoid it—but honestly, they’re just having too much fun.

Someone tried to poison Kate while she was attending the Royal College of Wizards. Meanwhile, there’s a hapless man attempting to trail Cecelia. But worst of all is Oliver, who was turned into a tree and can't be found. 

Wrede and Stevermer wrote this novel by drafting letters from Kate and Cecelia’s perspective to each other. The Sorcery & Cecelia series is a fun adventure brought to life one letter at a time.

Jo Walton’s semi-autobiographical novel Among Others blends the mythic and the mundane in a poignant coming-of-age tale, told entirely in the form of diary entries by Mori, a fifteen-year-old girl in boarding school, still mourning the death of her twin sister. Set amidst the Welsh countryside, where the remains of industrialization and the wilderness jostle each other for space, the novel is also a tender love letter to the sci-fi and fantasy classics of yesteryear. In between accounts of Mori talking to fairies or doing magic to find friendship and community (and manifesting a SFF book club and a boyfriend!), she also discusses the books she’s been reading in great detail—highlighting the archival and cultural values of personal record-keeping. An incredibly textured novel, it also delves into the far-reaching effects of grief and trauma, and focuses on healing with a slow, slice-of-life narrative.

Jonathan Harker believes he’s going to Transylvania to help an odd client purchase property in London. He assures his fiancé, Mina Harker, that all is well and he’ll be home soon. But things take a dark turn when Jonathan makes a horrifying discovery in the count’s castle. 

As Jonathan struggles to escape, Mina waits for word from him. Her best friend’s health declines when strange bite marks appear on her neck, and in a nearby asylum, a lunatic waits for his ‘Master’ to arrive.

Told through a series of letters and diary entries, this dark classic is a must-read for Gothic and dark fantasy fans.

Thomas F. Monteleone’s collection of short stories, Fearful Symmetries is a hefty volume that plays around with form and theme, making for a compelling, suspense-filled read. The stories span the length of his long career, tackling supernatural Twilight Zone-type episodes, classic horror tropes and eldritch entities lurking beneath the surface. A standout epistolary story is “Love Letters” which unfolds as an exchange of letters where at least one correspondent is distinctly not human. If you’re looking for some unsettling short fiction, Fearful Symmetries won’t disappoint. 

Heather Fawcett’s much-lauded novel, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies, follows a shy anthropologist’s quest for fairies that takes her to a remote frosty village far north, where she’s also joined by her academic rival who can be occasionally annoying but also endearing. Also told entirely in the form of regular diary entries, the book pushes the epistolary form further, as more than one character gets the chance to pen their thoughts down in the journal, through all the fey shenanigans going on. There are also a few folktales and anthropological notes interspersed in the text, adding to the immersive experience. If you’re in the mood for a cozy feel-good fairytale, this book and its sequels are for you.

Lemuel Gulliver wakes up to find he's shipwrecked on a strange island with inhabitants who are no more than six inches high.

After he escapes this land of Lilliput, Gulliver's adventure takes him to Brobdingnag, where he’s now the tiny one; the cold, but logical Houyhnhnm society; and the floating society of Laputa, with citizens who value science above everything—even as their cities crumble around them.

In this novel told as a series of travel memoirs, Swift uses each society as an exaggerated commentary on social philosophies of the time.

Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with creating life, and takes to robbing graveyards to cobble together the perfect human. But when the scientist shocks his experiment to life, he realizes he’s made a terrible mistake. The creature didn’t ask to be created. 

Confused by Frankenstein’s rejection, but desperate for companionship, the reanimated monster hunts down his creator and delivers a chilling ultimatum: make the monster a companion, or watch him destroy all that Frankenstein cherishes. This classic early sci-fi novel by Mary Shelley remains a great read today. 

Dan Frey’s novel Dreambound tells the story of a father searching for his missing daughter—who, in all likelihood, has been abducted by the fey. Hugely entertaining and engaging, the novel really pushes the genre of epistolary fiction to its extreme. The entire book is composed of found footage and mixed media elements including journal entries, emails, letters, interview transcripts, stories-within-stories, police reports and more—making for a truly unforgettable reading experience. Along with an enjoyable take on fey stories, the book also delves into fandom cultures and communities in great detail, while probing the strength of father-daughter relationships. 

In a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter that cryptically says 'burn before reading.' This starts a strange correspondence between two agents on opposite sides of a war. 

Each agent wants what’s best for their side. But although the letters begin as battleground bragging, they turn into something different—something more. Their romance could change everything, including time itself. But acknowledging their feelings for each other would mean death. 

The back-and-forth correspondence across time and turmoil reveals a tender testament to the power of love.

Kady Grant just broke up with her boyfriend, Ezra. But when a warship brutally attacks their planet, the brand-new exes are forced to escape together. 

The pair attempt to reach a jump station so that they can broadcast the attack to the rest of the universe. But things are about to get worse. The pair's escape ships are damaged, a plague has just broken out onboard, and the powerful AI that controls the ships may have been damaged in the battle.

Illuminae is told through a series of top-secret documents and reports.

When Rose Franklin was 11 years old, she fell into a strange, square-shaped cave with glowing carvings all around. It's only when firemen rescue her that she realizes she's sitting in the middle of an enormous metal hand. 

17 years later, Rose has worked her entire life to become a highly-trained physicist and is now head of a top-secret team. They're tasked with understanding the origin and relevance of the bizarre artifact she accidentally discovered in the Earth. 

As Rose and her entire team get closer to discovering the nature of the relic, they are interrogated by a mysterious organization. But what are the agency's intentions for the object? 

Told through journals, interviews, scientific notes, and mission logs, this book reads like a documentary into a classified government experiment.

If you’re up for a stay-at-home literary adventure, reading and rereading House of Leaves can be quite the venture. Intricately plotted with ciphers, codes, riddles and hidden messages encoded into the text, House of Leaves is presented as a puzzle for readers to solve. One of the inner stories is told in the form of a detailed academic treatise on ‘The Navidson Record’—a fictional documentary film about a haunted house that’s bigger on the inside and the family that inhabits it. 

Accompanying this text are copious footnotes by multiple unreliable characters while the appendices contain illustrations, photographs, and a bunch of letters written by a character locked in an asylum, that deepen the mysteries of this story. And if you’re struggling to make sense of it, you can dive down the internet rabbit hole, filled with hundreds of fan theories by intrepid readers like you. 

After he’s released from prison, Bax finds himself in a motel in the American midwest. He meets with a real estate agent who tells him that Bax is heir to an abandoned house in the town. 

But when Bax moves in, he discovers that the place isn’t as empty as he believed. Haunted by supernatural creatures, Bax sets out to discover the truth about Mr. Black, a sorcerer and the home's previous tenant. 

With each letter Bax writes, more of the mystery is revealed—but this isn't a straightforward story. 

In the eyes of the people of Fall River, Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden is still the primary suspect in the brutal murder of her parents. It doesn’t matter that a jury found her innocent. 

Lizzie uses her inheritance to buy Maplecroft, a mansion by the sea, where her and her sister can live in peace. But the evil that consumed her parents has followed her to the seaside. And now Lizzie has to fight the oncoming tide of nightmares and madness with nothing but her axe.

Told through letters and journal entries, Maplecroft weaves a dark and compelling Gothic mystery. 

Now made into an acclaimed film by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon in the titular role, Andy Weir’s The Martian was initially self-published as serialized entries on the author’s blog, before being picked up by a major publisher. It follows the plight of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded on Mars after the rest of the crew evacuate, presuming him dead; now he has to somehow survive all alone on the red planet by relying on his wits. 

Told in the form of journal logs, bristling with puns and humor, the book chronicles Mark’s ingenuity as he utilizes whatever limited resources at hand to stay alive. There’s plenty of scientific and technical details packed into this book but not in a heavy-handed manner, making sense to readers who aren’t scientists or fans of hard sci-fi. 

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes unfolds as a series of scientific progress reports, was initially published as a short story that won the Hugo Award and later expanded to a novel that won the Nebula Award. It narrates the life-changing journey of Charlie Gordon who is selected for an experimental scientific procedure precisely for his low IQ; consequently, the surgery turns him into a genius. Soon Charlie’s intelligence surpasses that of his peers, but it doesn’t bring him happiness and isolates him further, as he learns to accept the harsh and hypocritical ways of the world. Heartbreaking and engrossing, Flowers for Algernon remains a classic. 

Sylvie Cathrall’s A Letter to the Luminous Deep is a charming light academia novel, unfolding in a vivid underwater world, chronicling the story of two scholars who manage to fall in love with each other via the series of epistles they write. Like many other epistolary novels, this one also contains a mystery at its heart, as the reader joins two siblings to uncover the disappearance of the main characters following a seaquake. If the idea of two pen pals falling in love is intriguing, you’ll love this cozy debut novel and eagerly look forward to its sequel coming out this year.