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Books like Doomed

Chuck Palahniuk · 2013 · US · literary fiction
Book 2 of 2 in Damned
★ 3.33 Goodreads · 15,595 ratings

The sequel to Damned: after a Halloween ritual goes wrong, Madison Spencer, dead at thirteen, is stuck on Earth as a ghost, haunting her celebrity parents and remembering a terrible summer with her grandparents, while Satan's plan for her moves forward.

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12 books for readers of Doomed

Here Goes Nothing

Steve Toltz · 2022 · Australia 99% match ★ 3.61 Goodreads · 3,913 ratings
shares: afterlife, ghost, absurdist · ironic, easy read

A murdered man watches from a chaotic afterlife as his killer moves in with his pregnant widow, while a pandemic sweeps the world he left behind.

Not Forever, But For Now

Chuck Palahniuk · 2023 · US 98% match ★ 3.01 Goodreads · 5,413 ratings
shares: provocative, absurdist, satirical, satire · ironic, intimate

Cecil and his older brother Otto, two young men still kept by governesses in a grand house in Wales, are heirs to a family business of murder for hire, and their grandfather, a contract killer with stories about famous victims, wants Otto in the trade.

Pygmy

Chuck Palahniuk · 2009 · US 98% match ★ 2.99 Goodreads · 31,062 ratings
shares: provocative, absurdist, satirical, satire · ironic, intimate

A small, ferocious exchange student from an unnamed totalitarian country, placed with a family in the American Midwest, carries out a secret mission, narrated in his own broken English, in Palahniuk's most divisive novel.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Shehan Karunatilaka · 2022 · Sri Lanka 98% match ★ 3.89 Goodreads · 65,479 ratings
shares: afterlife, ghost, dark humoured · ironic, intimate

A war photographer wakes up dead in Colombo and has seven days to solve his own murder while navigating the Sri Lankan afterlife.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Percival Everett · 2009 · US 96% match ★ 4.00 Goodreads · 7,667 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, dark humoured, satire · ironic, easy read

A young Black man named Not Sidney Poitier, raised with a fortune and Ted Turner as guardian, stumbles through a life that keeps replaying the plots of Sidney Poitier's films.

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders · 2017 · US 95% match ★ 3.74 Goodreads · 186,693 ratings
shares: afterlife, ghost, dark humoured · uncanny, intimate

In February 1862, President Lincoln visits the crypt of his eleven-year-old son Willie, and a chorus of ghosts who refuse to admit they are dead watch the boy linger in the bardo.

Deadeye Dick

Kurt Vonnegut · 1982 · US 95% match ★ 3.84 Goodreads · 32,691 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, dark humoured, satire · easy read, ironic

At twelve, Rudy Waltz fires a rifle from the cupola of his father's house in Midland City, Ohio, and kills a pregnant woman eight blocks away. He spends the rest of his life, and a fair number of recipes, trying to live it down.

Dr. No

Percival Everett · 2022 · US 95% match ★ 3.68 Goodreads · 9,448 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, dark humoured, satire · ironic, low-key

A mathematics professor whose specialty is nothing is hired by a billionaire who wants to become a Bond villain and needs help stealing the nothing kept in Fort Knox.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

George Saunders · 1996 · US 95% match ★ 4.21 Goodreads · 23,096 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, dark humoured, satire · ironic, intimate

Saunders' debut collection of stories set in failing theme parks and corporate wastelands, including a Civil War park with real ghosts, established his mix of satire and heartbreak.

Earth Angel

Madeline Cash · 2022 · US 95% match ★ 3.80 Goodreads · 2,280 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, dark humoured, satire · ironic, intimate

Cash's first book, interlinked stories in which rebellious schoolgirls, internet strangers and a biblical plague of talking frogs turn up in a world that is absurd and knows it.

Bliss

Peter Carey · 1981 · Australia 95% match ★ 3.76 Goodreads · 3,662 ratings
shares: afterlife, satirical, dark humoured, satire · easy read, ironic

Harry Joy, an advertising man in an Australian city, is dead for nine minutes after a heart attack, and when he comes back he decides he is in Hell.

Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut · 1973 · US 95% match ★ 4.06 Goodreads · 286,996 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, dark humoured, satire · ironic, easy read

Kilgore Trout meets his creator in a Holiday Inn bar, and the meeting becomes a reckoning with free will, American madness, and the author's own despair.