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Pick-Up

Charles Willeford · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Night Train

Martin Amis · 175 pages

Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case - this case - has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop - now top brass - takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Det

NoirBleakSuicide ContentCrime
❤️

Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
❤️

The Death of Sweet Mister

Daniel Woodrell · 208 pages

"Shuggie Akins is a lonely fat boy of thirteen. His mother, Glenda, teases him with her sexual provocations. His father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises his son. Into this mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. It isn't long before he and Glenda begin a torrid affair. What follows is violent, shocking, and totally unpredicta

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
❤️

Sleepless

Charlie Huston · 353 pages

Parker T Haas is a straight-arrow LAPD cop whose cast-iron sense of right and wrong has made him a lone wolf on the force. But when a plague of sleeplessness attacks Los Angeles and the world beyond, his philosophical certainties are tested to destruction.

NoirBleakSubstance AbuseCrime
❤️

Mama Black Widow

Iceberg Slim · 312 pages

Mama Black Widow tells the story of Otis Tilson, a comely and tragic homosexual queen adrift with his brothers and sisters in the dark, labyrinthine world of pimping, tricking, violence, and petty crime. Written in the jagged, vivid, and always authentic language of the homosexual underworld and the black ghetto, Mama Black Widow is a tour of a predatory urban hell. This is Iceberg Slim's profound

BleakNoirSubstance AbuseCrime
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Junky

William S. Burroughs · 158 pages

A semi-autobiographical account, narrated in a matter-of-fact manner, of the author’s life as a drug addict. The story ranges from the backstreets of New York to a drug rehabilitation hospital in Kentucky, the bars of New Orleans and on to Mexico, recounting the difficulties of obtaining drugs, financial problems and homosexual encounters. Burroughs significantly stretched the boundaries of publis

Substance AbuseBleakNoirDark
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The Killing Of The Tinkers

Ken Bruen · 254 pages

Back in Galway and back to his old drinking habits, Jack Taylor agrees to assist a gypsy in an investigation into the deaths of a number of members of the gypsy clan, deaths that the Guards, the Irish police, are reluctant to investigate.

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
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Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages

A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in

BleakSuicide ContentSubstance AbuseCrime
❤️

Nightmare Alley

William Lindsay Gresham · 275 pages

Stanton Carlisle, employed as a carny at a travelling circus watches their freak-show geek - an abject alcoholic, the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision - and wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. Unlike the tragic figure he sees before him, Stan is young, clever and ambitious and quick

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
❤️

Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories

Frank Bill · 272 pages

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
❤️

The Wounded and the Slain

David Goodis · 252 pages

Their vacation in paradise became a descent into Hell... Their marriage on the rocks, James and Cora Bevan flew to Jamaica for a last chance at patching things up. But in the slums of Kingston, James found himself fighting for his life—while Cora found her own path to destruction...in the arms of another man.

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
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The Fade Out: Act Three

Ed Brubaker · 360 pages

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
❤️

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

NoirSubstance AbuseBleakCrime
❤️

Once Were Warriors

Alan Duff · 220 pages

A frank portrayal of Maori life in New Zealand. A powerful story in which everyone is a victim and through the strength and vision of one woman transcends brutality and leads the way to a new alternative.

Suicide ContentSubstance AbuseBleakDark
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Beautiful, Naked & Dead

Josh Stallings · 277 pages

Beautiful, Naked and Dead is a hard-boiled crime novel. Moses McGuire a suicidal strip club bouncer is out to avenge the death of one of his girls. From his East L.A. home, through the legal brothels of Nevada and finally to a battle with the mob in the mountains above Palo Alto, it is a sex soaked, rage driven, road trip from hell.

NoirSuicide ContentSubstance AbuseDark
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The Rules of Attraction

Bret Easton Ellis · 283 pages

First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin

Substance AbuseBleakSuicide ContentDark
🙂

Dopefiend

Donald Goines · 319 pages

The story of a young man who was brought up by the streets

Substance AbuseNoirBleakCrime
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Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

Adam Rapp · 310 pages

Sixteen-year-old Steve struggles to make sense of his mother's terminal breast cancer and his brother's suicide.

Suicide ContentBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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Cutter and Bone

Newton Thornburg · 316 pages

NoirSubstance AbuseCrimeDark
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The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling · 512 pages

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no

Suicide ContentBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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Leaving Las Vegas

John O'Brien

Substance AbuseSuicide ContentBleakDark
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The Criminal

Jim Thompson · 120 pages

A teenage girl is raped and murdered. A father turns his back on his son. A vicious press lord turns justice into a carnival. A terrified boy is railroaded. In the twisted world of Jim Thompson, everyone is guilty, and the worst crimes are unpunishable.

NoirBleakDarkCrime
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Young God

Katherine Faw Morris

Substance AbuseBleakCrimeDark
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Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn · 297 pages

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her legSince she left town eight years a

Substance AbuseBleakSuicide ContentCrime

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