Books like Megan Abbott

Ojeda understands, as Abbott does, that teenage girls can turn intimacy into a private religion—and that invented rituals, shared language, cruelty, and fear may be ways of testing who truly belongs. A group of schoolgirls becomes fascinated by horror stories and dangerous games, while a strained relationship with a teacher intensifies the atmosphere of obsession and control.

Translated with feverish precision by Sarah Booker, this National Book Award finalist is stranger and more nightmarish than Dare Me, but it has the same charged sense that desire and menace are inseparable. Its prose feels physically pressurized. If Abbott made you believe a locker room could become a kingdom, Ojeda will show you how quickly that kingdom can become a cosmology.

Foxfire offers the intoxicating thing Beth promises her squad: female solidarity sharpened into power. In a working-class town in the 1950s, a group of girls forms a secret gang under the spell of the charismatic Legs Sadovsky. Maddy, the gang’s chronicler, records how loyalty, rage, and self-invention bind them together.

What makes this essential after Dare Me is not simply the girl gang but Oates’s refusal to sentimentalize it. Collective strength can liberate, humiliate, protect, and consume; the person telling the story can adore the leader while seeing what adoration costs. Oates gives the girls’ anger mythic force without sanding away its recklessness. Few novels capture so fiercely the thrill of being chosen by a dangerous friend.

For the queasy pleasure of watching one woman study another with devotion that gradually reveals itself as possession, read Notes on a Scandal. Barbara Covett, a lonely, acid-tongued teacher, appoints herself confidante and recorder of a glamorous new colleague’s downfall. Her narration is exquisitely controlled—and every polished sentence exposes another hunger she cannot quite conceal.

Like Dare Me, this Booker Prize–shortlisted novel understands that the observer in a charged relationship is never merely observing. Barbara’s attention has the invasive intensity of Addy watching Coach: admiration becomes leverage, secrecy becomes intimacy, and intimacy becomes a claim. Heller is also savagely funny, making self-deception entertaining right up to the point where it feels terrifying. It is one of the great novels of weaponized friendship.