Comments on: I'm looking for a list of cult books.

Question: I'm looking for a list of cult books.

JPowers — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:02:11 -0800

I'm looking for a list of cult books. In other words, books that have acquired a highly devoted but relatively small group of fans.

For example, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind".

And I'm not necessarily against the idea of books that were, at one time, quite popular amongst a large number of people, but nothing that has been on any best seller lists in the past decade or so.

Both complied lists and personal recommendations welcome.

Fiction and non-fiction, but nothing terribly technical (for example, I don't want to read what most scientists consider the best book on string theory ever written, but something like THE TIPPING POINT would be great).

By: sneakin

sneakin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:05:19 -0800

Looks like this book would be helpful. Granted it's $105. Then again it's table of contents seems to be a listing of "classic cult fiction:"

# Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans
# Animal Farm, George Orwell
# Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins
# Axel, Philippe Auguste Villiers de Lísle-Adam
# Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Richard Farina
# The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
# Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
# A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
# The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
# Catch-22, Joseph Heller
# A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
# The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
# Demian, Hermann Hesse
# Dune, Frank Herbert
# Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
# The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
# Frankenstein, or the Modern Promethus, Mary Shelley
# The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
# The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
# The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson
# Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
# Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
# Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
# Lord of the Flies, William Golding
# Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
# Lost Horizon, James Hilton
# Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
# One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
# On the Road, Jack Kerouac
# The Outsider, Colin Wilson
# The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
# Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
# Reneé, Francois-Reneé de Chateaubriand
# A Separate Peace, John Knowles
# Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
# Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, Kurt Vonnegut
# The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
# The Stand, Stephen King
# Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
# The Stranger, Albert Camus
# Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
# The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
# The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda
# This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
# Time and Again, Jack Finney
# Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan
# 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
# Walden II, B. F. Skinner
# Warlock, Oakley Hall
# Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

By: sneakin

sneakin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:06:21 -0800

Oops! Didn't mean to post the whole dang thing. Should've previewed that. Sorry, gang.

By: Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:06:49 -0800

Anything by Thomas Pynchon.

By: wfrgms

wfrgms — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:07:43 -0800

This is so subjective that I'm sure this falls under chat filter, but if you want to build your own list you could start by narrowing down your interests. The wiki on Cult following has a stub for "cult fiction."

By: DrSkrud

DrSkrud — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:16:20 -0800

I'd recommend "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester... It still has a strong, devoted group of fans, but hasn't really been popular in years.

By: sourwookie

sourwookie — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:19:02 -0800

Robert Anton Wilson: "The Illuminati Trilogy" and "Schroedinger's Cat"
Back Issues of National Lampoon and Mondo 2000

By: elendil71

elendil71 — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:21:47 -0800

Anything by Cordwainer Smith aka Dr. Paul Linebarger. Some of the best classic science fiction out there.

Some of his works are available online, but a compendium is available The Rediscovery of Man. Highly recommended.

By: fire&wings

fire&wings — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:23:10 -0800

"The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil.

By: Slarty Bartfast

Slarty Bartfast — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:24:15 -0800

Anything by H.P. Lovecraft

By: box

box — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:26:01 -0800

Writers go in and out of fashion. When Carson McCullers first came out, she was huge. Then, for years, she wasn't read or taught much. Now, she seems to be on a bit of a come-up. Robert James Waller's first book was super-duper-popular. His next book was about as popular as asbestos dust. Erskine Caldwell used to be huge, but when's the last time you heard the name Erskine Caldwell? I could go on like this.

All that said, here are a few books which have small-but-devoted followings:
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey
Behold a Pale Horse, William Cooper
The Turner Diaries, William Pearce

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:26:23 -0800

"Dianetics".

By: drezdn

drezdn — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:26:56 -0800

Almost anything by Steve Erickson ("The Sea Came in at Midnight","Tours of the Black Clock", etc.).

By: ikkyu2

ikkyu2 — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:29:02 -0800

Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren has sold over one million copies, far more than all the rest of his books together; in addition to the hard-core speculative fiction readers who make up his core audience, I have met Dhalgren readers who were punks, hippies, feminists, goths, druggies, surrealists, postmodernists, poets, professors, anti-narrativists, atheists, and the occasional suburban Midwestern housewife who ran across a copy and found it to be the catalyst that changed her life. I occasionally recommend it on these threads but as far as I know no one has ever read it because of that.

By: tkolar

tkolar — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:31:10 -0800

Silverlock by John Myers Myers. For literature geeks.

By: hototogisu

hototogisu — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:10:45 -0800

I second or third someone's recommendation of Dhalgren here every chance I get (and it usually seems to be ikkyu2's at that).

I would also recommend Motorman, by David Ohle.

By: scody

scody — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:14:46 -0800

Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake both have small (very small, in the case of the Wake) but extremely devoted followings. Personally, I worship and adore Ulysses above all other works of literature (though a good chunk of Shakespeare comes a close second), and have never been able to get more that a few pages through Finnegans Wake.

By: milarepa

milarepa — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:21:46 -0800

I definitely recommend "Against Nature" by Huysmans. It's basically the blueprint for all decadent novels, and has a devoted following because of it. Huysmans' book "La-Bas" is also wicked good and is highly regarded in smaller circles.

"The Voyeur" by Robbe-Grillet is also the type of book you're looking for, I think. The people who read it, love it.

By: milarepa

milarepa — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:25:55 -0800

Also, listen to Scody - her taste is obviously...what's the word? It's that one known to all men. You know the one.

By: Bigfoot Mandala

Bigfoot Mandala — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:27:54 -0800

Jim Dodge, or at least Stone Junction and Fup
Gene Wolfe, esp Book of the New Sun
Wilhelm Reich
Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski
Godel, Escher, Bach
Ender's Game
Dune
The Magus

By: gauchodaspampas

gauchodaspampas — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:30:40 -0800

Any comics with any following pretty much necessarily have a cult following. Otherwise they just have no following. Or you could argue just a smaller cult following.

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:33:36 -0800

Seconding Gene Wolfe and Alfred Bester.

Little, Big by John Crowley.

Anything by Jack Vance, Avram Davidson or James Branch Cabell. Well, I suppose there are a lot of cult fantasy authors but those authors have nice small knots of hardcore fans.

As a side note and follow up to box's post: I love how every other question in the original Trivial Pursuit is about some guy named Herman Wouk.

By: box

box — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:42:24 -0800

In the '80s edition, half the questions are about Tip O'Neill.

By: maryh

maryh — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:46:38 -0800

As far as somewhat little known/read books that ended up having a big impact on popular culture, I'd add the ReSearch titles, esp. "Incredibly Strange Films", "Modern Primitives" and "Pranks". Also "The Book of the SubGenius", every issue of Raw, and, to second Sourwookie, back issues of the National Lampoon. ("Eat My Shorts" was a direct lift from Doug Kenney, for heaven's sake.) Oh, and "Army Man", too, as long as I'm thinking of overt Simpsons' references.

Also the strange and enchanting Dictionary of the Khazars. (MeFi'd here.)

By: DarlingBri

DarlingBri — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:52:12 -0800

Seconding Ender's Game and adding Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.

If you want really esoteric, The Maple Sugar Book by Helen and Scott Nearing. They were counter-culture in the 1950s, contemporary pioneers of self-sufficient living, and actually inspired a rather romantic urban decampment on the east coast in the 50s and 60s. The book is about 20,000 times more interesting than you'd think a book about maple sugar could be, and is really about much more than that, simply by example.

It was out of print forever, and I sold my soul for a copy, but happily it went back into print from a small press on its 50th birthday.

By: fuse theorem

fuse theorem — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:06:32 -0800

Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet

By: KokuRyu

KokuRyu — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:12:37 -0800

The Complete Books of Charles Fort, by Charles Fort

By: namewithoutwords

namewithoutwords — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:19:18 -0800

fuse_theorem: not to mention Kehlog Albran's The Profit

and while I see that The Illuminati Trilogy has been mentioned, I am somewhat surprised that the Principia Discordia has not.

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:21:06 -0800

It's interesting to see where various people's tipping points are. I think The Prophet is probably vastly more popular than a "cult" book. Ender's Game and Snow Crash are modern classics of SF and thus can only really be regarded as "cult" books, in my opinion, if the whole genre is. But maybe I'm attaching too much relevance to pure obscurity.

To offer some other suggestions... I think City of Saints and Madmen is sort of a developing cult book. And then you have an author like H. Rider Haggard, who was once tremendously popular but is now read mainly by a few hardcore fans of that sort of writing.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:21:47 -0800

I was thinking of Helen and Scott Nearing as well and agree with Little Big. Also The Monkeywrench Gang, The Anarchist's Cookbook, Steal This Book, Naked Lunch, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Manwatching, Housekeeping, American Splendor, In the Skin of the Lion, Ficciones, If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, Cat's Cradle, Still Life with Woodpecker, The Things They Carried, Passages, White Noise.

My list tends towards the postmodern and/or things my folks read and/or anarchist/rural/hippie books but I'd suggest any of those as worth a read.

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:12:09 -0800

The Illuminatus Trilogy
Gravity's Rainbow
Any collection of short stories by Don Barthelme
Survivor
The Dice Man (NOTE: this has nothing to do with Andrew Dice Clay or his stage persona)
Naked Lunch
The Master and Margarita
A Confederacy of Dunces
Anything by Philip K. Dick. My personal favorites : Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Ubik, Time Out Of Joint, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
The Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (the first three books are pure gold, the last two are somewhat skippable)

By: dawson

dawson — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:26:19 -0800

Frank's World
By George Mangels

The Book of Frank (unrelated)
By Simon Black

As above, Confederacy of Dunces (not strictly 'cult' as it won the Pulitzer for fiction in '81)
By John Kennedy Toole and Ender's Game

Sugar Among the Freaks
By Lewis Nordan

Pest Control
By Bill Fitzhugh

Any fiction by Stephen Hunter, particularly Pale Horse Coming

The Rabbit Factory
By Larry Brown

sorry, I'll stop!

By: strangeleftydoublethink

strangeleftydoublethink — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:37:38 -0800

The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr by E.T.A. Hoffmann (his only novel)

By: mediareport

mediareport — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:41:40 -0800

*Definitely* C.D. Payne's self-published 1993 novel Youth in Revolt, which has a bizarre and fanatical following (it's pretty much cult-only here, but was a bestseller in the Czech Republic a few years ago). I first heard of it when a co-worker used a week's vacation to fly out for a visit with Payne. Just on the strength of his reaction to reading the book.

Now *that's* cult. Here's more from an article last August about the upcoming movie adaptation:

Payne's self-published "Youth in Revolt" became an underground sensation and garnered a youthful cult following throughout the world, leading to a series of books featuring a teenager named Nick Twisp...The novel has been published in multiple countries, staged as a play, broadcast over the radio and has been the subject of countless fan Web sites.

And more still from this 2000 article.

By: dawson

dawson — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:47:27 -0800

YES! Youth in Revolt, that is essential.

By: jeremias

jeremias — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:23:26 -0800

The Fountainhead defines cult book on many people's eyes.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss, all about the cycle of generations in American history and the future.
Future Shock and The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.
Even Cowgirls get the Blues by Tom Robbins.
Anything by Carlos Castenada (Journey to Ixtlan)

By: Kellydamnit

Kellydamnit — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:34:03 -0800

Wow... I'm shocked by how many "cult" books everyone's listed that I was assigned to read in either high school or college! (granted, I was an English major)

Anyhoo... I'll toss House of Leaves into the ring. It was introduced to me by a friend, and I've gone on to introduce it to other friends. Everyone I know who has read it went through a brief fanatical period about it, and will still discuss it at length whenever it comes up in conversation.

By: charlesv

charlesv — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:50:28 -0800

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart.

Stuff by China Mieville.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:25:33 -0800

The Story of San Michele, the autobiography of Dr. Axel Munthe. It was first published in 1929, and in 1930, just a year after its publication, it was going into its 17th American edition and had already been translated into over 40 languages. A crazy-mad international best seller that I think has largely slipped from public consciousness. Read the Amazon reviews and I think you'll want to read it yourself.

By: damn dirty ape

damn dirty ape — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:29:55 -0800

Seth Speaks
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
Doors of Perception
Cosmic Consciosness
The Man in the High Castle
Satanic Bible
Dhalgren
Stranger in a Strange Land
Population Bomb
Future Shock
The Naked Ape
Book of Lies

Or what any self-respecting 80s stoner would have had on his bookshelf.

By: damn dirty ape

damn dirty ape — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:32:48 -0800

Also see the books section at Barbelith, which is like the culstish/stoner version of mefi.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:42:24 -0800

The Catalog of Cool and its sequel Too Cool both have extensive lists of cult literature. Some of my favorites of their recommendations:

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore
Red Dirt Marijuana by Terry Southern
King Blood by Jim Thompson
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:46:39 -0800

If you do read Carlos Castaneda, please keep in mind that his books are fiction.

By: maryh

maryh — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:22:46 -0800

I'm not quite sure if this is really cult or not, but Geek Love was one of those books that bookstore geeks like me liked a lot in the late 80's that seems to have developed a wider readership.

By: suedehead

suedehead — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:30:44 -0800

Infinite Jest. Because of its length, not many people end up reading it. It seems that those who do really like it.

By: goo

goo — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:52:42 -0800

A couple that haven't yet been mentioned: Walden Two by BF Skinner, which spawned several "modern utopia" communities, and Lanark by Alasdair Gray.

By: cmiller

cmiller — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 05:15:07 -0800

Lots of good ones so far. These may be too popular for you, but they have a devoted following:

- Persig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
- Pratchett's Discworld books

By: vito90

vito90 — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 05:28:03 -0800

A couple of good sports ones immediately spring to mind:

"Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, one year in the life of a nearly, but not quite, washed-up professional baseball player.

"Moneyball" by Michael Lewis is said to be required reading among General Managers in Major League Baseball. Lewis incidentally has many books to his credit which might be said to have achieved cult status in their respective fields. ("Liar's Poker" and "Money Culture" among the Wall Street types, "The New New Thing" among Dot Com entrepreneurs.)

By: pallak7

pallak7 — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:26:36 -0800

Another vote for Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon was one of my favorites.

By: sdn

sdn — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:55:42 -0800

someone has already done this for you: the rough guide to cult fiction.

By: i_am_a_Jedi

i_am_a_Jedi — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:10:21 -0800

Edward Whittemore fits the bill perfectly.

I have no idea how you could include Stephenson or OSC on this list. They're incredibly popular authors whose backlist still sells strongly.

By: zebra3

zebra3 — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:18:59 -0800

Cosmic Banditos, by A. C. Weisbecker. It's a hilarious and bizarre little book about drug running and quantum physics that was saved from literary oblivion when he sent a bunch of copies to "any soldier" in Iraq during Desert Storm. Those copies were read and reread and passed around to others. The story as recounted in the preface of the reprint is simply heartwarming.

Some devoted fans promote the book by buying multiple copies and giving them away.

By: JaredSeth

JaredSeth — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:31:33 -0800

Seconding Silverlock. (And thanks, tkolar...I hadn't thought about that book in ages, and I know I have a dog-eared copy of it around here somewhere. Time for a re-reading.)

By: pallak7

pallak7 — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:06:23 -0800

i_am_a_Jedi,

There are more than five authors that have been mentioned who are more popular and sell better than Stephenson, some of which aren't cultish in the least. Stephenson's work appears cultish and macabre comparatively.

By: Ian A.T.

Ian A.T. — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:56:51 -0800

Metafilter has a history of overrating the amount by which an artist is underrated. There was an AskMe a couple years ago about the most underrated musicians, and the resulting thread was basically a list of the most popular and successful artists in music.

I'm not adding anything new here, but of the suggestions already offered I'd nominate the following as true "cult" books, meaning they have an elusive quality that makes them more than just "obscure books with a small but passionate fanbase" or "books that were never blockbusters but have since become consistent sellers."

-The Illuminati Trilogy/Principia Discordia

-Dhalgren

-Dictionary Of The Khazars

-Youth in Revolt

-House of Leaves

-Geek Love

Ten years ago I would have also included "Stranger In A Strange Land," but I feel like the book has become much more visible over the last decade, especially as "grok" has gained widespread currency.

By: Meatbomb

Meatbomb — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:18:43 -0800

Yes, please do read Dhalgren if you haven't yet. Browse the Amazon customer reviews for an idea of what a unique experience reading it can be for many people.

By: maryh

maryh — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:49:51 -0800

One more book comes to mind, but again, I'm not sure if it can really be called a cult book: Cold Dog Soup by Stephen Dobyns. I read it years ago, and was utterly stunned to see an indie film adaptation on IFC a while back. Is anyone else familiar with this one?

By: Manjusri

Manjusri — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:50:07 -0800

The Rider - by Tim Krabbe is plugged as an "instant cult classic" on the cover of its english edition. And for good reason; it was instantly one of my favorite books. I read it cover to cover in one sitting and immediately started in again. If you have the slightest interest in bicycle road racing or competitive individual sports, give it a go.

By: MarkAnd

MarkAnd — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:16:14 -0800

Ishmael.

By: mumkin

mumkin — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 13:06:19 -0800

Oh, man. Ishmael is, indeed, a cult book. You're either crazy into it or it annoys the fuck out of you, and I'm in the latter camp.

By: JPowers

JPowers — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:28:01 -0800

I stumbled across these two lists and thought they might be a fit for this post:

- List of most commonly challenged books in the U.S.
- The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000