Elite academia, a charismatic circle, and a secret that rots everything from the inside. If The Secret History is still living in your head rent-free, start here.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man, a charming older influence, and a portrait that takes on the cost of his choices. The original blueprint for aesthetic obsession and moral decay.
M.L. Rio
If We Were Villains
Seven Shakespeare students at an elite conservatory, one death, and a decade of guilt. The closest match in feel: tight-knit, theatrical, and doomed from the first page.
Mona Awad
Bunny
An MFA student gets pulled into a clique of women who all call each other “Bunny.” Stranger, darker, and funnier than you expect, with the same insular-group obsession. When I read it, it felt like a fever dream, and I still think about it from time to time years later.
Micah Nemerever
These Violent Delights
Two brilliant, unsettling teenage boys in 1970s Pittsburgh and a friendship that curdles into something dangerous. Intense, claustrophobic, and impossible to look away from.
Eliza Clark
Penance
A true-crime writer digs into the murder of a teenage girl by her friends in a bleak English seaside town. Cold, sharp, and unsettling in the way a group of girls turning on someone can be. I read it last year and enjoyed the premise, but the ending left me feeling conflicted.
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