Books Under 200 Pages: Short Novels To Read (That Aren’t Classics!)

In the four decades since Ebola first appeared in 1976, it has made various short appearances with devastating effects every time. This is a little bit of a history of Ebola, how it was discovered, and about the various outbreaks.

Thirteen-year-old Miyax is alone and lost on the North Slope of Alaska after leaving an intolerable home with an abusive husband to get to San Fransisco.

She finds herself in the wilderness with a pack of wolves who soon accept her and she comes to love them like her own family. With their help and her father’s lessons, she survives the ice and rethinks her past and future.

In search of a better understanding of often deadly diseases, Grady heads to Angola amid the 2005 Marburg virus epidemic. Here she explores the realities of healthcare in the developing world and it’s potential effects on our own welfare.

There are also sections about other diseases like avian flu, HIV, SARS, West Nile Virus, and more.

Maybeth is worried her mother is caught up in the drug scene again when the police show up at their door. They’re actually here to question her about her long-lost father in regard to a string of killings across the country.

Maybeth is forced to confront the grim reality and may be the key to his conviction

Sabrina and her family just moved into their dream home in Jackson Hill but things aren’t quite as they seem. She hears odd noises and sees weird things. Worst of all, her already difficult relationship with her son will really be tested here. The Haskins family may be the newest owners, but they’re not the only residents.

Tsukiko works in an office and lives alone and one night she happens to meet a former teacher at a bar. He’s retired, thirty years her senior, and likely a widower. As the seasons change, their relationship develops from casual to hesitantly intimate to love.

This is the story of Alycin who followed her dreams and hitchhiked alone from Canada to Colombia, through Mexico and Central America, in the 1970s. Once she made it to Colombia, she bought an old dugout canoe thinking she could paddle the Amazon River to Brazil.

The Amazon Rainforest isn’t the paradise she imagines, especially with little food and no map. Along the way she faces life-threatening obstacles, mystical adventures, and even falls in love.

Area X has been cut off from civilization for decades and was reclaimed by nature. The first return expedition saw an edenic landscape while the second ended in mass suicide. Expedition eleven returned as shells of themselves and died from cancer within weeks.

We join four women on expedition twelve whose mission it is to map the terrain, record all observations, and most of all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

Sofia isn’t so sure about Fright Night. She just used it as an excuse to get close to Dylan. Spending a night in a deserted forest doesn’t sound so fun anymore. But they have a safe word and boy do they need it.

Allis Hagtorn, a TV presenter, leaves her partner and job for voluntary exile in a remote house on an isolated fjord. Here new job as a housekeeper and gardener isn’t quite what it seems, though.

Sigurd Bagge, her 44-year-old surly employer isn’t the old man she was expecting. As they wait for his wife to return from her travels, their uneasy encounters turn into an obsessive relationship and it becomes clear atonement for past sins may not be enough.

Kazu is dead now, but was born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the emperor. His life has been tied to the Imperial family by a series of coincidences and at every turn of modern Japanese history.

His life was also marked by bad luck and in death he is unable to rest and is doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station where his life began and ended.

He started as a laborer in preparation for the 1964 Olympics and ended living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the 2011 tsunami destruction and shattered by the 2020 Olympic announcement.

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, hears that childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they go to the Usher family’s home in the remote Ruritania countryside.

What awaits is an unsettling scene of fungus and possessed wildlife. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices, while her brother Roderick is battling a mysterious nerve problem.

With help from a tough British mycologist and a puzzled American doctor, Alex has to crack the mystery of the House of Usher before it swallows them whole

In a world rocked by a weird plague, monsters creep in the streets, and scared survivors gear up, wandering in packs. But maybe something totally different is going on. With a disease messing with reality, it’s hard to be sure of anything.

Spence, one of the “cured” at Ironside rehab, battles guilt and avoids the altered world until a new inmate urges him to find her old crew. Stuck between truth and lies, can he earn the redemption he dreams of, or is he just making things worse?

Twelve six year olds and three adult chaperones head into the woods for a field trip, but none of them make it out alive. This is the the harrowing tale of those days in the woods filled with illness, accidents, and a murderous child.

Chris’s world shatters when her son dies in a terrible car accident. Grief consumes her until a tiny cut on her finger alters everything.

A droplet of blood lands on her son’s memorial, and that night, Chris believes she spots his ghost outside her window. But is it truly him, or something sinister?

Soon she finds herself tangled in a risky game with forces she can’t handle, all to bring her son back to life.

Every year on her birthday, Laura gets a letter from a stranger who claims to know the whereabouts of her missing friend Bobby. But he’ll only share what he knows for something of hers in return.

Her quest for closure leads her too bizarre acts of harm and humiliation with no escape from he demands of her correspondent. The letter’s don’t stop and have a profound effect on her.

Our exorcist, nameless and morally flexible, handles demons with brute force and no qualms. He gets the job done, but the person involved? Not his concern.

Prosper of Schanz, a man of science, aims to raise the world’s first philosopher-king, all about pure principles. Too bad he’s got a demon hitching a ride.

It’s just another day at LitenVärld, the Swedish furniture store, when an elderly woman vanishes into a portal to another dimension.

It’s up to Jules and Ava, two minimum wage employees and exes, to track her down and protect the company’s bottom line. They face carnivorous furniture and a deep resentment between them.

Derek is LitenVärld’s most loyal employee but this is called into question when he takes a sick day. An employee like him, made to work at LitenVärld shouldn’t need time off.

To test his commitment to the job, he is assigned to the inventory team which is made up of four strangers who look and sound exactly like him, who has to search the store for defective products like mutant toilets and toy chests with eye stalks.

A tornado warning lands a family trapped in their bathroom on the verge of self-destruction as things spiral out of control.

Aloisville’s endless rain erases memories with each drop. Laverne journals as the town transforms, facing danger from leaky faucets and constant rainfall, always threatening to wash away everything she ever knew. Rebellion talk echoes, but Laverne just wants to survive in this memory-stealing downpour.

Quiver is a mostly-human astronaut, who escapes monotonous life on an asteroid by diving into virtual reality, chasing visions of a red-haired beauty. Her quirky robot sidekick, Mic, surfs Earth records for Al Pacino trivia and sushi recipes. After a cargo mishap, they go rogue on a wild space journey to the idyllic planet Trafik.

This is the story of Esperanza Corder, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, told through a series of of heartbreaking and joyous vignettes.

This tells the unexpected tale of Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old Tokyo resident who never fit in with her family or at school. Instead, she discovers peace at Smile Mart. Following store rules from the manual, she mimics colleagues to play the part of a ‘normal’ person for eighteen years. While she’s content, pressure mounts from family and coworkers to find a husband and pursue a ‘real’ career, pushing Keiko to desperate measures

Yetu carries memories for her people, descendants of pregnant slave women thrown overboard into the deep sea. Enduring a role too heavy as the sole historian, memories, both painful and beautiful, overwhelm her. Escaping to the surface, she rediscovers a world abandoned by her people long ago.

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation fueled the Klan’s rise, spreading fear and violence across America. They plan to bring Hell to Earth, but Ku Kluxes can be beaten.

Maryse Boudreaux and her resistance crew, a sharpshooter and a Hellfighter, stand against them. Armed and fierce, they hunt the Klan’s demons. Yet something terrible brews in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to intensify.

Conor wakes up seven minutes after midnight to a monster outside of his bedroom window but it’s not the monster of his nightmares, but an ancient one that wants something from him.

Alissa, Sky, Cleo, and Miles thought the escape room would be a fun way to spend a Friday night but as the night goes on, they start to wonder if they’ll ever really be let out.

Set in (apparently) colonial New England, a woman goes missing, or disappears, or flees, or has been kidnapped and when she meets another woman in the woods, everything changes.

As winter looms, a small Anishinaabe community is cut off and people start to panic as their food supply dwindles. As community members struggle to maintain order, a stranger shows up with others following.

The leadership loses its power and the strangers manipulate the tired citizens to take control. As the months pass, the death toll rises. Soon, a group of young friends and their families turn to Anishinaabe tradition in hopes to return their community to its thriving state while facing a grave decision.

Christmas hits Lower Lockwood as the Fairway Players gear up for Jack and the Beanstalk to raise money to fix the church roof. Behind the scenes, amateur drama unfolds—petty feuds, a sketchy beanstalk, and missing players. Oh, and there’s a dead body onstage. Lawyers Femi and Charlotte dig into Christmas letters, emails, and police transcripts to unmask the victim and killer before the holiday show wraps up.

Ella Minnow Pea lives on the made-up island of Nollop near South Carolina. The place was named after Nevin Nollop, who penned sentence with all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

But now, Ella’s on a mission to stop the island’s Council from a totalitarian takeover. As letters fall from Nollop’s memorial statue, they also vanish from the story and life on Nollop.

Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life takes a wild turn after a gentle invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Thanks to The Seep, everything’s linked, capitalism crumbles, and barriers vanish.

Trina and her wife, Deeba, live the dream under The Seep until Deeba imagines a fresh start as a baby. Using Seeptech, she makes the dream a realitty, leaving Trina heartbroken and drowning in booze.

In her sorrow, Trina tags along with a lost boy, starting an unexpected journey to save him from The Seep. Along the way, she faces a hardcore Seep fan and the void left by Deeba.

Marcos’s wife left him. His father’s dementia is getting worse. And he just tries not to think too much about how he makes a living. It just happened so quickly.

One day it was reported that animal meat was poisonous to humans thanks to an infectious virus. Then the government started the Transition making it legal to eat human meat, Special Meat.

One day he is given a special treat: a live specimen of the finest quality. He knows personal contact is forbidden but he starts to treat her like a human being and becomes tortured by what has been lost and may be saved.