100 books like Apt Pupil

If you are looking for a traditional war novel, Dalton Trombo’s 1938 masterpiece is not it. The World War I tale of American Joe Bonham is a horror story, a gruesome, disturbing, anti-war novel told from Bonham’s point of view as he lies in a hospital bed after being wounded by a shell. 

But wounded doesn’t actually explain his situation. Bonham’s arms and legs are gone. He is also blind and deaf, and his face is missing. No eyes, ears, tongue, nose, or teeth. All he can do is think. He recalls his life before the war: his first girlfriend, best friend Bill, and his parents, but the past is soon replaced by the terror of his new life.

Understandably, Joe decides that he wants to die. He tries to kill himself in various ways, but studious nurses keep rescuing him. One scene, where a new nurse pulls back his… show more.

Cronenberg’s 1996 movie adaptation (not the one that won many Oscars and is bad) captures Ballard’s sensual mechanical fetishism and apocalyptic consumerism perfectly. It is a 120-minute-long sex scene in a carousel of mangled metal. It is probably the best adaptation of prose to film I can think of, which is bolstered by the sheer strength of the book itself. Crash (again, not the 2006 one, the car crash sex one) is by far Cronenberg’s horniest feature, and that’s saying something. Uh. I didn’t mean to just talk about the movie. I should probably talk about the book. The book is very good. I’m deathly afraid of car accidents, and reading about them through Ballard’s dreamy, eroticized lens is a capital-E Experience. Truly one of my favorites.

A very dark turn in my list, indeed. A hole opens up in their apartment, who knows who or why? It doesn’t matter. They dub it the funhole, and would do what any of us would do, and start sticking things inside of it. Things get dark, fast.

If you want to be up all night, unable to sleep, give this book a whirl.

There isn’t another horror novel written in the past ten years that scratched at my brain as much as this one. Baztericca’s brilliance lies in her writing a story that no one else has thought of before. The subject matter–humans have run out of animals to eat–seems like an obvious one.

What is striking about the book is that it is told in an almost clinical fashion, observing horror with a detachment that is precise and unemotional. The plot follows one man through the routines of his life, but it’s the world in which he exists that haunts you. By the time I finished, it was easy to imagine the world of “Tender Is The Flesh” becoming all too real.

How could so many Nazi perpetrators escape to South America? Most relied on the help of a bishop of the Catholic Church in the Vatican, Alois Hudal.

Sands describes the structure of this support system (the so-called ratline) through the story of former SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Gustav Wächter, the governor of Galicia (1942–1944), who was responsible for the deportation of nearly 500,000 Jews to the Nazi death camps.

Wächter's post-war escape to Argentina actually ended in Rome, where he died of an infection in July 1949. Sands offers a riveting analysis of how this man found his way into the Nazi party, rose to a position that implicated him in mass murder, and how, with the support of his wife, he managed to hide in the Austrian mountains for years after the war. Sands also reflects on how difficult it is for the next generation to face up to the… show more.

While the author and I came from different sides of the same fence, I found myself empathizing with her deathbed promise, her fears, her worries, her self-doubt, and her commitment to finding, and eventually exposing, the truth. Setting out to write what should have been a fairly ‘easy’ biographical tribute to her late grandfather – hailed as a Lithuanian hero- she discovered - and uncovered - details and documents which shattered her world and confirmed “the gossip.” She began to doubt the stories she was told as a child and the people who told them- both in her Lithuanian-American neighborhood and back in the old country. What a page-turner…what agony and pain…until she finally made her courageous decision. Bravo, Silvia.

I am passionate about the book because both my parents were survivors of the Lithuanian version of the Holocaust. There were very few survivors from Lithuania, and Foti’s book helps… show more.

William Brodrick is a British solicitor who became a lawyer after leaving a monastery where he was a monk. Like Brodrick, I have re-invented myself as an author after 40 years of working as a medical educator. Knowing what it took for me to succeed in a new career, I admire what it cost the author to achieve such a radical shift. Monk-turned-lawyer-turned-Novelist Brodrick has written a stunning story about a guard at a WWII death camp who is being brought to trial fifty years after the war. The story is told by Anselm, a lawyer who left the Old Baily in London where he worked as a solicitor, to become a monk at Larkwood Priory (the reverse of the author’s life).

Another reason this story speaks to me so profoundly has to do with my background. I am the eldest child in an abusive family that enforced silence about… show more.

According to Hannah Arendt's famous description of Gestapo agent Adolf Eichmann, he was merely a cog in the larger machinery of murder–someone who could not think for himself.

In his detailed account of Eichmann's activities, historian David Cesarani argues instead that Eichmann's inner commitment to Nazi ideology led him to identify with his task of organizing the transport of Jews to the extermination camps—a fanatical dedication that continued through January 1945.

All fiction has some kind of basis in reality.

The bestsellers penned by Forsyth, Levin, and Goldman would not exist without the true stories of the men and women who worked tirelessly in the years after World War II to bring escaped Nazis to justice.

Nagorski’s wonderfully researched work of non-fiction shines a much-deserved light on those individuals who sought closure on behalf of the murdered 6 million when no one else cared to do so: Fritz Bauer, Simon Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman, Elizabeth Holtzman, Beate, and Serge Klarsfeld, and more.

Pressburger is better known as half of the film duo Powell and Pressburger, but The Glass Pearls shows he missed a career when he went into film. 

Karl Braun, the protagonist of this book, is an escaped Nazi living in London some years after the end of World War II. He attempts to have a life, but lives in constant fear of being found and rounded up (yes, the book is aware of this irony). 

The “quiet cruelty” comes from the fact that, like it or not, Pressburger’s wonderful ability at portraying Braun’s interior and his fear make the reader invest in him. 

You end the novel troubled to discover that you have sympathized with – even wished for the escape of – a Nazi.