Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Five top novels with fascinating protagonists who would never be called “good guys”

Richard Kadrey is the author of many stories and novels, including the Sandman Slim series. At Tor.com he tagged five books about awful, awful people, including:
The Narrator in Fight Club

While Fight Club isn’t specifically a fantasy novel, its off-kilter worldview, created by the narrator’s inability to sleep, places it in a realm that’s not entirely our own world. Fight Club tells the story of an unnamed insomniac who, after a three sleepless weeks, begins attending disease support groups because other people’s suffering helps ease own. When the support groups lose their effectiveness, he runs into a mysterious, charismatic man named Tyler Durden. They create a secret underground fighting society together which is also a recruiting center for Tyler’s anarchist master plan to, basically, destroy all modern consumer-oriented society. The core of the book is the often strained relationship between the narrator and Tyler. It’s a tricky one because as the story proceeds, we discover that our innocent narrator isn’t nearly as innocent as he first appeared. Author Chuck Palahniuk uses dark satire to test our ability to empathize with a set of interesting, but truly screwed up characters.
Read about another book on the list.

Fight Club is among Chris Moss's top 19 books on how to be a man, E. Lockhart's seven favorite suspense novels, Joel Cunningham's top five books short enough to polish off in an afternoon, but deep enough to keep you thinking long into the night, Kathryn Williams's eight craziest unreliable narrators in fiction, Jessica Soffer's ten best book endings, Sebastian Beaumont's top ten books about psychological journeys, and Pauline Melville's top ten revolutionary tales.

--Marshal Zeringue