100 Books Like Requiem for a Dream

I found this book in college, and at the time, I thought it was the most unique book I had ever read.

Thompson’s “Gonzo Journalism” was fresh, funny, and thought-provoking, with a subtext of modern poetry, political activism, and a sense of humor I have never seen replicated.

This was another true story of someone who suffered a terrible addiction and was able to overcome it. I liked it because Jim was a regular guy and not a celebrity sharing his life story as so many of these book are. It was one of the first books that gave me inspiration to write a book. It also became a movie where Leonardo DeCaprio played Jim Carrol.

The plot of this book seems simple enough. A guy goes to Vegas to drink himself to death, but whilst there, he develops a relationship with a prostitute. Now, if this were Hollywood, they’d end up eloping and starting a new life together. Yet, whilst there is indeed an excellent Hollywood adaptation of it starring Nicholas Cage, it is no less bleaker than the novel it is based on. A novel that was written by an alcoholic who killed himself and whose book was called a suicide note by his father.

Despite its sadness, however, the book is beautifully written. Aside from its doomed romance, it also has a romantic sense of being doomed, which I like.

Reding’s book on the methamphetamine epidemic in small-town Ohio is distressing but essential. He is exceptional in showing rather than telling how meth is in so many ways the Great American Drug. It makes you work even more maniacally, for one. And the hollowing out of Middle America makes the drug’s proactive nature even more attractive in these forgotten towns and cities. It is painful that the meth scourge might have eased but, as is so often the case, other destructive substances have quickly replaced it. 

Literally, this is the Godfather of Mafia novels and the book that made, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” part of the American vernacular.

It’s a great read, and it later became a great movie. I quote Michael Corleone from Godfather III in my novel. Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone was the reigning king of fictional Mafia dons until Tony Soprano walked onto the small screen.

Author Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather to get out of debt. He succeeded and magnificently so.

I once heard a friend of mine describe Last Exit to Brooklyn as “a significant minor novel.” He was wrong. It’s a good deal more than that.

Set in the same Brooklyn in which one will find Herschel Cain, the main character in my own novel, before he becomes professional wrestler Haystacks Kane, yet light years away, Last Exit is a searing portrayal of life in the raw amongst the American underclass, profoundly disturbing and terribly, terribly sad. It shook me to my core when I read it not long after it was published in the mid-1960s, and has remained with me ever since.

In countless ways, Selby’s novel thumbs its nose at traditional novel structure and the customary rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation in order to present virtually every moment of its bleak and upsetting narrative with a ferocious immediacy rarely found anywhere else.

In truth, it does… show more.

Richard Condon shows the mob as a family of degenerates, violent felons who are still human beings who also fall in love. The focus on the novel is how a hit man, looking to embellish his career, dates a big mob guy’s daughter, only to fall in love with another killer who is a woman. She has been hired to kill him but she also is in love with him. Published in 1982 , the novel captures the entanglements of a soap opera with real bite. The movie with Jack Nicholson is also top rate.

In this case, I saw the film before I read the book, and if I’m going to call myself an honest man, I’d have to say I enjoyed the film more than the book.

Still, the book struck me as a great read because it embraced and portrayed the extraordinary amount of tension an undercover agent deals with 24/7. I mean, when you’re trying to make an arrest undercover, you’re two people at the same time, but you’d better not mess up and let anyone know you are or it’s game over—and very probably, bang-bang, pal, you’re history.

Add to that being undercover for the FBI and you’re guaranteed a high-stakes conundrum. Which is to say, after reading this book, how could I not have had my book’s character working undercover for what he and his partner Jonas refer to as “the Bureau”?

Set in the 1980s, it captures a time when sex, drugs, and parties fueled life. When the image of taking and consuming the best was a narcotic of its own. Restless, gorging, faceless encounters, aspiring to an empty illusion of excess with no rules and consequences you would never admit to.

Driven by desire. To be. To do. To cover the truth with a glib smile, a quick snort, and a slide into numbness so no one knows the smallness of your failures and you never have to admit to the quest of things you can never have. Love. Acceptance as you are. Success of the one thing you never lie about, the compulsion to have your written words celebrated. Truth and lies and an unobtainable love.

Love to know why this murderous mob masterpiece has yet to make it to film.

This must-have for any True Crime bookshelf is from the dynamic duo of Gene Mustain (author of John Gotti bio) and Jerry Capeci (“Gangland” journalist extraordinaire). It chronicles the blood-soaked rise and demise of the deadly Roy Demeo crew, a gaggle of Gambino grunts a couple of rungs under Captain Nino Gaggi.

It’s an underworld tour of the black-and-blue-collar South Brooklyn rackets, circa 70s and 80s, often through the bloodshot eyes of Dominick Montiglio, Gaggi’s nephew, and bolstered by an avalanche of investigative research. From the innards of a Mafia street crew, to the entrails of an auto-theft ring, to the autopsy of Demeo’s whack-tastic dismemberment routine (a.k,a. “The Gemini Method”), there’s so much to digest, if you can stomach the body count.

Locations of interest: The Gemini Lounge on Flatlands Avenue; Bath Beach (Multiple… show more.