100 Books Like Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.

I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!

I believe this book is one of the classic staples of surreal fiction. Its disjointed, spiraling narrative and sprawling non-linear plot lines challenge the definition of what a ‘book’ is. It uses everything from footnotes to text alignment to color schemes to make the act of reading itself increasingly difficult, which matches the house’s influence on the narrators’ memories and interests.

Reading it for me was like learning Latin or watching Casablanca–it gave context to decades of experimental media inspired by it, from TV shows to DOOM game mods. Love it or hate it, it’s a solid tool for any inhuman’s toolkit. 

Attanasio can run hot and cold, but when he’s hot he’s on fire! This book may have the most ambitious plot of any novel I’ve ever read and is almost impossible to describe. It spans galaxies, has a truly bizarre vibe, and yet rings true, with a love story thrown in.  

Haruki Murakami is probably the most famous Japanese author in the world and the father of Japanese magical realism. I have read a large portion of his work, and I have enjoyed many of his books (even with his weird ear fetish).

This one, however, is one of my favorites. It’s two stories in one, and although others sometimes criticize it for not being a good blend between the two stories, it is that separation that actually makes this book a gem for me. It captures your imagination as you follow a human computer down into a psychological miasma of perception and thought.

If that seems confusing, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to spoil for you one of my all-time favorite Murakami books. Also, if you want to know what I mean by human-computer, I guess you’ll just have to pick up the book.

The variety of subjects covered in this collection of 22 short stories demonstrates Bradbury's prowess as a master craftsman and the reason why I count him among my literary heroes. 

More than a few of these tales have become legendary, including “A Sound of Thunder.” Bradbury's premise of how the death of a butterfly in prehistoric times could have drastic changes in the future is a variation on the famous “butterfly effect” and a fine example of the relationship between chaos theory and the physics of time travel.
For me, the most incredible story in the collection is “The Fog Horn” in which an elusive sea monster attacks a lighthouse after being attracted by its foghorn for years. This story was the inspiration for the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

This is a sci-fi book from famous sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick. Besides suggesting some big, scary questions, it didn't exactly stick to what I usually go for in a sci-fi book.

For a while, it involved this product, Ubik, which has so many uses that it's everywhere. But the story drew me in with a relatively everyman-type guy on a team of psionic corporate spies—and then things get weird. It's the kind of weird like when I was struggling to remember this amazing horror movie I had seen, only to realize the media in question had actually been this unforgettable book.

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.

The action in this book begins when Severian, an apprentice in the Torturers’ Guild, gives a convict a weapon to kill herself rather than be tortured.

The reason there’s a Torturers’ Guild is, allegedly, that it beats prison: Better to deliver a punishment and then let the punished person return to their life, the thinking goes, than confine them to a useless existence as a ward of the state. Severian is expelled from the Guild, but not from the profession, and wanders the world plying his trade, at least until the plot can’t spare him.

It’s a constant dissonance, looking through the eyes of a character whose training and purpose is the infliction of pain, who seems so decent and forthright in the story he narrates. (But don’t be fooled.)

The Book of Philip Jose Farmer is a collection of 16 brilliant short stories ranging from SF and horror to fantasy and satire. 

The most memorable and frightening tale of all—and one that I often use an example of a perfect paranormal tale—is “Father in the Basement.” An eleven-year-old girl employs her supernatural ability to help her father work around the clock for days to complete the first draft of his novel. He wanted it to be his final act, after all.

One of the most chilling endings of any horror story out there.