Favorite Books List

Here is a list of my favorite literary works. The list is not complete and is totally subjective in that the books listed are my personal favorites - the books that I go back to for whatever reason and read again and again. This is NOT a list of books I think have the most literary merit, this IS a list of books I have enjoyed reading the most for whatever reason. My friend and peer, Vincenzo Bilof has done a similar list you may find of interest here, in response to a challenge I made to him. This, of course, being my response to said challenge. 

My Favorite Books (to date)

Fiction (Novels)

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

Big Sur – Jack Kerouac

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Infinite jest – David Foster Wallace

The Killer – Colin Wilson

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson

The Stranger – Albert Camus

Redemption Falls – Joseph O’Connor

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Doystevsky

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts

Bliss – Peter Carey

Killer on the Road – James Ellroy

Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon – Thomas Harris

David Morrell – First Blood

Surfacing – Margaret Atwood

The Walking Drum – Louis L’amour

Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck

Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

The Shipping News – Annie Proulx

In My Father’s Den – Maurice Gee

In the Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

The Novel – James Michener

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag – Robert A Heinlein

The Girls He Adored – Jonathan Nasaw

Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski

Zombie – Joyce Carol Oates

Dandelion Wine, The October Country – Ray Bradbury

The End of the Night – John D Macdonald

Fiction (Horror)

Survivor – J.F. Gonzalez

The Backwoods – Edward Lee

The Face That Must Die – Ramsey Campbell

Exquisite Corpse – Poppy Z Brite

This Symbiotic Fascination – Charlee Jacob

Mystery Walk, Baal – Robert McCammon

The Shining, IT, The Dead Zone, The Stand – Stephen King

Ghost Story – Peter Straub

Psycho, American Gothic – Robert Bloch

Rats, Lair, Domain, The Fog – James Herbert

Slob – Rex Miller

Spawn – Shaun Hutson

Telekiller – John Warwick

The Lost – Jack Ketchum

Children of the Night, Carrion Comfort – Dan Simmons

Flesh and Blood, Family Portrait – Graham Masterton

Futile Efforts – Thomas Piccirilli

The Amityville Horror – Jay Anson

The Exorcist – William Peter Blatty

Short Story Collections

By Bizarre Hands – Joe R. Lansdale

The Complete Stories – Flannery O’Connor

Blue World – Robert McCammon

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe

Night Shift – Stephen King

Books of Blood 1-3 – Clive Barker

A Peaceable Kingdom – Jack Ketchum

The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Tales of Ordinary Madness – Charles Bukowski

Collected Stories, The Fat Man in History – Peter Carey

The Nightmare Chronicles – Douglas Clegg

Ray Bradbury Stories (Vol 1 and 2) – Ray Bradbury

Red Dreams – Dennis Etchison

Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader – Charles Bukowski

20^th Century Ghosts – Joe Hill

The Collection – Bentley Little

Anthologies

Cutting Edge – Ed. Dennis Etchison

Prime Evil – Ed. Douglas E Winter

Psycho-paths – Ed. Robert Bloch

Psychos – Ed. John Skipp

999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense – Ed. Al Sarrantonio

Poetry

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake

Selected Poems – Carl Sandburg

Complete Works, Prufrock & Other Observations, Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot

The Cantos – Ezra Pound

Greed – Ai

The Monkey’s Mask – Dorothy Porter

Love is a Dog from Hell, Mockingbird Wish me Luck – Charles Bukowski

The Divine Comedy – Dante Aligheri

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

Ring of Bone – Lew Welch

The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud

A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud

The Flowers of  Evil – Charles Baudelaire

Cap and Bells – Francis Webb

And there you have it - my list, not by any means complete or chronological, just what it is. This will evolve.