Astroturf is a novel – part black comedy, part literary thriller – in which much of the action takes place in the gym and on online bodybuilding and steroid forums. I know it sounds unlikely. But when I became acquainted with the subculture that gathers around those sites, it was clear to me that most of the materials needed to write about contemporary masculinity were focused there. There was an intensified sense of physical life and the possibility of transformation. There were highly charged relationships and codes of behaviour; there were specialised vocabularies concerning weightlifting technique and performance-enhancing drugs. There was the sense of online forums as spaces in which the performance of masculinity had to be constantly reiterated. And there was the dedication to pursuits that to an outsider seem crazy, pointless and excessive, yet have the utmost seriousness for those involved.

After I had written Astroturf, but before it was published, it started to seem like stories about anabolic steroids were all over the place. “Up to a million Britons use steroids for looks not sport” ran the Guardian headline during the week in late January when I was meeting production companies interested in acquiring screen rights. It couldn’t have been more apt if my agent had planted the story. Then in April, when the fatberg dwelling under the South Bank was autopsied, higher concentrations of muscle-boosting supplements than of recreational drugs were found. My sense that the topic was a huge one hiding in plain sight, at once widespread and culturally near-invisible, was confirmed. It seemed strange that there weren’t more novels being written about steroids and the gym.

As far as I know, there aren’t. But lots of valuable books approach the topic from various angles. This list ranges from writings about bodybuilding, to writings about the role of drugs in competitive sports, to writings about the role that testosterone – both the naturally occurring steroid hormone and its synthetic variants – plays in gender identity.

1. Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding by Charles Gaines, with photographs by George Butler (1974)

With this book, Gaines and Butler guided the obscure subculture of bodybuilding towards the cultural mainstream – a movement accelerated by the book’s adaptation into a documentary in 1977, and powered by the startling charisma of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here, Schwarzenegger is “the supreme example of an art form for which there is hardly an audience”, as well as “very possibly the most perfectly developed man in the history of the world”. He would soon find his audience, and Pumping Iron retains its power because of Gaines’s ability to capture the camaraderie of the gym and the strangeness and nobility of turning the body into an aesthetic object.

2. The Hero’s Body by William Giraldi (2016)

Gaines documented the golden age of professional bodybuilding, but Giraldi’s memoir of his own teenaged bodybuilding exploits in early 1990s New Jersey shows how far things had developed in a few decades. Setting his story of suburban steroid use and weightlifting in the context of three generations of his male forebears, Giraldi ponders how he “must have been pantingly desperate for some semblance of power, for my place among men”.

3. The Men Are Weeping in the Gym, from Physical by Andrew McMillan (2015)

McMillan’s second book of poems, Playtime (2018), has extended his searching and tender inquiry into the life of the body in poems such as Personal Trainer, Making Weight and Boxing Booth. But The Men Are Weeping in the Gym’ gets its place in my list for its irresistible picture of the pains and gains of muscle-building. At the end of the poem, the men it describes are still “swearing […] that they don’t hear / the thousands of tiny fracturings / needed to build something stronger”.

4. At the Gym from Source by Mark Doty (2002)

McMillan’s predecessor in casting the male body into poetic form is the US poet Doty. At the Gym takes something abject, the “salt-stain spot” created on the weightlifting bench by the residue of so many men laying their heads in the same place, and finds a figure for the beauty and pathos of the collective efforts to gain “some power / at least over flesh, / which goads with desire, / and terrifies with frailty”.

Nostalgia for factory work? … weightlifters in a gym. Photograph: Alamy

5. Against Exercise from Against Everything by Mark Greif (2016)

“Nothing can make you believe we harbour nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym,” declares this bracing critique of gym-going. For Greif, when we lift weights or run on treadmills, we volunteer to be the compliant subjects of 21st-century capitalism. Unlike the participant in team sports, the gym-goer’s practice is one of individual self-regulation; in counting out reps, distances and calories, we reduce bodily life to quantifiable economic units. He may well be right. And yet …

6. Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body by Kathy Acker (1997)

Acker’s brilliant essay on bodybuilding and the limits of words makes the strongest argument against Greif’s political analysis. For Acker, to be in the gym is to be “immersed in a complex and rich world” that takes the bodybuilder to the edge of what can be articulated. Her essay gives a strange and haunting account of how “bodybuilders experience bodybuilding as a form of meditation” that brings them face-to-face with the death and chaos that lie beyond language.

7. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B Preciado (2013)

First published under the name Beatriz Preciado, this book defines itself as a “body-essay”, “somato-political fiction” or work of “self-theory”. Among its wide-ranging analysis of how our “pharmacopornographic” era shapes gender and sexuality, the real force of the book comes in its ecstatic narrative of Preciado’s experimental use of black-market testosterone. As the female-born body begins to transform, “an extraordinary lucidity settles in, gradually, accompanied by an explosion of the desire to fuck, walk, go out everywhere in the city”.

8. Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds by Cordelia Fine (2017)

Psychologist Fine’s book represents a necessary counterpart to accounts of the physical effects of higher testosterone levels. While higher testosterone will undoubtedly promote increased muscle mass, she shows how complex the scientific evidence is for hormonal effects on behavioural traits and personality characteristics, and how the tenuous it is to think of risk-taking and competitiveness as intrinsically male.

9. Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams (2006)

The effectiveness of synthetic hormones in modern sporting competition is undeniable, even if the extent of their use across different sports is heavily stigmatised and shrouded in secrecy. Game of Shadows is the authoritative story of how Victor Conte’s Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO for short) supplied steroids to many of the major figures in US baseball and athletics in the 90s and early 2000s, and the scandal that followed.

10. The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle (2012)

The other necessary book on drugs in sport is this whistleblowing story of the role they played in professional cycling during the Lance Armstrong era. Hamilton was part of Armstrong’s US Postal Service team, and his book is a gripping account of the extraordinarily ruthless, controlling and inventive doping regime Armstrong ran during his peak years.

• Astroturf by Matthew Sperling is published by riverrun, priced £14.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £12.89, including free UK p&p.