Books like 'The Grotesque'
Readers who enjoyed The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
contemporary horror mystery 20th century psychological comedy action-adventure gothic suspense classics
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 88 ratingsBoisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her... -
![Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh]()
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsBrace yourself, America, for Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting—the novel and the film that became the cult sensations of Britain. Trainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh's spectacular career—an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. It accomplished for its own time and place what Hubert Selby, Jr...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics crime dark historical-fiction humor literary-fiction suspense -
![Franz Kafka's The Castle (Dramatization) by David Fishelson, Aaron Leichter]()
Franz Kafka's The Castle (Dramatization) by David Fishelson, Aaron Leichter
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsNote - This is not the novel by Franz Kafka! For the novel see The... -
![Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl]()
Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsIn these dark, disturbing stories Roald Dahl explores the sinister side of human nature: the cunning, sly selfish part of each of us that leads into the territory of the unexpected and unsettling.Originally published in 1960, Kiss Kiss brings together 11 of Roald's macabre adult tales... -
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![Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz]()
Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA dark, quasi-detective novel, Cosmos follows the classic noir motif to explore the arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, and man’s attempt to bring order out of chaos in his psychological life.Published in 1965, Cosmos is the last novel by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) and his most somber and multifaceted work... -
![Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk]()
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsShe's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists... -
![Factotum by Charles Bukowski]()
Factotum by Charles Bukowski
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 34 ratingsOne of Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics crime dark historical-fiction humor literary-fiction satire -
![The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe]()
The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsLike a surreal and highly caffeinated version of The Big Chill, Jonathan Coe's new novel follows four students who knew each other in college in the eighties. Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events. Robert has his life changed forever by the misunderstandings that arise from her condition. Terry spends his wakeful nights fueling his obsession with movies... -
![The Scarecrow by Ronald Hugh Morrieson]()
The Scarecrow by Ronald Hugh Morrieson
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratings'The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.' The greatest opening line in New Zealand literature opens this hilarious Gothic melodrama. Klynham is a sleepy little New Zealand town in which not a lot happens. But then one moonlit night the Scarecrow arrives, swilling brandies and looking for victims. Something sordid and even macrabre lies ahead... -
![Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk]()
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsFrom the author of the underground sensation Fight Club comes this wickedly incisive second novel, a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious vision of cult and post-cult life.Tender Branson—last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult—is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean... -
![Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]()
Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 3.82 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsDeadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut’s funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors—a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb—Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness... -
![The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe]()
The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe
Rated: 3.77 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsLike an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident–a man who has lost his face and, with it, his connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him... -
![American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis]()
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Rated: 3.82 of 5 stars · 71 ratingsPatrick Bateman is twenty-six and he works on Wall Street, he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognise but do not wish to confront... -
![Felicia's Journey by William Trevor]()
Felicia's Journey by William Trevor
Rated: 3.69 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWilliam Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking.Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics crime dark historical-fiction humor literary-fiction satire -
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![The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark]()
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
Rated: 3.47 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical fable of a blue-collar town turned upside down. When the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley hires Dougal Douglas (a.k.a. Douglas Dougal) to do "human research" into the private lives of its workforce, they are in no way prepared for the mayhem, mutiny, and murder he will stir up...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction satire suspense 20th-century adult -
![The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart]()
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
Rated: 3.54 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe cult classic that can still change your life! Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart -- and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time... -
![Dead Babies by Martin Amis]()
Dead Babies by Martin Amis
Rated: 3.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIf the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P.G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel by the author of London Fields. The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics... -
![Case Closed, Vol. 1 by Gosho Aoyama]()
Case Closed, Vol. 1 by Gosho Aoyama
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsGhastly beheadings, bloody murders, and cold-hearted child abduction cases: precocious high school student Shin'ichi Kudo uses his keen powers of observation and astute intuition to solve mysteries that have left law enforcement officials baffled... -
![Case Closed, Vol. 4 by Gosho Aoyama]()
Case Closed, Vol. 4 by Gosho Aoyama
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWhen ace high school detective Jimmy Kudo is fed a mysterious substance by a pair of nefarious men in black—poof! He is physically transformed into a first grader. Until Jimmy can find a cure for his miniature malady, he takes on the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and continues to solve all the cases that come his way... -
![Case Closed, Vol. 3 by Gosho Aoyama]()
Case Closed, Vol. 3 by Gosho Aoyama
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWhen ace high school detective Jimmy Kudo is fed a mysterious substance by a pair of nefarious men in black—poof! He is physically transformed into a first grader. Until Jimmy can find a cure for his miniature malady, he takes on the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and continues to solve all the cases that come his way... -
![Case Closed, Vol. 5 by Gosho Aoyama]()
Case Closed, Vol. 5 by Gosho Aoyama
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWhen ace high school detective Jimmy Kudo is fed a mysterious substance by a pair of nefarious men in black—poof! He is physically transformed into a first grader. Until Jimmy can find a cure for his miniature malady, he takes on the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and continues to solve all the cases that come his way...
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