Thinking Persons Horror and Dark Fiction
Explore a curated list of dark fiction and horror books for thinking persons. Discover chilling, intellectually stimulating reads that blend terror with thought-provoking narratives.
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The Night Country
by Stewart O'Nan
A tragic car accident that kills three teens while leaving one hospitalized with brain damage and another suffering with guilt yields more pain one year later when the spirits of the three dead kids return to torment the survivors.
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A Prayer for the Dying
by Stewart O'Nan
Set in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying tells of a horrible epidemic that has gripped the town in a vise of fear and death.Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed, though he continues to do what he can.But Jacob cannot control the plague's rapid spread, the panic that takes over Friendship, or his own feelings of despair.Dark, poetic, and chilling, A Prayer for the Dying makes us consider if it's possible to be a good man in a time of madness.AUTHORBIO: Stewart O'Nan's first collection of stories, In the Walled City, won the Drue Heinz Literary Prize.He is the author of four previous novels, Snow Angels, The Names of the Dead, The Speed Queen, and A World Away.He lives in Connecticut.
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The Speed Queen
by Stewart O'Nan
A drug-addled, bisexual Bonnie to her husband's Clyde--accompanied by her lover, Natalie--Marjorie Standiford winds up on death row despite her protestations of innocence, with a lucrative book deal to sweeten the pain. Reprint. Reprint.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
A masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future, and the inspiration for the blockbuster film Blade Runner One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They’ve even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and “retire” them. But when cornered, androids fight back—with lethal force. Praise for Philip K. Dick “The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.”—John Brunner “A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.”—The New York Times “[Philip K. Dick] sees all the sparkling—and terrifying—possibilities . . . that other authors shy away from.”—Rolling Stone
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Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
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Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. “Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly
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Kiss Me, Judas
by Will Christopher Baer
Don t worry, a voice whispers. You really only need one. Phineas Poe, disgraced cop turned psychiatric case, turned murder suspect, turned reluctant kidney donor, gives $200 to a beautiful woman in a red dress, a scar at the edge of her mouth and a body like a knife. He then wakes up in a bath of melting ice, blood on his fingers and staples in his sides. Now she haunts his dreams and his days. She s got his kidney on ice and her teeth in his heart. Finding her means throwing himself into a drug-blurred underworld. Falling in love with her means fighting to avoid becoming her accomplice as well as her victim. Fast, corrosive wit, glittering, razor-sharp images, a cast of comic and sinister characters, part love story, part mystery, part hallucination, Kiss Me, Judas is a startling novel of modern noir. A surreal nightmare full of the hard-boiled nourish spirit of Raymond Chandler. San Francisco Chronicle"
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The Stand
by Stephen King
June 16, 1985. That is when the horror began--the evil that started in a laboratory and took over America.
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Move Under Ground
by Nick Mamatas
"Those who appreciate sophisticated, progressive horror and fantasy fiction should eat [Move Under Ground] up."—Publishers Weekly The year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R’lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu. Move Under Ground is a horror novel mashup that combines the Beat style of Jack Kerouac with the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
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3000 Mph in Every Direction at Once: Stories and Essays
by Nick Mamatas
What if everyone actually was famous for exactly fifteen minutes? What if Joey Ramone could save the world? What if the spiritual enlightenment of saints and sages was a sexually transmitted disease? These are the fictions. Neon signs that predict a city's future. Companies paying people to insult their clients online. Edgar Allan Poe's New York is still alive, but not well. These are the facts. And they say speculative fiction and personal essays don't belong in the same book. Whether in the glossy pages of the men's magazine Razor or the stolen reams of office supplies that make up the zine The Whirligig, the writing of Nick Mamatas is your hitchhiker's guide to the new, and very weird, millennium. Don't know where the world is headed? Nick does and it's 3000 miles per hour in every direction at once.
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Punktown
by Jeffrey Thomas
Jeffrey Thomas' collection Punktown explored the streets and back alleys of a futuristic and nightmarish urbanscape in a series of unconnected short stories. In Punktown: Third Eye, Thomas has teleported authors Simon Logan, Jonathan Lyons, Charlee Jacob, Paul G. Tremblay, Michael McCarty, Mark McLaughlin, Garrett Peck, Thomas Andrew Hughes, and Scott Thomas into the city to pen their own tales of its citizens, aliens, mutations, and sentient machines. These talented authors bring a new perspective, a personal vision, a third eye view to the phantasmetropolis that is Punktown.