10 Heaviest Books of the 1990s

Image via Plume Published Jul 20, 2026, 7:32 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account You had all sorts of movies and music coming out in the 1990s, and then video games were really jumping forward in a technological sense, but people did still maintain an interest in reading. Books have never really fully gone away, and you had a few in that decade that proved to be blockbuster successes, or whatever the literature equivalent of a blockbuster success is (see the first few Harry Potter books, Northern Lights, and Jurassic Park for some usual suspects). Some of the following books were also successful, but they are a bit harder to call mass-appeal, at least in the traditional sense. They are the heaviest books of the 1990s, after all, and you can understand if not everyone is keen to read something bleak, harrowing, and cynical in their downtime, or if they're trying to read something before bed. But if you are after novels (plus a couple of works of non-fiction, and then one graphic novel) of a darker and more intense variety, then these ones have got your back. They’ll have your back, and then they’ll also stab you in it. In a good way. 10 'Underworld' (1997) Image via Charles Scribner's Sons The heaviest book Don DeLillo has written came out in the 1980s (Libra). For what it’s worth, the book that might well be his most entertaining came out in that decade, too (White Noise). But then Underworld, which was a ‘90s release, does still feel like one of his most uncomfortable (at times) and intense books, because it does have a lot of room to go to some dark places with it being such an epic. It’s chronologically interesting with its storytelling, and Underworld is also admirable for how it looks at so much recent (at least pretty recent, for now) American history. It’s 800+ pages long, and tries to condense much of the back half of the 20th century, regarding the U.S., into a single book. For the most part, it succeeds, and some sequences are striking for how visceral and upsetting they manage to be. 9 'The Green Mile' (1996) Image via Signet Books There is at least one very effective and frightening villain in The Green Mile, but it’s not really the kind of Stephen King story that’s scary in a more expected horror-focused sort of way. There is more of a crime and fantasy focus here, albeit it’s a dark sort of fantasy, and as far as the “crime” is concerned, it’s more of a post-crime book, since The Green Mile is mostly set in and around death row. When a supernatural/fantastical element does enter into the story, it’s done more to heighten the emotional intensity of it all, rather than excite or frighten. Those who are scheduled to die have already committed their crimes (in one case, just allegedly), and so the prisoners have to try and accept what’s coming, while the guards deal with being surrounded by so much systematic death. When a supernatural/fantastical element does enter into the story, it’s done more to heighten the emotional intensity of it all, rather than excite or frighten. It’s a bleak book, undeniably, though also undeniable is the fact that it kind of has to be bleak. 8 'Infinite Jest' (1996) Image via Little, Brown and Company One of those books you can argue might be the Great American Novel, Infinite Jest is a lot to take in, with its size, dense language, numerous characters, and almost overwhelming ambition, generally speaking. There are four main settings or threads in Infinite Jest, and usually only partial or obscure ways in which characters associated with one stretch of the book might run into characters from another. Then, things are told out of order, and closure in a traditional sense never seems particularly on the mind of David Foster Wallace. Still, he tackles a lot you can relate to, or find interesting, even while other parts of Infinite Jest might overwhelm. If you're not confused by what you're reading, you're either going to be amused, because Infinite Jest is quite funny at times, or you're going to be feeling emotionally down or paranoid, since those heavier and more tragic stretches of the book do hit hard, and contrast effectively with the more entertaining parts. 7 'Trainspotting' (1993) Image via Penguin Random House Trainspotting is about a handful of different people who are all living lives defined by addiction. Most of the main characters have some kind of drug addiction, but others seem like they live to do other things that might sometimes be destructive in other ways. No punches are pulled in exploring the oftentimes chaotic lives of all these people, and it makes for an honestly very anxiety-inducing read at certain points. Granted, if you're not always able to pick up on what’s being said, through the style of the book and the slang used in its dialogue (and also through the first-person narration), the impact might be mitigated a little. In that instance, though, there’s still something of a nightmarish and kind of surreal feeling to so much of Trainspotting that you do pick up on and process no matter what, so in one way or another (or multiple ways), it’s probably going to feel at least a bit intense. 6 'Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas' (1995) Image via Simon & Schuster In 1990, Goodfellas was released, and proved to be an amazing film adaptation of a non-fiction book by Nicholas Pileggi called Wiseguy. Martin Scorsese, five years on from Goodfellas, adapted another of Pileggi’s books, with both the book and movie ultimately coming out right around the same time, even if the book was written quite a while earlier. The movie was, of course, Casino, and the book had the slightly less catchy title of Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. It’s worth mentioning the movies and the history of Pileggi’s work being adapted, just because Wiseguy and Goodfellas are dark, but then Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas and Casino are both a good deal more harrowing. There aren’t really many figures who are even a tiny bit likable and endearing here, and there’s also something to be said about how the stakes perhaps feel higher – and the corruption seems to be more overwhelming and widespread – in both versions of Casino, compared to Wiseguy/Goodfellas. 5 'My Dark Places' (1996) Image via Random House There aren’t really any cheery James Ellroy books, especially if you look at the stuff he’s best known for writing. He’s great at writing no-nonsense, cynical, and unpredictable crime/noir-type stories, but with My Dark Places, he wrote more of a memoir, even if it also plays out like a crime story. He tackled the murder of his mother here, which happened when Ellroy was only 10 years old. The aftermath is explored, and much time is spent on the investigation and how it became increasingly desperate and eventually hopeless-feeling. Ellroy does also, inevitably, cover how the event shaped his life going forward, and you do get the sense of his history being baked into some of his fiction, sure, yet it’s all done in an undeniably intense and unavoidably personal way in My Dark Places. It’s one of his most powerful books, and then also one of his most emotionally challenging, too. 4 'A Game of Thrones' (1996) Image via Bantam Spectra Heavy-going science fiction books might traditionally be a little more common than exceptionally harrowing fantasy books, but if you think you're in safe and lightweight territory by sticking to fantasy, you might be caught off-guard by something like A Song of Ice and Fire. No, admittedly, this series did not invent the idea of making fantasy dark or feel rather realistic/grounded, but the series did do that kind of thing noticeably well. A Game of Thrones kicked the series off, and if you’ve seen the first season of Game of Thrones, you probably know why this book is here (since Game of Thrones adapted the first book for that first season). Things are unpredictable and genuinely shocking here, at least if you’ve not had certain things ruined. And even if you have had some things spoiled, you might still be surprised by the ways – and oftentimes the suddenness of how – characters are killed off, betrayed, or forever psychologically ruined here. 3 'American Psycho' (1991) Image via Vintage The movie adaptation of American Psycho is quite violent, but it really doesn’t have anything on the original book. It might also be fair to say that the movie is funnier, but American Psycho (1991) also isn't lacking in satire. It’s just that satire is more intense, and horror does overwhelm humor when all the horrible things Patrick Bateman does (or claims he's done) are described in so graphic a manner. But hey, it makes it hard to forget. American Psycho (1991) is relentless, and its message about sociopathy on Wall Street and people making a killing while also doing a lot of killing… it’s well-delivered. You can’t miss it. You might want to miss other parts of the book, because it’s a grueling read, but like a fair few already-mentioned novels, the subject matter here, to an extent, necessitates such unpleasantness. 2 'From Hell' (1999) Image via Top Shelf Productions Putting From Hell here is a bit complicated, since it’s a graphic novel rather than a more conventional work of fiction or non-fiction, and also, part of it was technically published in the late 1980s. 1989 was when the earliest parts of it were published in an anthology comic book called Taboo, but most of its volumes were published throughout the 1990s. And then it was collected into a single book published in 1999, so that’s being counted here as the year of publication. To try and summarize From Hell, it’s about the hunt for Jack the Ripper, and it delves into who the perpetrator of those infamous murders might've been, all the while sticking to history in the sense that no one investigating the crimes can really prove anything. It’s bleak in that regard, and then there’s also so much heaviness in From Hell that comes from how uncompromising it is with its violent imagery. Also, there are things it does that prove exceptionally unsettling in more unexpected ways, too. From Hell Release Date October 19, 2001 Runtime 122 minutes 1 'American Tabloid' (1995) Image via Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Back to James Ellroy, American Tabloid (the first book in the Underworld USA trilogy) might not be as personal as My Dark Places, but there is still a certain reality that aims to be captured, even with this being more based in fiction than his aforementioned memoir. Like, the main characters in American Tabloid are fictional, or only inspired by real people, but then plenty of side/supporting characters are historical figures. They're thrown into what feels like a darker version of the late 1950s and early 1960s than what might've really happened, in America, but then if Ellroy’s even somewhat on the money concerning that time in history, then things being not quite as dark in real life isn't saying much. There’s a portrait painted here of corruption being everywhere and life being exceptionally cheap, at least for those who have genuine power. American Tabloid never stops feeling unsettling and soul-crushing, and it is that while also being riveting and engaging. It’s easy to get through and read, maybe, but then what you have to grapple with and process once it’s done proves to be anything but easy.