100 Books Like Skagboys

In this classic, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, famously wakes up one morning to discover that he is a gigantic vermin.

Interpretations of the book range from Kafka trying to say that modern life reduces us all to being bugs, to the idea that Kafka was really writing about art, and how, since the artist cannot ever be understood, he might as well be an insect.

I read it as Kafka's attempt to reconcile two philosophies - that of Nietzsche, who claimed that the human will is a force that leads to happiness, and that of Schopenhauer, who claimed that the will is just about survival.

In Kafka's hands, metamorphosis is both life-affirming and life-denying. 

Tender Branson, the last survivor of the Creedish Church cult, has hijacked an airplane, which is flying on autopilot. His mission now is to dictate his life story onto its black box before the plane crashes.

Survivor is an innovative and erudite social commentary, brimming with satirical observations. Amongst the targets for its irreverent dark humour are death, The Bible, and suicide hotlines. In this reader’s opinion, Survivor is a work of undoubted genius, and one of the author’s best novels.

These interlinked short stories are set in ‘The Holler’; an impoverished part of Knockemstiff, an Ohioan backwater. The book’s lengthy timeline (mid-60s – late 90s) allows the reader to revisit the same people at different stages in their lives. This compelling aspect lends the compilation a cohesion that is so often lacking in short story collections. 

The grubby setting, visceral prose, and dark humour are a potent combination. I would not hesitate in recommending these authentic tales of the underclass.

Set during WWI, the story vacillates between Kent and German and British East Africa. There are a host of colourful and caricatured characters. An Ice-Cream War’s motif is the absurdness of war. Its author is unwavering in presenting the East African campaign as utterly futile. 

The book’s grave content is laced with humour of the dark variety, in addition to occasional gruesome descriptions. This unpredictable serio-comedy’s blend of tragedy and black humour appealed to me.   

We are brought up to think of racism as a matter of individual attitudes and biases. If only it were that simple. Stuart Hall and his colleagues taught me that understanding how racism worked required much deeper thinking. First published in 1978, Policing the Crisis argued that race is a key constituent of Britain’s social and economic structures. It presented a picture of Britain in the 1970s as caught in a crisis of authority. Society was fracturing, giving rise to new authoritarianism in response. A moral panic about black crime was the surface justification for new “law and order” policies. But in a strange way, the country was using black people to work through its own anxieties. This was Thatcherism in embryo. The same processes continue to shape our lives today. There is no better book on how politics in Britain has functioned in the last fifty years.

This book should be compulsory reading in every Secondary School–its message is more important today than ever. 

Andrea Dworkin was the archetypal American radical feminist, and over the years, I have come to really value her ungarnished message about men, power, and male sexuality. If you’ve ever gotten off to porn, then read this book because it is a definite libido shrinker.

Dworkin’s hard-edged radical feminism went out of fashion during the Thatcherite eighties, but it is back in style today, and this book shows why. Dworkin wrote some compelling, in-your-face works, but this book probably ranks No.1 among them. I defy you to read her explicit descriptions of sexual acts done to women by men and find them sexually arousing. If you do, then get some help. 

This is the first book in the Skelfs series by Doug Johnstone. A Dark Matter introduces us to Dorothy, Jenny, and Hannah, three generations of women who run a funeral home and a private investigator business in Edinburgh. Each chapter is from the perspective of one of the three central characters and gives the reader a different take on what is happening. The crime elements of the story keep you guessing and make you want to read on, however these are interspersed with moments of introspection from the characters who meditate on issues such as science versus faith and the different ways people deal with grief. It is both uplifting and grim all at the same time as well as being darkly humorous, and it takes you to the parts of Edinburgh that the tourists don’t go to.

None of Guthrie’s characters are anyone you want to get on the wrong side of. Pearce, an ex-con and Edinburgh hard man, may be his most dangerous creation. Guthrie’s black humor is fully displayed in this novel of a man out for blood and bound to get it in ever more inventive ways.

The Scottish writer Guthrie is in danger of falling into obscurity, but several of his other evangelists and I are intent on not letting that happen. This book is a good place to start with his work; if you like it, you will have a world of dark pleasures waiting in his other books.

Atkinson is a Scottish author who blends the murder mystery genre with superb writing. The result is startling, and not quite like anything we’ve seen before. As a murder mystery, this novel has it all. Set in Edinburgh, it’s rich with suspense, wild plot twists, a cast of truly memorable and unruly characters who are all, mostly unbeknownst to them, in an elaborate dance with one another. Atkinson tantalizes us with wicked secrets until the very last page. Darkly comic humor permeates throughout, and as we aficionados of dark humor know, it is the flip side of deep empathy for poor struggling, suffering humanity. Her rendering of a man dying from a blow to the head, told from the point of view of the victim in the last seconds of his life, could not have been written better by James Joyce himself.

I grew up in rural Ireland, so not exactly the gritty urban Scotland of Welsh’s novel, but the first thing that struck me about the book was its savage, semi-feral, intensely real Scottish dialect. I’d never seen anything quite like it in print.

The prose feels almost illegal, a ne’er-do-well that has simply decided to break into the publishing house and force its way onto the page without anyone’s permission. I didn’t consciously plan to steal this technique for my own novel, but how could I not endorse it?

Welsh has written more explicitly psychedelic works, but this book remains for me his masterwork, underscoring how, in many ways, his protagonist Renton’s life is at its weirdest when he tries to get sober.