100 books like Asylum Piece

By Anna Kavan,

Here are 100 books that Asylum Piece fans have personally recommended if you like Asylum Piece. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Skin

Mike Thorn Author Of Shelter for the Damned

From my list on descent into existential darkness.

Why am I passionate about this?

Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast. His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director of Urban Legend and Valentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator of Final Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director of Cam). His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror (Seventh Row), The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.

Mike's book list on descent into existential darkness

Mike Thorn Why did Mike love this book?

Like its classic predecessor, The Cipher, Kathe Koja’s second novel brilliantly navigates artistic and romantic movements between the somatic and the transcendent, the erotic and the morbid, and ultimately between creativity and destruction. The book centers on metal sculptor Tess’s burgeoning relationship with Bibi, a transgressive performance artist whose radical visions aspire to an extreme embodiment of posthuman aesthetics.

Incorporating Tess’s metal sculptures into her performances, Bibi explores increasingly intense modes of expression through self-mutilation, cutting, and scarification, and the book plunges fearlessly into the parallel arcs of an eroding love and an increasingly deadly obsession. Koja’s prose bristles with a violent passion channeled into hyperfocus, deftly bounding between her characters’ intense interiorities and vivid descriptions of environments and embodied experiences. 

By Kathe Koja,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Skin as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As a sculptor of metal, Tess is consumed with the perfection of welds, the drip of liquid metal, addicted to the burn. Her solitary existence ends when she meets Bibi.
A self-proclaimed "guerilla performance artist," Bibi pushes her body to the utmost in her dancing, sculpting it into a finely tuned machine. But the limits of her body frustrate her. With Tess, she creates a performance art of mobile, bladelike sculptures and human dance that becomes increasingly violent and dangerous.
Still this is not enough for Bibi. Her desire to grow and transform leads her to body piercing, then to…


Book cover of Imperial Bedrooms

Mike Thorn Author Of Shelter for the Damned

From my list on descent into existential darkness.

Why am I passionate about this?

Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast. His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director of Urban Legend and Valentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator of Final Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director of Cam). His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror (Seventh Row), The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.

Mike's book list on descent into existential darkness

Mike Thorn Why did Mike love this book?

With Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis channels many of his career-long obsessions into a nihilistic work of Hollywood noir, written in a minimalist prose style that evokes both Raymond Chandler’s staccato brutalism and Joan Didion’s haunting lyricism. Imperial Bedrooms takes a razor to Hollywood’s beautiful surfaces while drawing the reader deeper and deeper into protagonist Clay’s misanthropic paranoia. The writing is masterful, existential horror frozen into sentences so spare and focused they often resemble haiku. It features what might be my favorite closing line in fiction: “The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away—I now want to explain all these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.”

By Bret Easton Ellis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Imperial Bedrooms as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Clay is a successful screenwriter, middle-aged and disaffected; he's in LA to cast his new movie. However, this trip is anything other than professional, and he's soon drifting through a louche and long-familiar circle - a world largely populated by the band of infamous teenagers first introduced in Bret Easton Ellis's first novel Less Than Zero. After a meeting with a gorgeous but talentless actress determined to win a role in his movie, Clay finds himself connected with Kelly Montrose, a producer whose gruesomely violent death is suddenly very much the talk of the town.

Imperial Bedrooms follows Clay as…


Book cover of The Monk: A Romance

Mike Thorn Author Of Shelter for the Damned

From my list on descent into existential darkness.

Why am I passionate about this?

Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Vastarien, Dark Moon Digest, and The NoSleep Podcast. His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director of Urban Legend and Valentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator of Final Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director of Cam). His essays and articles have been published in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (University of Texas Press), Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror (Seventh Row), The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.

Mike's book list on descent into existential darkness

Mike Thorn Why did Mike love this book?

Matthew Gregory Lewis wrote The Monk in his late teens, and the book glows with the heat of youthful rage, gloriously unconcerned with issues of propriety and “good taste.” The title monk, Ambrosio, unknowingly sets the course for his own damnation when he has sex with Matilda, a demon disguised as a beautiful woman. As the novel progresses, this illicit affair ignites Ambrosio’s most lurid urges, and he descends into extreme depravity: he dabbles in sorcery, he rapes, he murders. Gregory writes the book’s climax in visceral detail, gruesomely describing Ambrosio’s fate at the hands of Satan. Although The Monk features two main plotlines and, in truly Gothic fashion, periodic digressions into flashbacks and tangential subplots, it is brisk, lean, scary, and fiercely propulsive.

By Matthew Lewis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Monk as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Scarcely had the Abbey Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by those reasons; and in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt. The Audience now assembled in the Capuchin Church was collected by various causes, but all of them were foreign to the ostensible motive. The Women came to show themselves,…


Book cover of The Demon

Jim Alexander Author Of GoodCopBadCop

From my list on unreliable narrators.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a comic book writer, published by Marvel and DC Comics, turned novelist. I enjoy getting inside the heads of my characters until they become entities of their own, with their own voices and actions. At that point I’m merely the facilitator; an interested spectator with a keyboard. Maybe, one whose prose shows a visual flair. Sometimes, I hear competing voices in my head, rather like the warring personas that feature in my debut novel GoodCopBadCop, but I don’t like to play favourites. 

Jim's book list on unreliable narrators

Jim Alexander Why did Jim love this book?

The narration is completely devoted to the worldview of main character Harry White. A man who climbs the ladder of corporate and social America thanks to unnatural drives inside him both dedicated to achieving his success and predicated ultimately to securing his eventual self-destruction. The demon is inside Harry White and it is the American dream. An extraordinary novel from an extraordinary writer who had already written himself into the annals of American literature with such classics as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room. The Demon in my view is Selby Jr.’s most personal and impersonal work.

By Hubert Selby Jr.,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Demon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A womanizer’s struggle for self-control spirals into crime, madness, and murder
Harry White grew up in blue-collar Brooklyn, but the young man’s charm, smarts, and good looks have helped him earn a place as an uptown junior executive. White’s gifts have also made his love life easy, and he takes special pleasure in seducing married women. But when “Harry the Lover” is ready to grow up and leave his womanizing behind, White finds that suppressing his libido has dangerous consequences. His attempts at restraint awaken something sinister, causing White to seek excitement in a new form of violence and depravity.…


Book cover of Eight Key Brain Areas of Mental Health and Illness

Sharon L. Cohen Author Of Disaster Mental Health Community Planning: A Manual for Trauma-Informed Collaboration

From my list on helping individuals respond to traumatic events.

Why am I passionate about this?

Sometimes you need to search for the next roads to take in your life; other times these roads approach you. I was looking for new ways to use my long-term communication and mental health advocacy skills and then, sadly, the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. I immediately wanted to help community members ease their pain and assist cities nationwide to greatly improve their disaster mental health response. I never expected a pandemic would arrive only two months after I published, making my book all the more important. Now climate change is exacerbating our already stressful times, and we must act to stem mental health issues before they become out of hand.  

Sharon's book list on helping individuals respond to traumatic events

Sharon L. Cohen Why did Sharon love this book?

We are continually learning how the brain works through the work of neuroscientists. Dr. Sweeton uses her knowledge in the field to give readers a view into our brain and what we know at the present time about its functioning, how it is affected by mental illness, and what changes can occur through brain-based therapy. We have made great strides in helping individuals with such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar and learning how disorders such as PTSD occur and impact the brain. The book’s information is reader-friendly. The more we know about this fascinating area of the body, the better treatments that can be developed to help those who suffer from trauma-impacting events become more resilient and whole. 

By Jennifer Sweeton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eight Key Brain Areas of Mental Health and Illness as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Recent advances in affective neuroscience reveal long-held secrets of mental health and illness in the brain. However, the gap between brain science and clinical practice is wide, and many clinicians find neuroscience to be tedious, overly technical and laborious to learn. Eight Key Brain Areas of Mental Health and Illness bridges this gap, providing key information about the neuroscience of mental illness so clinicians can apply it in their work.

In this handbook, clinical psychologist and best-selling author Jennifer Sweeton details the eight main areas of the brain affected by mental illness, how brain changes show up in the therapy…


Book cover of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Lisa Marchiano Author Of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents

From my list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners. 

Lisa's book list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health

Lisa Marchiano Why did Lisa love this book?

I loved this book because it addressed what I think is at the heart of much of our mental health crisis – that the stories that we tell ourselves can shape our mental health.

As a therapist, I know intuitively that how we think about our distress can shape the course that our illness takes. Does the story promote resilience and flexibility? Or does it fragilize us and lead to worse mental health?

Aviv tells compelling stories from a number of cultures that helped me explore these important questions further. 

By Rachel Aviv,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Strangers to Ourselves as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mind

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.

Rachel Aviv is…


Book cover of The Queen of the Tambourine

Alison Jean Lester Author Of Lillian on Life

From my list on keeping it real about older women.

Why am I passionate about this?

Literary agents often say they are looking for books about ‘quirky’ female protagonists. I’m more entertained by female characters who feel real to me. When I write, I make myself uncomfortable a lot of the time, trying to express the many ways people both disguise and reveal the truth. I blame my devotion to my parents for this because when I left home in Massachusetts for college in the foreign land of Indiana, studied for a year in China, then studied in Italy, then worked in Taiwan, then moved to Japan, and later to Singapore, I wrote them copious descriptive, emotional letters. My parents are gone now, but in a way, I’m still doing that.

Alison's book list on keeping it real about older women

Alison Jean Lester Why did Alison love this book?

Misguided do-gooder Eliza Peabody lives in wealthy South London. In her middle age, Eliza is not just dedicated to volunteering in charities but also to volunteering her unsolicited advice to her neighbours in notes through their letterboxes. The book is consistently reviewed as both hilarious and poignant, but my memory of it above all includes one scene that was neither of those things. Instead, it seared me. The reveal crept up on cats’ paws, and I wasn’t at all prepared, which made the moment true for me, and unforgettable. If I read it when it came out in 1992, I would have been 26 years old. I must read it again now, at 56. No doubt I’ll remember the funny bits this time.

By Jane Gardam,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Queen of the Tambourine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year: “Gardam’s portrait of an insanely imaginative woman in an elusive midlife crisis is impeccably drawn” (The Seattle Times).

With prose that is vibrant and witty, The Queen of the Tambourine traces the emotional breakdown—and eventual restoration—of Eliza Peabody, a smart and wildly imaginative woman who has become unbearably isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood. The letters Eliza writes to her neighbor, a woman whom she hardly knows, reveal her self-propelled descent into madness. Eliza must reach the depths of her downward spiral before she can once again find health…


Book cover of Ten Days in a Mad-House

Jerry Mitchell Author Of Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era

From my list on learning about investigative reporting.

Why am I passionate about this?

The stories of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. His stories have also helped get two people off Death Row. The author of Race Against Time, Mitchell is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant. After working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell left in 2019 and founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit that exposes corruption and injustices, investigates cold cases, gives voice to the voiceless, and raises up the next generation of investigative reporters.

Jerry's book list on learning about investigative reporting

Jerry Mitchell Why did Jerry love this book?

Nellie Bly was one of the great muckraking reporters in American history. She pretends to be insane and is admitted to the “mad house.” Along the way, she exposes the horrible treatment of those suffering from mental illness, but of her treatment in a boarding home, where spoiled beef was served.

Many at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Roosevelt Island suffered no mental illness; they simply didn’t know how to speak English, she wrote. “I left the insane ward with pleasure and regret—pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me, and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself.”

Her reporting led to a grand jury investigation and reforms inside the asylum.

By Nellie Bly,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ten Days in a Mad-House as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) is a book by American investigative journalist Nellie Bly. For her first assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's famed New York World newspaper, Bly went undercover as a patient at a notorious insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. Spending ten days there, she recorded the abuses and neglect she witnessed, turning her research into a sensational two-part story for the New York World later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House.

Checking into a New York boardinghouse under a false identity, Bly began acting in a disturbed, unsettling manner, prompting the police to be summoned. In a…


Book cover of This Train Is Being Held

Kristin Bartley Lenz Author Of The Art of Holding on and Letting Go

From my list on teen sports (and so much more).

Why am I passionate about this?

I wasn’t a sporty teen, but I discovered rock climbing in my twenties and that later inspired my first novel, The Art of Holding On and Letting Go. I’m also a social worker, and even though my main character Cara is a competitive climber and the book features gripping (ha!) rock climbing scenes, the story is about much more – love and loss, finding home, the transformative power of nature. Sports and athleticism (or lack thereof) are something we can all relate to. What a great starting point for exploring our multi-faceted lives.

Kristin's book list on teen sports (and so much more)

Kristin Bartley Lenz Why did Kristin love this book?

Welcome to the sweet romance of Isa, a dancer, and Alex, a baseball player, teenagers in New York with very different upbringings. Isa is a blonde, half-Cuban/half white, private school girl from a well-off family that’s falling apart behind the scenes. Alex is Dominican, attends public school, and divides his time between his divorced parents. He’s also a secret poet and leaves his poems for Isa to find on the subway train where they first met. Both have professional sports potential, but the reality is more complicated. The couple navigates challenges with their families and neighborhoods, including mental health and gangs, and you’ll be rooting for them the entire time. The author has a beautiful poem in the Rhyme and Rhythm anthology that I mentioned above.

By Ismée Williams,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked This Train Is Being Held as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Family and class differences threaten the love of two teens in this contemporary YA romance

When private school student Isabelle Warren first meets Dominican-American Alex Rosario on the 1 train, she remembers his green eyes and gentlemanly behavior. He remembers her long ballet dancer's legs and untroubled happiness, something he feels belongs to all rich kids. As the two grow closer in and out of the subway, Isabelle learns of Alex's father, who is hell-bent on Alex being a contender for the major leagues despite Alex's desire to go to college and become a poet. Alex learns about Isabelle's Havana-born…


Book cover of Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature

Ben Alderson-Day Author Of Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other

From my list on understanding the uncanny feeling of felt presence.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been either studying, researching, or teaching psychology since I was 16 – but before that, I was a reader. I have always been drawn to books that pose fundamental questions about the mind, and to this day I still go back to fiction and non-fiction that can generate ideas and hypotheses for new experiments. I’ve even used fictional stories in brain-scanning experiments to explore how the mind represents voices and characters: our findings show that we are experts at automatically simulating both the sound and the intention of other people when they talk in a story (even when the stories are very simple ones). 

Ben's book list on understanding the uncanny feeling of felt presence

Ben Alderson-Day Why did Ben love this book?

My book starts with a series of conversations with people who have psychosis and hear voices. Some people described to me a particularly unusual experience: the feeling of a voice being there, even when it wasn’t speaking.

As an undergraduate student one of the books that first got me thinking about these topics was Richard Bentall’s Madness Explained. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the mind and how we can think about experiences like hallucinations without necessarily pathologizing them.

This book was my gateway to then learning about things like the International Hearing Voices moment, which argues against an overly medicalized understanding of unusual experiences like voice-hearing. My book is quite wide-ranging, but I’ve tried to retain some of the ethos of Madness Explained in how I’ve approached the world of uncanny presences. 

By Richard P Bentall,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Madness Explained as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THIS BOOK WILL EXPLAIN WHAT MADNESS IS, TO SHOW THAT IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD IN PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS, AND THAT BY STUDYING IT WE CAN LEARN IMPORTANT INSIGHTS ABOUT THE NORMAL MIND. THE BOOK WILL ARGUE THAT TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO MADNESS MUST BE ABANDONED IN FAVOUR OF A NEW APPROACH WHICH IS MORE CONSISTENT WITH THAT WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE HUMAN MIND. OVER THE LAST CENTURY OR SO IT HAS BECOME SO COMMONPLACE TO REGARD MADNESS SIMPLY AS A MEDICAL CONDITION THAT IT HAS BECOME DIFFICULT TO THINK OF IT IN ANY OTHER WAY. BENTALL ARGUES INSTEAD THAT DELUSIONS, HALLUCINATIONS…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in mental disorders, existentialism, and Switzerland?

Mental Disorders 181 books
Existentialism 67 books
Switzerland 47 books