100 Books Like Falconer

I have always loved the central premise of the book, that a human being might never age, and yet a portrait of him ages as the years go by.

I love the way that Wilde used elegant and lyrical prose, always boosted by a flamboyant irony, in describing the dissolute life of an aesthete while putting it in the context of a philosophical pursuit of beauty and art. Dorian Gray himself is a deeply flawed moral character, and that is key to the success of the novel.  

What if queer American cannibal killer Jeffery Dahmer met his British equivalent, Dennis Nilsen?

This novel is a fictionalized answer to that question, pairing serial murderers Jay and Andrew in a psychosexual tear through lush New Orleans.

However, my favorites are the other central characters: Luke and Tran, two ex-lovers who are living with HIV, homelessness, and the emotional scars of their bad romance. There is subtle, skillful storytelling showcased in the relationship you only get in retrospect between these two.

It’s so unique that I once taught it to a Master’s degree writing class as an example of rule-breaking and genre-bending to aspire towards.

There are also alluring literary parallels to explore between venereal disease and violent death stalking the unsuspecting gay men of the bayou. Overall, it’s a delightfully depraved masterpiece.

The third of the five-book Riplead series, Ripley’s Game throws a twist on the traditional cat-and-mouse thriller.

The youthful homoerotic panic of The Talented Mr. Ripley has calmed down, and Tom Ripley is now a married man with a château in France. Trouble begins when he plays a game with his neighbor, Jonathan Trevanny—a man with a terminal illness, desperate to leave money to his wife and child. Ripley sets him up for an offer he can’t refuse: murder for hire.

I find the best facet of the novel to be Ripley’s begrudging humanity. He softens enough to help Jonathan when the job of garroting organized crime thugs is too horrible for him to stomach. While not explicitly gay, the queer vibes are strong as Ripley’s growing tenderness for Jonathan helps to humanize him.

We’ll start with another novel (there are many) inspired in part by the Leopold and Loeb crime. This one swaps Chicago for Pittsburgh, and changes their mismatch in IQs for a stark class divide.

One of the variations I most enjoy in this retelling is that university students Paul Fleischer and Julian Fromme are both damaged when they meet. Julian is scarred physically from a car crash in his youth, and Paul is still recovering emotionally from the death of his father.

Additionally, since the book is set in the 1970s, their sexual involvement with one another is more explicit than the original story could allow (though it still comes with social stigma).

A captivating work of dark academia and crime, the obsession between these two compels them to court their own ruin.

Helen McInnes books made their way into my family via those Readers Digest Condensed books that used to come in the mail. They were hard bound and heavy to hold, but it was fun to open them and explore new books. The only one I remember, though, is one by Helen McInnes. I had to go find the complete book because when they condense? You miss a lot. I recommend starting with her first book, Above Suspicion. I loved her characters right off. This isn’t one of those stories that starts with a big bang. The tension rises very slowly and you don’t realize you are being wound up like a spring until it’s too late to put it down. And cool factoid, the author was in the OAS in World War II. She knew her stuff. 

Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).

Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.

Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.

In a genre full of stories of almost infinite variety, this is one that caught my eye.

A middle-aged female professor of mathematics goes on a quest with her cat to track down a former student who is the only one who can save their world from destruction. Sounds cozy, doesn’t it? Except for the world-ending part.

And the fact that Vellitt’s path lies straight through a dreamscape out of the Lovecraftian mythos in this critique/homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. But you don’t have to have read the latter to enjoy the journey.

Vellitt is a marvelous character, the world-building is brilliant and the cat is the perfect addition that helps set the tone for a new and different kind of quest fantasy.

This book chronicles the heroic journey of Christopher Bache’s 73 high-dose LSD sessions over twenty years and how these sessions impacted his life.

His story was a testament to me of the incredible hard work and persistence required to clear the body of energetic blockages when using psychedelics to reach the highest states of consciousness, including tapping into the cosmic creative principle of the living universe, exploring hell and heavenly realms, and nonduality. I loved how compelling and inspiring Bache’s story is.

We move up a generation to the next “classic,” an equally entertaining satire that now sets the American university against the British. Two professors exchange roles for an academic year, swapping not only courses but eventually also students, colleagues, and (spoiler alert!) spouses. You get to look at each place through the eyes of the other—starting with the sunny American campus (based on Berkeley) against the damp British one—which is as jarring as it is revealing. Lodge beautifully melds the academic, the intellectual, and the personal, so the story grips you personally even as it stimulates and entertains. I read this as a graduate student and somehow stayed in the business anyway!

This is classic, quintessential British humor, the kind of dry wit that makes you laugh out loud as you’re reading. I didn’t want it to end because of how hilarious I found the main character. Even while being funny, the book does a great job establishing the imposter syndrome the main character feels as a member of the middle class attempting to enter the elite halls of academia as an older graduate student.

He is a fish out of water, incapable of having normal social interactions with his peers, “betters,” or students. Possibly, the best-ever hangover scene in writing occurs in this book.