If what hooked you was living inside Grendel’s head—his stalking of Heorot, his perverse mercy toward Unferth, his fixation on the Shaper—then you’ll relish the way The Talented Mr. Ripley seals you inside Tom Ripley’s suave, calculating psyche. Like Grendel prowling the meadhall’s edges, Ripley circles a gilded world he covets, then crosses the line with chilling, intimate logic.

Gardner’s dragon tells Grendel that nothing matters; Meursault lives that abyss. If you were compelled by Grendel’s arguments with the Shaper’s beauty and the dragon’s cold cosmology, The Stranger offers the same stark confrontation with meaninglessness—stripped of ornament, as pitiless as the sun beating down on a beach.

If Grendel’s first-person rants—his cave-bound soliloquies, his taunts from the darkness outside Heorot—pulled you in, Notes from Underground is a direct line to that claustrophobic intimacy. Dostoevsky’s underground man, like Grendel, claws at reason, spite, and self-justification until the voice itself becomes the battleground.

If you loved how Grendel flips Beowulf to reveal the creature’s aching interiority—his mother’s mute love, his fatal meeting with Beowulf—then Circe will resonate. Miller gives the supposed temptress a fiercely human voice as she recounts her exile, magic, and encounters with Odysseus, turning myth into a personal reckoning.

If Grendel’s monstrous body and the way humans project meaning onto him—Hrothgar’s terror, the Shaper’s gilded lies—fascinated you, The Metamorphosis distills that into one devastating change. Gregor Samsa’s inhuman form exposes family, work, and worth with the same bleak clarity that Grendel’s claws brought to Heorot.