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Books like These Violent Delights

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever reads as dark, intense. These 12 books share its genome — matched by how they actually read, not just their shelf label.

What These Violent Delights is like to read

An intense, slow-building descent into an obsessive, unequal friendship that curdles into something violent and inescapable — claustrophobic and psychologically fraught rather than fast-paced. Best for: readers who loved The Secret History's campus-intimacy-turned-dark and want a queer-coded obsessive duo.

Bunny cover
Bunny
Mona Awad · 2019
A hallucinatory campus satire that curdles from mean-girl mockery into body-horror surrealism, narrated by a lonely outsider whose grip on reality slips as she's drawn into the Bunnies' saccharine coven.
intensely scarycomplete storydeep cut
If We Were Villains cover
If We Were Villains
M.L. Rio · 2017
A confession framed a decade after the fact, saturated in Shakespeare quotation and the claustrophobia of a small theater conservatory where art and rivalry curdle into something lethal.
mildly eeriecomplete story
The Italian girl cover
The Italian girl
Iris Murdoch · 1964
A taut psychological homecoming in which a man confronts layered family pathologies and buried desires through the lens of funeral rituals and enforced proximity.
deep cut
Black chalk cover
Black chalk
Christopher J. Yates · 2013
Both explore obsession
Night Film cover
Night Film
Marisha Pessl · 2013
An obsessive investigation into a reclusive cult filmmaker pulls a disgraced journalist into an atmospheric, twist-laden descent through New York's occult underground.
creepy, not gorydeep cut
Gone Girl cover
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn · 2012
A corrosive he-said/she-said built on two unreliable narrators whose diary entries and present-tense reveals keep detonating what you thought you knew.
creepy, not gorycomplete story
The Secret Place cover
The Secret Place
Tana French · 2014
An investigation braided between the present-day interrogation and the girls' fraught past year, dwelling in teenage friendship dynamics as much as the murder itself.
complete storydeep cut
Plain Bad Heroines cover
Plain Bad Heroines
Emily M. Danforth · 2020
A gothic, multi-timeline novel that layers queer teenage obsession, a cursed Gilded Age school, and a modern Hollywood adaptation, building dread through interlocking mysteries rather than a single linear scare.
creepy, not gorycomplete storydeep cut
A Little Life cover
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015
An immersive, punishing decades-spanning portrait of four friends in New York whose bond orbits one man's unspeakable past — the prose accumulates until the reader is trapped inside his suffering.
complete story
The paying guests cover
The paying guests
Sarah Waters · 2014
Same literary feel
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo cover
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid · 2017
A frame-story confession that unspools a glamorous Hollywood life across decades — propulsive in its scandal and secrets, but built around a great forbidden love and a gut-punch re
complete story
Beast in View cover
Beast in View
Margaret Millar · 2015
Same thriller feel

About These Violent Delights — what the genome says

Is These Violent Delights a complete story or a cliffhanger?

The main arc resolves, with wider series threads left open.

Who is These Violent Delights for?

readers who loved The Secret History's campus-intimacy-turned-dark and want a queer-coded obsessive duo

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