Church of Satan Fiction Reading List
Explore the Church of Satan's curated fiction reading list featuring books on Satanism, dark themes, and occult literature. Discover must-read titles for enthusiasts of esoteric and provocative fiction.
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A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Set in New Orleans, the protagonist is nearly arrested for being a suspicious character and encounters many unfortunate events.
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Geek Love
by Katherine Dunn
Aloysious and Lillian Binewski, proprietors of a traveling carnival, attempt to reduce overhead by breeding their own freak show, with tragic results
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Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s (LOA #94)
by Robert Polito
Presents six early classics of American noir fiction: James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us, Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man, and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They'. A companion volume collects works of the 1950s. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell
by Nathanael West
A Cool Million (1934) subtitled "The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin", is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression and is written in a bracing, mock-heroic style that has lost none of its wit or power. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), West's first work, was described by one delighted critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatalogical adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan Horse."
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The King in Yellow
by Robert W. Chambers
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. "Notes From Underground," published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing: it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in "Crime And Punishment," "The Idiot," and "The Brothers Karamazov." And it remains to this day one of the most searingly honest and universal testaments to human despair ever penned. "The political cataclysms and cultural revolutions of our century...confirm the status of "Notes from Underground" as one of the most sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of European fiction."-from the Introduction by Donald Fanger
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Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward
by Horatio Alger
From the 1860's through the 1890s, Horatio Alger wrote hundreds of novels to teach young boys the merits of honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in the face of adversity. As Carl Bode points out in his introduction, Horatio Alger filled a void in American literature and met scant competition both in the nature and the number of his works. Like his heroes, Alger rose to the top by chance, coincidence, and hard work. The hero of Ragged Dick is a veritable "diamond in the rough"—as innately virtuous as he is streetwise and cocky. Immediately popular with young readers, the novel also appealed to parents, who repsonded to its colorful espousal of the Protestant ethic. Struggling Upward, published nearly thirty years later, followed the same time-tested formulas, and despite critical indifference it, too, had mass appeal. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Island of Dr. Moreau
by H. G. Wells
Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title—offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords. This edition of The Island of Dr. Moreau includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by Elisabeth Engstrom. After a collision between two ships in rough seas, a "private gentlemen"--the wreck's sole survivor--languished for eight days under a merciless sun. With neither food to eat nor water to drink, death seemed a certainty. But miraculously, Edward Prendick survived. Yet what he was to encounter in the days ahead was more horrible and terrifying than any death he could ever have imagined. For the island on which he landed was the home of the infamous Dr. Moreau. Exiled from England because of his gruesome experiments in vivisection, Moreau has taken up residence in this remote paradise in order to continue his work. His goal: To create a new, superior race of beings! His legacy, however, would prove to be a nightmare beyond comprehension...
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne
For use in schools and libraries only. A nineteenth-century novel of science fiction tells of adventures beneath the sea
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The Magic Christian
by Terry Southern
Guy Grand is an eccentric billionaire-the last of the big spenders-determined to create disorder in the material world and willing to spare no expense to do it.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The passionate love of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff mirrors the powerful moods of the Yorkshire moors.
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The Sea Wolf
by Jack London
The Sea Wolf is Jack London’s powerful and gripping saga of Humphrey Van Weyden, captured by a seal-hunting ship and now an unwilling sailor under its dreaded captain, Wolf Larsen. The men who sailed with Larsen were treacherous outcasts, but the captain himself was the legendary Sea Wolf–a violent brute of a man. Jack London was a worshipper of the strong and virtuous hero, and a firm believer in the inevitable triumph of good. The master storyteller nowhere demonstrates this theme more vividly than in this classic American tale of peril and adventure, good and evil.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
The inhabitants of the Rochester house wield a strange power over their neighbors. The inhabitants of the Rochester house wield a strange power over their neighbors.
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Plays by George Bernard Shaw
by Bernard Shaw
These four classic plays by the great playwright satirize society, military heroism, marriage, and the pursuit of man by woman. Includes "Mrs. Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida," and "Man and Superman," along with a new Introduction.
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The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus
by Cornell Woolrich
Including the complete novels "I Married a Dead Man" and "Waltz into Darkness" plus "Rear Window" and four other short stories, "The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus" provides a thrilling collection of classic works from the quintessential master of noir fiction.
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Great Weird Tales
by S. T. Joshi
14 spellbinding tales, including "The Sin Eater," by Fiona McLeod, "The Eye Above the Mantel," by Frank Belknap Long, as well as renowned works by R. H. Barlow, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, W. C. Morrow and eight other masters of the genre.
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Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin
Young wife Rosemary Woodhouse is drawn into a nightmare when she is selected by a coven to bear the son of Satan.
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The Complete Poetry of John Milton
by John Milton
The first complete annotated edition of Milton's poetry available in a one-volume paperback. The text is established from original sources, with collations of all known manuscripts, chronology and verbal variants recorded. Works in Latin, Greek and Italian are included with new literal translations.
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Ghost and Horror Stories
by Ambrose Bierce
Twenty-four grotesque horror tales written by Ambrose Bierce, the nineteenth-century journalist known for his cynicism
