87 books like The Suicide Shop

This contemporary, quirky tale centers around the life of Keiko, a young woman who has never done anything in a conventional way and has her mother very worried that her daughter will never find a man and settle down into a conventional life. No, Keiko’s ways of thinking are startling and odd in ways that are both amusing and somewhat horrifying, as she really does fall outside the realm of conventional thinking and socially rewarded behavior. The reader comes to love her as she grows into womanhood (and personhood) as a worker in a fast-paced convenience store, where she memorizes hundreds of products and practices behaving more “normally” by mimicking the actions and words of her co-workers. Then a man named Shiraha enters the picture, for a new twist.

Every book on my list has changed my life in some way, but this novel probably had the biggest impact. When I first read it, my life had followed a similar trajectory to the protagonist. I had become disillusioned with the meaning of life, quit my job, and left home to travel the world for a year or so. This book explores a lot of big themes in deceptively simple language. I re-read it any time I feel a bit lost in life. It always helps me to feel better, and see that things fit together, in just the right way.

This book got me out of a funk when I couldn’t feel like reading anything. It’s a book about a robot that wants to write a movie to save humanity after he becomes self-aware. It’s funny and sweet and will make you laugh and cry maybe not worry so much about the imminent robot uprising.

A beautiful book by one of my favourite comics about one man’s mental breakdown and how music and the people who made it saved him from the worst year of his life. It’s funny and tender and all the music he references was made by people going through their own shit and about how they used their music to save themselves. It’s a book about how we fall apart and how we put ourselves back together and you don’t have to know about music to be moved by it.

This is a recent reissue of a book first published in 1974 and long out of print. Bette Howland gives us a vivid and honest account of her time in Ward 3 of a Chicago psychiatric hospital after a serious suicide attempt in her late twenties. I was moved by the moments of communion, camaraderie and even comedy the narrator shares with her fellow patients. Having said that, Ward 3 is a terrible place. The “treatments” are also punishments. The narrator confronts the ward’s alienation with clear, unsentimental detachment. I was absorbed by her struggle to retain an element of dignity in the face of the hospital’s fatally indifferent bureaucracy. 

Time and again, I come back to this work of criticism because of its daring arguments. Fiedler attempts nothing less than a comparison of American fiction with English, French, and Russian literature.

If some of his arguments will leave you scratching your head, others will make you look at novels from an entirely different perspective and provide a new understanding of works you thought you knew. 

Originally published in 1978, I was still a bit young to be devouring such dark and twisted tales but this one became my own blueprint for writing short stories.

This wasn't my first SK book, I had previously read his other novels like Salem's Lot and The Stand. But once I discovered Night Shift, it was like getting a different story each and every time I opened the book. 

There are no 'favorites' here because each one is sublime, but if I were forced to select 2-3 out of the 20, I'd go with "Gray Matter", "The Mangler", and "Sometimes They Come Back", mostly because these have quotes that I still see and use here and there, some 40 years later.

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.

This was one of my favourite books of 2018. This one deals with the impact of suicide on a tight-knit community, while quietly following Shane as he discovers his sexual identity and love for his best friend, David. The author, Adam Garnet Jones, is an Indigiqueer screenwriter, director, bead-worker, and novelist from Edmonton Alberta. While his Indigenous identity includes Cree, Métis, and Kahnawake

Mohawk, his traditional ancestry is complicated by the fact that his home reserve no longer exists. The land and community were forcibly enfranchised by the Canadian government in 1958.

It is fair to say that this is my favorite memoir I’ve ever read. I’m shocked it didn’t make bestseller lists when it came out. Finneran is a poet, who through the language, attention to detail, and strategic pacing of key scenes, makes readers see and feel what she wants us to see and feel. This book offered me, as a teacher of college writing, numerous perfect examples of how scenes can be developed to drop readers into a moment, to transport them. Finneran focuses the memoir on how her brother’s suicide affected her whole, big, Catholic family. The Tender Land, a Family Love Story is a portrait of a family who has lost something huge. Devastating content aside, this is a memoir that you will delight in, sentence by sentence, for its language. Highly recommend this remarkable book.