Plot: A young girl corresponds with an imprisoned pedophile. Or does she?

Why it's on the list: In Lolita, Nabokov created a sympathetic pedophile inclined toward rhapsodic soliloquies about the syllables of his beloved's name. Homes' pedophile is pure grotesque: He "interprets" the letters from his young correspondent, and in doing so takes the reader over the edge. The fantasies are, at first, inventive if not innocent (the girl runs a tiny toy ambulance back and forth over her clit; or uses a garden sprinkler as a post coital douche); then the monster emerges. The description of prison sex is as graphic as it gets.

Excerpt: Hers was the divorced heart, but she carried on, sure -- or nearly sure -- that none of the others did the things she did with him. On the floor of her mother's walk-in closet, she gagged his mouth with a suede Dior belt; behind the cinder-block retaining wall, she employed a railroad tie to hold his legs spread. Deep in the furnace room, hidden among the spare tires and Flexible Flyers, she repetitiously wrapped him with kite string and extra electrical cords, tying him to the hot-water heater, his puny ass burning a bright and cheery pink as heat seeped through the thin insulation. She pushed him past his limit, drove his sweet Schwanstück backward and forward, slamming him from drive to reverse. Stripped, she slid her naked body over his, sweeping the rubbery tips of her tits across his fine and sensitive skin from neck to nuts, making him twist and turn, trying to pull away from the heater, the heater itself making a groaning sound and him begging, "Put it in, put it in."