100 books like Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Attanasio can run hot and cold, but when he’s hot he’s on fire! This book may have the most ambitious plot of any novel I’ve ever read and is almost impossible to describe. It spans galaxies, has a truly bizarre vibe, and yet rings true, with a love story thrown in.  

The variety of subjects covered in this collection of 22 short stories demonstrates Bradbury's prowess as a master craftsman and the reason why I count him among my literary heroes. 

More than a few of these tales have become legendary, including “A Sound of Thunder.” Bradbury's premise of how the death of a butterfly in prehistoric times could have drastic changes in the future is a variation on the famous “butterfly effect” and a fine example of the relationship between chaos theory and the physics of time travel.
For me, the most incredible story in the collection is “The Fog Horn” in which an elusive sea monster attacks a lighthouse after being attracted by its foghorn for years. This story was the inspiration for the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

I loved this book for the new concepts it brought to me about psychic abilities, specifically telepaths that could block other’s psychic abilities.

After this, I was drawn to the book for the way it blurred the lines of reality, making me question alongside the main character if anything they were experiencing was real. I also thought the idea of the UBIK drug that kept people in a 'half-life' was fascinating and a different way to show addiction and its consequences.

Lastly, the ending was quite thrilling and kept me reading into the wee hours of the morning, even though I had work the next day! 

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.

The action in this book begins when Severian, an apprentice in the Torturers’ Guild, gives a convict a weapon to kill herself rather than be tortured.

The reason there’s a Torturers’ Guild is, allegedly, that it beats prison: Better to deliver a punishment and then let the punished person return to their life, the thinking goes, than confine them to a useless existence as a ward of the state. Severian is expelled from the Guild, but not from the profession, and wanders the world plying his trade, at least until the plot can’t spare him.

It’s a constant dissonance, looking through the eyes of a character whose training and purpose is the infliction of pain, who seems so decent and forthright in the story he narrates. (But don’t be fooled.)

The Book of Philip Jose Farmer is a collection of 16 brilliant short stories ranging from SF and horror to fantasy and satire. 

The most memorable and frightening tale of all—and one that I often use an example of a perfect paranormal tale—is “Father in the Basement.” An eleven-year-old girl employs her supernatural ability to help her father work around the clock for days to complete the first draft of his novel. He wanted it to be his final act, after all.

One of the most chilling endings of any horror story out there. 

Harlan Ellison’s Shatterday holds two of the most memorable short stories I’ve ever read.

In “Jeffty is Five,” a young boy never ages and is somehow able to listen to new episodes of cancelled radio shows and conjure up new issues of pulp magazines long out of print. He is oblivious to the changing world around him until he is brutally exposed to the harsh realities of modern life. 

In “Shatterday,” a callous, insensitive young man finds himself confronted by a doppelganger who not only takes over his life, but improves it until the original simply fades away. 

In the introduction to his collection, Ellison indicates that his stories reflect the underlying theme of human frailty and ugliness. His goal is to shock his readers into seeing how this common fear unifies all people. This is one of the reasons why Harlan Ellison is one of my favorite writers of… show more.

If you’re too young to remember The Gong Show, it was the American Idol of its day. Equally as fake, but upfront about its fraudulent nature.

Back on the subject of pushing genre boundaries, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is Chuck Barris’ “unauthorized autobiography.” Get your head around that concept. Barris was the producer/host of both The Gong Show and The Dating Game. If that doesn’t sound like a full slate, Barris claims he was a CIA assassin during this time.

Say you wrote an autobiography, but it lacks in the excitement department. Say you also wrote a spy novel, but it came in at half the length a publisher’s looking for. A great solution for both problems; mash them together!

Is One Day a modern classic? After the hype had died down, I bought a battered copy second-hand from a charity shop. Over a decade since reading it, I still mentally return to Dex and Em: what was and what could’ve been.

There’s also something in the beautiful narrative structure – where we see both sides of their story over time – that makes me ponder the way we can never fully know another person. Even when they are familiar to us. Perhaps especially then.