100 Books Like Electric Eden

While the Ripper was abroad in Yorkshire, New York was stalked by its own phantom killer, Son of Sam, while its rapidly diminishing police force were otherwise engaged giving out leaflets entitled Welcome To Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors.

Abe Beame was Mayor over a burned-out necropolis of demolished buildings, crumbling infrastructure and tripling crime rates, a city President Gerald Ford told to "drop dead". This was the stage on which Lydia Lunch began her assault on the senses and sensibilities of her nation, at the tender age of 16.

Her account of not only surviving but grabbing every last moment of fun to be had in Fear City is rivalled only by mentor Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn as the ultimate in New York stories.

Many children of my generation were turned to the dark side by their parents' collections of Dennis Wheatley's glamorously lurid Black Magic novels.

Key to their appeal was the author's assurance that the diabolical deeds described therein were actually being practised today – from the heart of power in London to the most remote village in the land. Phil Baker's enormously entertaining biography makes it clear that Dennis sincerely believed this, and consulted all the leading magicians of his age – including Aleister Crowley – to get the Goat-based goods from the gate.

Not only that, but his own life was steeped in just as much intrigue and danger as any of his novels, including stints as a WWI solider, peacetime purveyor of Napoleon's own brandy, and WWII member of Churchill's secret services.

No other book captures the darkness at the dawn of the Thatcher decade with such verisimilitude as David Peace's conjuring of its premier bogeyman, the Yorkshire Ripper, in the third of his Red Riding Quartet.

Perhaps that's because the author used his Goth record collection to transport him back to the places where these crimes were committed, at the time of his West Yorkshire youth. Songs like Siouxsie and the Banshees' 'Night Shift' and The Sisters of Mercy's 'Fix' summon back that fearful terrain, where 'cow' was a term of endearment for a woman and the use of hammers to the head a familiar sign of domestic abuse.

Detectives are revealed to be as deadly as their quarry, priests give benediction with nine-inch-nails and stone angels turn their heads away.

The Manchester evoked by Joy Division and Barry Adamson's first band, Magazine, also entered the Eighties a ravaged post-industrial city, strafed first by the Luftwaffe and then its own planners, who erected Brutalist estates over its Victorian past.

The son of a white Mancunian mother and black Jamaican father, Adamson grew up in some of the worst of the city's social housing in the Hulme of the Sixties. Another Selby aficionado, Barry recounts the story his challenging childhood with a picaresque, magical realist flair.

Music offers both salvation and damnation – as he progresses through Magazine and into Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, so too do all his most self-sabotaging addictions, until death brings a reckoning and a salvation in the first fruit of his solo career, the LP Moss Side Story. 

Julian Cope writes like a fan. He doesn’t write like a musician or a music journalist. That’s why I like his books so much.

I find his views refreshing on everything from glam rock to living in Liverpool in the late 1970s. He may be best known for his music with The Teardrop Explodes and as a solo artist, but he doesn’t serve up a boring discography or describe what life was like on the road. He lets you into his head, and best of all, he doesn’t follow any party line. 

I found this book to have amazing detail, considering it goes back a long way, and I don’t know how John remembered it all. It’s an entertaining and intriguing book about his life and his amazing, honest story about becoming a performing poet, his battle with addiction, and his unique route to cult status.

I want more than a simple outline of a life when I’m reading a biography. I don’t want a sketch. I want a truly exhaustive account. I want everything.

I want the school reports, the scrapbooks, the family photo album, the letters and diaries, and the gauche snapshots before the child blossomed into a fully formed creative adult.

Well, that’s what you get here. You get first-hand accounts from those who grew up with Nick and a lot of insight from those who saw his music develop firsthand. And who better to collate the lot than his older sister?

I grew up with the Beatles. I went from 8 to 16 in the time it took the band to go from Love Me Do to Let It Be. I measure my own growth from infancy to adolescence during their lifespan.

The Beatles were more than a band to anyone of my age. They were a planet we all lived on. There have been hundreds of books about them, but few are more insightful than this one by their suave and urbane press officer.

Derek started off his career as a hard-bitten newspaper hack of the old school. Working with the Beatles changed his life. I can relate to that. The Fab Four changed all our lives. 

The Scarred for Life series (Volumes 1-3) is the most in-depth and expansive overviews of hauntological culture yet to be printed.

Covering Britain's popular (and unpopular) culture from 1970-1989, Scarred for Life leaves no stone unturned in its quest to discuss all the strangest TV, film, music, fiction, and other cultural ephemera that made these years the central influences on the “haunted generation.”

My favorite is Volume One, which covers the 1970s, when it seemed that the mission of the British media was to scare children into total passive submission. Although not exactly my childhood experience, I still loved every terrifying description and the authors’ “traumatic” memories.

Hopefully, some brave soul will write the American equivalent.

Although the title of this list mentions the “wyrd and eerie,” I didn’t choose Mark Fisher’s brilliant The Weird and the Eerie, but rather his wonderfully insightful Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.

Fisher didn’t “create” hauntology (that would be Jacques Derrida), but he was its most innovative and deepest thinker. Able to take complex theoretical concepts and explain them using creative analysis of cultural media, Fisher combined philosophical, political, social, and artistic analyses into the corpus of what we now recognize as the core tenets of hauntology.

Ghosts of My Life displays Fisher’s personal investment in his ideas and critiques: this was not just an intellectual exercise for him; he felt these assessments of life in late 20th century/early 21st century to the core of his being.

His examinations of Joy Division, Ghost Box Records, Stanley Kubrick, The Fall, and genre TV… show more.