Fans pick 62 books like The Collector

I read this collection of loosely connected short stories about Tim O’Brien’s service in the Vietnam War when I was in high school, only a little younger than O’Brien was when he was drafted into the Army. The hazy line between memory and fiction in the book leaves you feeling like you’re strolling through someone else’s dream.

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in particular has stuck with me throughout my life, the seemingly impossible yet terrifying realistic narrative of how a young girl who has no business being in a war zone falls in love with combat then with the primordial earth itself and eventually disappears into the heart of darkness. Did it really happen? Was it a tall tale? Memory is such a slippery thing.

I love this book first and foremost because it is essentially the OG of madwomen narratives. Written in 1892, it is a super-creepy, sensory, trippy exploration of one woman’s sanity slowly being shredded by male medical “expertise”—in this case, a doctor’s prescription for postpartum depression: utter isolation in a bedroom with no intellectual stimulation... in order to alleviate postpartum depression (?!). Unsurprisingly, rather than “recovering,” the heroine drags readers down a terrifying rabbit hole of hallucination, self-destruction, and—ultimately—murder.

It’s a masterful, Hitchcockian deep dive into psychosis written over a half-century before Psycho. But it’s also an extremely satisfying example of feminist revenge-writing; Perkins not only drew on her own experience after suffering this “treatment” but sent a copy directly to her practitioner after its publication. Pow!

This is a love-it or hate-it novel. Either you find it tiresome, or you give yourself over whole-heartedly to its unique madness. It has at its heart a film, The Navidson Record, a documentary about a photojournalist who moves his family into a pretty house and discovers that the house is bigger on the inside than the outside, and getting bigger.

As he and his friends try to explore the limits of the house, it rearranges itself around them. The film is described in the text by an old man, complete with a mountain of scholarly footnotes by a tattoo artist. But this book is also powered by a genuinely unsettling, often terrifying descent into hell. It’s a deranged funhouse of a novel that you will probably never forget. 

As an ex-pat Oklahoma who writes crime fiction, I’ve long been enamored of my homeboy, the great noir-ist Jim Thomson, whose best novel this is. Like most of Thompson’s work, this is set in Texas, not Oklahoma, but as in all my choices, the world he evokes is indistinguishable, the one from the other.

Lou Ford, the main character, is the kind of guy who makes you want to sleep with both eyes open. A psychotic, small-town Deputy Sheriff, Ford openly mocks the idea of justice; he is a purely malign force, a glad-handing menace who rules his petty fiefdom with the wisdom of Josef Goebbels and the kind-heartedness of Charles Manson. Ford’s first-person narration reads like it’s been scrawled in Magic Marker on the walls of a men’s room in hell. No one did nihilism better than Jim Thomson.

I had no idea what I was getting into with this book, and the experience was so much richer for that blindfold. That title alone was enough to intrigue me–what on earth could it mean? This is one of the most interesting and shocking coming-of-age stories I have ever read.

The island world the author creates made me think of Lord of the Flies and what can happen when youth is allowed to go unsupervised. This is deliciously dark and twisted stuff. It’s a short book, but you won’t forget it.

Skye Warren is one of my favorite romance authors. Her Endgame Trilogy got me hooked on romance. However, I love Wanderlust even more.

It chronicles the story of a budding photographer who leaves her overbearing mother to work in another city. On her way there, a trucker kidnaps and holds her in the back of his truck as they cross the country. This book has a similar theme as my book and some of the others I've listed and deals with captivity and power.

I've read this book several times, once as a reader and then as a writer, analyzing how to transform a morally gray character or someone despicable into someone readers could care about. Turning hatred for an abductor into pity and wanting him to be with the heroine is no easy feat. I'm still impressed with her skill.

This is one of the most intense and gripping dark romances I've ever read. The story follows Caleb, a damaged man seeking revenge, and Livvie, the innocent girl he kidnaps. From the start, I was pulled into their twisted, complicated dynamic. It’s dark, raw, and pushes boundaries, but I couldn’t stop reading. Caleb is a character you both hate and feel for, while Livvie’s journey from fear to something more complex kept me glued to the pages. 

He’s the morally greyest character, and I hated to love him, but that’s what made him unforgettable. This book will definitely leave a mark. Caleb will always be one of my favorite anti-heroes, making this an unforgettable dark romance that still stands as the best I’ve ever read.

This is what fairy tales would look like if they were gothic, so I love this book.

I read it a few years ago and fell in love with it. I purchased the print copy because I wanted the illustrations in front of me to look at too. Almost any story you read comes from a myth or a fairy tale if you deconstruct it, so reading this book keeps your brain tuned into this idea, but you don't need to be a writer to find delight in this book.

The cover of this book is quite lovely, too!

This book was an incredible ride all the way through. We have two narrators, one who is clearly dubious and the other is a detective telling the story of how his wife died of a serious illness. The same wife mysteriously turns up at his station asking for him several years after her death.

That premise alone pulled me in, but Weaver has a particular writing style that just flows, and it’s beautiful writing, darkly rich, questioning everything, and a creepy serial killer in the mix. Just the sort of book I love to read!

Maxim Jakubowski is a staple in the crime, thriller, and writing world. Also known as an editor. But this book was a wonderful revelation. A female assassin–which I’m very partial to–and a somewhat perverse love story.

What I like about the main protagonist, Cornelia, is how different she is from anyone portrayed as ‘normal’ in the book. It does buy into my view that someone who is a killer can’t be wired the same way as someone who isn’t. There’s a bleak message in this book, which I’m not going to lie about and I love it. Dark, dark, and more dark. Brilliant!