Books like The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

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. 

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. 

How much do I love this hilarious, terrifying, completely bonkers carny show of a novel? Written and illustrated by Barry, a cartoonist, it opens with a suicide note by Roberta, a misfit teen with a busted-up face who’s left behind a rageful diaristic manifesto describing child abuse, theft, revenge, murder, and a cast of characters out of a circus nightmare.

I got whiplash, veering from stomach-cramping laughter to anxious dread, heartbreak, and complete wonder at the strange, freakish beauty of her prose, like finding chunks of gold in the trash. When I finished, I thought, WTF did I just read, and HOW TF did she do it? I really don’t know. But every few years, I re-read it to try and find out.

I savor and relish stories that play with the dynamics and boundaries of reality and fiction, truth and illusion, and Nicholas Rombes’s Lisa 2 is dissonantly steeped in these hybrid conceptual relations.

Revolving around a snapshot of an idyllic family vacation, that morphs into a portrait of family disintegration, with a Lisa 2 Apple computer (1984 model) enacting the role of devil’s advocate, this novel plays out new-wavishly lo-fi, generating its own glitchy nostalgia in a liminal haunt.

What is not there casts a visceral and auditory spell, or a space in which memory and imagination proliferate like incubi rabbits. There is a line spoken by a character in David Lynch’s film, Lost Highway —a creed that I liken to the unstable calculus of Lisa 2: “I like to remember things my own way…not necessarily the way they happened.”  

One of my favorite contemporary authors is the Ukrainian-born Yelena Moskovich, and her third novel, A Door Behind A Door is crime story in a house of broken and mostly blacked out mirrors.

Centered around brother and sister, Olga and Misha, who relocate to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1991, the jittery contagions of violence, longing, and desire for absolution pepper the spiritual core of the novel, while the phantom ties that bind family—sometimes as breath-damming corset, other times as a cortege of tenderness—serve as lynchpins. 

Moskovich’s multi-layered novel speaks to mercy and salvation, on undisclosed terms, and her architecting of the narrative is rendered in a series of scintillating poetic drive-bys. 

Discovery has its own timeline and date with destiny, and in the case of Meridel Le Sueur’s small masterwork, The Girl, that is unequivocally true.

Written in 1939, it had to wait nearly forty years until it saw the light of publication day (1978), thanks to John Crawford of West End Press, whose mission was “to print works by American writers neglected by publishers in the mainstream."

The Girl is set in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the Depression, with most of its action centered in a speakeasy known as the German Village. This is where the protagonist, a young naif known only as “Girl,” works as waitress and initiates her crash course into a harsh and unsentimental education—an extended blues song chronicling her passage from innocence to experience.

There is a raw and taut musicality, a nerve-strung throb to Le Sueur’s prose, as she wrings hard-boiled lyricism from passages… show more.

Efficiency has become the catchword and hell-hound in our society. And in Hiroko Oyamada’s mordant fable, efficiency has taken on the form of a sprawling factory, a city unto itself, which is regulating, ordering, and arranging its brave new world one rote directive after the next.

Here’s what I saw when metaphysically touring the interior: An emaciated Kafka stooped over one of the desks, half-obscured behind a tower of documents, staring out bleary-eyed at the ledge of a window where black birds are gathering.

Across from him, a nerve-bitten Nietzsche paces, furiously smoking a cigarette, and refashioning his notions of the abyss to fit the conditions in which he finds himself atrophying. The abyss, now an omnipotent complex, an unnamable morass with a bottomless capacity for soul-feeding.

People are no longer staring into the abyss, they are wearing it, breathing it, speaking it, and perpetuating its slow-drip filtration to the… show more.

Many an idealistic young law student like me felt that jolt in our spine early on when we saw up in the balcony of that courthouse a sleepy Scout being told, “Stand up, Jean Louise. Your father’s passin’.”

The movie is as faithful to the novel as the medium would allow. The novel is told entirely from Scout’s POV and not only focuses upon the racism of the time and place, but also upon her coming of age as a tomboy and being told to act “As a little girl should.”

The book offers more to those of us for whom the rule of law and not of men is a passion, especially in Finch’s closing: “There is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of Rockefeller, a stupid man the equal of Einstein… That institution, gentlemen, is a court.” 

This book reminded me that while immigrant stories can carry deep grief and pressure, they’re also held together by quiet acts of care that are sometimes hard to see, but no less real.

I loved how the author claimed her identity as American while still drawing comfort from Indian culture. Her deep love for her father and the painful clarity he eventually gains about who holds power in their family felt especially healing.

This book helped me see how much shared experience exists in immigrant households, and how love and harm often sit side by side. It also affirmed that even in the messiness of it all, healing is still possible.