AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Based on a True Story

Norm Macdonald · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson · 204 pages

Maverick author Hunter S. Thompson introduced the world to "gonzo journalism" with this cult classic that shot back up the best seller lists after Thompson's suicide in 2005. No book ever written has more perfectly captured the spirit of the 1960s counterculture. In Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race, Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (inspired by a friend of Thompson) are quickly

Dark ComedyUnreliable NarratorAddictionSatire
❤️

Choke

Chuck Palahniuk · 304 pages

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedyAddictionSatire
❤️

Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedyDry HumorSatire
🙂

The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien · 200 pages

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles,

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorSatire
🙂

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey · 311 pages

An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedySatireAbsurdist Humor
🙂

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Brock Clarke · 305 pages

Sam Pulsifer is determined to put his past behind him after serving a prison term for torching an American literary landmark and killing two people in the blaze, but when the homes of notable American writers begin to go up in smoke, his history makes him the prime suspect.

Dark ComedySatireUnreliable NarratorAbsurdist Humor
🙂

Pulp

Charles Bukowski · 192 pages

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on M

Dark ComedySatireAbsurdist HumorDry Humor
🙂

Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Shehan Karunatilaka · 416 pages

Retired sportswriter W.G. Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son, and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, a spin bowler who has mysteriously disappeared.

AddictionUnreliable NarratorDark ComedySatire
🙂

Headlong

Michael Frayn · 373 pages

"A British comedy in which academic Martin Clay is asked by a boorish country squire to assess his paintings. Clay spots what he suspects is a Bruegel and so begins a tale of lies and concealment as he schemes to separate the painting from its owner. By the author of Now You Know." --from WorldCat

Unreliable NarratorDry HumorDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
🙂

What the Hell Did I Just Read

David Wong · 384 pages

Investigating the activities of a shapeshifting entity that is snatching local kids, the friends from This Book Is Full of Spiders are challenged to navigate an uproariously convoluted maze of illusions, incompetence and lies.

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorSatire
🙂

The Room

Jonas Karlsson · 190 pages

Bjorn is a compulsive, meticulous bureaucrat who discovers a secret room at the government office where he works--a secret room that no one else in his office will acknowledge. When Bjorn is in his room, what his co-workers see is him standing by the wall and staring off into space looking dazed, relaxed, and decidedly creepy. Bjorn's bizarre behavior eventually leads his co-workers to try and hav

Unreliable NarratorAbsurdist HumorSatireDry Humor
🙂

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess · 188 pages

A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedySatireAbsurdist Humor
🙂

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Jeff Lindsay · 304 pages

Kriminalroman. Miamipolitiet og politiofficer Deborah Morgan prøver at finde en seriemorder. Deborah håber sagen vil fremme hendes karrieremuligheder, og hun får hjælp af sin bror Dexter, der arbejder for politiet. Han er også seriemorder - men det er ikke ham, sagen drejer sig om

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedyDry HumorFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Up in the Air

Walter Kirn · 311 pages

Ryan Bingham's job as a Career Transition Counselor--he fires people--has kept him airborne for years. Although he has come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls "Airworld," finding contentment within pressurized cabins, anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks. With a letter of resignation sitting on his boss's desk, and the hope of a jo

Unreliable NarratorDry HumorSatireDark Comedy
🙂

Forrest Gump

Winston Groom · 240 pages

A man named Forest Gump sits at a bus stop and tells everyone about his life. It starts in a doctor's office when he gets leg braces. Then he goes to school where he meets Jenny, and his entire school career and football. Then it goes on to college football. then to Vietnam where he meets bubba. then bubba dies and forest saves a whole platoon. After the war forest gets a medal of honor and runs a

SatireAbsurdist HumorDark ComedyDry Humor
🙂

The Dice Man

Luke Rhinehart · 431 pages

The cult classic that can still change your life...Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart - and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

Unreliable NarratorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorSatire
🙂

The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt · 379 pages

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, El

Dry HumorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Magical Thinking: True Stories

Augusten Burroughs · 272 pages

Absurdist HumorDark ComedyDry HumorFirst Person Narrator
🙂

I See You've Called in Dead

John Kenney · 294 pages

Dark ComedySatireDry HumorAddiction
🙂

Cooking with Fernet Branca

James Hamilton-Paterson · 292 pages

Unreliable NarratorSatireDry HumorDark Comedy
🙂

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris · 272 pages

A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of “Naked”, presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day sp

Dry HumorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard · 126 pages

Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of

Dry HumorSatireDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
🙂

White Noise

Don DeLillo · 326 pages

The trials and tribulations of a profesor of Hitler studies.

Dry HumorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorSatire
🙂
Dry HumorDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorSatire
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗