Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)

An unnamed narrator becomes disillusioned with his role in consumerist North American society and, in collusion with the charismatic creation Tyler Durden, creates a group called Fight Club which provides an outlet for men's pent-up aggression. The club grows and eventually becomes an organisation named Project Mayhem, intent on destroying the fabric of corporate America.

Style: non-linear narrative

Themes: masculinity, chaos, violence, consumerism, alienation, industrialisation

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

The first person narrative of Patrick Bateman, a wealthy investmant banker and self-proclaimed serial killer as he negotiates the upper echelons of New York society in the 1980s, ponders the latest fashions in clothes and music, and stalks, kills, tortures and mutilates several young women. This controversial novel is disturbingly graphic but also darkly comic in its satire of a materialistic culture and epoch.

Style: first person, unreliable narrator, stream-of-consciousness

Themes: consumerism, inequality, alienation, violence, gap between appearance and reality

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Written as a series of letters from the successful career woman Eva to her absent husband following the arrest and imprisonment of their son Kevin on charges of multiple murder committed during a high school massacre. Eva's account of Kevin's childhood raises a number of questions, not least who is to blame for the tragedy - the career-focussed mother, the indulgent father, the media, or simply Kevin himself, a unlikeable boy who squanders the privileges of his surburban upbringing to rain destruction down on those who care about him.

Style: epistolary form, unreliable narrator

Themes: nature vs nurture, parenthood, evil,

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

A dystopian novel which charts the nocturnal sprees of violence carried out by teenage rebel Alex until his arrest and imprisonment in a correctional institution where he is subjected to an innovative brainwashing technique, a form of mental castration that removes the ability, but not the desire, to commit violent acts, leaving Alex alienated and suicidal.

Style: distinctive slang voice

Themes: youth, individual and institutional violence, redemption, free will

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

Style:

Themes:

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (1984)

Described by one reviewer as 'a work of unparalleled depravity', Banks' debut novel is a bildungsroman in which the disturbed narrator, Frank, lives with his father on an unnamed Scottish island in a fantasy world of his own creation. Frank spends his time inventing superstitious rituals that involve killing animals, reminiscing about the murders he committed as a child and waiting to hear from his brother Eric, who has escaped from a lunatic asylum. Darkly comic, this macabre tale is both a philosophical exploration and a farcical parody.

Style: unreliable narrator

Themes: nature/nurture, creation/destruction, parenthood, madness, gender,

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (2003)

The Outsiders

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Trainspotting