100 books like Because They Wanted to

Like other books in this list, I first read this book in college, and I was enthralled by the famous Battle Royal scene. Here’s the thing: even as the black boys are physically and sexually tortured for the amusement of the white Southern gentry, the scene never felt sensationalist to me. It felt exactly like something that would happen during Jim Crow. This was the black experience as horror, and in seeing such a story on the page, I was spurred toward writing black horror.

I felt sick watching the unnamed protagonist go from upwardly mobile student to laborer to activist to squatter while constantly under attack from grotesques representing the worst of America. Even black people don’t get let off the hook: There’s the Cosby-esque college administrator who sabotages other black people in order to keep his spot, but then there’s also the working-class laborer at the paint factory… show more.

I’m reluctant to recommend it because these guys don’t need the money. Four raging narcissists/rapists/drug addicts create a band and proceed to destroy themselves and everything around them. I remember reading it and thinking, “This is the stuff they admit to.”

This book is the very definition of “If they were black, they’d be locked up.” By the point I was reading Vince Neil whine about not being able to tour Japan because he was on probation for drunkenly killing his friend, I realized I was witnessing pure evil. However, evil can be fascinating.

This book is so singularly revolting that it completely spoiled my already low interest in stories about entitled people growing more entitled. It was adapted into a very whitewashed Netflix movie.

Statutory rape between teachers and students is a very uncomfortable subject that Alissa Nutting tackles head-on in her 2013 breakthrough novel.

I was impressed with how Nutting avoided sympathy for the devil. Her hebephilic protagonist, Celeste, is a terrible person who, like Richard III, conspiratorially lets the reader in on her plans to manipulate and seduce 12-year-old boys. The longer the book goes on, the clearer it becomes that Celeste isn’t some evil mastermind, just a dunderheaded rapist who gets out of trouble by virtue of being an attractive white woman.

I respect Nutting for writing this book. By staring at the monster in all her ugliness, she creates sympathy for the people whose lives are destroyed by Celeste and by people like her in the real world.

From Mary Gaitskill to a book that skips empathy and goes straight for evil.

This book about horrible middle school students systematically tearing down the fat girl in their class through bullying that borders on sexual assault is, to this day, the most nihilistic book I’ve ever read about human nature. The choice Blume makes that gives this book its extra edge is she writes from the viewpoint of Jill, a gutless follower. Jill tortures Linda because the popular kids sanction it; her evil is only matched by her mediocrity. Thus, Blume doesn’t even give her readers a “cool” bully to anchor the story.

Evil children, lazy teachers, no kernel of hope, just good old American cruelty where even the perpetual victim, Linda, turns out to suck in the end. I doubt I’ll ever write a book this dark, but damn, do I admire Blume for writing it.

Jonathan Raban’s nonfiction books take travel writing to another level. He has a special mastery of the intersection of self, journey, place, and narrative. This collection – of essays, short memoirs, travel pieces, and more – isn’t necessarily his best book (that would probably be Passage to Juneau); but it’s full of brilliant reflections on the writing life, and on the challenges facing the writer as a craftsperson. There’s a particularly memorable section on the difficulties of transferring real-world dialogue onto the page. “You isolate the speaker’s tics and tricks of speech, his keywords,” Raban says, “and make him say them slightly more often than he did in fact; you give him small bits of stage business to mark his silences; you invent lines of dialogue for yourself to break up a paragraph of solid talk that looks too long to be believable. You are trespassing, perhaps, into writing… show more.

Set in the 19th century New England social landscape of transcendentalist educational trends, this is an important book about women, misogyny, education, and ‘western’ medicine. The landscape here is a farmhouse outside a New England village where the patriarch social philosopher and teacher has started a school for girls following the death of his wife. His grown daughter is his helper, and you see where I’m going with this…also his prisoner. She is vulnerable by her sensitive nature and by her lack of worldly education. When other girls come to board at the new school and other teachers, men, arrive to practice the educational theories they have developed in a fervor of advancing just how women’s education should evolve, the young women respond variously to these new influences. The remote landscape, again, keeps them from freedoms that might improve their awareness. There are also magical trees, birds, and a… show more.

Elliott came out to his fans with this beautiful novel charting the life and times of Seaton Ross, a protagonist in the author’s image. Despite the terrible series of obstacles placed in Seaton’s way, from overbearing or absent family, deeply closeted and self-centred lovers to furious fag hags, he manages to escape Australia—just as Elliott did—without developing a lasting hatred in his exile. Rendered with the author’s signature wit (he took a leaf from E. M. Forster), the homophobia of Australia’s working classes becomes a source of this novel’s pathos, so that when Seaton encounters the most shocking consequences a gay man can face, we are ill-prepared. A wry, sexy, heartfelt swan song from the Australian who made it big in the American broadcasting industry.

A page-turning journey through the motivations, passions, and secrets that led to a shocking crime; but also a long-overdue look at the elements of Brokeback Mountain that have always existed in Australia's rural heartlands. Assisted by a key survivor of the Wettenhall family drama—Bob Perry—Drinnan takes a very personalised look back at a rural dynasty’s fortunes, but also the social, legal, and cultural restrictions for same-sex-attracted men in Australia from the 1970s to the present day. Australia is a nation said to have been built on the sheep's back, yet the truth about gays in this nation's bush culture is only just emerging. Drinnan's book sharply spearheaded the discussion into the mainstream while documenting Perry’s journey from the closet to liberation.  

This is a searing memoir about siblings—Annabet and Anders—who grew up in an abusive household in a privileged Sydney suburb; but it is also the author’s search for the reasons behind her gay brother’s suicide. Anders Ousback became an accomplished restaurateur and potter, yet Annabet explores how despite this success, he never really outran his demons. She courageously searches for their source, using his surviving journal as clues, and what she finds throws up an incomplete and terrifying picture of a young gay Australian boy faced with the ‘rules’ of gender and sexual politics in postwar Sydney, where gay men were expected to pretend to survive. The real red herring in this story is unforgettable.

Homophobia appears to have been the least of Jack Charles’ worries. If it ever bothered him, he barely lets it register in this memoir of a creative life lived both on the fringes and in the spotlight. Perhaps that’s the point, that his eloquent, good-humoured approach always seemed to scotch the haters right from the get-go. In an unbendingly honest self-reflection, Charles also pulls off describing himself as a “poof”, a very Australian term of derision that has been reclaimed by many. His ‘born again’ tale similarly relates how he survived in the face of terrible prejudices endured by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders—the First Nations people of Australia—and their vibrant, resilient spirit. An uplifting gem.