Three Valentine's Day reading suggestions for the black-at-heart

Valentine's Day may be all about fountains of cartoon pink hearts, but that doesn't mean you have to lose your mind about it. This Valentine's Day, why not read a book that features some, shall we say, non-traditional romance storylines?

1. Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr.
If you're tired of the posh, airbrushed, white-washed 1950s nostalgia of Mad Men, Last Exit to Brooklyn is your antidote.

This harsh work of transgressive fiction was published in 1964, and quickly became one of the banned-est books of its time. It explored the dark side of working class life in 1950s Brooklyn, including drug use, transvestitism, rape, domestic violence and street gangs.

The book is structured in six parts. Relationships and romance figure heavily in several of the stories, although it's not the sort of love you'll find at a Hallmark store.

2. 1984, George Orwell
Everything was going fine in Winston Smith's life until he meets Julia. (It's even a "meet cute:" Julia takes a fall, and when Winston helps her up, she secretly slips him a note that says "I LOVE YOU.") Their love affair blossoms in secret, and it's all very romantic until someone rats them out to the government.

In many ways, 1984 is a book about the power of love to be used as leverage to destroy lives. Winston and Julia would have been fine, if their love for each other hadn't been so strong.

3. The Stress of Her Regard, Tim Powers
This book is a two-fer: it features the Romantic poets (Byron, Keats and Shelley) as victims of an invisible society of vampiric evil spirits, plus the lynchpin of the story is the corrosive power of toxic love.

It all starts when a man slips a ring on a wooden statue on his wedding night, unwittingly "wedding" himself to the evil spirit (a nephilim), which had inhabited the statue. The nephilim kills the man's fiancée because she wants him all to herself, and things kind of go downhill from there.

This is a great fantasy novel for people who dislike fantasy novels in general, and an excellent introduction to Tim Powers' earlier works.

Image copyright Hubert Selby, Jr/Grove Press, courtesy Wikimedia Commons