Books like The Collector
Patricia Highsmith traps you inside the captor’s immaculate reasoning; Kōbō Abe traps you beside the captive until freedom itself becomes hard to define. Zoë Heller, meanwhile, finds the same possessiveness hiding in friendship, where it can pass for concern.
If you liked The Collector, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Collector, and we tell you exactly what.
David Kelsey has built his life around a woman who rejected him—and around the fantasy that she has not really rejected him at all. Highsmith keeps the reader unnervingly close to his orderly, self-protecting mind, where obsession dresses itself as fidelity and every contrary fact can be explained away.
Like Fowles, she understands that the most frightening monster is not irrational: he is industriously reasonable, wounded, and convinced of his own delicacy. Few novelists have matched Highsmith’s gift for making moral deformity feel intimate and almost airless. This is among her purest studies of obsession, and anyone fascinated by Frederick Clegg’s bland self-justification should find it horribly irresistible.
An amateur entomologist visiting a remote settlement descends into a sand pit containing a woman’s house—and discovers that leaving will not be simple. From that stark premise, Abe creates a tactile nightmare of sand, sweat, labor, resentment, and unstable power.
The kinship with The Collector lies not merely in confinement but in the questions confinement exposes: Is another person a companion, an instrument, or a possession? What remains of identity when resistance becomes routine? Winner of Japan’s Yomiuri Prize and the novel that established Abe internationally, it has the inexhaustible strangeness of a modern myth. Its physical world is so convincing that the sand seems to work its way into the reader’s clothes.
Barbara Covett, a lonely, caustic schoolteacher, begins chronicling the downfall of a younger colleague. Her voice is witty, observant, and dangerously persuasive; only gradually does the emotional claim she has staked on another person become unmistakable.
Heller reproduces one of Fowles’s sharpest effects: the distance between what a narrator believes about herself and what every sentence reveals. Barbara’s intelligence makes her possessiveness subtler than Clegg’s, but not less chilling; pity, class resentment, contempt, and hunger continually change masks. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this compact novel is both viciously funny and psychologically exact—a masterclass in how loneliness turns other people into private property.