Books Like Disco Elysium: 10 Dark, Literary Reads to Devour Next

Disco Elysium is not a book, and that is exactly the problem for the people who love it. A detective role-playing game from 2019, it drops you into the head of an amnesiac, hungover cop in Revachol, a port city still limping decades after a failed revolution, and asks you to solve a hanging while your own skills bicker inside your skull. What makes it stay with you is the writing: hard-boiled noir shot through with dense, melancholy, politically loaded prose, absurdist humour, addiction and regret, and a strange alternate world with its own buried history. There are very few games like it. Happily, there are books.

The readers who come to us after finishing it tend to want one of a handful of things: an existential detective story, a city so vivid it becomes a character, Eastern European and Soviet-era fiction with the same wry exhaustion, New Weird and literary science fiction, or paranoid, talky American noir where the ideas matter more than the gunfire. The ten below cover all of that ground. They are adult books, with drink, drugs and violence in several of them, and most of them are slow, talky and idea-heavy in the best possible way.

What to read after Disco Elysium

The City & the City by China Miéville

Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is handed a murdered woman in Besźel, a decaying city at the edge of Europe, and the case takes him over the border into Ul Qoma, its rival and intimate neighbour. The catch is that the two cities occupy the same streets, and their citizens are trained from birth to unsee each other. It is the book most often pressed on fans of the game, and rightly: the same hard-boiled frame, the same rigorously strange world, and a mystery that is really about borders, ideology and what a city teaches its people not to notice.