The Ultimate Anti-Euphoria Season 3 Reading List

If you're anything like me (which I wouldn't recommend), watching the first two seasons of Euphoria felt like seeing definitive show of messed-up teenage life unfurl in front of your eyes, much like Skins did a generation earlier. Euphoria had everything, that haunting soundtrack (thanks to Labrinth), the sweeping camera movements, the cinematography, the colours... it's not just me being a fan here: there was a period when everything from Emerald Fennel's Saltburn to the Russo brother's Cherry drew comparisons to Euphoria.

But half a decade has passed since then, Fennel's Wuthering Heights more than disappointed us, and the Russo brother's are well of their way to retcon everything that happened since Avengers: Endgame with their upcoming movie, Avenger: Doomsday. And almost as if on cue, Euphoria Season 3 degraded just as much, and all we are left with now is an auth-right middle aged man's fantasy of what it means to be in your twenties.

So instead of hate-watching a show that no longer trusts its audience or its own story, you might as well spend that time with books that actually understand obsession, addiction, desire, and self-destruction, and respect it enough to not be a spectacle. Read on.

Written in verse instead of your standard paragraphs, Crank follows Kristina, a high-achieving teenager whose life crumbles down when she meets “the monster” during a visit to her absentee father. Said monster being crystal meth, her little act of curiosity mutates till it completely erodes any and all identity the girl once had. The novel is loosely based on Hopkins’s own daughter, which makes Kristina's drug addiction hurt even more.

Set in early 1980s Los Angeles, The Shards is more Class than Euphoria: it drops you into a rarefied prep school ecosystem of beautiful, wealthy teenagers who are sleeping with each other, doing drugs, all the while hating each other from the bottom of their hearts. The narrator, a version of Ellis himself, becomes obsessed with a new student whose arrival coincides with a series of murders by a serial killer known as The Trawler.

Journalist Camille Preaker returns to her suffocating hometown to cover the murders of two young girls, but the assignment quickly turns inward as she’s forced to reflect back on her dysfunctional family. Camille struggles with self-harm and alcoholism, and as she reconnects with her manipulative mother and unsettling half-sister, the line between being a professional observer and an unwilling participant in the murder starts collapsing in this book by the Gone Girl author.

Equal parts uncomfortable and hilarious, Boy Parts centres on Irina, an erotic photographer who manipulates vulnerable men into modelling for her under increasingly exploitative conditions. Set against a grimy, hyper-online art scene, the novel tracks her unraveling as her work, relationships, and sense of self all start to corrode in the process. You would like this if you like unreliable narrators, but be warned, there's a bit of gore involved.

In this memoir that reads like a fictional novel, Tweak chronicles Nic Sheff’s descent into meth addiction and the exhausting cycle of relapse, recovery, and relapse again. The book details all the lies, the theft, the physical and emotional toll, and the way addiction reshapes not just the addict but everyone around them. Tweak hits even harder if you have read Beautiful Boy, written by his father, which tells the same story from the outside looking in.

Sure, Julia Fox has a reputation, but don't let it take you away from her fantastic memoir, which chronicles her teenage years in New York. Instability, volatile relationships, and a growing sense of displacement push her toward drugs, risky situations, and a constant search for validation. The book doesn’t frame this period as a neat “before” to her later fame. More like, it traces how her sexuality, mental health struggles, and early brushes with addiction shaped the person she became.

Steadfast follows Jude, a man recently released from prison after serving time for a crime tied to his drug addiction. On his return to his hometown and confronts the people and choices he left behind. Central to the story is his relationship with Sophie, the woman connected to the tragedy that sent him away, and the themes of guilt, accountability, and the possibility of rebuilding something resembling a life. The book explores the consequences of addiction, but more than that, it is a study of what it takes to completely redeem yourself from a past like Jude's.