Here are 56 books that The Cipher fans have personally recommended if you like
The Cipher.
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Why me / this list? Well, as a kid of parents whose cities were blitzed, I spent my early years in a tiny English village, eventually walking to school through the graveyard of a 12th-century church. We moved to Canada when I was eight, and a whole new history bloomed – Iroquois and coureur de bois were magnetic! As I evolved into a voracious reader, Lee, Orwell, and Vonnegut got me into the complexity of people. Now I’m compelled to read (and write) stories centered on how experiences shape us as individuals, and as societies.
P.S. Shortly after my departure, archeologists found Roman ruins under that tiny English village.
Published just two days after World War II was declared in Europe in 1939, and two years before the United States would enter the conflict, Dalton Trumbo’s powerfully emotional story centering on horribly wounded American World War I soldier Joe Bonham sparked controversy for its anti-war stance, while also winning the 1939 National Book Award for Most Original Book.
Apparently inspired by an article Trumbo had read about the Prince of Wales paying an emotional visit to Curley Christian, a Canadian soldier who’d survived the loss of all four limbs at the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge. Johnny Got His Gun is simply a gut-wrenching read that took me to places no one should really go.
Let’s just say I was a different 14-year-old the day I closed its covers and sat thinking for a very, very long time.
“Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury accounting to eloquence.”—The New York Times
This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered—not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. . . . This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome . . . but so is war.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’ve always admired epistolary novels—stories told in the form of diaries, letters, or other mass media. They seem so real and so much more believable than plain narratives. When dealing with fantastic subjects, like paranormal phenomena, any technique that can draw the weird back into the real world helps me become more invested as a reader. It’s a quality I’ve also tried to capture as a horror writer. Moreover, the epistolary format pairs well with unreliable narrators, often filtering stories so as to make them more ambiguous and disturbing. From the many epistolary works I’ve read over the years, here are my picks for the most compelling—and creepy.
This phantasmagorical oral history unfolds during one of my favorite time periods, the psychedelic late 60s/early 70s. It also fuses two of my favorite sub-genres, folk horror and haunted houses.
I could easily visualize the setting and the different characters as I read their statements and tried to piece together the reality of what happened during the band’s infamous time at Wylding Hall.
After the tragic and mysterious death of one of their founding members, the young musicians in a British acid-folk band hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with its own dark secrets. There they record the classic album that will make their reputation but at a terrifying cost, when Julian Blake, their lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen again. Now, years later, each of the surviving musicians, their friends and lovers (including a psychic, a photographer, and the band s manager) meets with a young documentary filmmaker to tell his or her own version…
I've been a student of horror since my mother first sat me down in front of the TV to watch the old monster movies with her. It's a genre for the outsiders, the underdogs, which I've certainly felt at several points throughout my life. Good horror is both an escape and a vessel to affect change in the world. Many people in my life believe horror is just boobs and blood, so I feel like it's my job to educate them. This is why I started hosting my horror movie nights, which later developed into my first cookbook. Horror is a major part of my life and I hope it gets the appreciation it deserves.
It is a beautifully gruesome story about love, desire, and greed. Though I found it to be absolutely frightening, I also found it strangely comforting.
As a young gay man in the early 00s, as the AIDS epidemic was slowing down a bit, Barker's depiction of sexuality and openness was quite refreshing. I can only imagine what it must have been like reading this story for the first time as a gay man in the 1980s.
The classic tale of supernatural obsession from the critically acclaimed master of darkness—and the inspiration for the cult classic film Hellraiser
From his scores of short stories, bestselling novels, and major motion pictures, no one comes close to the vivid imagination and unique terrors provided by Clive Barker. The Hellbound Heart is one of Barker’s best—a nerve-shattering novella about the human heart and all the great terrors and ecstasies within its endless domain. It is about greed and love, desire and death, life and captivity, bells and blood. It is one of the most frightening stories you are likely to…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I like to create silly, fun things. This is not the kind of content I consume. If something makes me feel bad, I generally like it; if it is also beautiful, I will like it a lot. It is through the generosity of the Shepherd team that I was allowed to flip a promo for a gay dad comic into a way for me to peer pressure you into consuming media that will make you feel bad. Consider this list an aperitif for the feel-goodness of Dream Daddy, a delicate shot glass of cyanide after a hearty meal. Bon appetit!
Cronenberg’s 1996 movie adaptation (not the one that won many Oscars and is bad) captures Ballard’s sensual mechanical fetishism and apocalyptic consumerism perfectly. It is a 120-minute-long sex scene in a carousel of mangled metal. It is probably the best adaptation of prose to film I can think of, which is bolstered by the sheer strength of the book itself. Crash (again, not the 2006 one, the car crash sex one) is by far Cronenberg’s horniest feature, and that’s saying something. Uh. I didn’t mean to just talk about the movie. I should probably talk about the book. The book is very good. I’m deathly afraid of car accidents, and reading about them through Ballard’s dreamy, eroticized lens is a capital-E Experience. Truly one of my favorites.
The definitive cult, post-modern novel - a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism - reissued with a new introduction from Zadie Smith.
When Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of auto-erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash - a head-on…
During my 45 years of practicing law, I've learned that everyone has flaws, but we all still struggle to be recognized and accepted. I always ask my law clients why things have gone sideways because understanding the personalities involved and why they are in conflict is essential. This depth of understanding is equally necessary in the process of writing believable fiction. Characters and their conflicts must resonate with the reader. For me, as a writer, this is the essential challenge for writing good fiction. I can have imaginary conversations with any of my characters because they become very real personalities in my mind.
Todd Bowden, a middle-class boy, has everything good going for him until he meets Kurt Dussander, a man who was the pure embodiment of evil during Hitler’s Nazi regime, now living in America under the assumed name, Arthur Denker. Todd figures out who “Arthur Denker” is from crime magazines his father had kept in a trunk in the garage.
Todd’s curiosity for violence rises to the surface. He is increasingly drawn down into darkness, blackmailing Mr. Dussander to tell him what went on in the concentration camps.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s timeless coming-of-age novella, Apt Pupil—published in his 1982 story collection Different Seasons and made into a 1998 Tristar movie starring Ian McKellan and Brad Renfro—now available for the first time as a standalone publication.
If you don’t believe in the existence of evil, you have a lot to learn.
Todd Bowden is an apt pupil. Good grades, good family, a paper route. But he is about to meet a different kind of teacher, Mr. Dussander, and to learn all about Dussander’s dark and deadly past…a decades-old manhunt Dussander has escaped to this…
Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by scary movies, creature features, and books that tell tales of the strange and supernatural. Years later, my own books explored those things that scare us, from monsters of the deep and the ways we die to the mythology of blood. Research for those books led me into realms that explained why we fear the things we do. Many of those fears are found in horror novels, which provide an endless source of fright, release, and entertainment within their haunting pages. I can’t think of any other genre of writing that takes its readers on such a joyously terrifying ride.
There isn’t another horror novel written in the past ten years that scratched at my brain as much as this one. Baztericca’s brilliance lies in her writing a story that no one else has thought of before. The subject matter–humans have run out of animals to eat–seems like an obvious one.
What is striking about the book is that it is told in an almost clinical fashion, observing horror with a detachment that is precise and unemotional. The plot follows one man through the routines of his life, but it’s the world in which he exists that haunts you. By the time I finished, it was easy to imagine the world of “Tender Is The Flesh” becoming all too real.
It all happened so quickly. First, animals became infected with the virus and their meat became poisonous. Then governments initiated the Transition. Now, 'special meat' - human meat - is legal.
Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans - only no one calls them that. He works with numbers, consignments, processing. One day, he's given a gift to seal a deal: a specimen of the finest quality. He leaves her in his barn, tied up, a problem to be disposed of later.
But she haunts Marcos. Her trembling body, and watchful gaze, seem to understand. And soon, he becomes…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Although I’m an academic by training, I secretly struggle with heavy nonfiction tomes (think: massive histories of long-ago countries). I start reading these with the best intentions but quickly get sleepy, bored, or both, setting them aside and instead picking up a novel, which I’ll immediately devour. That’s why I love memoiristic, hybrid work so much: writing that pairs the intimacy of fiction with the information buffet of nonfiction, where you learn without realizing you’re learning. These books feel like a conversation with a close friend who is intelligent, thought-provoking, and passionate about various subjects—what could be better than that?
I read Olivia Laing’s bookat the height of my own loneliness: isolated, in lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part memoir, part art history, part cultural criticism, the book managed to be both intimate and expansive—just what I needed as I sat by myself in front of a computer, anxiously refreshing virus graphs.
I became absorbed by the lives of Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, artists I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and by the various aspects of loneliness I’d never previously considered. It’s the perfect example of the type of hybrid writing that I find truly magical.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
#1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings
Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub
A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began…
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctlyeither. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so specific that the unspoken point is all too clear: what’s broken is much bigger than any of these individual people or things.
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 An NPR Best Book of 2021 An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021 A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021
In Hoarders, Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader…
I respond to the darkness and the darkness responds to me. Before writing anything creative, I was studying to be a sociologist. I didn’t get there but all those peculiarities that criminology, deviant behavior, and symbolic interactionism (don’t get me started on Foucault or else we’ll be here all day) stuck with me. I won’t say I don’t care about characters but I’m more interested in stories that examine a character in relation to their status and situation within society. So yeah, lots of poverty, loneliness, and identity issues.
Matthew Revert and I go way back. He’s a true polymath in that he’s a designer, musician, and also the author of multiple novels and collections. My favorite of his is Basal Ganglia, a novel about two lovers that live in this insane pillow fort. There’s a movie, I think it’s called Dave Builds a Maze, that kind of taps into the full-flung dive into implausibility to explore personal space and intimacies but of course, Revert’s just hits different.
Basal Ganglia casts an unsettling spell, but one that in its aphoristic intensity and lightning-flash insights into human loneliness and connection, achieves a genuine empathic wisdom." - SERGIO DE LA PAVA, author of A Naked Singularity
"Matthew Revert is one of the visionaries. What else can you say?" - SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, author of Hill William and Crapalachia
As teenagers, two lovers, Rollo and Ingrid, escape the world as it is known to live underground in a sprawling pillow fort that mirrors the structure of the human brain. Construction of the fort takes 25 years and once complete, their life exists…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I respond to the darkness and the darkness responds to me. Before writing anything creative, I was studying to be a sociologist. I didn’t get there but all those peculiarities that criminology, deviant behavior, and symbolic interactionism (don’t get me started on Foucault or else we’ll be here all day) stuck with me. I won’t say I don’t care about characters but I’m more interested in stories that examine a character in relation to their status and situation within society. So yeah, lots of poverty, loneliness, and identity issues.
A polarizing book for sure, Ballard was an early influence of mine, probably because I’ve always viewed reality from behind a sociological lens and Ballard famously (or infamously?) tackled increasingly dire sociological topics like technology, isolation, and repression. In High-Rise, which just might be his best novel, Ballard turns a high-rise apartment block into ground zero of a class war wherein the floors themselves are demarcated and stratified according to property values, which leads to all kinds of scenes readers get to tear apart and inspect like a social scientist.
"Harsh and ingenious! High Rise is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind." —Martin Amis, New Statesman
When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on “enemy” floors. In this visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as once-peaceful residents, driven by primal urges, re-create a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.
