Plot: Young man obsesses about girlfriend, torches her house, stalks her, gets locked up.

Why it's on the list: Obsession? Spencer can make a sex scene last for pages, each sentence revealing something exquisite, or painful, or funny -- "She grabbed the pillow with her free hand and breathed out with a kind of yogic completeness as if to open herself further to me, but it was useless because her anus was as cryptic as a belly button. I could feel its stunned rejection of my approach." Unanimous erection? Standing ovation, undivided attention, pure targeted lust.

Excerpt: Her back was soaked with sweat and the sheets were like slush. I was panting and sweating myself and sore all over but I didn't want to stop, neither of us did. The friction, our need of it, wasn't really connected to pleasure at that point. It was more of an attempt to erase our bodies and explode out of them into pure matter. It was afternoon, there was soft light in her little room, and when she spread her legs and offered her rump to me I looked at the back half of her vagina, with the dark brown hair sopping wet and pointing out in curly spikes. I'll never understand exactly what the sight of her body did to me, I mean why it worked the way it did, but its effect was so powerful, so unfailingly powerful that I believed then and will always believe that I was born to see it, to look at her face, throat, breasts, genitals, and feel a heat and spaciousness that no word in my vocabulary can even begin to express. I think that after all of that wet, wet fucking I was only three-quarters hard, but the sight of her backside restored me to my unanimous erection and at once I began to move myself into her.