Here are 100 books that Slug and Other Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am the author of over a dozen LGBT novels. I wrote my college thesis on queer criminal coding in Victorian London novels vs. 20th-century American literature. I was a teenage fan of Leopold and Loeb fiction before I added to the canon myself. I chose these books for a queer murder compendium because each offers something unique to the genre. Challenge yourself by asking: do you have sympathy for these murderers? Is it dangerous when queer characters are criminals? Is it fair representation, since homosexuality is illegal to act on, identify with, or speak of in many places? Read these stories, and let their implications disturb you.
What if queer American cannibal killer Jeffery Dahmer met his British equivalent, Dennis Nilsen?
This novel is a fictionalized answer to that question, pairing serial murderers Jay and Andrew in a psychosexual tear through lush New Orleans.
However, my favorites are the other central characters: Luke and Tran, two ex-lovers who are living with HIV, homelessness, and the emotional scars of their bad romance. There is subtle, skillful storytelling showcased in the relationship you only get in retrospect between these two.
It’s so unique that I once taught it to a Master’s degree writing class as an example of rule-breaking and genre-bending to aspire towards.
There are also alluring literary parallels to explore between venereal disease and violent death stalking the unsuspecting gay men of the bayou. Overall, it’s a delightfully depraved masterpiece.
From the author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes a thrilling and chilling novel that bestselling author Peter Straub says serves as a “guidebook to hell.”
To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his “art” to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his “art” to limits…
Obsession and mania have never been far from my heart, and with that has always come the certainty that everything we build can fall apart. I’ve always been fascinated by our frail bodies; what they can do, what they can’t, and the limits we can all be pushed to. People are forced to their extremes, day after day, and that this can happen to anybody at any time has always attracted my imagination. Something shatters. Bones break. Flesh twists. And, in itself, the incident is never the end. Afterward, what’s left? This question haunts me through every word that I write.
Crawling with cockroaches, mold, and touching moments, this dark love story of a protagonist unable to move on and his neighbor whose boyfriend is so controlling he’s stitched himself to her is a bizarro classic. I’ve lived with both pretty abhorrent apartments and breakups, and the grotesque escalation of the novel as both the protagonist and their dwelling fall apart get under my skin in the best way possible. Full of nightmarish yet recognizable characters (maybe this says a lot about me), the plot propels itself forward through so many twists and turns that the ending is a true surprise. Slater’s ability to fascinate and repulse in equal measure is on full display as he explores the nightmare side of relationships, and I can’t help but sympathize with the protagonist as their heartbreak causes a brutal and irrecoverable decay.
You can’t know where this one is going. Even as the…
WHEN THE WORLD FALLS APART AND YOUR BODY STARTS TO ROT, LET THE ROACHES LEAD.
Meet Ernie. His life is a mess. Gretchen's gone, and the apartment they once shared in this grey, grim city is now overrun with intelligent mold and sinister bugs.
Then his neighbor Dee shows up, so smart and lovely. If he can just get past the fact that her jealous boyfriend could reach out of her blouse and punch him in the face at any moment, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
Unfortunately for all involved, a Great Storm is coming and…
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
Alright, so a theme seems to be developing here, but in this case, ‘Don’t mess with nature’ gets a Canadian island treatment (those poor Boy Scouts). And, of course, a storm is coming. And, of course, the communications go out. I was gripped and frankly grossed out by this Stephen King-esque tale.
There are also shades of Frankenstein and Lord of the Flies, and I love a horror novel that asks the question of which monsters are worse—the ones we create or the ones that lurk inside.
'THE TROOP scared the hell out of me, and I couldn't put it down. Not for the faint-hearted' STEPHEN KING
He felt something touch his hand. Which is when he looked down.
For the scouts of Troop 52, three days of camping, hiking and survival lessons on Falstaff Island is as close as they'll get to a proper holiday.
Which was when he saw it.
But when an emaciated figure stumbles into their camp asking for food, the trip takes a horrifying turn. The man is not just hungry, he's sick. Sick in a way they have never seen before.…
I’ve loved weird horror from a young age, and that passion only grew as the years went on. It all started when I was ten, and I got an anthology of classic horror for my birthday. Inside I read The White People by Machen, Cast the Runes by MR James, and The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, and I was hooked. Ever since then I chased that same thrill of the horror that is so out there and strange it just breaks your brain and changes you inside out. I have a feeling I’ll be chasing that obsession until the end of my days.
A very dark turn in my list, indeed. A hole opens up in their apartment, who knows who or why? It doesn’t matter. They dub it the funhole, and would do what any of us would do, and start sticking things inside of it. Things get dark, fast.
If you want to be up all night, unable to sleep, give this book a whirl.
Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel is finally available as an ebook.
Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as…
I’m a horror writer to the core, always have been, so few things get me as interested as a great collection of short stories. I can remember a few corkers that really put the wind up me as a kid, and it seems I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since! Australia is my home, and it has a broad and diverse genre scene that deserves a lot more attention – I’ve befriended a great many authors of horror, fantasy, SF, and all points in between, and to a person they are lovely, generous, and talented. I’m doing my part to draw attention to the proliferation of vital voices down here.
Claire is an irreverent delight in person, but you won’t see much of that persona in her stories – this book is heavy with gooey and bizarre body horror that always has a deeply personal context for her characters.
She’s admitted that writing is a vehicle for talking about her epilepsy, but you don’t need to share that with her to relate to the strange changes that take place on her pages.
This is just her first collection, an opening salvo across the bow of Australian horror, so it will be interesting indeed to see how her work evolves and metamorphosises over time – to meet the creature that crawls, slime-slicked and hungry, from the casing of her next books.
This short story collection includes 17 tales of terror. Madeline will never become a woman. William will never become a man. Does June deserve to be human? Does Lilith deserve a heart? If imperfection is crucial to a society’s survival, what makes a monster?
I’m a horror writer to the core, always have been, so few things get me as interested as a great collection of short stories. I can remember a few corkers that really put the wind up me as a kid, and it seems I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since! Australia is my home, and it has a broad and diverse genre scene that deserves a lot more attention – I’ve befriended a great many authors of horror, fantasy, SF, and all points in between, and to a person they are lovely, generous, and talented. I’m doing my part to draw attention to the proliferation of vital voices down here.
Kirstyn is another stalwart of the Australian scene whom I have always admired, and this recent collection of her stellar short work is so overdue it’s almost insulting.
Like the best of our number, she delves deep into the heart of her characters to present tales that never feel rote or disengaged, and her tales have teeth in the most unexpected places.
Her weirdness is never dispassionate, her horror never tame, and she returns from the darkness with gifts of many hues.
These are modern fairy tales for the grimy backstreets and dimly lit suburban kitchens down here at the bottom end of our haunted globe.
"Kirstyn McDermott's prose is darkly magical, insidious and insistent. Once her words get under your skin, they are there to stay." -Angela Slatter, author of All the Murmuring Bones and The Path of Thorns
Hard Places collects the very best of Kirstyn McDermott's short fiction written over the past twenty years along with a previously unpublished novella. From unsettling obsessions and brutal body horror to unexpected monsters and ghosts drifting through suburbia, these stories run the gamut of horror and the contemporary gothic. By turns harrowing, provocative and poignant, this collection will haunt you long after the last page is…
I've been a passionate lover of all things horror. I strive to take my readers on an unforgettable journey, one that often places them well out of their comfort zone. I believe that horror should make readers uncomfortable, whether through a mounting sense of unease or full-blown exposure to gore and depravity. I do my best to pull readers into my stories so that they can almost personally experience the horrors. If I don’t make them cringe and wince, then I have failed. As outrageous as my books may be, they're not full of violence and gore for the sake of mere shock value. I do my best to create well-developed characters with thought-provoking and immersive storylines.
Some
might say that this is a really crappy story. I will agree only to the extent
that this book does, in fact, center on feces. Sara Todd is pregnant and she’s
not craving pickles and ice cream!
This
book is brilliantly written. McCluskey presents a most vile and disgusting
story—one that is ripe with imagery and depravity. There’s not much that shocks
and disturbs me, to be honest, but this book had me muttering, “No, oh no, no,
no” in anticipation of the nasty deeds. Each one seemed progressively worse. It
will likely turn your stomach and surely disgust you!
Sarah Todd doesn’t believe in cravings. She’s pregnant and determined to live the next seven months giving the baby all they nutrients it needs to grow into a healthy baby boy, or girl. The baby, however, has other plans. How far is she willing to go to succumb to her… CRAVINGS?From the dark mind of D E McCluskey, author of CRACK and The Twelve, comes this disturbing novelette. The baby must have what the baby needs…
My family was divided by religion, leaving me skeptical about belief systems. After a background in science, I studied philosophy and became intrigued by Heidegger's ‘pitiless atheism.’ The power of his thought but his personal failings have long been an issue for academics. I have since been fascinated partly by powerful personalities but more by the struggle of their followers as they suspend critical thinking and make huge sacrifices to offer their support. This struggle and difficulty of turning back, particularly as the systems begin to collapse, are a feature of many of the works of fiction that intrigue me most, particularly in the books I have chosen.
The novel presents a range of archival material, including graphical elements. The main account has an objective restraint that reads almost like a scientific report, which makes it moving at times. The main character Bella develops rapidly from a child-like state into a mature woman and way her language and insight progresses is skillfully handled.
I found it fascinating how reasonable-sounding scientific ideas can become barbaric actions. The novel is multi-layered, with competing narratives and Bella undermining most of what appears in the Lanthimos film, Poor Things. In the end, I was left in a state of exhilarated confusion and went to read it all again.
What strange secret made rich, beautiful, tempestuous Bella Baxter irresistible to the poor Scottish medical student Archie McCandless? Was it her mysterious origin in the home of his monstrous friend Godwin Baxter, the genius whose voice could perforate eardrums? This story of true love and scientific daring whirls the reader from the private operating-theatres of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church.
My PhD work focused on horror fiction and film, and I spent ten years teaching about horror (I even included two of my recommended books in courses). The academic stuff is more a symptom than a cause of my passion for the scary. I’ve been a horror freak forever, becoming interested in vampires by age four, reading Stephen King and writing stories to frighten classmates by age nine, and putting a poster of Freddy Krueger on my wall at age ten. Extremes of fiction take me away from extremes of real life, which are much harder to handle.
This book originally consisted of six short collections of novellas and stories, but they’ve since been gathered into a two-volume set, so I’m hoping I can count them as one. They go together, and I think they’re nearly all excellent.
When I was a kid, these stories helped build a bridge for me, from the likes of Stephen King (whom I still adore) to new imaginative worlds of horror that include all kinds of transgressive imagery.
I love how Barker combines the fantastic with the visceral, blurs lines between the monstrous and the human, and makes desire dark, dirty, and wonderful. I also love these stories for all they taught me and helping usher in modern extreme/hardcore horror.
Rediscover the true meaning of fear in this collection of horror stories from Clive Barker, New York Times bestselling author and creator of the Hellraiser series.
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
In this tour de force collection of brilliantly disturbing tales, Clive Barker combines the extraordinary with the ordinary, bringing to life our darkest nightmares with stories that both seduce and devour. As beautiful as they are terrible, the pages of this volume are stained with unsettling imagery, macabre humor, and visceral dread. Here then are the…
Horror was never something that appealed to me when I was younger. However, in adulthood, I realised the fascination of the unsettling. As I began writing, I realised that true horror is not all about monsters and gore but about breaking our everyday complacency and realising the possibility that the world is bigger than us and how we are unprepared to deal with it. This is why I write horror. Not to shock you with a jump-scare, but you leave you thinking about my words long after the lights have gone out.
His storytelling and artwork combined create books which even the strongest stomached would find uncomfortable. And yet, we are drawn to them, unable to look away. And he understands that the most terrifying thing is not an invasion by something outside of our world but the realisation that the everyday world around us might turn against us.
Uzumaki is a story about incomprehensible obsession and how it can take over a society to the point of destruction. One by one, the people of a small Japanese town become obsessed with spirals. Not a monster or a ghost, but a shape, until the power behind it destroys everything.
Kurozu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It manifests itself in everything from seashells and whirlpools in water to the spiral marks on people's bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi's father and the voice from the cochlea in our inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurozu-cho are pulled ever deeper into a whirlpool from which there is…
