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

Wake in Fright

Kenneth Cook · 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
❤️

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.

Animal CrueltyFall From GraceBleakIntense
❤️

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

Fall From GraceBleakIntenseSubstance Abuse
❤️

The Beach

Alex Garland · 448 pages

Een jonge reiziger komt met zijn metgezellen terecht op een verborgen, paradijselijk Thais eiland, dat langzaam aan verandert in een nachtmerrie.

Substance AbuseFall From GraceIntenseDark
❤️

Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee · 220 pages

At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless, shunned by his friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find meaning from the one remaining relationship. David attempts to relate to Lu

Fall From GraceAnimal CrueltyBleakIntense
❤️

Native Son

Richard Wright · 398 pages

Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)

Fall From GraceBleakIntenseDark
❤️

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Yukio Mishima · 150 pages

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea  tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not lo   ...more

Animal CrueltyBleakDarkClassics
❤️

The Drinker

Hans Fallada · 304 pages

An autobiographical novel written during the Second World War in Germany in 1944 during the author's confinement in a medical asylum. It is a self-portrait of an alcoholic and the effect of his behaviour on his surroundings, especially on his deteriorating marriage.

Substance AbuseFall From GraceBleakLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Fall From GraceIntenseBleakDark
🙂

House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III · 365 pages

Fall From GraceBleakIntenseSubstance Abuse
🙂

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

BleakSubstance AbuseIntenseLiterary Fiction
🙂

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy · 337 pages

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indi

DesertBleakIntenseClassics
🙂

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 346 pages

Fall From GraceIntenseBleakDark
🙂

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.

Fall From GraceBleakDarkLiterary Fiction
🙂

Brother

Ania Ahlborn · 329 pages

"Deep in the heart of Appalachia stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it's served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don't knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what's buried in the Morrows' backyard. But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn't like the rest of his family. He doesn't take pl

Animal CrueltyBleakIntenseDark
🙂

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy · 356 pages

Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have mad

Fall From GraceBleakLiterary FictionSubstance Abuse
🙂

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.

Substance AbuseBleakIntenseDark
🙂

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Fall From GraceBleakIntenseDark
🙂

Rabbit, Run

John Updike · 307 pages

*Rabbit, Run* is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in

Fall From GraceBleakSubstance AbuseLiterary Fiction
🙂

Tender Is the Flesh

Agustina Bazterrica · 209 pages

Animal CrueltyIntenseBleakDark
🙂

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

Substance AbuseDesertVacation Gone WrongClassics
🙂

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

BleakIntenseSubstance AbuseDark
🙂

The Summer I Died

Ryan C. Thomas · 216 pages

Animal CrueltyBleakIntenseDark
🙂

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser · 831 pages

The classic depiction of the harsh realities of American life, the dark side of the American Dream, and one man's doomed pursuit of love and success..."Mr. Dreiser is not imitative and belongs to no school. He is at heart a mysticist and a fatalist, though using the realistic method. He is, on the evidence of this novel alone, a power." --The New York Times Book Review

Fall From GraceBleakLiterary FictionDark
🙂

Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler · 254 pages

"The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon--the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule--is now restored and in a completely new translation. Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic"--

Fall From GraceBleakDarkLiterary Fiction

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.