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

Closer

Dennis Cooper · 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
❤️

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkBleak
❤️

Save Yourself

Kelly Braffet · 317 pages

While a convenience-store clerk navigates the pitfalls of his father's imprisonment and the baffling attentions of two young women, a high school freshman endures her parents' fundamentalism and cruel classmates by joining a circle of dark misfits.

DarkLiterary FictionSexual Assault ContentBleak
❤️

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Hubert Selby Jr. · 303 pages

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a raw depiction of life amongst New York's junkies, hustlers, drag queens and prostitutes. An unforgettable cast of characters inhabits the housing projects, bars and streets of Brooklyn: Georgette, a hopelessly romantic and tormented transvestite; Vinnie, a disaffected and volatile youth who has never been on the right side of the law; Tralala, who can find no escape from

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSubstance Abuse
❤️

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

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistDarkLiterary FictionSubstance Abuse
❤️

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkBleak
❤️

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistDarkLiterary FictionBleak
❤️

Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko · 768 pages

Literary FictionDarkBleakSubstance Abuse
❤️

Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

Literary FictionDarkBleakSexual Assault Content
❤️

Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

DarkLiterary FictionSexual Assault ContentBleak
❤️

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

DarkLiterary FictionSexual Assault ContentBleak
❤️

The Slap

Christos Tsiolkas · 485 pages

*"Although this is Australian author Tsiolkas’ fourth novel, it is the first to be published in the U.S. With its raw style, liberal use of profanity and racial epithets, and laserlike focus on the travails of suburban life, it is a down-and-dirty version of Tom Perrotta’s best-selling Little Children (2004). At a barbecue in a Melbourne suburb, a man loses his temper and slaps the child of the ho

Literary FictionDarkLGBTQ+ ProtagonistSubstance Abuse
❤️

Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

Literary FictionLGBTQ+ ProtagonistDarkTeenagers
❤️

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

Literary FictionDarkBleakSubstance Abuse
❤️

On the Savage Side

Tiffany McDaniel · 464 pages

Literary FictionDarkBleakSexual Assault Content
❤️

Invisible Monsters

Chuck Palahniuk · 304 pages

Shannon McFarland, splendida top model, dalla vita ha avuto tutto quello che si può desiderare: l'amore, la carriera, un'amicizia sincera. La sua esistenza viene però sconvolta quando, mentre sta guidando la sua auto, una misteriosa fucilata la raggiunge al volto, lasciandola orrendamente sfigurata e incapace di parlare. E da affascinante centro di attrazione Shannon si ritrova a essere un mostro

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSubstance Abuse
❤️

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

Literary FictionDarkBleakSubstance Abuse
❤️

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Marlon James · 640 pages

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSexual Assault Content
🙂

Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado · 248 pages

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying di

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSexual Assault Content
🙂

Here Comes the Sun

Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn · 352 pages

In this radiant, highly anticipated debut, a cast of unforgettable women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican village. Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis- Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSexual Assault Content
🙂

Trainspotting

Irvine Welsh · 352 pages

Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a collection of short-stories revolving around a group of friends, their drug use, and struggles in the city of Edinburgh.

Literary FictionDarkBleakSexual Assault Content
🙂

The Fifth Season

N.K. Jemisin · 505 pages

**A SEASON OF ENDINGS HAS BEGUN.** IT STARTS WITH THE GREAT RED RIFT across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. IT STARTS WITH DEATH, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. IT STARTS WITH BETRAYAL and long-dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistDarkLiterary FictionBleak
🙂

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages

Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past - an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haun

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSubstance Abuse
🙂

Mysterious Skin

Scott Heim · 304 pages

At the age of eight Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he cannot remember an entire five–hour period of time.During the following years he slowly recalls details from that night, but these fragments are not enough to explain what happened to him, and he begins to believe that he may have been the victim of an alien encounte

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSexual Assault Content
🙂

Brass

Helen Walsh · 296 pages

Nineteen-year-old Millie O'Reilly is clever, spiky and adored by men yet utterly forlorn. Increasingly disillusioned, she seeks an escape in the underbelly of Liverpool . . . Shockingly candid and brutally poetic, Helen Walsh has created a portrait of a city and a generation that offers a female perspective on the harsh truth of growing up in today's Britain. Brass is an unsettling but ultimately

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionDarkSubstance Abuse

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.