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The Laughing Monsters

Denis Johnson · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

EspionageMorally Gray CharacterDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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My Sister, the Serial Killer

Oyinkan Braithwaite · 226 pages

Morally Gray CharacterSparse ProseDark ComedyDark
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Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis · 208 pages

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless

Sparse ProseFriendship and BetrayalLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

Friendship and BetrayalCon ArtistsLiterary FictionDark
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De Niro's Game

Rawi Hage · 280 pages

In the Christian part of Beirut, torn by civil war, two befriended young men make a different choice about whether to flee or join the fight.

Friendship and BetrayalSparse ProseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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White Cat

Holly Black · 310 pages

Con ArtistsMorally Gray CharacterFriendship and BetrayalFirst Person Narrator
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The Tailor Of Panama

John le Carre

Harry Pendel is the charismatic proprietor and guiding genius of a top Panama City tailoring firm. Andrew Osnard is an Old Etonian and spy, his mission is to keep a watchful eye on political manoeuvrings leading up to the handing over of the Panama Canal. Originally published: London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.

Con ArtistsEspionageDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Lullaby

Chuck Palahniuk · 264 pages

"Carl Streator is a solitary widower and fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scenes of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song tur

Morally Gray CharacterSparse ProseFirst Person NarratorDark Comedy
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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

Morally Gray CharacterSparse ProseLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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Vicious

V.E. Schwab, Victoria Schwab · 367 pages

**A masterful tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers.** Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditi

Friendship and BetrayalMorally Gray CharacterDark ComedyDark
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Under Western Eyes

Joseph Conrad · 341 pages

"First published in 1911, Under Western Eyes traces the experiences of Razumov, a young Russian student of philosophy who is uninvolved in politics or protest. Against his will he finds himself caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing directed against the Tsarist authorities. He is pulled in different directions - by his conscience and his ambitions, by powerful opposed political forces,

Friendship and BetrayalEspionageLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith · 256 pages

The first of the acclaimed Ripley novels, this clever psychological thriller introduces the reader to Tom Ripley and his extraordinary modus operandi. Accepting a commission from a wealthy businessman to travel to Italy in an attempt to convince his wayward son to return to the United States, Ripley gradually develops a plan to assume the young man’s identity along with his bank account.

Con ArtistsMorally Gray CharacterThrillerDark
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The Grownup

Gillian Flynn · 71 pages

A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the "psychic" visits t

Con ArtistsSparse ProseDark ComedyDark
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The Cloisters

Katy Hays · 387 pages

Morally Gray CharacterFriendship and BetrayalFirst Person NarratorDark
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Antichrista

Amelie Nothomb · 107 pages

When Blanche's mother, who finds her own daughter rather colourless, bookish and dull, is also dazzled by Christa, she invites her to stay at the family house. Suddenly Christa can do no wrong and, as Blanche's parents scour their address-book for long-lost friends to invite for dinner to meet the newcomer, their friendship sours and Blanche's already negligible self-confidence goes into a steep d

Friendship and BetrayalSparse ProseLiterary FictionDark
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All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · 236 pages

This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the s

Sparse ProseFriendship and BetrayalFirst Person NarratorDark
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Casino Royale

Ian Fleming · 194 pages

Introducing James Bond: charming, sophisticated, handsome, chillingly ruthless and licensed to kill. This, the first of Ian Fleming's tales of secret agent 007, finds Bond on a mission to neutralize a lethal, high-rolling Russian operative called simply "le Chiffre" -- by ruining him at the Baccarat table and forcing his Soviet spymasters to "retire" him. It seems that lady luck is taken with 007

EspionageFriendship and BetrayalSparse ProseDark
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Friendship and BetrayalSparse ProseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Cormorant

Chuck Wendig · 356 pages

In the third installment of the suspenseful Miriam Black series, Miriam is on the road again, having transitioned from “thief” to “killer.” Miriam Black is being developed as a TV series on Starz with the producers of Breaking Bad. Hired by a wealthy businessman, Miriam heads down to Florida to practice the one thing she’s good at: knowing when people are going to die. In her vision she sees th

Morally Gray CharacterSparse ProseDark ComedyDark
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If We Were Villains

M.L. Rio · 368 pages

Entreated to tell his side of the story to a detective who put him in prison a decade earlier for a murder he may not have committed, Oliver Marks describes his past as a Shakespearean actor in college whose rivalry with a castmate escalated in dangerous ways.

Friendship and BetrayalFirst Person NarratorDarkLiterary Fiction
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Sparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski · 288 pages

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of

Sparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler · 324 pages

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Friendship and BetrayalMorally Gray CharacterFirst Person NarratorDark
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The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Morally Gray CharacterEspionageLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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