Five top novels about destructive romantic friendships

Micah Nemerever was trained as an art historian. He wrote his master’s thesis on queer identity and gender anxiety in the art of the Weimar Republic. He is an avid home chef and amateur historian of queer cinema.

After studying in rural Connecticut and Austin, Texas, he now resides in the Pacific Northwest.

These Violent Delights is his first novel.

At CrimeReads, Nemerever tagged "five books [that] invite the reader to surrender again to the intoxication of a destructive relationship, and to follow it to a nightmarishly logical end," including:

Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

Stories of codependent friendships often feature an element of social aspiration, with one friend yearning to adopt the other’s higher economic class, beauty, or social prestige. The relationship at the heart of Ugly Girls has no such clearly lopsided social dynamic. Both Perry and Baby Girl live in severe poverty and struggle to make friends besides each other. What unites them, in their acerbic but fiercely protective friendship, is a keen awareness of the threats posed by the outside world. They propel each other to toughness and nihilistic rebellion, but each girl is merely performing toughness, and neither has any illusions about the other’s true fragility. In the early pages Perry half-fondly thinks of Baby Girl as a “fake-ass thug,” but it becomes clear over the course of the story that Perry shares her friend’s false confidence. They desperately conceal their own frailty and show no mercy for each other’s. For all their posturing, it is this very vulnerability that propels the girls to an act of violence. Their situations are dire, their prospects bleak—and the outside threat that encroaches on their friendship is a matter of their very survival.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Ugly Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue