Loved Obsession? Here Are The Books to Read Next

If you left the cinema feeling equal parts thrilled and unsettled, you’re not alone. Curry Barker’s horror-romance became one of the breakout hits of the year, and it’s easy to see why. A hopeless romantic breaks a mysterious trinket called the One Wish Willow to win his crush’s heart, only to discover that getting exactly what you wished for can be its own kind of nightmare. What starts as a sweet, slightly awkward love story tips, scene by scene, into something much darker: devotion curdling into control, affection twisting into possession.

That queasy, can’t-look-away feeling doesn’t have to end when the credits roll. Fiction has been exploring the fine line between love and obsession for well over a century, long before anyone thought to put a curse inside a novelty toy. Whether you want something gothic and slow-burning or a full-throttle psychological thriller, here’s where to go next.

Obsession (2026)

Why Obsession Struck a Nerve

Part of the film’s appeal is how ordinary it starts. Bear is not a monster. He’s a lonely, socially awkward music store employee who wants the girl he has liked for years to finally notice him. It’s only once his wish is granted that the story reveals its real subject: what happens when someone’s love for you stops being about you at all, and becomes about them.

That is exactly the territory the best obsession novels have always mined. They ask the same uncomfortable question the film does: how much of what we call romance is actually about control, and how would we know the difference from the inside? Here are six stranger, more left-field reads for anyone who wants their obsession stories a little more unsettling and a lot more absurd.

Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

This is the closest thing on this list to a direct cousin of the One Wish Willow. A lonely young woman finds a shapeless blob outside a bar, takes it home and slowly molds it into her ideal boyfriend. It sounds like a joke, and often it is a very funny one, but underneath the premise is a sharp, sad story about loneliness, identity and what happens when you get to build exactly what you asked for. If Obsession’s central irony (be careful what you wish for) is what stuck with you, this is the book that takes that idea most literally.

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Annie is an AI companion, built and trained specifically to please her owner, Doug. She is designed to be endlessly devoted, endlessly available and endlessly understanding. The novel’s quiet horror comes from watching Annie begin to develop wants of her own inside a relationship built entirely around suppressing them. It’s a sharp, unsettling read about devotion that was never really a choice, and it sits in fascinating conversation with Obsession’s central question about what happens when someone’s love for you is manufactured rather than earned.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Weird girl lit royalty, and deservedly so. Samantha is an isolated MFA student who gets drawn into a clique of wealthy, cultish classmates who call each other “Bunny” and speak in a private language of hyper-feminine affection. What starts as social anxiety curdles into something genuinely surreal and disturbing as Samantha is pulled further into the group’s rituals. It’s a strange, prickly book about the specific horror of wanting to belong so badly that you stop noticing how far you have gone.

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

About as niche and gloriously odd as this list gets. The narrator is a woman convinced she is meant to die in a plane crash, in the arms of an airplane she is sexually and emotionally fixated on. Told with total deadpan sincerity, it is one of the strangest fixation narratives in recent fiction, and, somehow, a genuinely moving story about desire, faith and the lengths people go to for a feeling of destiny. Not for everyone, but exactly right if you want your obsession stories completely unhinged.

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Eighteen, pregnant and drifting, the narrator delivers pizza for a living and becomes quietly, then not so quietly, obsessed with one of her regular customers, an older woman with a young son. Nothing especially dramatic happens for most of the book, which is exactly the point. Frazier is interested in the slow, mundane way fixation can take over an ordinary life without anyone around you noticing.

Creep by Emma van Straaten

A woman working as a housekeeper retreats almost entirely into an elaborate fantasy life about one of her clients, blurring the line between the relationship she actually has and the one she has built in her head. It is a quieter, more internal kind of obsession story than Obsession’s supernatural premise, but the core mechanism is identical: a fixation that starts

as comfort and slowly replaces reality altogether.

Where to Start

New to weird girl lit? Bunny is the most talked-about entry point and a good gauge of whether the genre’s off-kilter style works for you.

Want the most direct callback to the film’s premise? Blob: A Love Story is the one to reach for first.

Looking for something quieter and more literary? Pizza Girl and Creep are both slower burns

with less overt strangeness on the surface.

Ready to go all in? Sky Daddy is as weird as this list gets, in the best possible way. Obsession worked because it took a familiar romantic wish and let it rot from the inside. These six books do the same thing, just with more surrealism, more dark comedy and a lot less concern about looking normal while they do it.