Books like 'I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories'
Readers who enjoyed I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories by William Gay also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
contemporary horror 20th century mystery gothic southern-gothic literary-fiction rural dark noir
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Different Seasons by Stephen King
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 67 ratingsFrom the Magical Pen of Stephen King, Four Mesmerizing Novellas…“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”An unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge…the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award nominee The Shawshank Redemption... -
The Shining by Stephen King, Campbell Scott
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 89 ratingsFirst published in 1977, The Shining quickly became a benchmark in the literary career of Stephen King. This tale of a troubled man hired to care for a remote mountain resort over the winter, his loyal wife, and their uniquely gifted son slowly but steadily unfolds as secrets from the Overlook Hotel's past are revealed, and the hotel itself attempts to claim the very souls of the Torrance family... -
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 73 ratingsFour decades after it first terrified the world, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is back! An extraordinary classic work of horror and dark paranormal suspense. In this stunning 40th Anniversary Edition, a desperate mother and two priests fight to free the soul of a little girl from a supernatural entity of pure malevolence... -
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsThis now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South...Categorized as:
dark gothic literary-fiction southern-gothic 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook -
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The Body by Robin Waterfield, Stephen King
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsFrom Different Seasons The Body, as a media tie-in for the movie starring River Phoenix, Kiefer Sutherland, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell...Categorized as:
crime dark literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure audiobook bildungsroman book -
Misery by Stephen King
Rated: 4.16 of 5 stars · 81 ratingsNovelist Paul Sheldon has plans to make the difficult transition from writing historical romances featuring heroine Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. Annie Wilkes, Sheldon's number one fan, rescues the author from the scene of a car accident... -
Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsMaster of new noir Dennis Lehane magnificently evokes the dignity and savagery of working-class Boston in Darkness, Take My Hand, a terrifying tale of redemption.Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro’s latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist, running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know about cold-blooded retribution... -
Crimson Rivers by Jean-Christophe Grangé
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsA horrifically mutilated corpse is discovered wedged in an isolated crevice. The highly-regarded but unpredictable ex-commando Pierre NiTmans is sent from Paris to the French Alps to investigate. Meanwhile, Karim Abdouf, a young Arab policeman, is trying to find out why the tomb of a young child has been desecrated... -
Psycho by Robert Bloch
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsThe story was all too real-indeed this classic was inspired by the real-life story of Ed Gein, a psychotic murderer who led a dual life. Alfred Hitchcock too was captivated, and turned the book into one of the most-loved classic films of all time the year after it was released.Norman Bates loves his Mother. She has been dead for the past twenty years, or so people think... -
The Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAcross the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. Authorities are convinced they're runaways with just the bad luck of the draw to connect them. It's the job of criminal profilers Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan to look for a pattern. They've spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But sane men kill, too. And when they hide in plain sight, they can be difficult to find.. -
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsIn his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the 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, 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 the back... -
Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr., Darren Aronofsky
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsIn Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sarah Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin... -
The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFor five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair... -
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsThe sixties and seventies witnessed the emergence of Joyce Carol Oates as one of America's foremost writers of the short story. In 1962, 'The Fine White Mist of Winter, ' composed when the author was 19 years old, appeared in The Literary Review and was selected for both the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories of that year... -
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Midwinter of the Spirit by Phil Rickman
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLibrarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.The post of Diocesan Exorcist in the Church of England has changed to the preferred term Delivery Ministry. It sounds less sinister, more caring, so why not a job for a woman? When offered the post the Rev. Merrily Watkins cannot easily refuse, having suffered uncanny experiences of her own... -
The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibargüengoitia
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis is the first appearance in English of a Mexican novelist of enormous talent. His brilliant novel is based on fact: the discovery in the yard of a small-town brothel of the corpses of six prostitutes... -
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsA collection of linked stories narrated by a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict, Jesus' Son is a disturbing portrayal of loneliness and hope. He travels through an American underworld of burnt-out sports stars, hospital waiting rooms, doomed relationships and senseless violence... -
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 68 ratingsThe year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance... -
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... -
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsLamb to the Slaughter is a short, sharp, chilling story from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking tale.In Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a twisted story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a wife serves up a dish that utterly baffles the police.. -
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 71 ratingsA second family has been massacred by the terrifying serial killer the press has christened "The Tooth Fairy" Special Agent Jack Crawford turns to the one man who can help restart a failed investigation?Will Graham. Graham is the greatest profiler the FBI ever had, but the physical and mental scars of capturing Hannibal Lecter have caused Graham to go into early retirement... -
The Tenant by Roland Topor
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe Tenant chronicles a harrowing, fascinating descent into madness as the pathologically alienated Trelkovsky is subsumed into Simone Choule, an enigmatic suicide whose presence saturates his new apartment. More than a tale of possession, the novel probes disturbing depths of guilt, paranoia, and sexual obsession with an unsparing detachment... -
The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 52 ratingsDear Reader,I'm sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe... -
Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis collection features tormented individuals who play out their doom in various odd little towns, as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics. The cycle of narratives that includes the title work of this collection, for instance, introduces readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives...Categorized as:
dark gothic literary-fiction 20th-century 21st-century adult anthologies contemporary -
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The Elementals by Michael McDowell
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOn a split of land cut off by the Gulf, three Victorian summer houses stand against the encroaching sand. Two of the houses at Beldame are still used. The third house, filling with sand, is empty...except for the vicious horror which is shaping nightmares from the nothingness that hangs in the dank, fetid air... -
Books of Blood, Volume Two by Clive Barker, Dominique Dill
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 25 ratingsAlternate Cover Edition of ISBN 9780425087398To a surgeon, cutting into the human body is an art. Muscle and flesh are his canvas, the scalpel his tool. He studies the composition of the organs -- their balance and form -- the structure of the bones and network of blood vessels. He makes his incision, cutting, slicing with loving care. — Clive Barker is another type of surgeon... -
Heaven by V.C. Andrews
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsOf all the folks in the mountain shacks, the Casteels were the lowest the scum of the hills.Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest, smartest girl in the backwoods, despite her ragged clothes and dirty face...despite a father meaner than ten vipers...despite her weary stepmother, who worked her like a mule. For her brother Tom and the little ones, Heaven clung to her pride and her hopes... -
Killing Floor by Lee Child, Dick Hill
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 73 ratings3 Compact Discs / 3 hoursWhen Jack Reacher suddenly decides to ask a Greyhound bus driver to let him off near the town of Margrave, Georgia, he thinks it's because his brother once mentioned that the famed blues guitarist Blind Blake died there... -
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 58 ratingsThe Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories... -
The Stephen King Collection: Stories from Night Shift by Stephen King, John Glover
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsincludes 16 of the 20 Night Shift short storiesThe BoogeymanI Know What You NeedStrawberry SpringGray MatterThe Woman in the RoomBattlegroundGraveyard ShiftThe Man Who Loved FlowersThe Last Rung on The LadderNight SurfJerusalem's LotLawnmower ManThe ManglerQuitters, Inc... -
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 55 ratingsIn a small American town, the local residents are abuzz with excitement and nervousness when they wake on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June. Everything has been prepared for the town’s annual tradition—a lottery in which every family must participate, and no one wants to win. “The Lottery” stands out as one of the most famous short stories in American literary history... -
Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsRosemary and Guy Woodhouse, an ordinary young couple, settle into a New York City apartment, unaware that the elderly neighbors and their bizarre group of friends have taken a disturbing interest in them... -
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yōko Ogawa
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAn aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon’s jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman... -
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsFrom its bravura opening onwards, THE CROW ROAD is justly regarded as an outstanding contemporary novel. 'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach... -
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The Collector by John Fowles
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsWithdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time... -
Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFor the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson's scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh After the publication of her short story "The Lottery" in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller... -
A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFrom the acclaimed author of such novels as "Blood and Grits" and "Childhood" comes a wildly weird and breathtakingly original visit to the rural South that reveals the exotic subculture that erupts in all its glory at the Rattlesnake Roundup in Mystic, Georgia. "No number of adjectives in the thesaurus can do full justice to the dazzlingly bizarre nature of Crews' creations"... -
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsTwo terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” (The Washington Post) Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction... -
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... -
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsHow long he fought with them in the darkness he could not tell, but at last the beating of the wings about him lessened and then withdrew...A classic of alienation and horror, The Birds was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's sense of dominance over the natural world... -
Duel by Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe late Richard Matheson's classic tale of highway terror.He was heading west, en route to San Francisco. It was Thursday and unseasonably hot for April. He had his suitcoat off, his tie removed and shirt collar opened, his sleeve cuffs folded back. There was sunlight on his left arm and on part of his lap...Categorized as:
crime literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook classics contemporary -
Cuentos de Amor de Locura y de Muerte by Horacio Quiroga
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 37 ratingsThis collection of stories includes tales about illness, despair, exile, and human brutality. The author himself compiled the selection. Held to be among the greatest writers of short-fiction, Horacio Quiroga has been compared to Kipling and Poe...Categorized as:
gothic literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies audiobook classics -
Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsEscaping from his North Carolina home after his father murders their family and commits suicide, Trevor McGee returns to confront the past, and finds himself haunted by the same demons that drove his father to insanity... -
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 71 ratingsMy name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had... -
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The Other by Thomas Tryon
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsEntranced and terrified, the reader of The Other is swept up in the life of a Connecticut country town in the thirties—and in the fearful mysteries that slowly darken and overwhelm it.Originally published in 1971, The Other is one of the most influential horror novels ever written... -
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsWritten in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information... -
Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsKerr, in the NY Herald-Tribune, describes: "This, says Mr. Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, 'is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' He has made it seem true-or at least curiously and suspensefully possible-by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror...Categorized as:
gothic literary-fiction southern-gothic 20th-century adult book classics contemporary -
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage... -
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, Porochista Khakpour
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsRecognized as the outstanding Iranian writer of the twentieth century, Sadegh Hedayat is credited with having brought his country's language and literature into the mainstream of contemporary writing. The Blind Owl, long considered a classic and often compared to the works of Poe, chillingly recreates the labyrinthine movements of a deranged mind... -
Skeleton Crew by Stephen King
Rated: 3.97 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsIn this brilliant collection of stories, Stephen King takes readers down paths that only he could imagine.A supermarket becomes the place where humanity makes its last stand against destruction. A trip to the attic becomes a journey to hell. A woman driver finds a scary shortcut to paradise. An idyllic lake harbors a bottomless evil...
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