Fans pick 82 books like The Devil Is a Gentleman

While the Ripper was abroad in Yorkshire, New York was stalked by its own phantom killer, Son of Sam, while its rapidly diminishing police force were otherwise engaged giving out leaflets entitled Welcome To Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors.

Abe Beame was Mayor over a burned-out necropolis of demolished buildings, crumbling infrastructure and tripling crime rates, a city President Gerald Ford told to "drop dead". This was the stage on which Lydia Lunch began her assault on the senses and sensibilities of her nation, at the tender age of 16.

Her account of not only surviving but grabbing every last moment of fun to be had in Fear City is rivalled only by mentor Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn as the ultimate in New York stories.

I like books that take me via the scenic route. If I’m reading a history of folk music, I don’t just want dry old discographies and lists of bands and their lineups. I want a living, breathing account of where this all came from and what the modern era has inherited.

I want to know about the collectors and archivists and famous composers like Vaughan Williams and Holst who went from town to town and village to village getting information from people of my Grandad’s age about the songs that were passed down to them through the generations. I want a sense of how this stuff is in the very soil and landscape we inhabit.

This book does all that and more. 

No other book captures the darkness at the dawn of the Thatcher decade with such verisimilitude as David Peace's conjuring of its premier bogeyman, the Yorkshire Ripper, in the third of his Red Riding Quartet.

Perhaps that's because the author used his Goth record collection to transport him back to the places where these crimes were committed, at the time of his West Yorkshire youth. Songs like Siouxsie and the Banshees' 'Night Shift' and The Sisters of Mercy's 'Fix' summon back that fearful terrain, where 'cow' was a term of endearment for a woman and the use of hammers to the head a familiar sign of domestic abuse.

Detectives are revealed to be as deadly as their quarry, priests give benediction with nine-inch-nails and stone angels turn their heads away.

The Manchester evoked by Joy Division and Barry Adamson's first band, Magazine, also entered the Eighties a ravaged post-industrial city, strafed first by the Luftwaffe and then its own planners, who erected Brutalist estates over its Victorian past.

The son of a white Mancunian mother and black Jamaican father, Adamson grew up in some of the worst of the city's social housing in the Hulme of the Sixties. Another Selby aficionado, Barry recounts the story his challenging childhood with a picaresque, magical realist flair.

Music offers both salvation and damnation – as he progresses through Magazine and into Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, so too do all his most self-sabotaging addictions, until death brings a reckoning and a salvation in the first fruit of his solo career, the LP Moss Side Story. 

To say that Kenneth Grant’s (1924-2011) writing style is idiosyncratic would be a huge understatement, for to read him often equals entering into a dream state shot through with sinister overtones and illumined by the morbid light of witch’s Moon. Grant is mostly known for his “Typhonian Trilogies”–nine volumes that explore Crowley’s Thelema in connection with Lovecraftian mythos, Haitian Vodou, Austin Osman Spare’s art and sigil magic, Asian Tantra, and a number of related subjects.

Grant casts a wide conceptual net over the topics he explores by integrating them as aspects of a putative “Typhonian” or “Draconian” tradition, with its roots in pre-dynastic Egypt, that focuses on the mysteries of sexual magic and gives preeminence to the mystical power of female sexual vibrations. His argument is that this tradition often glossed over as the “left-hand path” sans negative moral connotations in its nomenclature, suffered historical repercussions by the representatives of… show more.

Few people can claim the title The Wickedest Man in the World bestowed upon one of the most vilified and revered characters of the nineteenth century, Alistair Crowley.

Writer, mountain climber, occultist, and dare I say visionary, Crowley has rubbed shoulders with both literary giants and personalities of the early nineteen hundreds. A member of several secret societies and founder of his own Temple of Thelema and surrounded by some of the strangest characters one could hope to meet in a single lifetime.

This biography recounts passages from his own diaries and manuscripts bequeathed to the author after his death and anecdotes both funny and disturbing about a man who lived a most extraordinary life. Eventually dying in poverty at a rooming house in Brighton.

From bat-shit to actual shit, Dread in the Beast is one of the darkest dives into the bowels of humanity — literally. A work of horror centered around filth and foulness, Jacob’s brilliant work weaves a violent landscape with odes to Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, and pagan gods and goddesses. This isn’t a conspiracy novel, it's just a full-on dive into dark depths and that is one of the reasons it resonates so deeply: Jacob doesn’t hold back, not a bit. To experience an author so fully engage and let herself go into the darkness is as brilliant to behold as it is uncomfortable.

An atmospheric biography—a book you can curl up with—by British occultist King (not to be confused with the more ‘literary establishment’ Francis King, a respected gay novelist; our man sometimes called himself Francis X King to distinguish between them). King was a quietly eccentric character who had been traumatized by his experiences in the Korean War, and at one stage sold ice cream on Bournemouth beach. Steeped in the Golden Dawn tradition, his other books include works on alchemy, Western esotericism, tantra, and more, and he was a friend of Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke, who also wrote on those subjects. I’ve always had a soft spot for their charmingly old-school, gentlemanly style of bygone British occult scholarship.

I love compilation books, as this style of book works fantastically well for horror. In a short period of time, you can be transported from London to the Black Forest, from deepest Africa to the frozen climes of the Arctic. This book does not disappoint in this respect, taking the reader on a discovery of differing locations and also styles of horror writing. As you read this book of David’s, he takes you through a deeply reflective journey of horror writing genres, from Lovecraft to Poe and beyond. With great artwork to boot. Utterly fantastic!

Some guy in Egypt realized long ago that you can create illusions, fly through the air, change your body into whatever you want, or “demolish buildings and castles,” all by writing out little crossword puzzles.

Like a fool, he recorded his method and handed it to some German dude, who passed the information along, and now it’s just in a book anyone can buy? All those secret crossword puzzles of power? Oh, man, if they catch you with this one, watch out, because people are really fond of their buildings and castles, and they do not have a sense of humor about their unscheduled demolition.