100 books like The Big Book of Hell

When I say Slaughterhouse-Five is funny, people eye me like I’m a monster. But it is. The New York Times even has my back on this.

Is the novel also gut-wrenchingly tragic and horrifying? Of course. It’s one of the most potent stories ever written, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered anything whose biting satire eviscerates the absurdity of war (and of existence) so well.

Vonnegut balances humor and grief on the head of a pin: “Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.” 

With its repetition and echoing of phrases, Kafkaesque chronology, and circular logic, Catch-22 illustrates the absurdity of war more than any other novel I have read.

Every time pilot Yossarian, the book’s anti-hero, gets close to flying the number of bombing missions required to go home, the requirement is raised. A paradoxical catch keeps them flying. If you ask to be grounded because you understand the dangers, you aren’t insane. Insane soldiers just need to ask to be grounded. But asking proves you aren’t crazy.

Beneath the absurdist comedy, there is an existential dread at the heart of the book. The death of Yossarian’s friend Snowden leads him to see that ‘Man was matter.’ For me, this is the dreadful secret that war exposes - the precarious preciousness of life - as our fragile bodies are turned to quiet, still matter.

This Pulitzer Prize winner remains a time-tested testament to the absurdity that is New Orleans.

I felt like I’d met every one of the characters at least twice in my own walks on the streets of this storied city. I could even taste the Lucky Dogs. This is one of the few books to have me consistently laugh out loud. You can even take a picture with the statue of Ignatius J Reilly (the main character) on Canal Street.

While I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, there was something in The Mouse that Roared that really spoke to me. The way that it takes an already absurd reality to an extreme really spoke to my own sensibilities and humor. History books tell the facts, but stories like this reflect how absurd the geopolitical culture must have felt to most people. It’s akin to Dr. Strangelove, not only in being a Cold War satire, but in the absurd and extreme nature of the farce. It influenced my own political satire heavily.

Keller is a nice guy; everyone likes him. His only fault is he kills people for money. He is, by definition, a serial killer, but for him, it’s all business. Yes, he kills people, but for him, no big deal, just making a living.

Most of the book is about everything else in his life, his apartment, his girlfriend, and going to an art show. His stamp collection, etc. It’s like a look behind the curtain. Fascinating! 

I liked his cute conversations with his boss lady too. Funny.

Derek Raymond’s 4th book in his Factory Series is sublimely dark and poetic. It’s brit-grit with an industrial, dirty backdrop and hard feel. Some lines are funny in their harshness with a cliched bad PI turned up to max.

This is a British hard-boiled, hard-drinking, and damaged detective with all the atmosphere of a French noir clashing with Ted Lewis’ Get Carter.

I Was Dora Suarez is a prime example of brit-noir with a flawed protagonist chasing clues and signs in an equally damaged world. Despite the bleakness of the characters and situations it’s impossible not to be gripped and have your face thrust against the glass to see.

This is the dirty realist poet, Charles Bukowski's, last novel and is filled with intriguing code and name-dropping of people he knew and was influenced by. As well as being as poetic as hell. Pulp also gives a glimpse of what it might have been like if Bukowski had lived on and ventured fully into crime fiction or pulp noir.

I love the book’s surface-level simplicity to draw you into its world. However, it then subversively lets bigger themes creep in: including surrealism and spiritualism, as the author faces his own death. All this with Bukowski’s deftly poetic touches.

This showed me how semi-autobiographical elements can fuse and influence fiction and vice versa. And, that it doesn't have to be hard to absorb or distract from the story. By acknowledging layers in writing which are there for those who want to peel back and discover them. And when they don’t,… show more.

Stephen J. Golds is a prolific powerhouse of dirty realist poetry and gritty modern crime fiction. I’ve been lucky enough to work with him on a number of projects now and admire his mind and words greatly. 

Say Goodbye When I’m Gone is a breakthrough work of art for someone well-studied in his craft. It’s punchy, atmospheric, and brutal…but also, so sensitively poetic and soulful.

Say Goodbye When I’m Gone, and his other books generally, are prime examples of how a masterwork doesn’t have to be a doorstop in page length. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, these gems of noir fiction are often in novella format. Soulful, concise, sharp, and lean. Like the best poetry, which Golds happens to be unsurprisingly masterful with too.

Imagine coming back from the dead only to realize the world doesn't want you: You move in with parents who are disgusted by you, random strangers on the street throw food or pull mean jokes on you and your friends, and being caught out past your curfew sends you to the dog pound. That's the life that Andy Warner reanimates into after a fatal accident. It's not all bad, though. At least he's got some friends at the Undead Anonymous support group, including the dead-sexy Rita, and Ray, a guy whose “venison” seems to come with some miraculous healing abilities. This is a darkly comedic book filled with a colorful cast, and you can't help but delight in the tragic spiral of the characters as they become increasingly inhuman. After all, can you blame them? 

The Wild Boys is at once dystopian and utopian, featuring a band of boys who’ve gone rogue and have perfected strange and poetically beautiful sex rites which allow them to ritually and meditatively conjure or reproduce more wild boy offspring. At once science fiction and fantastical in its imaginative scope, it is also, like all Burroughs’s work, a profound exploration of social control, the excesses and assumptions inherent in state and religious terror, and the sexual and erotic oppression and misunderstanding that is the real enemy of freedom. Fearless and experimental, Burroughs inspires me to be bold, blunt, and not afraid to disturb or offend in exploring the poetic and erotic relationships between all manner of ideas.