I love most all genre fiction, but I’m a sucker for dark fiction—and I have a particular fondness for dark fiction that explores the hidden shadows of men and women as they make dubious choices that lead to consequences rife with fear, despair, and unflinching terror. Whether it’s young men meeting in a basement to engage in a secret barbaric club or a world gone mad following the literal death of God, my favorite dark fiction is woven with sly satire and subversive social commentary.
Chuck Palahniuk is one of the best writers of satirical dark fiction, and Fight Club is my favorite of his books. It’s most famous for its premise of a secret club of men who willingly engage in organized, bare-knuckle fistfights—but, subversively, Palahniuk’s novel uses razor-sharp wit and humor to examine themes of consumerism, anarchy, and subjugated masculinity through the strange and unlikely friendship of the book’s nameless narrator and his mysterious friend, Tyler Durden. The first rule of Fight Club: no spoilers.
Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.
Before Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for his sophomore effort, he debuted on the literary scene with one of my very favorite books, The Virgin Suicides, a dark and haunting novel about a group of five repressed teenage sisters who each commit suicide over the course of a year. In Eugenides’ subversive coming-of-age tale, he explores themes of religion, isolation, and mental illness through the collective narrative voice of the neighborhood boys who obsessed over the sisters and want to understand why they killed themselves.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
That girl didn't want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.
The five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric and, now, gone - had always been a point of obsession for the entire neighbourhood.
Although the boys that once loved them from afar have grown up, they remain determined to understand a tragedy that has defied explanation. The…
Tim O’Brien is one of my very favorite writers, and his seminal work, The Things They Carried, is one of my all-time favorite books (dark fiction or otherwise). It’s a collection of interconnected short stories, each set in or around the Vietnam war, that explore themes of war, guilt, memory, and death. Based on O’Brien’s experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division, The Things They Carried playfully subverts the conventions of traditional storytelling, blurring the lines between fact and fiction as O’Brien uses the names of real people and places, including a character named Tim O’Brien.
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme.
But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried', it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry through…
Max Barry’s satirical science-fiction novel, Machine Man, is a dark and funny mediation on contemporary society’s compulsive over-reliance on technology. The narrator, Charles Neumann, is a mechanical engineer who, while obsessively searching for his phone, loses his leg in an industrial accident. After building himself a new machine leg, Charles purposely loses his other leg, so he can replace it with another machine leg. After seeing how great his new legs work, Charles wonders if maybe he should replace more of his body parts with machine parts, begging the question: Where does humanity end and technology begin?
Scientist Charles Neumann loses a leg in an industrial accident. It's not a tragedy. It's an opportunity. Charlie always thought his body could be better. He begins to explore a few ideas. To build parts. Better parts.
Prosthetist Lola Shanks loves a good artificial limb. In Charlie, she sees a man on his way to becoming artificial everything. But others see a madman. Or a product. Or a weapon.
A story for the age of pervasive technology, Machine Man is a gruesomely funny unraveling of one man's quest for ultimate self-improvement.
Ron Currie Jr. has written some of my very favorite books that explore big ideas through a dark, satirical lens. My favorite of Currie’s books is God Is Dead, which is a collection of interconnected stories that wonders what the world—and, more importantly, humanity—would look like if God took human form…then died. Each story looks at different characters and how they have responded to the reality of God’s death, from a group of teenagers who make a suicide pact to an epidemic of parents worshipping their children in the absence of God. Each story works together to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and the purpose of life.
The electrifying, "cutting-edge" (USA Today) debut work of fiction from Ron Currie, author of the forethcoming novel The One-Eyed Man (March 2017)
Ron Currie's gutsy, funny book is instantly gripping: If God takes human form and dies, what would become of life as we know it? Effortlessly combining outlandish humor with big questions about mortality, ethics, and human weakness, Ron Currie, Jr., holds a funhouse mirror to our present-day world. God has inhabited the mortal body of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan. When she is killed in the Darfur desert, he dies along with her, and word of…
15-year-old cannibal Timber Marlow has lived her entire life within a murderous cult called the Divinity of Feminine Reproach, but she’s always suspected there was more to life than the strange and twisted lessons she’s been indoctrinated to believe. After risking her life to escape into the Outside, Timber bears witness to some dark and unsettling truths about the world around her…and the integral role she unwittingly plays in it.
As a child, I lived in a small valley sheltered from the night city lights. I could see the stars, and from that time, that is where my imagination dwelled. As a teenager, I read several of the books I have listed here, and from that point, I was inspired to read more and also to write myself. I sincerely believe that despite our current problems, humanity will outlive its troubled childhood and reach for the stars. We are destined for the stars, and only in the works of science fiction writers is that future explored. The books below helped me to become a successful author in my own right.
An alien starship appears in the Solar System! Humanity faces a glorious future, or total extinction, and only Joe Falcon can make the choice. Never would Joe have imagined it would fall to him to make the decision that would alter the destiny of two worlds, launching humanity towards a glorious future, or to extinction.
Falcon's Call is an action packed dive into the unknown, written in the style of the great, classic, science-fiction stories. If you like surprising plot twists, compelling characters and a hero who actually cares, you must read this new novel by Mike Waller.
Reader's Favorite Gold Medal winner 2019 B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree 2019 Chill With A Book Premier Award 2019
In a heart-pounding battle for humanity's survival, one man holds the key to a glorious future or utter extinction.
In a race against time, Earth and Mars race to claim a derelict alien ship as it enters the Solar System, both aware that whichever planet succeeds might in so doing achieve technological advantage over the other. But who should they send? Joe Falcon, an unlikely candidate, never saw himself as the "right" person. Accompanied by a crew of misfits, each fleeing their own…
