100 books like The Passion

Lemebel was a courageous and flamboyant activist during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Having lived in Chile myself, I think this book captures the erotic Chilean soul in all its humor, grief, and idealism at an important historical moment. The hopelessly romantic and delightfully ironic seamstress/protagonist Queen of the Corner lives on a rooftop in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios and hosts discussion groups by local leftist students who keep leaving behind really heavy boxes, ostensibly full of books, as they prepare a vague plan that will have enormous implications. The group’s ringleader Carlos is a charmer ala Che Guevara, and the Queen is soon head over heels in love as a friendship and a tender unrequited love affair begins. A story of remarkable humanism that mixes the erotic with revolution.

The novel’s prose is breathtaking. Jackson tells us from the start that Hill House is not sane and that sets the tone for the unraveling of the other characters’ minds.

For me, one of the best things about the novel is that it gives the reader space to create their own horrors. Nothing is explicitly stated and that makes it all the more frightening. Add to that an unreliable narrator and this novel captured my mind from the moment I read it. 

A book I’d wanted to read for a long time, but it wasn’t until later in life I was able to get it. When I was just on the early stages of my writing career, my now longtime friend, Marty, said he had a spare copy of Cabal laying around and offered to send it to me. Marty was my writing mentor at the time as he’d been writing horror for many years previous, and his work is inspiring. So, knowing I was getting a book in the mail from my mentor, to whom I hadn’t met in person yet, was very exciting. The book itself was a tired secondhand copy (which I was told it was) yet this gave it more special meaning. Even the cover was a little torn and it was a pocket edition. So, I sat back with this little book, which I still have as… show more.

The first in a trilogy from vastly underrated author Susan Price. This is on the surface a charming kids’ book, but moved me more and has haunted me for longer than most 'adult' novels (and is also remarkably dark.) Set in a fairy-tale some-when, somewhere in a blizzard-scoured kingdom, the young witch Chingis seeks to rescue a czarevitch from the tower in which he's imprisoned.
When I first read this book, I cried publicly on a train, it got to me so much. I'm envious of Price's skill at using simple language so exquisitely to conjure vivid, jewel-toned worlds and invoke both deep dread and soaring joy. It's a deceptively simple little tale of freedom, choice, destiny, privilege, responsibility, and love.

I read this tiny collection of stories after chatting to the author on social media, and it's what got me reading again after two years of barely reading a thing.

Nostalgic, atmospheric, and vivid, these stories are sometimes stomach-churningly brutal. Even though a lot of them deal with the supernatural, it's the most mundane of situations that are the most anxiety-inducing. They took me right back to my own Northern childhood, with all the mystery, boredom, wonder, and terror it entailed. A very emotional collection with as much heart as heartbreak, wrapped up in chiming prose.

I return to this dark, sensual collection of Angela Carter stories most autumns, often through audio book. While these are not technically romance stories, they’re what I call romance-adjacent: fairy tales centered on love and passion—and their dangers—with gorgeous language and twists that subvert your expectations.

My favorite story here is “In the Company of Wolves,” but really that’s like choosing a favorite child.

This book is probably the single most praised underground gay novel of my generation, and deservedly so. It’s so many things—beautiful writing, an old west setting in all its ugliness and adventure and hope, and a highly original narrative voice in the bisexual native orphan, Shed, who is being raised in a bordello. All the characters are well-drawn and as odd as the narrator, and the erotic journey, if I can call it that, is one of the most original, thought-provoking, and beautiful expressions of the possibilities of queer I’ve ever encountered. Spanbauer has helped me to write more skillfully about class and race and sexuality and how they are everywhere and how they can warp—and sometimes, oftentimes—set people free. 

The Wild Boys is at once dystopian and utopian, featuring a band of boys who’ve gone rogue and have perfected strange and poetically beautiful sex rites which allow them to ritually and meditatively conjure or reproduce more wild boy offspring. At once science fiction and fantastical in its imaginative scope, it is also, like all Burroughs’s work, a profound exploration of social control, the excesses and assumptions inherent in state and religious terror, and the sexual and erotic oppression and misunderstanding that is the real enemy of freedom. Fearless and experimental, Burroughs inspires me to be bold, blunt, and not afraid to disturb or offend in exploring the poetic and erotic relationships between all manner of ideas.

I love this book for its science fiction and magical realism. This generational saga of a small town on a recently terraformed Mars is both a love letter to and an evolution on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

McDonald wanted to capture the frontier magic of a whole new world in a way that wasn’t just moving the American West to space, and in the end he breathes new life into one of the oldest tropes of SF, the colony story.

Charming, fantastical, and witty, it shares its source material’s deep humanism even in the face of cynical realism. It may very well be my favorite novel of all time, and luckily for all of us, there’s an equally great sort of sequel, Ares Express.

Natsuki is an outsider to polite Japanese society. She is content with an asexual-by-design marriage and comfortable questioning the norms and expectations of marriage and babies. She also has an alien called Piyyut living in her backpack, which happens to be a talking plush hedgehog.

Wherever you think this bizarre, bonkers novel is going, it goes even further–I read the final pages with my jaw basically detached.