Books for the Bold: Embrace the Weird and Creepy

The Collector

294 pages

Fowles' psychological thriller explores obsession and power dynamics, making it a gripping read for fans of suspenseful literature.

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

270 pages

Roquelaure's erotic retelling of the classic fairy tale offers a bold and provocative exploration of desire and power.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

305 pages

This book offers a fascinating look at how corpses have been utilized throughout history, blending humor with intriguing facts that keep you engaged even if you're not usually a fan of non-fiction.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

167 pages

Ellison's chilling tale is a masterclass in dystopian fiction, exploring themes of despair and survival that resonate deeply with readers.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

178 pages

Carter's collection of stories reimagines classic fairy tales with a feminist twist, making it a fascinating read for those who appreciate innovative storytelling.

Columbine

512 pages

This book provides a deep and insightful look into the events surrounding the Columbine High School tragedy, making it a must-read for those interested in understanding the complexities of such incidents.

Flowers In The Attic

411 pages

Andrews' controversial tale of family secrets and survival captivates readers with its dark themes and emotional depth.

The Four Books

354 pages

Lianke's narrative weaves together history and fiction in a way that challenges readers to reflect on the nature of truth and storytelling.

The Blind Owl

115 pages

This haunting novella offers a deep dive into existential despair and the human psyche, making it a captivating read for those interested in psychological literature.

The Cement Garden

154 pages

McEwan's unsettling narrative about family dynamics and isolation is both haunting and beautifully written, appealing to readers who enjoy literary fiction.

The People in the Trees

498 pages

Yanagihara's novel is a rich exploration of morality and the consequences of scientific discovery, making it a thought-provoking read.

Blindness

334 pages

Saramago's 'Blindness' is a profound and thought-provoking narrative that delves into the human condition, making it a compelling read for anyone interested in philosophical literature.

American Psycho

American Psycho is super famous and accepted, making it a notable choice for those looking for a book that sparks intriguing conversations.

Exquisite Corpse

272 pages

This book delves into the chilling encounter between two serial killers, making it a gripping read for those intrigued by dark and twisted narratives.

Outlander - Ein Schatten von Verrat und Liebe

1815 pages

Outlander is a captivating historical fiction, but be prepared for its brutal and violent second half.

Atlas Shrugged

1243 pages

Atlas Shrugged is often criticized, yet many haven't even read it, making it a polarizing choice.

Lolita

338 pages

Lolita is a controversial read that delves into the dark themes of pedophilia.

A Clockwork Orange (Restored Text)

273 pages

Clockwork Orange is a thought-provoking novel that continues to trouble readers long after finishing.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

642 pages

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a gripping read that can leave you horrified with its intense themes.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

175 pages

It's an interesting read that offers a unique perspective on life and death from someone who works in a crematorium.

Geek Love

366 pages

This book is a unique and darkly fascinating read that explores the lives of a family of circus performers, making it a memorable experience.

The Rules of Attraction

289 pages

From the New York Times bestselling author or Less Than Zero and American Psycho—a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England with no plans for the future—or even the present—who become entangled in a romantic triangle. • “An extraordinary writer.” —LA Weekly Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives. Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor who split for Europe months ago and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letter to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus, and Paul, Lauren's ex, forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism. They waste time getting wasted, race from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World or The Graveyard. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance. The basis for the major motion picture starring James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Jessica Biel, and Kate Bosworth. Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!

Glamorama

656 pages

In Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis delivers a shadowy, looking-glass world. It is a world where fame and fashion, terror and mayhem meet – and begin to resemble the familiar surface of our own lives . . . The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere. Even in places he hasn’t been, and with people he doesn’t know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind . . . 'Does for the cold, minimal ’90s what American Psycho did for the Wall Street greed of the ’80s. You name it, he manages to get it all in' – Vogue

Slammerkin

274 pages

This book tells the gripping story of a poor girl in the 1800s who faces unimaginable hardships, including rape and a life of prostitution, before ultimately committing murder. It's a challenging read, but Emma Donoghue's storytelling is compelling, making it worth exploring.

Guts

176 pages

This book is a hilarious spoof horror novel that was once rejected by every publisher for its extreme content. Now published, it features sentient intestines that yearn for freedom, delivering a series of outrageous encounters filled with clever humor and absurdity. It's a wild ride that proves no subject is too vile for publication!

A Child Called 'It'

144 pages

This book is a gripping autobiography that recounts the harrowing experiences of Dave Pelzer, who faced extreme abuse from his mother. It's a difficult read due to its graphic nature, but it powerfully illustrates themes of perseverance and inner strength.

A Little Life

833 pages

This book is an emotional rollercoaster that deeply impacts its readers, making you want to check in on those who recommend it.

Annihilation

209 pages

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024

281 pages

This book offers a unique perspective by telling the story from a zombie's point of view, exploring the horror of transformation and the struggle of a human mind trapped in a decaying body. It's a thought-provoking read that makes you question your own quirks.

Less Than Zero

209 pages

This book is a wild ride through the lives of disaffected youth in Los Angeles, showcasing the dark side of excess and the emptiness that comes with it.

Child of God

209 pages

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post

A Ghost in the Throat

252 pages

An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.

The Black Jewels Trilogy

1796 pages

This trilogy is a unique blend of weird and disturbing elements that makes it a captivating read.

The Wasp Factory

140 pages

'One of the most brilliant first novels I have come across' Telegraph 'One of the top 100 novels of the century' Independent 'Brilliant...irresistible...compelling' New York Times 'Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down' Financial Times 'Read it if you dare' Daily Express The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath - one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels. 'Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.' Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.

Running with Scissors

346 pages

This book is filled with great humor and memorable characters while tackling serious topics, making it a unique and enjoyable read for those with an open mind.

White Oleander

400 pages

White Oleander is a painfully beautiful first novel about a young girl growing up the hard way. It is a powerful story of mothers and daughters, their ambiguous alliances, their selfish love and cruel behaviour, and the search for love and identity.Astrid has been raised by her mother, a beautiful, headstrong poet. Astrid forgives her everything as her world revolves around this beautiful creature until Ingrid murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life. Astrid's fierce determination to survive and be loved makes her an unforgettable figure. 'LIQUID POETRY' - Oprah Winfrey 'Tangled, Complex and extraordinarily moving' - Observer

Dhalgren

801 pages

This novel is a unique experience with its strange elements and beautiful prose, making it a fascinating read for those who appreciate unconventional storytelling.

Eileen

273 pages

Now a major motion picture streaming on Hulu, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize “Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings. Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.

The Library at Mount Char

402 pages

This book is a gripping read that keeps you hooked from the start. It features a woman kidnapped as a child, along with other kids, by a mysterious ruler of the universe. The story is twisted and filled with shocking events, including some truly disturbing moments. The writing is excellent, with a captivating plot and engaging characters that make it hard to put down.

Rant

338 pages

After 21st century serial killer Buster "Rant" Casey dies in a fiery blaze of glory, three of his closest compatriots--a gang of urban demolition derby aficionados affiliated with a group calling themselves The Party Crashers--travel back to his hometown of Middleton to record an oral history of their fallen idol. Conducting interviews with Rant's family and childhood friends and enemies, they compile stories about Rant's fascination with vermin, the plague of rabies he unleashed on the world, the formation of the Party Crashers, and other legends surrounding America's newest and greatest celebrity mass murderer. But the question remains: "Who was Rant Casey?"