The best books with an unreliable narrator

The idea of an unreliable narrator covers a multiple of sins. They are invariably outliers, dangerously and controversially so. It’s not an easy journey entering their world, but then again, it’s not meant to be. The Wasp Factory was Iain Bank’s debut novel, where dark twisted humour prevails as we follow the unhinged adventures of a deranged Scottish family. Frank, the younger brother, tells the story, where he relies on wasps released into a torture factory of his own making to help divine the future. The book brims with vivid imagery, of burning sheep, and a nightmarish image which continues to stay with me, and I don’t see that ever changing, where someone throws themselves out of a tall building, and by the time they hit the ground they have ripped out all of their teeth.

The narration is completely devoted to the worldview of main character Harry White. A man who climbs the ladder of corporate and social America thanks to unnatural drives inside him both dedicated to achieving his success and predicated ultimately to securing his eventual self-destruction. The demon is inside Harry White and it is the American dream. An extraordinary novel from an extraordinary writer who had already written himself into the annals of American literature with such classics as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room. The Demon in my view is Selby Jr.’s most personal and impersonal work.

American Psycho takes the idea of a driven but morally skewered sociopath and plunges him into the wild excesses of the eighties. Patrick Bateman worships at the altar of financial greed; who indulges in the gods of torture, murder and mutilation to an unbearable degree. There are two contrasting interpretations to the novel where every monstrous act committed by Bateman is real, while the other claims it’s all in his head. I believe it’s the former, but the idea of the latter also fascinates. American Psycho is an undeniably unsettling and powerful piece of work which lives long in the memory. Although sometimes, you’ll wish it wasn’t.  

In the comic books (and films) Batman and Joker are locked together in the eternal battle between good and evil. Except, as The Killing Joke so brilliantly explores, that’s not quite how Joker sees it. For Joker, they are both sides of the same coin. If Joker is seen as evil incarnate, then why, he asks, is Batman considered the opposite? The story has since been disowned by writer Moore, possibly because of the interminable number of nihilistic-styled super-hero stories that followed in its wake. But sometimes I think the writer’s dissonance from the subject matter adds to the sense of unease and chaos at play. And there is undeniable power at the root of the story, taken entirely from Joker’s impeccably flawed point of view. That it only takes ‘one bad day’ to turn an ordinary joe into one or the other, Joker or Batman.

Like the previous books in this list, the main character, in this case Humbert Humbert, seeks to justify the unjustifiable. The writer skilfully weaves around our expectations as a reader and attempts to subtly subvert them. Humbert’s skill of manipulation, using his standing as a professor to seduce and subsequently control a minor, can never be described as an easy read, and it’s a tribute to Nabokov’s beautiful, unapologetic, delicately poised prose that we even consider hearing the bastard out.