If riding shotgun with Jonny Frost as he chauffeurs the clown through a turf‑reclaiming spree pulled you in, you’ll devour the first‑person dive into Deputy Lou Ford’s head in The Killer Inside Me. Like watching Joker sweet‑talk, terrify, and betray his way through Penguin and Two‑Face’s corners, Lou’s genteel drawl masks a calculating monster—letting you feel the same nauseating mix of fascination and dread as the façade slips and the body count rises.

You liked how Joker drags you through a rain‑slicked Gotham—strip clubs, back rooms, and back‑alley deals—while Joker muscles in on old territory and squeezes the Penguin. Coward drops you into an equally grimy world, following a heist pro who knows every angle and every betrayal is coming. The double‑crosses, the doomed scores, and the moral rot echo the way Joker toys with Jonny Frost and turns the city’s crooks into meat for his machine.

If the flayings, beatings, and casual executions in Joker—from back‑alley mutilations to Joker’s gleeful cruelty toward his own crew—held a terrible magnetism, Blood Meridian amplifies that into a scorching desert apocalypse. Judge Holden’s philosophizing amid massacres channels the same chill you felt when Joker turns a business meeting into a bloodbath, forcing you to stare straight at violence stripped of comfort or apology.

Reading Joker through Jonny Frost’s eyes—his hero‑worship, fear, and rationalizations—makes you question what’s real when he rides with the clown, watches him humiliate rivals, and staggers through the aftermath. Fight Club weaponizes that same uncertainty: the narrator’s confessional voice and Tyler’s anarchic stunts mirror Jonny’s unreliable proximity to madness, right down to the way charisma turns followers into accomplices.

If what gripped you in Joker was the intimate access to a diseased moral compass—the way Jonny tries to explain the clown’s logic while witnessing things like brutal shake‑downs and a final, personal reckoning—The Wasp Factory offers an equally unsettling interior tour. Frank’s rituals, trophies, and matter‑of‑fact narration echo that same cold, clinical glimpse into a psyche that makes horror feel inevitable.