87 books like The Restraint of Beasts

This was one of the hardest books to "get into," but a friend of mine told me to stick with it because the rewards of getting through the first quarter would be so great. I'm glad I did. It is an astounding piece of work, quite different from anything I've ever read before or since, and remains one of my top five books.

The tangents the book takes, and the blasé attributes of the leading character are superbly crafted. It was suggested it was "unfilmable," and there's one scene in particular I thought they'd never get away with, but if you look at the movie version carefully, it's in there. 

High Life is pitch black Hollywood noir. It’s one of those rare books that starts out dark and just keeps getting darker and more disturbing. Stokoe outdoes himself on nearly every page. This book was shocking and eye-opening, even for me. I’ve read a lot of extreme horror and I think this might outdo nearly all of them. Stokoe manages to fully flesh out the characters, rendering them terrifying, absurd, and profoundly sad, and does so with a style that is compulsively readable.

Statutory rape between teachers and students is a very uncomfortable subject that Alissa Nutting tackles head-on in her 2013 breakthrough novel.

I was impressed with how Nutting avoided sympathy for the devil. Her hebephilic protagonist, Celeste, is a terrible person who, like Richard III, conspiratorially lets the reader in on her plans to manipulate and seduce 12-year-old boys. The longer the book goes on, the clearer it becomes that Celeste isn’t some evil mastermind, just a dunderheaded rapist who gets out of trouble by virtue of being an attractive white woman.

I respect Nutting for writing this book. By staring at the monster in all her ugliness, she creates sympathy for the people whose lives are destroyed by Celeste and by people like her in the real world.

Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout

As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.

I’ll caveat that The Third Policeman isn’t going to delight everyone—it’s a wacky, somewhat bewildering book to wander through.

But it’s also masterfully written, and one of the most creative and exalted ways I know of bicycles appearing in literature.

Probably better known for his novel At Swim-Two-Birds, O’Brien brings the bicycle to life in this murky murder mystery that doubles as a philosophical exploration on humanness and reality.

It’s as if Samuel Beckett wrote a play that prominently features bicycles, directed by the Coen Brothers.

This is my only non-fiction pick, but it reads a little like a gripping work of fiction except that I had to keep pinching myself to remember it really happened. The author is writing about her experience as a professional violinist in a "fake" orchestra. It is a wonderfully nuanced look at the gray area between "fake" and "real", which is devastatingly pertinent to our times. It challenges us to consider if we can actually always tell the difference and if the difference is really clear-cut at all. The reason I'm including it in the list is that the main protagonist, the author, is a strong woman who is determined to make her own way. And there is one section I found particularly satisfying, in which (and I don't think this will give too much away) she refuses to include any romance in the book. She declines to write of… show more.

Detective CW Sughrue was working the topless bar scene well before Jack Reacher wandered across the literary landscape. But unlike Reacher, Sughrue carries the sins of mankind on his own shoulders, just as likely to solve a crime as to curl up in a cheap motel with a bottle of whisky. 

He begins the book looking for a trouble author (is there any other kind?), but once he finds him, things get really messy…

The first time I saw a Coen Brothers’ movie I felt like I was already familiar with their style. It’s probably because I had already read Crumley’s novels with their existential sadness and brutal violence just-barely-buoyed by clever plotting and pitch-black humor.

We had to go back to the 1952 book that essentially invented this format. Lillian Ross was a writer on staff at The New Yorker when she received the opportunity to be a fly on the wall during the production of The Red Badge of Courage (1951), writer/director John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel of the American Civil War.

She tracked the film from start to finish, explaining how the two-hour version that Huston regarded as his best work became a sixty-nine-minute afterthought. Ross’s depiction of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer clearly influenced the studio kingpin in one of our favorite movies about movies, the Coen Brothers’ brilliant Barton Fink (1991).

As one of Norway’s top recruitment specialists, Roger Brown views himself as a ‘headhunter’ extraordinaire. The fact that he moonlights as an art thief, is simply a way of dealing with his own inadequacies and his reckless spending habits. Unfortunately, his next heist goes horribly wrong. The story unfolds evenly and cleverly, with blunt bursts of murder and mayhem around every corner.

What makes this such a fun read, is the duplicitous nature of the protagonist. The absurdity of his circumstances is directly caused by his inability to refrain from committing other criminal acts. This internal struggle is brilliantly depicted throughout and creates a palpable tension for readers.

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.