Arrangement of Darkness by Mariusz Walus

The Arrangement of Darkness

Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books Georges Perec

Author’s Note This is a list of 15 books are that organized from level of darkness. Some may say these 15 books are the darkest pieces of fiction ever written. As you span through this list, feel free to rearrange the books based on your exposure to them. It is subjective, but it would be hard to argue that any of these 15 books don’t belong on this list.

Table of Contents 12.

1984

14.

The Book Thief

16.

The Painted Bird

18.

Lullaby

20.

Living Dead Girl

22.

House of Leaves

24.

Crossed

26.

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

28.

Blindess

30.

Johnny Got His Gun

32.

Blood Meridian

34.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

36.

120 Days of Sodom

38.

The Mysterious Stranger

40.

Haunted

Publication Date

1900

120 days of sodom 1904

1910

The Mysterious Stranger

The Arrangement of Darkness

THE DARK DATE

1920

1916

1930 1940 1950

Johnny Got His Gun 1939

1984 1949

1960

The Painted Bird 1965 1970 1980

Blood Meridian 1990

1985

Blindness 1995

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

1998

1999

2000

House of Leaves 2000

Lullaby 2002

The Book Thief 2005

Haunted 2005

Living Dead Girl 2008 2010

2020

Crossed, Vol. 1 2010

164 Years

Author Birthdate

Marquis de Sade 1740

81 Years

Mark Twain 1835

34 Years

Dalton Trumbo

1905

46 Years

George Orwell 1903

32 Years

Jerzy Kosinski 1933

52 Years

Cormac McCarthy 1933

73 Years

Jose Saramago

1922

40 Years 52 Years

Gaetan Soucy 1958

Stephen King 1947

34 Years

Mark Z. Danielewski 1966

40 Years

Chuck Palahniuk

1962

43 Years 43 Years 36 Years

Chuck Palahniuk

1962

Markus Zusak 1975

Elizabeth Scott

1972

40 Years

Garth Ennis 1970

The most used words in reviews

WHAT’S WITH THE Book Thief

Mark Twain

Nazi Germany

Mysterious Stranger

Elizabeth Scott

World War

Short Story

Winston Smith

Little Girl

Well Written

Moral Sense

Animal Farm

Subject Matter

Highly Recommend

Human Race

Well Written

Markus Zusak

Tom Sawyer

Field Trip

Beautifully Written

Big Brother

Living Dead

George Orwell

Dead Girl

High School

Thought Police Required Reading Brave New Thought Provoking Ministry of Truth Science Fiction New World

House of Leaves Johnny Truant Navidson Record Ever Read Mark Danielewski Blair Witch Inside Than the Outside Stephen King Bigger on the Inside Blind Man Witch Project

The Arrangement of Darkness

Within a Story

Hucklberry Finn

Garth Ennis

Ever Read

Painted Bird

Character of Satan

Upon a Time

Walking Dead

Writing Style

Eastern Europe

Great Read

Quick Read

Graphic Novel

Long Time

World War

Satan and Satan

Sexual Abuse

Comic Book

Narrated By Death

Young Boy

God

Even Though

Jacen Burrows

Death as the Narrator

Jerzy Kosinski

Angel

Zombie Apocalypse

Main Character

Religion

Group of Survivors

Eastern European

Theodor

Survivor Horror

Faint of Heart

Work of Fiction

Big Fan

Years Ago

Alan Moore

Human Beings

Post Apocalyptic

Little Boy

Days Later

Six Years

Men and Women

Years Old

Main Character Young Adult

Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy Judge Holden Ever Read Country for Old Old Men Glanton Gang Old West Writing Style Moby Dick Harold Bloom Pretty Horses Quotation Marks

MENTIONED DARKNESS? DARKNESS Days of Sodom Marquis De Sade Ever Written Crimes Amour Les Crimes Simone de Beauvior Book Ever Look Like Shock Value Real Life Boys and Girls Destructive Principle Ever Read

Got His Gun

Doctor and his Wife

Fight Club

Johnny Got

Writing Style

Culling Song

Dalton Trumbo

Jose Saramago

Chuck Palahniuk

Joe Bonham

Nobel Prize

Carl Streator

High School

Quotation Marks

Real Estate

Required Reading

Lord of the Flies

Sudden Infant

Arms and Legs

Human Nature

Estate Agent

Morse Code

Dark Glasses

Insivible Monsters

Years Ago

Girl With Dark

Ever Read Must Read

Outside World Ever Read Story Line

Main Character

Unusual Book

World War

Language

Western Front

Father Soucy Horror Narrator Child Disturbing French Isolated Masterpiece Odd Pages Protagonist Raised

White Blindess Mental Hospital Human Condition

Fight Club Chuck Palahniuk Main Story Shock Value Short Story

Hoover Boyle Infant Death Death Syndrome Helen Hoover Road Trip

Stephen King Tom Gordon Lost in the Woods Red Sox Little Girl

Ever Read

Nine Year

Main Plot

Gets Lost

Writers Retreat

Mother and Brother

Collection of Short

Trisha McFarland

Nightmare Box

Main Character

Invisible Monsters

Find Her Way

Writing Style

Bag of Bones

Faint of Heart

Old Girl Boston Red

BANNED YES NO Graphic Content

YES, RECENTLY IN CHINA Its Social and Political Themes

NO NO IN POLAND, BUT PUBLISHED A YEAR LATER

The Arrangement of Darkness

Banned under Communist rule until the fall of the Berlin wall.

YES, DURING WORLD WAR II Was labeled a communist.

OR NOT? NO NO

NO, BUT WAS CHALLENGED Portrays many details about the life of Nazis and the life of the German people.

NO NO YES, BY SOME GOVERNMENTS Due to its explicit nature and themes of sexual violence and extreme cruelty

About The Author

George Orwell (pseudonym for Eric Blair [1903-50]) was born in Bengal and educated at Eton; after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living penning novels and essays. He was essentially a political writer who focused his attention on his own times, a man of intense feelings and intense hates. An opponent of totalitarianism, he served in the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Besides his classic Animal Farm, his works include a novel based on his experiences as a colonial policeman, Burmese Days, two firsthand studies of poverty, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia; and the extraordinary novel of political prophecy whose title became part of our language, 1984.

“1984 is the darkest I know of. Humans have built a

society that exists for no purpose but to be a boot grinding the individual into the ground. If you rebel in the smallest way, you won’t be killed. You will be tortured and tortured and tortured by all you fear most in the world. This will continue until you love your lot in life. You will be tortured into loving all you hate, and hating all that you love. This is

The Arrangement of Darkness

George Orwell

inevitable. And then they kill your body.” — tyguytheshyguy

1984

15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Publisher: Signet Classic

while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever...

Pages: 328

•Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read • “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was

Rating: 4.7 out of 5

their final, most essential command.” Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows

Best Sellers Rank: #188 in Books

to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that

#2 in Dystopian Fiction

Big Brother is always watching... A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can

#2 in Fiction Satire

deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with thepassage of time.

#3 in Political Fiction (Books)

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prophecy about the future. And

53,734

1984 George Orwell

Written more than 70 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling

Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books (Perec) Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways. One of my friends had the idea one day of stopping his libraryat 361 books. The plan was as follows: having attained, by addition or subtraction, and starting from a given number n of books, the number K = 361, deemed as corresponding to a library, if not an ideal then at least a sufficient library, he would undertake to acquire on a permanent basis a new book X only after having eliminated (by giving away, throwing out, selling or any other appropriate means) an old book Z, so that the total number K of works should remain constant and equal to 361: K + X >361> K - Z.

YORK

TIMES

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME The

extraordinary,

beloved

novel about the ability of books

Pages: 578

to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The

Rating: 4.7 out of 5

country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who

Best Sellers Rank:

scratches out a meager existence

#607 in Books

for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen

#1 in Children’s Holocaust Fiction Books

books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author

#2 in Teen & Young Adult Holocaust Historical Fiction

Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be lifechanging.” —The New York Times

with The Diary of a Young Girl

The Arrangement of Darkness

by Anne Frank.” —USA Today

Perec (Cont.)

“Deserves a place on the same shelf

#4 in Children’s Orphans & Foster Homes Books

The Book Thief Markus Zusak

30,875

NEW

BESTSELLER • ONE OF

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As it evolved this seductive scheme came up against predictable obstacles for which the unavoidable solutions were found. First, a volume was to be seen as counting as one (1) book even if it contained three (3) novels (or collections of poems, essays, etc.); from which it was deduced that three (3) or four (4) or n (n) novels by the same author counted (implicitly) as one (1) volume by that author, as fragments not yet brought together but ineluctably bringable together in a Collected Works. Whence it was adjudged that this or that recently acquired novel by this or that English-language novelist of the second half of the nineteenth century could not logically count as a new work X but as a work Z belonging to a series under construction: the set T of all the novels written by the aforesaid novelist (and God knows there are some!). This didn’t alter the original scheme in any way at all: only instead of talking about 361 books, it was decided that the sufficient library was ideally to be made up of 361 authors, whether they had written a slender opuscule or enough to fill a truck.

About The Author

Markus Zusak is the international bestselling author of six novels, including The Book Thief and most recently, Bridge of Clay. His work is translated into more than forty languages, and has spent more than a decade on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing Zusak as one of the most successful authors to come out of Australia. All of Zusak’s books – including earlier titles, The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, When Dogs Cry (also titled Getting the Girl), The Messenger (or I am the Messenger) – have been awarded numerous honours around the world, ranging from literary prizes to readers choice awards to prizes voted on by booksellers. In 2013, The Book Thief was made into a major motion picture, and in 2018 was voted one of America’s all-time favourite books, achieving 14th position on the PBS Great American Read. Also in 2018, Bridge of Clay was selected as a best book of the year in publications ranging from Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal. Markus Zusak grew up in Sydney, Australia, and still lives there with his wife and two children.

“This book is set during World War II

and the narrator is death , which is an extremely interesting

perspective. Its a hauntingly beautiful story and I highly recommend it to everyone.” — penea2

Markus Zusak

TH E BOOK TH I E F 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

Jerzy Kosinski (born Józef Lewinkopf; June 14, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was a PolishAmerican novelist and two-time President of the American Chapter of P.E.N., who wrote primarily in English. Born in Poland, he survived World War II and, as a young man, emigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizen. He was known for various novels, among them Being There (1970) and The Painted Bird (1965), which were adapted as films in 1979 and 2019 respectively.

“Author offed himself after writing it

allegedly

.” — devoricpiano

Jerzy Kosinski

The Arrangement of Darkness

TH E

PAI NTE D B I R D 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

a s h a t t e r e d p o s t - Wa r E u r o p e . Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy

Pages: 234

Kosinski as a major literary figure. Kosinski’s story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to

Rating: 4.4 out of 5

another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal of adult experiences, Kosinski sums up a Bosch-like world of harrowing

Best Sellers Rank:

excess where senseless violence and

#47,007 in Books

untempered hatred are the norm. Through sparse prose and vivid imagery, Kosinski’s novel is a story of mythic proportion, even more relevant to today’s society than it

#391 in World War II Historical Fiction

was upon its original publication.

#504 in Classic American Literature

Perec (Cont.)

#554 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction

The Painted Bird Jerzy Kosinski

836

Publisher: Grove Press

mythic, master-work of

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J e r z y K o s i n s k i ’ s

This modification proved effective over several years. But it soon became apparent that certain works - romances of chivalry, for example - had no author or else had several authors, and that certain authors - the Dadaists, for example - could not be kept separate from one another without automatically losing 80 to 90 per cent of what made them interesting. The idea was thus reached of a library restricted to 361 subjects - the term is vague but the groups it covers are vague also at times and up until now thatlimitation has been strictly observed. So then, one of the chief problems encountered by the man who keeps the books he has read or promises himself that he will one day read is that of the increase in his library. Not everyone has the good fortune to be Captain Nemo: ‘...the world ended for me the day my Nautilus dived for the first time beneath the waves. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last newspapers, and since that time I would like to believe that mankind has neither thought nor written.’

York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic

Pages: 272

thriller for our times. “A

harrowing

and

hilarious glimpse into the future of civilization.” — M i n n e a p o l i s S t a r - Tr i bu n e

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill,

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whether spoken or even just thought.

#64,980 in Books

You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be

#252 in Lawyers & Criminals Humor

picked up by unsuspecting readers. Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the

#1,467 in Serial Killer Thrillers

poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country

The Arrangement of Darkness

quest to put the culling song to rest.

#3,978 in Horror Literature & Fiction

Perec (Cont.)

country. Accompanied by a shady

896

Lullaby Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Anchor

From the author of the New

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER •

Captain Nemo’s 12,000 volumes, uniformly bound, were thus classified once and for all, and all the more simply because the classification, as is made clear to us, was uncertain, at least from the language point of view (a detail which does not at all concern the art of arranging a library but is meant simply to remind us that Captain Nemo spoke all languages indiscriminately). But for us, who continue to have to do with a human race that insists on thinking, writing and above all publishing, the increasing size of our libraries tends to become the one real problem. For it’s not too difficult, very obviously, to keep ten or twenty or let’s say even a hundred books; but once you start to have 361, or a thousand, or three thousand, and especially when the total starts to increase every day or thereabouts, the problem arises, first of all of arranging all these books somewhere and then of being able to lay your hand on them one day when, for whatever reason, you either want or need to read them at last or even to reread them. Thus the problem of a library is shown to be twofold: a problem of space first of all, then a problem of order. 1. Of Space 1.1. Generalities

About The Author

Chuck Palahniuk’s nine novels are the bestselling Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Lullaby and Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of the non-fiction profile of Portland Fugitives and Refugees and the non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

“Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (guy who did fight club) is pretty messed up. After a string of misterious infant deaths, a journalist discovers that a poem in a lullabies book is actually a curse that kills whoever the speaker is saying it to to. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s a story about this guy tracking down all the copies of that book and poem and all the crazy horrible and bizarre things that happen along the way.” — SoWhatComesNext

Chuck Palahniuk

LU LLABY 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

Elizabeth Scott is the author of Bloom, Perfect You, Living Dead Girl, Something Maybe, The Unwritten Rule, Between Here and Forever, and Miracle, among others. She lives just outside Washington, D.C. with her husband and firmly believes you can never own too many books.

“It’s a teen book written from the perspective of a girl who was kidnapped by a pedophile as a child. She has been living with him ever since, but he is no longer as attracted to her since she reached puberty and he is making her help him kidnap her replacement. She

knows that he intends to kill her once her replacement is found, and she knows she’s not the first girl he’s kidnapped.” — Elphabeth

The Arrangement of Darkness

Elizabeth Scott

LIVI NG DEAD G I R L 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Once upon a time, my name was not Alice. O n c e time, how

upon

didn’t

luck y

know was.

Pages: 176

When Alice was ten, Ray took her away from her family, her friends -- her life. She learned to give up all power, to endure all pain. She waited for the nightmare to be over.

Rating: 4.3 out of 5

Now Alice is fifteen and Ray still has her, but he speaks more and more of her death. He does not know it is what she longs for. She does not know he has something more

Best Sellers Rank: #156,413 in Books

terrifying than death in mind for her. This is Alice’s story. It is one you have never heard, and one you will never, ever forget.

#38 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Sexual Abuse

#153 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Violence

Perec (Cont.)

#290 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Emotions & Feelings

Global Ratings

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

little girl who disappeared.

888

Living Dead Girl Elizabeth Scott

Once upon a time, I was a

Books are not dispersed but assembled. Just as we put all the pots drop-leaf drinks cabinet of jam into a jam cupboard, so we put all our books into the same drop-leaf writing desk place, or into several same places. Even though we want to keep two-door dresser them, we might pile our books away into trunks, put them in the hi-fi unit cellar or the attic, or in the bottoms of wardrobes, but we generally television console prefer them to be visible. slide projector display cabinet In practice, books are most often arranged one beside the other, etc. along a wall or division, on rectilinear supports, parallel with one another, neither too deep nor too far apart. Books are arranged usually - standing on end and in such a way that the title printed on the sine of the work can be seen (sometimes, as in bookshop windows, the cover of the books is displayed, but it is unusual, proscribed and nearly always considered shocking to have only the edge of the book on show). In current room layouts, the library is known as an ‘area’ for books. This, most often, is a module belonging as a whole to the ‘living-room’, which likewise contains a 21

thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the

subconscious.”

The

New

York

—

Times

Pages: 709

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet.

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers,

Best Sellers Rank:

strippers, environmentalists, and

#1,709 in Books

adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also

#29 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored

#68 in Horror Literature & Fiction

words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prizewinning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of

The Arrangement of Darkness

creature darkness, of an evergrowing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams..

#217 in Literary Fiction

Perec (Cont.)

where they discover something is

and is offered in catalogues adorned with a few false bindings. In practice books can be assembled just about anywhere. 1.2. Rooms where books may be put in the entrance hall in the sitting room in the bedroom(s) in the bog Generally speaking, one kind of book is put in the room you cook in, the ones known as ‘cookery books’. It is extremely rare to find books in a bathroom, even though for many people this is a favourite place to read in. The surrounding humidity is unanimously considered a prime enemy of the conservation of printed texts. At the most, you may find in a bathroom a medicine cupboard and in the medicine cupboard a small work entitled What to do before the doctor gets there. 1.3. Places in a room where books can be arranged

7,233

House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski

Publisher: Pantheon

simultaneously reads like a

Global Ratings

“A novelistic mosaic that

About The Author

Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel House of Leaves, National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and the novella The Fifty Year Sword, which was performed on Halloween three years in a row at REDCAT. His books have been translated into multiple languages, and his work has been the focus of university classes and literary events. In 2015, Danielewski’s THROWN, a reflection on Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER 2, was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum during its Storylines exhibition. Between 2015-2017, Pantheon released five volumes of The Familiar, each an 880-page installment about a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten and sets off a chain reaction with global consequences.

“It will make you feel cold and closed off from the world, and alone in a vast universe of darkness and gritty human emotions. It pulls you in slowly, making you experience every emotion the protagonist feels as his fate unfolds in a beautiful literary masterpiece.” — demonchefofportland

Mark Z. Danielewski

HOUSE OF LEAVES 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

Garth Ennis is the award-winning writer of Hellblazer, Hitman, Punisher, Preacher, Pride and Joy and War Stories. He is much in demand for his hardedged, wickedly humorous style. Ennis began his comic-writing career in 1989 with the series Troubled Souls. Appearing in the short-lived but criticallyacclaimed British anthology Crisis and illustrated by McCrea, it told the story of a young, apolitical Protestant man caught up by fate in the violence of the Irish ‘Troubles’. It spawned a sequel, For a Few Troubles More, a broad Belfast-based comedy featuring two supporting characters from Troubled Souls, Dougie and Ivor, who would later get their own American comics series, Dicks, from Caliber in 1997, and several follow-ups from Avatar.

“Garth Ennis’ Crossed has my vote for ‘darkest comic book’, at least. The antagonists rape/kill a couple and their young daughter when they catch up to them in the first few pages. The husband’s intestines are hanging out while he is being raped, still alive. That’s how the comic starts. It gets bleaker from there.It

was one of the only two things I’ve ever oped out of finishing reading.” — JDAlvey

The Arrangement of Darkness

Garth Ennis

CROSSE D 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

cruelest affronts to decency. Conjure your darkest nightmares... and then realize it could all be so much worse. When civilization crumbles in one terrifying moment; when people are gleefully breaking into unthinkable

Pages: 240

acts of violence all around you; when everyone you love has died screaming in agony: What do you do? There is no help. There is no hope. There is no escape. There are only the Crossed. Garth Ennis has pulled out all the

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

stops to write the most depraved and twisted book of his career, one that also may be his most poignant human drama! Crossed is Ennis’ horrifically visceral exploration of the pure evil that humans are truly capable of indulging and collected here are all

Best Sellers Rank: #152,673 in Books

ten heart-stopping chapters. This gutwrenching vision is brought to vivid (and more than a little disturbing) life by his partner in crime Jacen Burrows.

#405 in Horror Graphic Novels (Books)

Perec (Cont.)

#602 in Science Fiction Graphic Novels (Books)

Global Ratings

Publisher: Avatar Press

crimes against humanity. Picture the

495

Crossed Garth Ennis

Imagine, for a moment, the worst

On the shelves of fireplaces or over radiators (it may be thought, even so, that heat may, in the long run, prove somewhat harmful), between two windows, in the embrasure of an unused door, on the steps of a library ladder, making this unusable (very chic), underneath a window, on a piece of furniture set at an angle and dividing the room into two (very chic, creates an even better effect with a few pot-plants). 1.4 Things which aren’t books but are often met with in libraries Photographs in gilded brass frames, small engravings, pen and ink drawings, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, matchbox-holders containing, or not, chemical matches (dangerous), lead soldiers, a photograph of Ernest Renan in his study at the Collége de France,* postcards, dolls’ eyes, tins, packets of salt, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, letter-scales, picture hooks, marbles, pipe-cleaners, scale models of vintage cars, multicoloured pebbles and gravel, ex-votos, springs.

by a forest, a pair of siblings speak a language and inhabit a universe of their own making. When their father commits suicide, they are forced into contact with the villagers beyond the enclosure and their cloak of romance

Pages: 124

and superstition quickly falls away to reveal not only the startling truth about themselves, but the startling truth about the world to them. Balancing naiveté with carnality, Soucy creates a powerfully gripping

Rating: 3.8 out of 5

story where nothing is as it first seems. His surprising twists and fascination with guilt, cruelty, and violence make this story a resounding triumph.

Best Sellers Rank:

#439,428 in Books

#11,893 in Family Life Fiction (Books)

The Arrangement of Darkness

Perec (Cont.)

#26,772 in Literary Fiction (Books)

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches Gaétan Soucy

Publisher: A List

on an immense estate surrounded

Global Ratings

Alone with their authoritarian father

2. Of Order A library that is not arranged becomes disarranged: this is the example I was given to try and get me to understand what entropy was and which I have several times verified experimentally. Disorder in a library is not serious in itself; it ranks with ‘Which drawer did I put my socks in?’. We always think we shall know instinctively where we have put such and such a book. And even if we don’t know, it will never be difficult to go rapidly along all the shelves.

About The Author

Gaétan Soucy was a novelist and professor. He published four novels to wide acclaim in Canada and abroad: The Immaculate Conception, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction; Atonement, Vaudeville!; and The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, which was translated into more than ten languages. He died in Montreal in 2013.

“I’m no literary expert, but the book seems kinda normal until you get near the end and then

you realize everything you thought you knew was wrong and it’s actually a hundred levels of fucked up.” — hermitsdayout

Gaétan Soucy

TH E LITTLE G I R L WHO WAS TOO FON D OF MATCH ES

15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

Jose Saramago is one of the most acclaimed writers in the world today. Jose is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of numerous novels, including All the Names, Blindness, and The Cave. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. Saramago died in June 2010.

“Pun intended. It’s a pretty fucked up book though. I think for me the shocking part was how fucked it got. I mean, if you read ‘American Psycho,’ you kind of know what you’re getting into. But in ‘Blindness; as things gradually become worse and worse for the characters it’s like the boiling lobster metaphor, and suddenly it hits you that holy shit… This

is really fucked up and humans are basically monsters.” — Shigdig7

The Arrangement of Darkness

Jose Saramago

B LI N DN ESS 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl

Pages: 304

with dark glasses, a dog of tearsthrough the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the

Rating: 4.2 out of 5

reading public with its powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses-and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man’s will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature

Best Sellers Rank: #943,254 in Books

Perec (Cont.)

#49,596 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Blindess Jose Saramago

1,930

Publisher: Harcourt

one. Authorities confine the blind

Global Ratings

A city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” which spares no

Opposed to this apologia for a sympathetic disorder is the small-minded temptation towards an individual bureaucracy: one thing for each place and each place for its one thing, and vice versa. Between these two tensions, one which sets a premium on letting things be, on a good-natured anarchy, the other that exalts the virtues of the tabula rasa, the cold efficiency of the great arranging, one always ends by trying to set one’s books in order. This is a trying, depressing operation, but one liable to produce pleasant surprises, such as coming upon a book you had forgotten because you could no longer see it and which, putting off until tomorrow what you won’t do today, you finally re-devour lying face down on you bed.

Trumbo’s stark, profoundly troubling masterpiece about the horrors of World War I brilliantly crystallized the uncompromising brutality of war and became the most influential

Pages: 320

protest novel of the Vietnam era. With a compelling new foreword by fellow award-winning writer E. L. Doctorow, Johnny Got His Gun is an undisputed classic of antiwar

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

literature that’s as timely as ever. “A

terrifying

book,

extraordinary emotional intensity.”--The Washington Post “Powerful...an

Best Sellers Rank:

eye-

o p e n e r. ” - - M i c h a e l M o o r e

#133,371 in Books

“Mr. Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury amounting to

#1,188 in Classic American Literature

eloquence.”--The New York Times “A book that can never be forgotten by anyone who reads it.”--Saturday Review

#2,066 in War Fiction (Books)

Perec (Cont.)

#9,493 in Literary Fiction (Books)

1,562

Johnny Got His Gun Dalton Trumbo

Publisher: Citadel

original publication in 1939, Dalton

Global Ratings

An immediate bestseller upon its

2.1. Ways of arranging books ordered alphabetically ordered by continent or country

The Arrangement of Darkness

*A famously pompous, highminded nineteenth-century scholar and writer, unlikely to have appealed to GP. ordered by colour ordered by date of acquisition ordered by date of publication ordered by format ordered by genre ordered by major periods of literary history ordered by language ordered by priority for future reading ordered by binding ordered by series 30

About The Author

Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was among the most prolific and important literary figures of his time. One of the famous Hollywood Ten, he refused to testify about his alleged communist affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Blacklisted from the film industry and charged with contempt of Congress, he served an elevenmonth prison sentence. Johnny Got His Gun, the most highly acclaimed work of Trumbo’s extraordinary career, won a National Book award (then known as an American Book Sellers Award) in 1939. The idea for the novel came to Trumbo after he learned of a British soldier who was seriously injured during World War I. In 2015 the acclaimed film “Trumbo,” starring Bryan Cranston, spurred renewed interest in the author’s life and works.

“Hopeless from the start, and only goes downhill.

You’re stuck with him as a prisoner in his own mind, and you get to bear witness as he goes stark-raving mad.” — tumblechuckles

Dalton Trumbo

JOH N NY GOT H IS G U N 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in1933 and spent most of his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. He served in the U.S. Air Force and later studied at the University of Tennessee. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lives today. McCarthy’s fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West--the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992, and The Crossing.

“Probably the darkest book I’ve ever read, personally. Biblical in prose, disturbingly violent detail, all wrapped up in a nihilistic interpretation of the West. Plus, it has the most unsettling/interesting villain of all time in it. A man who seems to represent the vast sum of human violence, encapsulating both all its knowledge and all its depravity.

Cormac McCarthy may have missed out on being hugged as a child, but he’s an indisputable literary genius.” — Interminable_Turbine

The Arrangement of Darkness

Cormac McCarthy

B LOOD M E R I DIAN 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

by Blood Meridian, since Cormac

Publisher: Modern Library

McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner,” writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. “I

Pages: 384

venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable.” Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre

Best Sellers Rank: #26,482 in Books

on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since

#108 in Native American Literature (Books)

its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf. “A classic American novel of

regeneration

t h ro u g h

#111 in Biographical Historical Fiction

violence,” declares Michael Herr. “McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers.”

Perec (Cont.)

#653 in Westerns (Books)

4,810

and of As I Lay Dying is augmented

Global Ratings

Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy

“The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick

None of these classifications is satisfactory by itself. In practice, every library is ordered starting from a combination of these modes of classification, whose relative weighting, resistance to change, obsolescence and persistence give every library a unique personality. We should first of all distinguish stable classifications from provisional ones. Stable classifications are those which, in principle, you continue to respect; provisional classifications are those supposed to last only a few days, the time it takes for a book todiscover, or rediscover, its definitive place. This may be a book recently acquired and not yet read, or else a book recently readthat you don’t quite know where to place and which you have promised yourself you will put away on the occasion of a forthcoming ‘great arranging’, or else a book whose reading has been interrupted and that you don’t want to classify before taking it up again and finishing it, or else a book you have used constantly over a given period, or else a book you have taken down to look up a piece of information or a reference and which you haven’t yet put back in its place, or else a book that you can’t put back in its rightful place because it doesn’t belong to you and you’ve several times promised to give it back, etc.

emotions on the most primal level, a fairy tale grimmer than Grimm but aglow with a girl’s indomitable spirit. What if the woods were full of them?

Pages: 224

And of course they were, the woods were full of everything you didn’t like, everything you were afraid of and instinctively loathed, everything that tried to overwhelm you with nasty, no-brain panic.

Rating: 4.6 out of 5

The brochure promised a “moderateto-difficult” six-mile hike on the Maine-New Hampshire branch of the Appalachian Trail, where nine-yearold Trisha McFarland was to spend

Best Sellers Rank:

Saturday with her older brother Pete

#321,560 in Books

and her recently divorced mother. When she wanders off to escape their constant bickering, then tries to catch up by attempting a shortcut through the woods, Trisha strays

#677 in Psychic Thrillers

deeper into a wilderness full of peril and terror. Especially when night falls. Trisha has only her wits for navigation, only her ingenuity as a defense against the elements, only her courage and

#4,673 in Psychological Fiction (Books)

faith to withstand her mounting fear. For solace she tunes her Walkman to broadcasts of Boston Red Sox games and the gritty performances of her hero, number thirty-six, relief pitcher Tom Gordon. And when Trisha imagines that Tom Gordon is with her—her key to surviving an enemy known only by the slaughtered

The Arrangement of Darkness

animals and mangled trees in its wake.

#5,791 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)

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her radio’s reception begins to fade,

2,182

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner

King, a classic story that engages our

Global Ratings

From international bestseller Stephen

In my own case, nearly three-quarters of my books have never really been classified. Those that are not arranged in a definitively provisional way are arranged in a provisionally definitive way, as at the OuLiPo. Meanwhile, I move them from one room to another, one shelf to another, one pile to another, and may spend three hours looking for a book without finding it but sometimes having the satisfaction of coming upon six or seven others which serve my purpose just as well.

About The Author

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively. King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King’s books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald’s Game and It. King was the recipient of America’s prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

“It’s one of Stephen King’s lesser known works and it is pretty fucking disturbing. It’s about a nine year old girl who gets lost in the Northeast American wilderness. It’s pretty dark given the fact that it mostly focuses on the girls mental state as hunger, exposure and dehydration cause her to loose touch with reality and go insane as she is faced with death. Also, over the course of the book, there are increasing signs that she is being stalked by a supernatural creature hell bent on killing and eating her.

It was quite hard to make it through the whole book.” — quitpayload

Stephen King TH E G I R L WHO LOVE D TOM GOR DON

15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 - 2 December 1814) was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence and criminality.

“The word ‘sadism’ is derived from this guy’s name! It tells the story of four wealthy male libertines who resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. To do this, they seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle… with a harem of 46 victims, mostly young male and female teenagers, engage in the sexual abuse and torture of the victims, which gradually mounts in intensity and ends in their slaughter.” — snackbot7000

The Arrangement of Darkness

Marquis Sade

120 DAYS OF SODOM 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

120 Days of Sodom Marquis Sade

The extensive wars wherewith

State’s treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, none the less contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which, instead of

Pages: 406

appeasing, they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously. The end of this so very sublime reign was perhaps one of the periods in the history of the French Empire when one saw the emergence of

Rating: 3.8 out of 5

the greatest number of these mysterious fortunes whose origins are as obscure as the lust and debauchery that accompany them. It was toward the close of this period, and not long before the Regent sought, by means of the famous tribunal which goes under the name of the Chambre

Best Sellers Rank: #1,775,735 in Books

de Justice, to flush this multitude of traffickers, that four of them conceived the idea for the singular revels whereof we are going to give an account. One must not suppose that it was exclusively the low-born and vulgar sort which did this swindling; gentlemen of the highest note led the pack. brother the Bishop of X***, each of whom had thuswise amassed immense fortunes, are in themselves solid proof that, like the others, the nobility neglected no opportunities to take this road to wealth. These two illustrious figures, through their pleasures

#31,010 in BDSM Erotica (Books)

Perec (Cont.)

The Duc de Blangis and his

293

his reign, while draining the

Global Ratings

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Louis XIV was burdened during

2.2. Books very easy to arrange The big Jules Vernes in the red binding, very large books, very small ones, Baedekers, rare books or ones presumed to be so, hardbacks, volumes in the Pléiade collection, the Présence du Futur series, novels published by the Editions de Minuit, collections, journals of which you possess at least three issues, etc.

and business closely associated with the celebrated Durcet and the Président de Curval, were the first to hit upon the debauch we propose to chronicle, and h av i n g

c o m mu n i c at e d

the

scheme to their two friends, all four agreed to assume the major roles in these unusual orgies.

that he worked on for a number of years between 1897 and 1908. This final version was published in 1916 after his death. The story takes place in 1590, where three boys, Theodor, Seppi, and Nikolaus, live relatively happy simple lives in a remote Austrian village called

Pages: 122

Eseldorf (German for “Assville” or “Donkeytown”). The story is narrated by Theodor, the village organist’s son. This edition also contains three other Twain stories: “A Fable”, “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey”, and “The McWilliamses and

the

Burglar

Alar m.”

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Best Sellers Rank:

#1,072,669 in Books

Perec (Cont.)

#26,296 in Classic Literature & Fiction

The Mysterious Stranger Mark Twain

Global Ratings

Publisher: SeaWolf Press

by the American author Mark Twain

191

The Mysterious Stranger is a novel

2.3. Books not too difficult to arrange Books on the cinema, whether essays on directors, albums of movie stars or shooting scripts, South American novels, ethnology, psychoanalysis, cookery books (see above), directories (next to the phone), German Romantics, books in the Que Sais-je? series (the problem being whether to arrange them all together or with the discipline they deal with), etc.

The Arrangement of Darkness

2.4. Books just about impossible to arrange The rest: for example, journals of which you possess only a single issue, or else La Campagne de 1812 en Russie by Clausewitz, translated from the German by M. Bégouën, Captain-Commandant in the 31st Dragoons, Passed Staff College, with one map, Paris, Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot et Cie, 1900; or else fascicule 6 of Volume 91 (November 1976) of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) giving the programme for the 666 working sessions of the annual congress of the said Association. 38

About The Author

Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910). He was born and brought up in the American state of Missouri and, because of his father’s death, he left school to earn his living when he was only twelve. He was a great adventurer and travelled round America as a printer; prospected for gold and set off for South America to earn his fortune. He returned to become a steam-boat pilot on the Mississippi River, close to where he had grown up. The Civil War put an end to steam-boating and Clemens briefly joined the Confederate army - although the rest of his family were Unionists! He had already tried his hand at newspaper reporting and now became a successful journalist. He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. He took the name from his steam-boat days - it was the river pilots’ cry to let their men know that the water was two fathoms deep.

“It’s the most cynical, pessimistic, ‘darkest’ thing I’ve ever read. The story is essentially about three Austrian children and their encounters with Satan. Satan attempts to convince the children that God is either nonexistent or indifferent to human suffering, that life is ultimately meaningless, and that humans are doomed, ignorant creatures.

Many scholars believe The Mysterious Stranger expresses Twain’s own despair towards the end of his life.” — MVB1837

Mark Twain TH E MYSTE R IOUS STRANG E R

15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About The Author

“A total of 67 people passed out or needed medical assistance when he did a national speaking tour where he read it aloud.” — JellybeanFernandez

The Arrangement of Darkness

Chuck Palahniuk

HAU NTE D 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mindblowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people

Pages: 416

who have answered an ad headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from

Rating: 4.4 out of 5

creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat

Best Sellers Rank: #446,070 in Books

and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations

#8,206 in Short Stories (Books)

become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/ nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight. Haunted is on one level a satire of

#18,271 in Horror Literature & Fiction

reality television—The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition—The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest—which means his most extreme and his most provocative.

#51,900 in American Literature (Books)

Perec (Cont.)

Frankenstein—to tell an utterly

Global Ratings

Publisher: Doubleday

made up of stories: Twenty-three of

1,452

Haunted Chuck Palahniuk

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel

2.5 Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact thesame word, denoting pure chance. It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms.

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Textual References “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books” Georges Perec Amazon ThoughtCatalog Reddit

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