10 books like Sing, Unburied, Sing

If you’ve ever looked at a picture of Abraham Lincoln and wondered why he looked so sad, you may find your answer here. He faced an almost insurmountable challenge and mourned the potentially fatal division of his country, it is true. But the death of his young son compounded that grief. Before reading this book, I had never heard of a ‘Bardo,’ and I’m still not convinced of its existence, except as a psychological state. But as a bereaved parent myself, I could understand Lincoln’s need to hold onto the memory of his dead son a little while longer. If you want to know what makes a man strong, you must first learn what can break his heart.

Toni Morrison’s magnificent Beloved is another novel that is deeper and more interesting each time I read it. It is, I think, a perfect novel, filled with heart and character and emotional truth. No American, certainly, can truly understand our history without reading this story of an escaped slave who murders her own child rather than allow her to be brought back to slavery, and then is haunted by the daughter’s ghost. What a beautiful and redemptive book, perhaps the most important novel written in my lifetime.

I always try to find reasons to read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the painfully sad story of a family hauling their mother’s body to her hometown in order to bury her. Addie Bundren’s life has been sad and dreary, but the path to her resting place is even more so, replete with flood and fire, as well as a post-death monologue that contains one of the most psychologically complete rationalizations in literary history. Every time I read this book, I understand each of the Bundren family members more deeply, and have greater sympathy for the yoke their circumstance has harnessed them to.

Contemporary suspense, psychological fiction, the afterlife, family dynamics, and heaps of disturbing are the ingredients mixed together in The Lovely Bones. Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was raped and murdered. Only none of the living know who did it. But Susie knows. Her soul is stuck in the “Inbetween,” where she can watch the Earth below. She sees her family grieve. Sees her murderer, Mr. Harvey, who lives in her neighborhood near her school. Will he get caught? Or will Susie’s sister or another young girl be his next victim? As a ghostly “watcher” from the Inbetween, Susie narrates this compelling story and elevates it with her amazing voice. The message and emotional weight of The Lovely Bones will keep readers fully invested.

Part one of the Southern Reach Trilogy, this hypnotic book explores a mysterious island with nightmarish qualities. Area X is cut off from everywhere, and nature (or a renewed but ultimately unknowable notion of what nature can be) has supplanted humans there. An expedition exposes a new kind of extra-terrestrial Eden, but mass suicides occur. Later, explorers turn on each other in violence and gunfire; others return not as their former selves and die of cancer. The mystery of the place becomes more powerful and metaphorical for remaining a mystery.

The narrative goes beyond mere storytelling to leave profound imprints on the hippocampus as regards the alien forces that may or may not already be here and inseparable from our ordinary reality.

Jack Torrance is struggling with his creativity and his alcohol consumption and when he takes his family to the Overland Hotel he becomes possessed by the hotel! Spending a winter in isolation, his imagination runs rampant. I recommend the novel because it shows a writer who is deep in agony, stressed about being dried up, and then finds himself in such isolation his mind hooks into the dark, disturbing nightmare of murder and mayhem. Though Stephen King at first disliked the Stanley Kubrick film, he is slowly changing his mind. For me, the novel shows what could happen to a writer when they are utterly secluded. I have never been one of those writers who wants to rent a cottage in the woods and write.  I like writing in big cities never too far from a restaurant, a party, a human face.    

William Faulkner might have been the father of Southern Gothic, but Flannery O’Connor was the master. This is one of those books that makes you thankful for genius. Because everything about this book is genius. The story is about a young man named Hazel Motes who struggles to avoid his relentless fate. O’Connor’s writing is filled with religious extremism, grotesqueness, and mental illness—all the things that make America great. If I could have written a single book—this would be it.  

Heart Shaped Box is a fantastic horror novel. I thought I knew where the story was going, but I was totally wrong. The main characters are heavily flawed, but you cheer them on anyhow, hoping they can escape. This story kept my heart pumping til the last page. I loved that I didn’t guess what the ending would be.

When I was thirty-one, on a Marine base in Virginia, I had a spiritual awakening. I stepped out of my ego and saw it from the outside—this thing I’d thought was myself but was actually a persona I’d fabricated to protect myself. The experience left me no longer wanting to solve the mystery of life, but wanting to live in the mystery. Peace Like a River is the embodiment of this longing to live in the mystery of existence. Narrated by a young boy whose father’s mysterious, other-worldly powers are revealed again and again as his older brother faces and flees from murder charges, this book leaves you with the hope that the things we can’t see are even more graceful than we can imagine.

In this exceptional story that I’ve read twice, Elizabeth Strout places a seemingly ordinary, though distant, mother and her shy teenage daughter in the provincial town of Shirley Falls, Maine, to create a stunning awakening in the daughter Amy and foster the admission of a long-hidden secret by Amy’s mother Isabelle. As much as Amy thinks her development is about her sexuality, it is more about forming a relationship with her lonely mother. After Amy learns her mother’s story, she learns her most important moment of identity has not been sexual initiation, but her self-acceptance. The relationship between mother and daughter fosters Amy’s coming of age.