Fans pick 96 books like The Killer Inside Me

The perfect crime? Actually not! It was so imperfect that it turned into the perfect crime by just pure luck. No clues were left behind. In fact, there was nothing to trace the murder back to the murderer except his own guilt. 

His guilt turned out to be his biggest punishment. When he finally surrenders, he feels at peace–the long-eluded peace. 

I read this collection of loosely connected short stories about Tim O’Brien’s service in the Vietnam War when I was in high school, only a little younger than O’Brien was when he was drafted into the Army. The hazy line between memory and fiction in the book leaves you feeling like you’re strolling through someone else’s dream.

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in particular has stuck with me throughout my life, the seemingly impossible yet terrifying realistic narrative of how a young girl who has no business being in a war zone falls in love with combat then with the primordial earth itself and eventually disappears into the heart of darkness. Did it really happen? Was it a tall tale? Memory is such a slippery thing.

I love Sack’s empathy toward his patients and his commitment to telling a different and highly unique narrative about the human experience. His classic collection of essays is not about intelligence, but each patient he writes about knows and understands the world differently than what is considered normal.

Sacks makes room for the challenges and brilliance of all ways of being in the world.

I love a clever sociopath. I felt myself strangely rooting for the main character, hoping that he would continue to evade the law and get away with his crimes. I liked the way the author built up this person, showing how smart, adaptive to changing circumstances, and manipulative he could be. I liked the backstory of social deprivation breathing life into his mysterious persona.

Ripley’s constant need for a new identity, desperate to escape from his past and humble origins, as well as grappling with his sexual identity, sustained my interest throughout the novel. It made me wonder what percent of the population would do anything to become someone else.

A gruesome story of murder and desire that also happens to have the most vivid olfactory descriptions of any genre.

Suskind’s preternatural ability to summon odor from the page makes you feel as if you are there beside him, walking through the flowered hillsides of Provence, or in the back room of a perfume shop on the Pont au Change. His twisted use of classic perfume techniques is as accurate as it is chilling.

Speaking of nihilism, Cormac McCarthy’s book is a miasma of sin without redemption. The characters—a band of psychopaths who scalp, murder, and torture their way across the American Southwest during the mid-19th century—are manifestations of pure evil motivated by nothing but animal desire. As much as I dig Larry McMurtry, his Old West novels can play on a need for moral certainty, thus raising doubt as to their verisimilitude.

In contrast, McCarthy‘s characters behave the way you’d expect desperate men far removed from the inhibiting influence of civilization would act in that time and place. I was often repulsed by the brutality, but by the time I finished, I was convinced I had read the Great American Novel.

I’ve always been fascinated by surrealism and expressionism—and The Unconsoled takes those dreamlike images and expresses them in a fascinating and disorienting story. Reading this novel makes you feel like you’re trapped in a terrifying and anxious nightmare—and I mean that in the best possible way. The novel uses dream logic: characters appear out of thin air and morph into other characters. The setting is a strange labyrinth in some nameless European city. If you like David Lynch movies, you’ll dig this. If you’re looking for a linear narrative, stay away!

About halfway into Red Dragon, you meet Francis Dolarhyde, and from then on, the book is all his. Forget the FBI who are looking for him, the only person you care about is Dolarhyde, the serial killer who’s been brutally murdering entire families.

As far as I’m concerned, he’s the hero. Hannibal Lecter isn’t Thomas Harris’ best villain. It’s Dolarhyde. He’s everything Lecter isn’t. He’s awkward, shy, hates his body, hates himself and spends all his time stewing on his inadequacies. If I’ve got to pick between the Virgin Dolarhyde and the Chad Lecter, it’s Dolarhyde every time.

Deep down, he just wants to be loved, but the way he goes about it is almost comically misguided. Dolardhyde is on an impossible, bloody mission to fix himself, and no matter how many bodies he drops trying to do it, I’m always rooting for him to make it out the… show more.

I read this novel when I was twenty-two years old.

I remember exactly where I was (in the kitchen of a dilapidated apartment I loved) and what time of day I read it (early afternoon until early evening). I cackled and sobbed (I am not a sobber), and afterward, I couldn’t get the main character’s voice out of my head for days. He narrated everywhere I went and everything I did.

Before then, I’d always written casual nonsense for my own entertainment, but I knew afterward I wanted to do that—I wanted to make people laugh, horrify them, and put their hearts through the wringer. 

This is a love-it or hate-it novel. Either you find it tiresome, or you give yourself over whole-heartedly to its unique madness. It has at its heart a film, The Navidson Record, a documentary about a photojournalist who moves his family into a pretty house and discovers that the house is bigger on the inside than the outside, and getting bigger.

As he and his friends try to explore the limits of the house, it rearranges itself around them. The film is described in the text by an old man, complete with a mountain of scholarly footnotes by a tattoo artist. But this book is also powered by a genuinely unsettling, often terrifying descent into hell. It’s a deranged funhouse of a novel that you will probably never forget.