10 books like Lord of the Flies

Beyond the usual five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—a sixth stage of heavy responsibility may develop when someone dies in the service of a great cause. As the Battle of Franklin played out in the yard of her Carnton Plantation, Carrie MccGavock felt that sense of obligation to the 9000 soldiers who died in that battle. It is in that sense that Carrie called herself the “Widow of the South.” She disinterred over 1000 anonymous bodies, identified them, reburied them in her own cemetery, and sought to give their families a sense of closure. This moving novel, based on a true story, reminds us that the Civil War was more than maps and casualty statistics. It is a story of heartbreak and devotion.

I read The Road when I was working three jobs, enrolled in university full-time, and trying to figure out what it meant to be an adult. I felt the gut-punch bleakness of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic future, and yet despite all the gray, grim privation, I found hope in the Man and the Boy’s march toward…something. While it’s not quite a fantasy, the ashen world rendered in McCarthy’s beautifully austere language changed the way I write, and changed the way I read. There is a sobering warning that I hear echoed in The Odyssey and Gilgamesh; something like an Ozymandian warning: look upon the works of man, ye mortal: all this shall fade. The Road stays with you like a scar, but one you earned, that taught you something.

A globe-spanning story of a zombie apocalypse.

One journalist travels the world in the aftermath and interviews the heroes, villains, and ordinary people who survived. It was made into a film with Brad Pitt, which is quite different, but I love anything with a fast zombie. The whole book makes you glad to live in a non-apocalypse.

(If the apocalypse has broken out between me writing this and you reading it, I’m not surprised, but I am sorry. Seriously, find a copy of WWZ as it’s full of good tips for your current predicament.) 

Firemen… who burn books? The premise of a censorship society grabbed me right away. Ray Bradbury’s wonderfully imaginative writing has stuck with me since I first read this novel in high school. While the book was written in the 1950s, these are issues that we continue to grapple with to this day. What makes this imagined future so frightening is how possible it seems.

I read this book out of curiosity after deep disappointment with Bladerunner, the film it inspired, and was delighted to discover it is so much better! Dick paints a convincing picture of machines that are superficially human but completely lacking empathy and any sense of responsibility for their actions. And of a hero just too human to get the better of them. Dick avoids drawing the parallels between robot use and slavery which I always find unhelpful to debate on the ethics of AI; instead, he gives us a glimpse into the minds of manufacturers of ethically questionable products, which, for me, resonates with the situation regarding human milk substitutes.

This is the book that got me into Science Fiction in the first place and it remains, perhaps, my favorite novel. The setting is a near-future dystopian society where a subculture of young, roving gangs control the streets through extraordinarily violent antics (ultra-violence). This violent behavior is enhanced by “milk plus,” a drink laced with synthetic drugs available at the Korova Milk Bar, which is where we first encounter our main character, Alex, a 15-year-old gang leader.

When Alex is arrested for murder, he is selected to undergo an experimental therapy (The Ludovico Technique) designed to wean him off violent behavior forever, after which his sentence will be commuted. During these treatments, he is injected with (yet another) drug called Serum 114. This drug induces extreme nausea while he is made to watch horribly violent films. Utterly changed, Alex is released back onto the streets to a world in which… show more.

Let me be clear: I’m talking about the book—not the TV series!

This is a dystopian classic that everyone should read. In fact, all of Atwood’s books should be read. As for The Handmaid’s Tale, I read it in a literature class in university, and it has stuck with me ever since (much like other classics—hello The Great Gatsby).

The Republic of Giliead, where the story takes place, was created when the US government was overthrown, and strips women of their rights. It’s a premise that has roots in real events—the 1979 Iranian Revolution, most notably, and so the rich worldbuilding (and powerful imagery) doesn’t feel contrived—or all that dystopian.

And while it will definitely transport you away from your day-to-day life while you read it, it’s the way the haunting Republic will stay with you afterwards that makes this book a gem. 

This is a highly relevant book for our time.

Conceived in 1948, Orwell reversed numbers to envision a dystopic world in 1984. I remember how it was in 1984, when I felt some sense of relief that the world “wasn’t as bad” as Orwell had predicted. But, in today’s politics? This novel told of a political party with the slogan “Ignorance is strength”. How far is that from silencing the history of racism in this country and trying to keep people from waking up (“woke”) to the injustices of the world?

The “Big Lie,” first practiced by Adolph Hitler, was standard fare in 1984, and has deeply infected our politics today. I take the warnings of this book seriously. 

Brave New World is both frightening and enticing at the same time. It confronts the reader with a perfectly managed society that is orderly and fine-tuned in so many ways so as to give a perfect superficial paradise-like veneer. The only problem is that when you look more closely at it as the “savage” did with the woman who is so willing to give up her body so freely to him, it’s cheap, inhuman, and hollow to the core. The society has no human value or substance.

Written for young adults, this is a modern classic.

In the book, what used to be North America has become “Panem”, a country where an authoritarian government keeps itself in power by turning regions of the country against each other through “hunger games”, where young people must hunt and kill each other to survive.

I believe the future hope for our country is for people getting back together and learning to care for each other again. Rather than “us against them,” a healthy democracy should be “all of us against oppression.”