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🧲 Books like this

Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky · 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
❤️

The Gunslinger

Stephen King · 238 pages

***The Gunslinger is the first book of the Dark Tower series. "Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, The Dark Tower series is unlike anything you've ever read." Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger, is in relentless pursuit of the man in black through his strange and desolate world that is oddly similar to our own. He enc

BleakAnti-HeroSparse ProseEerie
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The Pearl

John Steinbeck · 118 pages

Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.

Treasure HuntBleakSparse ProseWorking-Class Protagonist
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick · 216 pages

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

BleakScience FictionClassicsAnti-Hero
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To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway · 262 pages

This 1936 novel tells the story of an American fishing boat skipper who dabbles in a little smuggling to make ends meet. In need of money for his family the captain reluctantly becomes agrees to smuggle a group of Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida. This is Hemingway’s only novel to be set in the United States.

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakSparse Prose
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The Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham · 272 pages

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day

BleakEerieScience FictionClassics
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Eden

Stanislaw Lem · 274 pages

A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger, and everywhere there are images of death. The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth-cruel precisely because it is so human.

First ContactSparse ProseEerieSurvival Story
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The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 95 pages

Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.

Sparse ProseEerieWorking-Class ProtagonistBleak
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The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin · 304 pages

[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969) > One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how

First ContactScience FictionSurvival StoryAtmospheric
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BleakScience FictionClassicsEerie
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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 186 pages

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Sparse ProseBleakAnti-HeroClassics
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistSparse ProseSurvival Story
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Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Herman Melville · 420 pages

A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.

BleakAnti-HeroAtmosphericClassics
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Phantom Road Volume 1

Jeff Lemire · 132 pages

EerieWorking-Class ProtagonistSparse ProseBleak
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Perdido Street Station

China Mieville · 710 pages

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory

Thieves and RoguesEerieBleakAtmospheric
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Rendezvous with Rama

Arthur C. Clarke · 256 pages

Written in 1973, a massive 50 kilometre long alien cylinder begins to pass through the solar system provoking a hurried effort to intercept it. The closest available ship rushes to rendezvous so as to have a quick study before it gets too close to the sun. Able to enter via an airlock on one end of the ship, the crew explores the huge world found inside, a world full of wonder and mystery. As usua

First ContactClassicsSparse ProseScience Fiction
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The Family of Pascual Duarte

Camilo Jose Cela, Anthony Kerrigan · 198 pages

Anti-HeroSparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistBleak
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The Island of Dr. Moreau

Herbert George Wells · 112 pages

Shipwrecked in the south Pacific Ocean, Englishman Edward Prendick awakens aboard a ship where a man named Montgomery and his beastly looking servant were transporting animal cargo. Soon, they arrive on an island and more and more of these bizarre humanlike creatures appear. Prendick senses a sinister secret to the island after he meets with the owner, a one Dr. Moreau...The Island of Doctor Morea

EerieBleakScience FictionSurvival Story
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Post Office

Charles Bukowski · 160 pages

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sad

Anti-HeroBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistSparse Prose
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Blindness

Jose Saramago · 327 pages

A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone tryi

EerieAtmosphericBleakSurvival Story
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The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

Sparse ProseBleakAtmosphericSurvival Story
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Shroud

Adrian Tchaikovsky · 436 pages

First ContactEerieScience FictionAtmospheric
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The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde · 224 pages

**The Picture of Dorian Gray** is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical *Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine*. The novel-length version was published in April 1891. (Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray))

Anti-HeroEerieAtmosphericClassics
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Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

BleakAnti-HeroEerieClassics
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No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy · 320 pages

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed *Border Trilogy.* The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in th

Thieves and RoguesAtmosphericBleakSurvival Story

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