If Mudito’s shifting I/he voice and the way his tale rewrites the reality of Jerónimo de Azcoitía’s household drew you in, you’ll love how Charles Kinbote hijacks John Shade’s poem in Pale Fire. Kinbote’s footnotes don’t just explain; they replace the story with his own grand fantasia of Zembla—just as Mudito’s accounts of the Casa and the “Boy” distort what anyone else might call facts. That pleasure of doubting every line while being pulled deeper into a mind’s invention is the same intoxicating game here.

If the labyrinthine Casa—half convent, half mausoleum—hooked you with its echoing whispers and broken timelines, Pedro Páramo delivers a similarly eerie collage. Juan Preciado arrives in Comala chasing his father and finds a town speaking in murmurs of the dead; scenes fold backward and sideways the way Mudito’s accounts of the Azcoitías and the hidden “Boy” keep reordering themselves. That same feeling of walking through rooms of the past where the walls talk is alive on every page.

If the imbunche myth, sewn mouths, and body-as-prison imagery in Donoso’s novel thrilled you, The Third Policeman is a perfect next nightmare. Its nameless narrator wanders a countryside where bicycles and men trade atoms, policemen enforce physics like theology, and identity loops into an eternal trap—an uncanny rhyme to Mudito’s self-erasure and the Casa’s grotesque rituals around the “Boy.” It’s that same dream logic where each explanation only deepens the unease.

If you were gripped by Mudito’s self-dissolution—how being the Azcoitías’ mute secretary becomes a kind of vanishing—Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. stages a single consciousness unmaking itself in real time. In a maid’s room, G.H. crushes a cockroach and then spirals through an ecstatic, terrifying meditation on identity and emptiness. That same ruthless, intimate pressure that Donoso applies in the Casa’s chambers is turned inward here, sentence by sentence.

If the hidden, deformed “Boy” and the Casa’s staged illusions worked for you as symbols of class rot and moral decay, The Tin Drum offers a similarly ferocious allegory. Oskar Matzerath wills himself never to grow, shatters glass with his scream, and drums through a collapsing Europe—his body and voice as charged and unreliable as Mudito’s testimony about Jerónimo de Azcoitía’s project. It’s that blend of carnival grotesque and social indictment you’re craving.