Hey fellow bookworms 🙂
I’m in a bit of a rut and looking for suggestions on books I should read next. I thought it would be fun to buy the first 10 books mentioned in this post (if they’re on kindle!)
I’m really into morbid/macabre themes (bonus points for a Dystopian Setting. To give you a better idea of my gruesome taste, some of my favourite books include:)
Tender is the Flesh – Agustina Bazterrica
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
The End of Alice – A. M. Holmes
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Asylum – Patrick McGrath
Looking forward to your suggestions 🙂
by SophDoph91
10 Comments
‘Siddhartha’ by Hermann Hesse is a novel that I recommend for its exploration of the spiritual journey. Following the life of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Buddha, this story is a timeless meditation on the quest for self-discovery and enlightenment.
Perdido St Station by China Mieville
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.
Blurb: “National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities–with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes.
Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.”
Here’s another weird one for you: The Devil’s Alphabet by Daryl Gregory. I enjoyed it but there’s no question that it’s weird.
Cows by Matthew Stoke. I promise that reading it will make you physically ill.
Grotesque – Natsuo Kirino
Out – Natsuo Kirino
Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff and The Power by Naomi Alderman
Spider by Patrick McGrath
Perfume by Patrick Susskind
For horror-comedy, Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend
This is nonfiction and probably not what you are looking for but *Written in Bone* is a book written by forensic anthropologist Sue Black. She explains how she uses forensic science to identify and rediscover how a person may have lived their life/how they died from their bones alone. It’s super morbid and fascinating, and she has another book about the criminal cases she has worked on too.
If you like McCarthy Blood Meridian is unrelentingly bleak. It’s set in Victorian times but the hell he describes is dystopic. Though it lacks the redeeming humanity of The Road.
Earth Abides by George Stewart is an intelligent end of the world book where a virus has destroyed most of humanity. No zombie crap but very plausible.
The Passenger and Stella Maris by McCarthy I also thought brilliant. Lots of morbid themes and some incest thrown in.