The eight-year long war with Iran produced a plethora of literature. Largely known as the “Literature of Saddam’s Qadisiyya” it is now primarily seen as derivative, state-sponsored propaganda and dismissed by many as a stain on the Iraqi literary scene. Following the war, however, writers and poets began to cautiously rewrite the war narrative, challenging the bellicose tone of the state-sponsored wartime literature. Since 2003 this has taken a new turn with the Iran-Iraq War forming but one episode of over 35 years of warfare and violence imposed upon Iraq. This paper will examine how three prominent Iraqi novelists, Lu’ay Hamza Abbas, Ahmad Sa’adawi and Sinan Antoon, have looked back at the eight years of war with Iran within their post-2003 writings of violence and war in Iraq. The novels under consideration are Abbas’ Madinat al-suwwar (City of Images) Antoon’s Wahdaha shajarat al-rumman (translated as The Corpse Washer) and Sa’adawi’s Frankishtayn fi Baghdad (Frankenstein in Baghdad). The paper will discuss how these novels, all published between 2011 and 2015, attempt to rearticulate the experience of total warfare that was foisted upon Iraq from 1980-1988. In so doing, it claims that they give voice to narratives of civilian resistance during a period that most historical studies continue to neglect and that many current journalistic accounts generalize or ignore. Critically, the paper will address two important questions that these novels pose to modern Iraqi literary and historical studies. Firstly, how have these authors chosen to take on the narrative of sectarianism that now threatens to overshadow all of Iraqi history? Secondly, how have the aesthetics of violence transformed in literary narratives of the war from a time of intense state-involvement in the production of culture (the 1980s) to the current day, when the Iraqi state has all but collapsed. As such, the paper makes an intervention in current studies of modern Iraqi literature, as well as Arabic literature more generally, by shedding light on the aesthetics of writing about the memory of a past war at a time of intense violence, foreign occupation and rising sectarian discourse.