So much has been built on the American Dream in fiction that it seems less a novelistic motif and more a staple of the national consciousness. Of course, every dream carries the chance of turning into a nightmare (think of poor, wealthy, handsome Jay Gatsby shot by a jealous mechanic and found floating in his Long Island swimming pool). In the tradition of tracking American obsessions, my latest novel, Orient (out 9 April) touches on that sense of dreams transforming rapidly into nightmares. Here are ten novels in American fiction that I think do a fantastic job of rendering the American nightmare on the page.

THE NIGHTMARE OF COMING HOME: DOG SOLDIERS, BY ROBERT STONE

Converse, a war correspondent in Vietnam, is about to return to his wife and life in beautiful Southern California. But a little drug-smuggling deal he’s arranged quickly turns the So Cal hippie wonderland into a second bloody war front. The brutal, brilliant book reminds you not to bring the battle back with you from your trip.

THE NIGHTMARE OF YOUR OWN NEIGHBOURHOOD: NO LEASE ON LIFE, BY LYNNE TILLMAN

Okay, as someone who lives in the scrubbed-clean East Village of 2015, Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, vibrant, super-dark novel about a woman who can no longer take the decaying street life of the neighborhood outside her apartment windows reads as a delicious ode to a much realer, grittier, far-off era. But Tillman is a master of getting under her character’s skin and then letting every irritation – drug deals, late-night revelers, indifferent super-intendants, urine in the downstairs foyer – get under that skin as well. This shamefully underappreciated novel is a downtown New York war cry.

THE NIGHTMARE OF LOVING A KILLER: THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG, NORMAN MAILER

By far one of the best books the United States has ever produced, The Executioner’s Song – a sort of fictional non-fiction – follows Gary Gilmour right through the storm of his Utah murder spree and his years of incarceration. But for me the most full-fleshed character is Gilmour’s on-and-off-again girlfriend Nicole Baker, who achieves a sad, resigned, mistake-prone heroism in her life during and after Gilmour. You almost want to drive through the dust of her small town and rescue her.

THE NIGHTMARE OF RUNNING OUT OF OPTIONS: THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, EDITH WHARTON

How many times have I been in a conversation where someone suddenly says, “I am Lily Bart!”? What that person means is that they thought they had so many cards to choose from but are now clinging to to any card dealt their way. This epically tragic downward spiral of the gorgeous, stubborn Bart charts just what can happen when you refuse the lifesavers thrown to you in hopes of being gathered up by the yacht that never appears on the horizon.

THE NIGHTMARE OF MAKING NEW FRIENDS: THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

My vote for the true Great American Novel. Never, while living high and happy in Southern Italy, befriend a young man sent by your parents to bring you home. Highsmith’s malicious twist on Henry James’ The Ambassadors perfectly portrays the charming sociopath who kill you, become you, steal your friends and identity, and get away with murder. This book is evil in a postcard.

THE NIGHTMARE OF BEING CURSED: THE VANISHERS, HEIDI JULAVITS

I am forever recommending this book to smart friends. Landing a job is always good except when it’s being the stenographer for a jealous, narcissistic occultist at a school for psychics—which is just how The Vanishers begins. This novel spills over with nightmares, hallucinations, curses, and wicked mind games among rivals, except in the hands of Julavits it’s all so enchanted and well devised. Maybe this is actually the nightmare of not being as clever as the author.

THE NIGHTMARE OF LIVING IN A SIMULATED, NAME-BRAND, TRENDIFYING CULTURE: GENERATION X, DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The prophetic might of this novel has been eclipsed by the generation it came to represent, but Coupland’s funny, vivacious, Decameron-like book, full of mishaps and misbehavior of a young, affluent twenty-somethings drifting in a Palm Springs of plasticity, predicts the feel-good, me-centric, people-without-a-higher-meaning that we’re still mired in with no way out. You laugh. You will then look in a mirror. And you will weep.

THE NIGHTMARE THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN WHAT OTHERS WANT TO DO TO YOU: EVERY NOVEL BY DENNIS COOPER (PARTICULARLY CLOSER, FRISK, TRY, THE MARBLED SWARM)

Dennis Cooper: read him. Keep reading him. It’s a flinch test. Can you read the carnage, the dissections, the mistreatment of young men, the zero behind the pretty face, the sexual fantasies gone so berserk there is no way to walk them back to a safe border? Cooper is a genius and tests our limits with his nightmares.

THE NIGHTMARE OF ISOLATION: THE SHINING, STEPHEN KING

This list requires a Stephen King, and The Shining is the master at his best. Never, ever let your husband take a job as winter caretaker at an old hotel in the Rockies miles away from the closest emergency vehicle. You will go crazy from cabin fever, and King does a blockbuster job packing every hallways and guest room with a new torment. (Side note: my deep eight-year-old love of Shelley Duvall in Kubrick’s film version has followed me to this day).

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE FUTURE: THE HANDMAID’S TALE, MAGARET ATWOOD

I read this book the summer after my freshman year of high school. It struck deep and has stayed with me ever since. Before I read Atwood’s novel, I envisioned the future as a chaotic, robotic mess or some Cold War hyper-organized socialist state. Until The Handmaid’s Tale, it never occurred to me that the future could be as religiously oppressive and backward as the past. That possibility was a shock to my 15-year-old self, and in many ways it bore rather true in time. The book should be read and re-read.

Christopher Bollen's Orient is out 9 April, courtesy of Simon & Schuster U.K.