The best literary fiction about how dark things can get for people, and how dark people can get

Robert Stone was very much a product of his generation, which he immortalized in A Flag for Sunrise, Dog Soldiers, and a half dozen other novels. A master of dialogue and emotional intensity, he had no betters and few equals, and saw with startling clarity the darkness and flaws that motivate not just individuals but entire societies. This richly imagined and painfully wrought collection of stories hit me like a dangerous narcotic, leaving me breathless, wounded, and desperate for more. 

There’s so much of dystopian fiction written these days—and for good reason—but Hall led the pack with this 2007 book, which shares DNA with The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men. Read now, it feels not just more timely, somehow, but also more possible. The world is in disarray after “the collapse,” with food and power rationed for a populace that numbs itself with drugs between meaningless and oppressive factory shifts. The brutal Authority has seized control of women’s bodies, enforcing compulsory contraception and a pregnancy lottery. When the nameless narrator sets out to find a cadre of women—the army of the title—rumored to be living outside the reaches of the Authority, Hall nurtures our hope like a wounded bird even as she hurtles us inexorably toward disaster.  

This isn’t just a book, it’s a magic trick—and I’m not sure how Flanagan pulls it off. Writing about the prisoners of war forced by Japanese soldiers to build the Thai-Burma Railway during World War II, he pulls no punches in his depictions of human cruelty, and readers will feel every single one. As he renders misery and starvation in relentless focus, the subject matter is pitch black… and yet, by bridging the story to the present, when the survivors and their captors are trying to live normal lives beneath the weight of their history and their actions, Flanagan turns this from a litany of human suffering into something far more complex and interesting. Black magic, maybe, but magic just the same.

I could recommend this book for the writing, which is remarkable—layered and incisive and beautiful—or for the plotting, which is dense and chaotic in all the best ways, even as Veselka displays the patience of a confident master. Or for the multitude of richly drawn, intriguing characters and how they move around the country and one another. As they wander from Alaska to Seattle to New England in search of a family secret—and in search of themselves—Veselka brings readers along on their quest as she slowly reveals the mystery of a dysfunctional family dynamic and the systems that create so many others like it.  

Like Holbert’s other novels, Lonesome Animals and The Hour of Lead, this one is populated by unusual characters, teems with senseless violence, and is rendered in a voice as compelling as it is unique. Set near the Grand Coulee Dam, Whiskey is about two part-Native American brothers, Andre and Smoker, who set out to find Smoker’s daughter, Bird, when she’s taken by a religious zealot. But the madcap plot is just one-third of a bigger story about the brothers and their destructive parents, Peg and Pork, and their collective collisions with alcoholism, marriage, the law, and one another. Though Whiskey belongs on the top shelf, expect it to burn going down. I wish I’d written it.