BOOKS THAT NEEDED TO BE SAID: I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT. Recommends by Shane Jesse Christmass
Why did I choose these books? Perhaps because, to me, they represent literature that stands apart from the hegemonic literary marketplace … operating outside the structures of commercial garbage publishing, which prioritises market-driven narratives and commodifiable claptrap stories.They resist assimilation into the literary industrial complex, which often seeks to sanitise or manipulate raw human experience for consumption. Instead, these texts engage in an unapologetic exploration of obsession, identity, and the dissonance between desire and self-destruction. These writers embrace a nonconformist aesthetic, their works subvert the conventional expectations of plot resolution and character redemption. The protagonists are not mere vehicles for moral lessons, but complex figures navigating the contradictions of human existence: power, alienation, and emotional rupture. Their novels interrogate the performative nature of relationships, questioning how much of our identity is shaped by the gaze of others or by societal pressures. Furthermore, the texts address the commodification of identity itself, particularly in the way desire and personal agency become entangled with market-driven forces.Their place … especially Moore, Durbin and Chelosky … outside the conventional literary canon … positions them as crucial, albeit uncomfortable, interventions in the landscape of contemporary thought.And, of course, my choices also prove that I have impeccable taste. Now, let’s begin, motherfuckers. Danielle CheloskyCheat (The Waiting Room, 2022). show me your face (The Waiting Room, 2023). Watching the world get right with itself by reading Pregaming Grief by Danielle Chelosky has been an agreeable thing. That book deserves every bit of its massive audience. Chelosky is one of the rare writers whose work I’ll devour without question … whatever she publishes, I’m there. Her writing is a seismic bomb, a carnal rush, a primordial teenage ooze. Raw, unflinching explorations of youth, desire, the blurred lines between love, obsession, and self-destruction. Bodily attraction is in the dirt, the convenience store-soaked chaos, clubs / bars smeared with lament and sweat. Chelosky doesn’t ask permission. Chelosky’s characters often obsess over others in ways that blur the line between love and control. She pushes us to consider how much of our identity is shaped by the people we fixate on. Chelosky has a new book out, Baby Bruise, but for now, I want you to read her earlier chapbooks. In Cheat, Chelosky crafts a fragmented memoir that reads like a dream-drenched brain-fog … disjointed, urgent, painfully honest. The narrator … caught in the chaos of a love triangle … navigates intimacy, betrayal, and the intoxicating pull of self-destruction, our emotional wreckage laid bare. Where does power lie in relationships, especially in undefined dynamics? Chelosky dissects the fluidity of power … who has it, who loses it, and how it shifts in moments of vulnerability.show me your face pushes this voyeuristic intensity even further, dissecting ambiguous teenage sexual relationships with an unsettling clarity. A collage of encounters, text messages, and confessional prose, Chelosky forces us to sit with the complexities of power, submission, dismissal, sorrow, agency, the murky space between affection and exploitation. It’s uncomfortable in the best way … an unfiltered look at the desperation to be seen, to be wanted, to define oneself through others, to be defined by others moving though you, how we self-destruct in the pursuit of connection. Her work often explores the compulsion to chase intensity, even when it leads to ruin, asking why we crave the pain of wanting. Chelosky suggests that love, in its rawest form, is messy and consuming, and she forces us to sit in that ache.Chelosky strips everything down to goosepimple skin and White Claw-scorched throat, just an aching need for connection, for rejection, extracted in prose that lingers like a somnambulist bruise. I can never remember my own name, nor to whom or when or where I’ve said this, but this … Chelosky’s earlier work, not to be mistaken for lesser work … holds weight, holds thought. The weight of silence in digital communication, the tension of waiting, the power play of who responds to text messages first … her writing magnifies these seemingly minor interactions. She dissects the way intimacy shifts when it’s performed versus when it’s private, exposing the performative nature of some desires. In tangled relationships, her characters wrestle with guilt and responsibility, but not always in a way that leads to redemption. Her fragmented style mimics memory itself—half-formed, fevered, unreliable—forcing us to question how we piece together our own histories.Chelosky isn’t interested in neat answers. She’s interested in the mess, the halfway space. All of it is essential. All of it gets my full, undivided attention. Her writing is a gift. Receive it. No replacement will do. No stand-ins allowed. Only this will work. There’s no one better to capture the chaos of chasing love. Thomas Moore.A Certain Kind Of Light (Queer Mojo, 2013). In Their Arms (Rebel Satori, 2016).Another writer I’ll read without hesitation, Thomas Moore has a way of capturing the weightlessness of disconnection, the slow drift of a life untethered. For this, again … I’m looking back at some of his earlier work … the first two books of his I read nearly a decade ago. Moore’s settings are often faint spaces … sterile apartments, anonymous bars, strange city streets … where everything feels slightly off, mirroring the protagonist’s emotional state. Dialogue in his work is often stilted or drained of substance, emphasising the disconnect between people who should be close but aren’t. Thomas Moore’s A Certain Kind of Light and In Their Arms are meditations on alienation, identity, and the quiet despair of searching for meaning in a world that offers little in return. Moore has numerous novels released since these two, predominantly on Amphetamine Sulphate, including his newest novel: We’ll Never Be Fragile Again. In A Certain Kind of Light, Moore follows a teenage boy suspended in his own existence, detached from family, friends, even his own interests. The novel distills that eerie sensation of moving through the world as if behind glass … where nothing feels entirely real, and everything remains just out of reach. His prose is sparse yet immersive, drawing the reader into a space where existence isn’t about being seen or understood, but about grasping at any feeling at all. His characters go through the motions … work, socialising, sex … but instead of grounding them, these routines only reinforce their sense of emptiness. Many of his characters look back on their lives with a kind of yearning, but instead of offering comfort, these memories feel like faded versions of something that was never quite real to begin with.In Their Arms deepens this theme, centring on an art journalist suffocating under the weight of his own apathy. Employment, friendships, even desire … all become indistinct, reduced to habit. Seeking solace in fleeting sexual encounters, he only finds the void widening. Moore writes with a cool detachment that mirrors his protagonist’s emotional numbness, making every moment of longing, confusion, and solitude feel starkly real. If we feel disconnected from our own lives, do we still have a self? Or are we just reflections of the things that once mattered to us. His characters seek intimacy, sex, or art to fill the void, but these pursuits often leave them feeling just as vacant as before.These novels refuse resolution. There’s no grand epiphany, no comforting arc of redemption … only the raw, unvarnished truth of what it means to feel lost in your own life. Moore doesn’t just depict alienation … he immerses you in it, makes you sit with it. And that’s why his work lingers … unsettling, inescapable, unforgettable. Moore’s protagonists often move through life like traces, their relationships shallow, their emotions dulled. He asks what happens when life feels less like something we live and more like something we observe. Is meaning something we find, or something we fabricate? His novels suggest that meaning is neither inherent nor easily discovered. Instead, it’s something we desperately try to construct. Thomas Moore’s writing interrogates alienation, identity, and the numb drift of modern existence. His work isn’t about finding answers … it’s about sitting inside the uncertainty, feeling the weight of detachment. Moore’s work doesn’t offer easy catharsis. He forces us to sit inside estrangement, stripped of all the cinematic polish, leaving just the quiet dread and factual weight. It’s detached, it’s weightless, and it’s devastating.I love Thomas Moore’s work because he nails that quiet, suffocating feeling of being stuck in your own life … disconnected from everything and everyone around you, these petty, miserable existences. Édouard Levé.Suicide (P.O.L., 2008)Suicide by Édouard Levé is less a novel than a quiet, haunting reckoning … a stark and unflinching meditation on despair, alienation, and the slow erosion of self. Written as a confessional monologue, it unfolds in a voice that is both intimate and distant, tracing the contours of a mind unravelling. There is no conventional plot, no external conflict … only the relentless introspection of a man examining his own existence and the quiet inevitability of his decision to end it. Levé examines whether taking one's own life is a surrender to suffering or a final assertion of autonomy … a decision as rational as any other. The novel presents a man not just through his death, but through the fragments of his existence. Levé asks what it means to be remembered … whether a life is defined by its end, or by the details that preceded it.Levé strips away sentimentality, offering a portrait of suicide not as a moment of crisis, but as the culmination of a long, slow drift toward nothingness. The novel is chilling in its simplicity, thought-provoking in its restraint … a work that does not seek to explain or justify, only to lay bare the depths of mental anguish. Levé explores the idea that identity is as much shaped by absence as by presence. How do others hold onto us when we are no longer here to define ourselves?Levé’s Suicide lingers in the quiet, intimate spaces of existence, asking how the smallest details … a hobby, a gesture, a fleeting thought … add up to form a person. The novel subtly questions whether suicide is an act of selfishness or selflessness, leaving the reader to wrestle with the weight of absence. It explores the unsettling coexistence of detachment and suffering, as the narrator speaks of his death with eerie calm, challenging the assumption that deep pain must always be outwardly visible. Silence and omission shape the narrative as much as what is said, forcing us to consider what is left unsaid and what that absence reveals. Ultimately, Suicide questions the very limits of language … can words ever fully capture the complexity of choosing to die, or do they fail in the face of something so final and unknowable? Considering the novel revolves around suicide, it’s also unexpectedly funny.Given Levé’s own suicide shortly after delivering this manuscript, the novel blurs the boundary between fiction and reality, making the reader question whether artistic expression can ever be fully separate from the person creating it. Is this the pinnacle of autofiction, unmatched and never to be surpassed? It’s not just about suicide … it’s about the quiet, slow burn of a life fading, and how the smallest things can shape who we are, even when we’re no longer here. Derek McCormack.Castle Faggot (Semiotext(e), 2020).Derek McCormack’s Castle Faggot is a mysteriously mocking, deeply unsettling descent into a world of desire, artifice, and excess … a grotesque, glittering funhouse. The novel follows Louie, a man drawn into a surreal, nightmarish wonderland … a castle-like mansion populated by eccentric, twisted figures who reflect and distort the anxieties of gay identity, masculinity, and commodified sexuality. As Louie drifts through this uncanny realm, the boundaries between fantasy and reality collapse, leaving him trapped in a world as seductive as it is suffocating.McCormack’s Castle Faggot probes the uneasy relationship between queerness, consumerism, and spectacle, asking whether identity can ever exist outside the forces that market, regulate, and distort it. He examines the thin, unsettling line between camp and horror, revealing how exaggerated performance can be both a celebration and a trap. Through a world of excess and grotesque artifice, the novel questions whether queer identity is something authentic or something constantly consumed … by culture, by capitalism, by the self. Beneath the satire, Castle Faggot forces us to confront an unsettling possibility … that queerness, in a world obsessed with spectacle, risks becoming just another product … one that entertains, shocks, and sells, but never escapes the systems that define it. Are we bonded to Faggotland, haunted by Count Choc-o-log?McCormack dissects the ways fantasy distorts self-perception, forcing us to question whether our desires shape us or if we are merely chasing illusions. Through Louie’s journey, he explores how performance … whether through camp, drag, or artifice … can be both freeing and suffocating, a means of self-expression that risks turning into a caricature. The novel’s biting humour masks a deeper horror, blurring the line between resilience and denial, making us wonder whether laughter is a shield or just another layer of self-deception. As Louie is pulled deeper into the castle’s bizarre world, the question of escape lingers … whether from the constraints of identity, the expectations of culture, or the endless cycle of spectacle and consumption.McCormack layers his narrative with biting wit, subversive humour, and a queasy blend of camp and horror, crafting a book that feels like a neon-lit carnival ride through the absurdities of desire, self-image, and cultural expectations. Strange, unsettling, and unrelentingly bold, Castle Faggot is both a satire and a spectacle … an exploration of queerness that is at once deeply unsettling and wildly entertaining. I’m here for the suffocating nature of spectacle.Maybe I’ve gotten this all wrong, but this book pulled me into a cavalcade-land where everything about identity and desire got twisted and turned inside out, forcing me to confront how I / we perform ourselves and how easily that performance becomes a deception. Kate Durbin.Hoarders (Wave Books, 2021). Kate Durbin’s Hoarders is an arresting exploration of compulsion, accumulation, and the emotional weight of objects. Blending poetry and nonfiction, Durbin crafts a series of fragmented narratives that delve into the lives of individuals consumed by the need to collect, revealing how hoarding becomes both a coping mechanism and a source of deep isolation. Through a sharp, empathetic lens, she examines the intersections of mental illness, consumerism, and the personal histories embedded in material possessions.Durbin explores how the act of hoarding reflects broader cultural issues such as consumerism and materialism, questioning whether the compulsion to collect is a deeply personal disorder or a reflection of a society that places value on accumulation. She probes the role of possessions in shaping identity, asking what it means to find meaning in objects and whether they can ever truly satisfy emotional or existential needs. Durbin also examines hoarding as both a symptom of isolation and a way to assert control, exploring whether it’s a desperate attempt to stave off abandonment or a misguided effort to maintain personal autonomy. Ultimately, she raises the question of whether objects can offer meaningful connection, or if they instead create a suffocating prison, leaving individuals trapped in their own attempts to hold onto the past or to make sense of their lives.The book offers a haunting meditation on the ways people attempt to fill emotional voids with things, capturing the desperation, obsession, and quiet heartbreak of those who struggle to let go. With a style that is both poetic and incisive, Hoarders gives voice to a misunderstood disorder while holding up a mirror to a culture obsessed with excess.Durbin’s style is deliberately disjointed, mirroring the fractured lives of those consumed by accumulation. The poetry here functions less as a linear exploration of language and more as a raw, unfiltered examination of human desperation and the psychological toll of hoarding. By employing a fragmented, almost documentary-style approach, Durbin creates an intimacy that transcends typical poetic abstraction, allowing the emotions and struggles of her subjects to resonate deeply. Her work isn’t just poetic in form but in its ability to convey truth and experience through vivid, often painful snapshots of life.The way Durbin mixes poetry and raw storytelling creates this deep, unsettling connection to the emotional wreckage … making you feel the weight of each item and the lives they entrap.
