Hmmm! It’s interesting, as a follow-up from Running with Scissors, to see what some literary readers put in the category of cult lit. Here is one selection. I’ve read a considerable number of these works and don’t necessarily think of them as belonging in the category of cult literature, but it appears that I may have to start trying to re-define this term. Do teachers teaching The Great Gatsby really call it cult lit.?
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld
The Beach by Alex Garland and The Magus by John Fowles
Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Destroy All Monsters by Ken Hollings
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
The Fog and The Rats by James Herbert
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hammer of the Gods: Led Zeppelin Unauthorized by Stephen Davis
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Heart’s Journey in Winter by James Buchan
I am Legend by Richard Matheson
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
The Inheritors by William Golding
Institute Benjamenta by Robert Walser
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier
Light by M. John Harrison
Lightduress by Paul Celan
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Machine in Ward Eleven by Charles Willeford
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Mount Analogue by Renee Daumal
The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Nico: Songs They Never Play on the Radio by James Young
Nog by Rudolf Wurlitzer
The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
The Satyricon by Titus Petronius
Sheepshagger by Niall Griffiths
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
Spy on the House of Love by Anais Nin
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich by Solomon Volkov
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Another list includes Trout Fishing in America. Really, that’s cult literature?
Can someone explain this term more succinctly?
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