I watched the 2010 film the Black Swan with Natalie Portman, and it was the best drama I've ever seen. I'm also a huge fan of Shakespeare's tragedies (Othello, R+J, Hamlet, Macbeth etc.). Does anyone have any recommendations for any dark dramas that fit what I'm looking for? Thank you!!!
Posted Oct 17, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC
{{The Walls Around Us}} is unofficially tagged as “Orange is the New Black Swan.”
^(By: Nova Ren Suma | 319 pages | Published: 2015 | Popular Shelves: young-adult, ya, mystery, paranormal, fantasy)
On the outside, there's Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer days away from the life of her dreams when something threatens to expose the shocking truth of her achievement.
On the inside, within the walls of the Aurora Hills juvenile detention center, there's Amber, locked up for so long she can't imagine freedom.
Tying their two worlds together is Orianna, who holds the key to unlocking all the girls' darkest mysteries…
What really happened on the night Orianna stepped between Violet and her tormentors? What really happened on two strange nights at Aurora Hills? Will Amber and Violet and Orianna ever get the justice they deserve—in this life or in another one?
In prose that sings from line to line, Nova Ren Suma tells a supernatural tale of guilt and of innocence, and of what happens when one is mistaken for the other.
^(This book has been suggested 10 times)
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This is a thriller with a ballet aspect: {{The Turnout by Megan Abbott}}
^(By: Megan Abbott | 352 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: fiction, thriller, mystery, dnf, mystery-thriller)
New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Megan Abbott's exquisite new novel, "dark and juicy and tinged with horror" (The New York Times Books Review), set against the hothouse of a family-run ballet studio.
With their long necks, sheer tights, and taut buns, Dara and Marie Durant have only known the course of a well-bred dancer. Not much changes when their parents face death in a tragic accident. As Dara and Marie take over their mother's duty of running the Durant School of Dance, along with Charlie, Dara's husband and once their mother's prized student, the sisters perfect a fine dance, circling around one another, six days a week, keeping the studio thriving.
But when another eerily suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school's annual performance of The Nutcracker--a season of tense competition, provoked anxiety, and wild exhilaration--an interloper arrives and threatens the sisters' delicate balance.
With its uncanny insight and writing that haunts, The Turnout is Megan Abbott at the height of her game--a sharp and strange dissection of family ties and sexuality, femininity, and power, and a sinister tale that is both alarming and irresistible.
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My local bookstore is out of stock :( It seems like an interesting book, Amazon here I come. Thanks for the rec!
You're welcome, I hope you like it! It gave me the same creepy dreadful feeling that "Black Swan" did.
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion and The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both have women characters going through an identity crisis and spiraling.
Thanks for the recs! Funny enough, I think I remember seeing Joe reading Play It as it Lays in the Netflix show, "You"- which is another show I enjoyed quite a lot. Thank again!
No problem. Oh yeah You is a fun show, isn’t a new season coming out soon?
Yeah, very soon and in France this time. I may re-up my Netflix subscription for it.
Maybe All's Well by Mona Awad? Backdrop of Shakespeare, descent into madness, a very surreal quality throughout.
Thanks!
{{Hangsaman}}
^(By: Shirley Jackson | 191 pages | Published: 1951 | Popular Shelves: horror, fiction, classics, gothic, owned)
Hangsaman is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen.
The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.
^(This book has been suggested 17 times)
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If you loved Black Swan have you seen the anime movie it was (mostly) based on* called Perfect Blue? Absolutely stunning and more eerie than Black Swan imo.
Perfect Blue (the movie) was itself adapted from the 1991 novel Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis by Yoshikazu Takeuchi
*Edit: Apparently Aronofsky claims Black Swan was not inspired by Perfect Blue. However, some scenes of Black Swan are shot-for-shot the same as Perfect Blue, Aronofsky claims to be a fan of Perfect Blue, and he met the director, Satoshi Kon, in 2001. So I find it hard to believe it wasn't inspired by it haha.
Interesting! One of my friends did tell me today that it was ripped off from an anime. I’ll check out the novel. Thanks for the comment!