There are a lot of novels I’ve discovered, either by accident at the suggestion of others, that I think deserve a wider audience. Give these books a read, and give them some love!

LIVES OF THE MONSTER DOGS by Kirsten Bakis
I found a used paperback copy of this in a little bookstore in Greenwich Village, and was intrigued enough by the cover to take it home. Best decision ever. As it turned out, this was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, so it’s not exactly unknown, but I never hear it mentioned. Isolated deep in a forest compound, a cruel but brilliant surgeon creates a race of monster dogs. Through Island of Dr. Moreau style experimentation, surgical butchery, and genetic engineering, the dogs gain human intelligence, the ability to speak and walk on their hind legs, even prosthetic hands. When the dogs overthrow their masters and make their way to New York City, they are at first the talk of the town. And then they are not. This entire novel is steeped in an at times unbearable melancholy, yet I couldn’t put it down. A true original.

THE DOLPHIN PEOPLE by Torsten Krol
A group of Germans near the end of World War II, enroute to a remote jungle outpost, crash land in the Amazon jungle and are taken in by a stone-age tribe. Whatever you think happens next based on that beginning, I guarantee you are wrong. This is the damnedest fever dream of a book, chock full of hallucinatory passages, nazi proselytizing, and a bravura sequence involving genital surgery that had me shaking my head in wonder. Pure, unadulterated lunacy of the finest kind. Look, just read this book and see for yourself.

TENDER MORSELS by Margo Lanagan
The very first piece of fiction by Margo Lanagan that I read was the short story “Singing My Sister Down“. If you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this and go find it online, I’ll be here when you get back. It’s a revelation. Lanagan has several collections of short stories, all of them excellent. Her novel The Brides of Rollrock Island is a stunning take on the selkie myth. But I digress. Tender Morsels tells the story of a young woman (a girl, really) who escapes her brutal life in a small village by living in her own personal fantasy world, where evil can’t reach her. That’s the bare bones, but it doesn’t come close to describing the wonders Lanagan achieves here. She writes about tough subjects like rape, abortion, and even quasi-beastiality in the heightened, evocative language of fairytales, walking a tightrope I think few authors could pull off. Lanagan is one of our very best writers, and Tender Morsels is one of my favorite novels ever.

DR. RAT by Willaim Kotzwinkle
In some circles, William Kotzwinkle may be best known as the author of the E.T. novelization. For others, it’s his novel The Fan Man, or his short story collection Elephant Bangs Train. Not me. For my money, his best work, his crowning glory, is the batshit crazy Dr. Rat, the story of the world-wide uprising of animals against humans, narrated by an insane laboratory rat. Part sustained howl against animal experimentation and the subjugation of animals by people, part war story as whales, elephants, and all the creatures of the wild go on the attack, and all of it filtered through Dr. Rat’s extraordinarily skewed intelligence. One of the best examples of an unreliable narrator I’ve ever read. There are moments here where Kotzwinkle’s language is positively incandescent.