Bracken MacLeod

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Bracken MacLeod

Goodreads Author


Born
in The United States
April 03

Website

Twitter

Genre

Influences

Member Since
February 2010

URL


Bracken MacLeod is the Bram Stoker, Splatterpunk, and Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of the novels, Mountain Home, Come to Dust, Stranded, and Closing Costs, as well as three short fiction collections including LET NOT YOUR SORROW DIE, coming this fall from Bad Hand Books. He's a former litigator who used to represent victims of domestic violence, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination.

He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.
...more

No Country for Old Muggles: an excerpt.

I don’t know said Harry quietly as he struggled with the pain of knowing all his life was a lie though now faced with great things being expected of him that he couldn’t comprehend despite the evidence of even greater things happening all around and everything going his way while he staggered across the imagined […] Read more of this blog post »
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Published on September 28, 2017 07:31
Average rating: 3.75 · 6,075 ratings · 1,325 reviews · 69 distinct worksSimilar authors
Stranded

3.44 avg rating — 1,819 ratings — published 2016 — 9 editions
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Closing Costs

3.61 avg rating — 424 ratings — published 2021 — 8 editions
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Mountain Home

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4.16 avg rating — 266 ratings — published 2013 — 9 editions
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Come To Dust

3.79 avg rating — 284 ratings — published 2016 — 5 editions
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13 Views of the Suicide Woods

3.80 avg rating — 178 ratings — published 2017 — 7 editions
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How We Broke

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3.98 avg rating — 81 ratings3 editions
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White Knight

4.47 avg rating — 66 ratings4 editions
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Mouse and Owl: a novelette

4.07 avg rating — 42 ratings — published 2018 — 2 editions
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The Texas Chainsaw Breakfas...

4.35 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 2015
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Blight Digest (Winter 2015)

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4.32 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 2014 — 2 editions
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Forbidden Lands P...
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The Honor of Your Presence by Dave Eggers
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Forbidden Lands Gamemaster's Guide by Tomas Härenstam
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Forbidden Lands Player's Handbook by Tomas Härenstam
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ShadowDark RPG Core Rulebook by The Arcane Library
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Cairn Player's Guide - 2nd Edition by Yochai Gal
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Bracken liked a quote
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
“...Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, pe ...more George Bernard Shaw
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Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
“The world is broken and I don't know how to fix it.”
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Jeff Vandermeer
Bracken entered a giveaway
Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Dead Weight
by Hildur Knútsdóttir (Goodreads Author)
50 copies available, ends on February 04, 2026 Enter to win »
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Quotes by Bracken MacLeod  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“A bullet has no conscience to consult as it flies from the barrel of a gun. It doesn't feel the wind or the sun or the rain as it speeds toward its target. It penetrates the innocent and the guilty with equal intent and creates victims with the same enthusiasm with which it saves them from the bullets of others.”
Bracken MacLeod, Mountain Home

“Maybe a little fishtail skid around the turn. Something to remind them that life was too short to be judgmental pricks.”
Bracken MacLeod, Mountain Home

“You’re depressing me, dude. What is the point if it’s all fucked up and meaningless?” “Living is the point. The guy who wrote the book thought it took more courage to keep on going than it did to just give up. He said something like living in revolt against meaninglessness gives life meaning.”
Bracken MacLeod, Stranded

Polls

What would you like to discuss in December? (Read by Dec 1st)
Please do not vote unless you will return if your book wins.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu
2018, 376 pages, 3.64 stars
Kindle $8.99, used print starting at $9.30, at library

"Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

Tamsen Donner must be a witch. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the pioneers to the brink of madness. They cannot escape the feeling that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it was a curse from the beautiful Tamsen, the choice to follow a disastrous experimental route West, or just plain bad luck--the 90 men, women, and children of the Donner Party are at the brink of one of the deadliest and most disastrous western adventures in American history.

While the ill-fated group struggles to survive in the treacherous mountain conditions--searing heat that turns the sand into bubbling stew; snows that freeze the oxen where they stand--evil begins to grow around them, and within them. As members of the party begin to disappear, they must ask themselves "What if there is something waiting in the mountains? Something disturbing and diseased...and very hungry?"


 
  11 votes, 44.0%

Stranded by Bracken MacLeod
2016, 304 pages, 3.46 stars
Kindle $7.99, cheap used print, probably not at library

"In the spirit of John Carpenter's The Thing and Jacob's Ladder comes a terrifying, icebound thriller where nothing is quite what it seems.

Badly battered by an apocalyptic storm, the crew of the Arctic Promise find themselves in increasingly dire circumstances as they sail blindly into unfamiliar waters and an ominously thickening fog. Without functioning navigation or communication equipment, they are lost and completely alone. One by one, the men fall prey to a mysterious illness. Deckhand Noah Cabot is the only person unaffected by the strange force plaguing the ship and her crew, which does little to ease their growing distrust of him.

Dismissing Noah's warnings of worsening conditions, the captain of the ship presses on until the sea freezes into ice and they can go no farther. When the men are ordered overboard in an attempt to break the ship free by hand, the fog clears, revealing a faint shape in the distance that may or may not be their destination. Noah leads the last of the able-bodied crew on a journey across the ice and into an uncertain future where they must fight for their lives against the elements, the ghosts of the past and, ultimately, themselves."


 
  6 votes, 24.0%

When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall
2016, 352 pages, 3.4 stars
Kindle $7.31, cheap used print, at library

"A taut, gripping novel set in the future, when the lives of a family existing on the margins of a dramatically changed society are upset by a mysterious stranger.
In a world prone to violent flooding, Britain, ravaged 20 years earlier by a deadly virus, has been largely cut off from the rest of the world. Survivors are few and far between, most of them infertile. Children, the only hope for the future, are a rare commodity.

For 22-year-old Roza Polanski, life with her family in their isolated tower block is relatively comfortable. She's safe, happy enough. But when a stranger called Aashay Kent arrives, everything changes. At first he's a welcome addition, his magnetism drawing the Polanskis out of their shells, promising an alternative to a lonely existence. But Roza can't shake the feeling that there's more to Aashay than he's letting on. Is there more to life beyond their isolated bubble? Is it true that children are being kidnapped? And what will it cost to find out?

Clare Morrall, author of the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Astonishing Splashes of Colour, creates a startling vision of the future in a world not so very far from our own, and a thrilling story of suspense."


 
  5 votes, 20.0%

When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie
1999, 382 pages, 3.91 stars
Kindle $11.99, cheap used print, at library

"A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans. A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made When Worlds Collide one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time."


 
  3 votes, 12.0%

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“The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.”
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“I encourage people to remember that "no" is a complete sentence.”
Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
Mark Twain
tags: war

“…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing….”
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

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