Books like This Sweet Sickness
Reading This Sweet Sickness is like watching a man furnish a locked room inside his own mind, then calmly insist it is the real world. Highsmith makes delusion intimate, logical and horribly embarrassing; the suspense comes from seeing how much reality David can mutilate before his fantasy collapses.
If you liked This Sweet Sickness, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with This Sweet Sickness, and we tell you exactly what.
David Axelrod begins by setting a small fire at his beloved’s family home, imagining he can rescue them and regain their favor. That grotesque plan captures the kinship with Highsmith: desire has become a private system of reasoning in which violation looks like devotion.
Spencer gives obsession a feverish eloquence rather than Highsmith’s chill, but he is equally exact about self-deception. David’s intelligence only makes him better at converting humiliation, jealousy and coercion into evidence that his love is exceptional. A modern classic repeatedly diminished by its film adaptations, Endless Love is far stranger and more psychologically merciless on the page: one of the rare novels that understands romantic absolutism as both genuinely moving and morally catastrophic.
Lise leaves her job and travels south on holiday, dressed in violently clashing colors and behaving as though everyone she meets has already been assigned a role. Spark soon tells us where the journey will end; the mystery is what design Lise is pursuing and why.
Where Highsmith traps us inside David’s explanations, Spark keeps Lise at an unnerving distance. Her crisp, cutting narration turns every purchase and conversation into a clue, while the comedy makes the gathering dread sharper rather than lighter. This tiny, ferocious cult classic offers the same sensation of inevitability as This Sweet Sickness: a disturbed person imposing a plot on reality, and reality beginning to comply.
Freddie Montgomery, writing from prison, admits almost immediately that he stole a painting and killed a woman. The question is not who did it but how such a cultivated, articulate man narrates himself around the unbearable fact of what he has done.
Like David Kelsey, Freddie is most frightening when he sounds reasonable. He aestheticizes his appetites, edits inconvenient people out of moral existence and treats confession as another opportunity for performance. Banville’s sumptuous prose is far removed from Highsmith’s severe efficiency, yet it creates the same poisoned intimacy: you become absorbed by a consciousness you cannot trust and cannot escape. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Book of Evidence is among the finest novels of the self-exonerating criminal mind.