100 books like Slug and Other Stories

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.

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… show more.

I love horror novels that center on a group of characters, in this case, a scout troop in the wilds of an island off Canada. I enjoy the dynamics that can be explored when an ensemble cast like this is set against a terrible threat.

Despite my usual preference for supernatural horror, I also enjoyed this one for its scientific explanations of what the troop faces. It was a clever and disturbing exploration of where science can sometimes lead to awful outcomes.

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.

Recently adapted as a film by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, Alasdair Gray’s novel of birth and creation is another example of the complicated and horrific birth stories that I find so fascinating.

When the dead body of a young, pregnant woman is pulled from the River Clyde in Glasgow, a local scientist, Godwin Baxter, takes it upon himself to create a new life, by installing the unborn baby’s brain in its mother’s head and bringing the new creation to life.

Gray’s grisly premise leads to a satire on education and complacency in light of social injustice. It's funny, and there are plenty of sly postmodern comments on reality and how we understand the past. Gray illustrated his own books, and his image of Bella as ‘Bella Caledonia’ is, I think, a brilliant image of a strong woman that has become iconic in Scotland and beyond.

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.

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.

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!

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.

In this book, Doris Lessing tells the story of the Lovatts, a perfectly normal middle-class English family with four children and a seemingly idyllic life. The idyll is spoiled when the wife, Harriet, becomes pregnant with her fifth child.

The novel tells the story of the child's (Ben’s) life until he is in his teenage years, but the early scenes that describe Harriet’s difficult pregnancy and her foreboding that something is deeply wrong with her unborn child are the ones that I find particularly sinister.

Here, Lessing shows how pregnancy can be an experience that wreaks unpredictable consequences on the smooth functioning of life.