The best books that reflect a grim view of the world, and those beyond

Few debut collections have so powerfully announced the presence of a fully formed literary presence. There’s a unique honesty at play, a raw handling of guilt, shame, and the worst aspects of our species, creating brutal narratives of a genuinely unsettling nature. These are human tales, and these are monster tales, and sometimes they are both, set amid backdrops of the Weird. Ballingrud’s horrors can just as easily arise from your garden variety parent, spouse, or child, showing us that anyone, anywhere is capable of doing very bad things, depending on the choices they are willing to make. North American Lake Monsters is a landmark work of speculative fiction that will stand up to the weathering of the ages, and Ballingrud is one of the best writers working today.

Puppets, clowns, mannequins, carnivals, art, crumbling buildings, means of production, mundane workplaces, hidden histories, the body, the mind, the unglimpsed universe, life itself—these are the essential salts of Ligotti’s special alchemy of universal nihilism and societal decay. The result is a brand of fatalistic fiction that is legitimately terrifying and profoundly pessimistic, casting the world in an uncanny, yellowish fog where everything is suspect. All of Ligotti’s collections and varied works are special, but Teatro Grottesco distinguishes itself for its thematic through line of the sinister nature of art and its various artistic underworlds. The firmness of the stories’ subject matter makes it the perfect introduction to the Ligottian multiverse for new readers.

When my wife handed me The Bluest Eye and told me to “just read it,” I had no idea what I was about to experience. Few writers wield the weight of perfectly balanced, powerful prose like Morrison, and fewer still have produced her unique brand of grim, heartbreaking, beautiful story craft with such breathtaking quality and consistency. She shows both the meanness of the world, and its humanity, in all its many guises. Morrison’s masterful combination of unflinching truth, keen observation, dark subject matter, and pitch-perfect execution long ago cemented her legacy as one of the world’s greatest writers, and The Bluest Eye is an example of Morrison at her mightiest.

Southern Gothic is that purely American literary tradition that draws its power from the land, its ghosts, and the people and personalities that populate its unique geography, and none have done it better than O’Connor. Her cogent commentaries on the foibles, weaknesses, and grotesqueries of the human condition are biting and astute as she effortlessly weaves humor into the darkest of tales. She lays open each character with a razor-sharp filet knife, showing everything squirming and hiding inside. The deeply disturbing title piece stands in my top five short stories ever penned (the top spot claimed by Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery). O’Connor’s entire catalogue is untouchable, and a must-read for any devotee of dark fiction, human satire, and foundational American literature. 

Readers of H.P. Lovecraft, and writers (like me) who have mined the Lovecraftian Mythos for decades, have struggled in recent years to square the inspiration they have derived from the work and the intensely problematic nature of the man’s white supremacy and xenophobia. Several recent books have addressed this ethical conflict head-on, and none so brilliantly and effectively as LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, which reconstitutes Lovecraft’s “The Horror of Red Hook” from an African American POV. LaValle’s sharpness of prose, keen eye, and feel for environment grounds his tale of a street hustler in 1920s Harlem confronting horrors both cosmic and terrestrial, acting as the perfect answer to the insult of the original tale. This work stands as a landmark of contemporary cosmic horror that needs to be on every bookshelf.