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

Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry · 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
❤️

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.

AddictionStream of ConsciousnessSubstance AbuseBleak
❤️

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

Stream of ConsciousnessAddictionSubstance AbuseBleak
❤️

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

Stream of ConsciousnessHauntingTragicBleak
❤️

Lie Down in Darkness

William Styron · 400 pages

The story is set out in the south. The Loftis family members are waiting for the coffin of their daughter Peyton. The novel goes back in time through flashbacks and recollections uncovering truths and events leading to Peyton's suicide. Lie Down In Darkness is a post-modernist novel, a post-war account of the human state, an age of alienation, decay and meaninglessness. Neither society nor family

Stream of ConsciousnessTragicBleakSubstance Abuse
🙂

House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III · 365 pages

HauntingBleakTragicMarriage in Trouble
🙂

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

Stream of ConsciousnessHauntingDense ProseBleak
🙂

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Stream of ConsciousnessHauntingMarriage in TroubleTragic
🙂

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

HauntingBleakDense ProseTragic
🙂
TragicSubstance AbuseMarriage in TroubleHaunting
🙂

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick · 254 pages

Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in massive doses--gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself. Caustically fu

AddictionSubstance AbuseBleakTragic
🙂

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

TragicBleakHauntingMarriage in Trouble
🙂

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 346 pages

TragicHauntingBleakMarriage in Trouble
🙂

The Lost Weekend

Charles Jackson · 244 pages

A would-be writer's dissatisfaction with his life leads him on a three-day binge. This film gives an uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism. Made into a motion picture.

AddictionSubstance AbuseStream of ConsciousnessBleak
🙂

The Spire

William Golding · 224 pages

Told in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, this is a story of obsession. Against the advice of his builder, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, slowly dying from tuberculosis, plans the construction of a towering spire atop the cathedral as the culmination of his life’s work but becomes increasingly deranged as the construction faces constant problems due to the sheer grandiosity of the work.

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseTragicHaunting
🙂

L'Assommoir (The Dram Shop)

Emile Zola · 480 pages

AddictionTragicSubstance AbuseBleak
🙂

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

Stream of ConsciousnessSubstance AbuseAddictionBleak
🙂

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

AddictionMarriage in TroubleTragicSubstance Abuse
🙂

The Trial

Franz Kafka · 256 pages

HauntingTragicBleakDense Prose
🙂

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Stream of ConsciousnessBleakTragicDense Prose
🙂

The Iceman Cometh

Eugene O'Neill · 216 pages

AddictionSubstance AbuseBleakTragic
🙂

Macbeth

William Shakespeare · 135 pages

BleakHauntingTragicDense Prose
🙂

Leaving Las Vegas

John O'Brien

AddictionTragicSubstance AbuseBleak
🙂

Candy

Luke Davies · 295 pages

AddictionSubstance AbuseBleakTragic
🙂

Dubliners

James Joyce · 226 pages

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation

HauntingBleakSubstance AbuseDense Prose

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.