100 Books Like Cruddy

The book is better than the movie, and the movie is amazing. I love how the author manages to create a dense feeling of female suffocation, gaslighting, hallucination, panic, satanism, conspiracies, deception, and paranoia while simultaneously describing the ordered and neat lives of New York City's emerging glitterati through detailed descriptions of the housewife’s sphere of choosing the right material of towels and the right hue of wallpaper when nesting.

Rosemary’s personal limits and borders, both physical and psychological, are challenged as she becomes a vessel of something unknown, but only unknown to her. An amazingly dense yet easily accessible book.

One of my favorite hair-raising tropes is the hostile doppelgänger, and this one really delivers! After sensing an intruder in the house, Molly, a young mother, encounters a menacing double who calls herself “Moll” and claims to be her from an alternate reality, one where she has no children—which prompts her to claim Molly’s.

What makes this book so tense and creepy is Molly’s unreliable POV as she wrestles with her anxiety, exhaustion, and protectiveness over her two young children. Is Moll the manifestation of a psychotic breakdown? Does Molly want to vanquish her or trade places? The prose is potent and spare, with short chapters alternating between past and present action, twisting the suspense all the way to its ambiguous—but for me, satisfying—conclusion. 

Katya Apekina’s debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, compelled me to do something that I have not done in a very long time: read an entire book, cover to cover, in a single night.

There are certain writers who excel at meting out their prose with deceptive flatness, or muted lucidity (Raymond Carver and Marguerite Duras being two prime examples), and it is this “awesome simplicity,” of which the jazz musician Charles Mingus raved, which Apekina deftly demonstrates in her rendering of a searing family drama and modern American gothic.

Subtly weaving together a tapestry of voices and shifting perspectives, the novel centers on two teenage daughters—Edith, sixteen, and Mae, fourteen—who go to live with their dad in New York, after their mother has been hospitalized for a suicide attempt and breakdown.

Their dad, about whom Mae has no memories and Edith has a scattered scarcity… show more.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but I loved all its disturbing, cyclical layers. Wang’s debut is a darkly mythical tale about inherited madness and sexual obsession.

Spanning decades, from the forties to the seventies, it centers around the Nowaks: David, the schizophrenic heir to a piano maker’s fortune; Jia-Hui (later Daisy), his wife from Taiwan; their son William; and Gillian, David’s daughter from an affair with his former sweetheart, who gives up their child to him and Daisy.

Its complex themes of mental illness, misogyny, and incest are difficult and possibly unpalatable for some. But for me, no subject is taboo if I can glean the humanity within it, and Wang’s prose is so strong and suffused with compassion it kept pulling me in. 

Ever loved a book series so much that you got it permanently etched on your skin? (That’s me) Punpun, the titular character seen to readers as a line drawing of a bird, has one of the most broken families I’ve ever read about. Still, I found solace in his life. Ending the series (even though I couldn’t sleep that night) I wanted to go back and start again just to see how much he has developed.

Most of the characters are pretty unlikeable which makes them realistic. Even with the way Asano draws them, you’d think he’s pretty pessimistic about the overall human spirit too. I will say that this book has nearly every trigger warning I can think of, so be careful.

The Pigman was the first YA novel I ever read that’s told in two separate voices. Each chapter alternates between two high school sophomores: John Conlan and Lorraine Jenson. The two meet Angelo Pignati, a lonely widower, due to making a random prank phone call asking for a monetary donation to the “L. and J. Fund.” John and Lorraine nickname Mr. Pignati the “Pigman” because of his deceased wife’s collection of ceramic pigs. Their prank call soon leads to friendship, which horrifically ends in tragedy inadvertently caused by John and Lorraine, thus inspiring both to choose to deal with their grief by writing “a memorial epic” of their friend.

I love the writing style of alternating two character voices, which inspired me to write my own first novel in two voices. The dialogue in The Pigman is filled with dark humor and sarcasm, which for me, brings even more shock… show more.

I do have a real penchant for dark stories and thrillers that ooze suspense and intrigue and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is one of the best for that. I haven’t come across many stories that have adapted this so I was definitely interested in that. New Girl is a suspenseful adaptation of this classic. After the mysterious disappearance of an elite school’s most popular student, the new girl, who remains unnamed through most of the story, finds herself taking Becca’s place within the school and her friendship groups but is always aware she’ll never be able to escape her shadow. This is also a dual POV book. I enjoy both writing and reading from this perspective. This is an excellent adaptation of this mysterious classic.

It’s about the simplest idea you can hang a story on: three people discover a house in the wilderness and explore it. But this short, black and white, silent graphic novel just sucked me deeper and deeper into the terror of a place that seems to grow impossibly larger, even as your pathway through it becomes narrower and narrower until...well, it’s pretty dark stuff. Simmons’s art is also inky black, but visualizes the concepts at play with beautiful power. There is a terrible force behind the scenes here, but you can never know what it is and you can never defeat it.  

Two words: Wesley Rush. I’m a sucker for a bad boy with charisma. And Bianca—my girl!—definitely gives Wesley a run for his money. I love her feistiness. Wesley dubs Bianca the “Designated Ugly Fat Friend” which is a huge no-no, but somehow he and Bianca began a steamy enemies with benefits fling and I lived for it. Naturally, their walls began to come down the closer they got, and there’s a line in the book (I will not spoil it) that took my breath away and made me fall completely in love with Wesley. Skip the movie, read the book! I loved Keplinger’s authentic uncensored teen voice in this. It made me a fan.

I found myself surprisingly captivated by this present-day body horror mermaid transformation tale focused on a high school swim team.

This novel follows a gradual decline from an everyday reality towards an increasingly unhinged climax, and I appreciated how slowly this sneaks up on you. Even though the book makes no secret of where it’s ultimately going, I was still pleasantly surprised about how we got there and the weirdness of the ending.

The sapphic relationship between the protagonist and her best friend is a key throughline, with an interesting dichotomy between the best friend’s long-term adoration and the protagonist’s relative detachment and bitterness.