11 Books Like Battles in the Desert

A seemingly bottomless plunge into the horror genre. Jones artfully blends a nostalgic look at life in 1980’s small-town Texas with the expected blood-soaked scenery of an over-the-top horror tale. Convinced he is a serial killer, Tolly Driver plays with our minds in a plot that backtracks on itself, erasing clues as it presents new ones. I love how he’s plenty aware that the gruesome killings follow the tropes of a teenage slasher flick, yet his attempt to predict and stop the next massacre only keep placing him in the role of villainous monster. Clever and sharp prose make this novel a most delicious guilty pleasure.

The struggle for land grants in New Mexico is forever now also the story of Reies Tijerina, a man of many labels—activist, Chicano rights trail blazer, rabblerouser, charlatan, criminal. When the US annexed New Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1847, this brought waves of opportunistic and unscrupulous Anglos onto lands worked and owned collectively by the resident Mexican-Americans, known then as Hispanos, on centuries old titles granted to them by Spain. In the 1960s, Tijerina, an itinerant Evangelical pastor, was transformed from preacher to crusader during his sojourns through the impoverished communities of northern New Mexico, hearing accounts of how they had been swindled and forced off their land, ownership now with the politically connected and even the Federal government. I love this account of Tijerina’s saga that includes shootouts, the kidnapping of a judge, arrests, courtroom drama, international notoriety, and of course, more backstage political maneuvering to undermine… show more.

Lemebel was a courageous and flamboyant activist during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Having lived in Chile myself, I think this book captures the erotic Chilean soul in all its humor, grief, and idealism at an important historical moment. The hopelessly romantic and delightfully ironic seamstress/protagonist Queen of the Corner lives on a rooftop in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios and hosts discussion groups by local leftist students who keep leaving behind really heavy boxes, ostensibly full of books, as they prepare a vague plan that will have enormous implications. The group’s ringleader Carlos is a charmer ala Che Guevara, and the Queen is soon head over heels in love as a friendship and a tender unrequited love affair begins. A story of remarkable humanism that mixes the erotic with revolution.

Ocean Vuong writes in a poetic prose that transforms memories into fragments that linger in your mind. His choice to write this book as fictionalized letters to his mother was deeply beautiful and heart-wrenching. This is a book that took me on a journey through the Vietnam War, my first queer experiences, and the journey of finding out what it means to become American.

Written from the perspective of one of the victims of the infamous 2001 Queen Boat scandal, when 52 men were arrested and put on trial in Egypt during a raid on a gay party, In the Spider’s Room is an intense depiction of living in a society that fears and rejects any form of queerness. Unflinching, claustrophobic, and suffocating, Abdelnaby does not shy away from exploring what happens when one is presented with no avenues for expressing their desires and sense of self.

This affecting and disturbing novel about a group of queer friends in late-80s Taiwan was ahead of its time in content, form, and vision. Premised on the idea of a collection of notebooks, the text incorporates multiple literary forms, and the “otherworldly” element is in Qiu’s use of the crocodile as a literalized metaphor for queer identity. A sobering and captivating read. 

What can I say about this book? It’s raw, brutal in places, tender in others, brimming with imagination and invention, and ultimately unforgettable. For myself, as a Western reader, it challenged my ideas of gender, identity, and personhood in its depiction of its central character, Ada, as an ogbanje, an Igbo spirit that is born into a human body as a kind of malevolent trickster. But Ada is an ogbanje who survives (something that rarely occurs), coming through traumatic experiences to forge a new identity that embraces plurality. 

If you want to plunge into a tumultuous mind that spins through grief and tragedy, life and death, hope and rebirth, you should read this book. You should read this book if you want to step into the shoes of someone who may be quite unlike yourself or someone more like you than you might think. You should read this book if… show more.

I love love stories and this is a great one. It is surreal, evocative and simply captured me.

The genius that lies behind the best collections of short stories, such as Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber," relies on developing a theme in the stories that is inherently dependent upon the reader's response.

In "The Bloody Chamber," Carter re-tells fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood and Cinderella, from a feisty feminist point of view meant to evoke both horror and a bit of revenge from most feminist readers. How that combination of horror and revenge affects our psyches is most revealing to the readers as to how they react to the new version of a very old, if not myth-based tale from the patriarchal cultures of the past where women were mistreated and abused on a regular basis.

My favorite was the re-telling of Red Riding Hood called "The Company of Wolves," a prelude to her next tale called "Wolf-Alice"!

This book is probably the single most praised underground gay novel of my generation, and deservedly so. It’s so many things—beautiful writing, an old west setting in all its ugliness and adventure and hope, and a highly original narrative voice in the bisexual native orphan, Shed, who is being raised in a bordello. All the characters are well-drawn and as odd as the narrator, and the erotic journey, if I can call it that, is one of the most original, thought-provoking, and beautiful expressions of the possibilities of queer I’ve ever encountered. Spanbauer has helped me to write more skillfully about class and race and sexuality and how they are everywhere and how they can warp—and sometimes, oftentimes—set people free.