82 books like My Friend Dahmer

An incredibly haunting book. At first glance it looks like a fairy tale for children but after only a few pages in you realise it is quite a sinister tale and something much darker altogether. It is a very brave book I think and I’m not really sure how to categorize it other than it being very, very dark indeed.

Bone was the first book I ever read on my own as a 5th grader. For the first time, I didn’t use an audiobook or need a parent/teacher to read it to me. For that alone, I’ve put it at the top of the list. Bone follows the story of three wayward brothers as they each find their way to a fantastical valley filled with mythical dragons, bizarre creatures, and a lost princess. What starts off as this fun and goofy comic, spirals into this adventure of epic proportions as the author-illustrator takes young readers into a world they never imagined before. 

This fast-paced saga helped captivate me from the first page to the last and I personally owe a lot to this book for helping me overcome my dislike for reading as a young person. This book helped me on my journey to becoming a reader and it… show more.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is described as a graphic novel, but it takes the form of the notebook of a 10-year-old girl who is obsessed with monsters. The art is terrific and the story is haunting and mysterious. I’ve always been a notebook person myself, filling up stacks of sketchbooks through my childhood and teens, so the way the main character processed her life by scribbling on a page really resonated with me. This book is super unique, from the way the character always draws herself as a werewolf, to the mysterious death of her upstairs neighbor, and the way she remembers conversations by drawing them as comics.

I personally read everything Burns makes. He is one of my all-time favourite graphic novelists and I’m heavily inspired by his work. This penultimate work of his has again that sense of otherwordly weirdness to it that he does so well. I just adore the tight line work and moody nightmarish sequences he does. Painting a tale here that raises questions that only get answered when the entire trilogy is completed. Mind-bogglingly well-constructed and strange but very good.

So few books give me chills, but I could feel my temperature downright drop the deeper into this graphic novel I went. Certainly not for the weak-hearted, or stomached for that matter, Powell and Schechter plunge into one of the most depraved characters of the Midwest… none other than Ed Gein himself. There is an odd beauty to the madness at display here. It just goes to show you never know what’s going on behind the closed doors of your next-door neighbors.

I’ve read all of this author’s work and the Rushed series is my favourite because although it’s a sinister paranormal fantasy, it is filled with humour. The world-building for each book is amazing – certainly daunting and nasty in parts, yet believable.

There are remarks in reviews that it’s confusing and weird, so maybe you have to be odd to understand and appreciate it. I did, so I must be.

Because…I love language, and Timberlake spins out one gorgeous sentence after another.

Set in 1871, the story follows Georgie Burkhardt as she tracks her big sister, who’s run away with “pigeoners”, a seedy bunch who follow the migration of passenger pigeons (which once existed in the millions but were hunted to extinction). Georgie’s voice is tough, funny, and wildly original, just like the West itself.

There’s plenty of mystery and suspense, but for me, it’s about the language! Here’s the glorious ending: “I say let all the world be alive and overwhelmingly so. Let the sky be pressed to bursting with wings, beaks, pumping hearts and driving muscles. Let it be noisy. Let it be a mess. Then let me find my allotted space. Let me feel how I bump up against every other living thing on this earth.”

Before Trump, there was Scott Walker. The controversial former governor of Wisconsin, Walker waged war against the state’s unionized public employees and universities.

I tell everyone I know to read this book, because it is an honest and incisive portrayal of why rural people vote for politicians like Walker and Trump. Too often leftists seem to want to unfairly dismiss all rural conservatives as hopelessly ignorant, racist, or even worse. The Politics of Rural Resentment’s humanizing portrayal helped me to better understand the motivations of people who don’t live in urban centers.

If we are to bridge the divides in this country, it will be only by following Cramer’s lead.

A stunning assembly of archival photographs and newspaper clippings from Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the last decade and a half of the 19th century, and the definitive explanation of why nobody in old-time photographs is ever smiling—and, I choose to believe, the real reason the parts of The Wizard of Oz set in Kansas were filmed in black and white. Economic privation, unceasing bereavement, disease both physical and mental—in other words, Tuesday. Was there any joy in Jackson County? Somewhere, I’m sure. What’s documented here is a stark, powerful beauty. The most real book I’ve ever encountered, and one of two on face-out display on my bookshelves.

When this astonishing debut novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship came out, I wondered if the author had met my mother. Because Adele August believes there’s nothing for her in her small Wisconsin town, she sets off for Los Angeles with her twelve-year-old daughter and a dream—Ann will be a child star; Adele will make a wealthy marriage; they’ll live the lives they were meant to. Simpson’s writing is gorgeous: “My mother and I should have both been girls who stayed out on the porch a little longer than the rest… who strained to hear the long-distance trucks on the highway... girls who looked at the sky and wanted to go away… but who finally sighed, and calling the dog with a mixture of reluctance and relief, shut the door and went home.” Reality can’t live up to Adele’s delusions; mother-child roles are often reversed; but love underlies this tangled… show more.