Books Like Bailey Sarian's Dark History: 12 Reads for Fans of the Show

Books like Bailey Sarian's Dark History are the ones that take a single episode's worth of story, a serial killer, a cult, a corporate cover-up, and give it the 300 pages it actually needs. Sarian built Dark History out of Murder, Mystery & Makeup by picking the true crime and scandal stories your history class skipped and telling them with real research underneath the humor. These 12 books are where you go when 45 minutes isn't enough.

What makes Dark History work isn't just the crime, it's the mix: serial killers next to cult leaders next to corporate criminals next to political scandals nobody taught you in school. This list follows that same range instead of sticking to one lane, because that variety is exactly what keeps people watching the show in the first place.

If you started with the serial killer episodes

Sarian's most-watched episodes tend to be the ones on individual killers: their childhoods, the investigations that took years to close, the details that never made the news cycle. These books stay in that lane but go deeper than any episode has time for.

1. The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

Rule worked alongside Ted Bundy at a crisis hotline before anyone knew what he was, which makes this the one Bundy book written from actual proximity rather than after-the-fact research. She describes watching the case break in real time, cross-referencing what she knew of the coworker she liked against what the evidence was showing, and the disorientation of realizing both were true.

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule is the only major Bundy book written by someone who knew him personally before his crimes became public.

2. The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy by Elizabeth Kendall

Kendall dated Bundy for years, through the period when he was actively killing, and this memoir covers what that relationship actually looked like from the inside: the warning signs she noticed and dismissed, the calls to police she made and that went nowhere, and the years of processing what she'd been part of without knowing it. It's the closest thing to a firsthand account of loving someone who turns out to be a predator, and it fills in the domestic detail that a case-file account of Bundy's crimes leaves out entirely.

The Phantom Prince by Elizabeth Kendall is Bundy's own girlfriend's account, written by the person closest to him during the years he was killing.

3. I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

McNamara spent years chasing the identity of the Golden State Killer as an amateur investigator, cross-referencing case files, running her own theories past retired detectives, and building a following of true crime obsessives who helped crowdsource the search. She died before the case was solved using DNA genealogy techniques she'd championed, and the book was published posthumously. It's as much a portrait of obsessive investigation as it is a crime book.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara follows the decades-long hunt for the Golden State Killer from the perspective of the amateur investigator who helped crack it.

4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Capote spent six years researching the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and effectively invented the "nonfiction novel" doing it, reconstructing conversations and interior states with a novelist's technique applied to a real crime. Every modern true crime book that reads like a thriller instead of a police report owes something to this one.

Where do you go after Dark History's cult episodes?

Move to Robert D. Hare's Without Conscience for the psychology behind why cult leaders and con artists can operate for years without detection, then to a specific case study like Charles Manson or Jonestown to see that psychology in practice. The pattern repeats: charisma, isolation, and a slow escalation members don't notice until they're already committed.

5. Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

Bugliosi was the prosecutor who put Charles Manson away, and this book is his own account of building the case, including the parts the trial coverage never captured: the difficulty of proving Manson ordered murders he never personally committed, and the cult psychology that made his followers carry them out without hesitation. It's still the definitive account decades after the trial.

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry is written by the prosecutor who convicted Manson, with case-file detail no outside account can match.

6. Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare

Hare developed the psychopathy checklist that clinicians and investigators still use today, and this book explains the traits behind the cult leaders, con artists, and killers Dark History covers: superficial charm, a total absence of remorse, and an ability to read what other people want to hear. It's the psychological framework underneath most of the show's most disturbing episodes.

Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare explains the clinical psychology behind the manipulators Dark History profiles.

The corporate and historical scandals

This is the side of Dark History that separates it from a straight true crime channel: episodes on corporate cover-ups, government experiments, and historical scandals that never involved a single murder but destroyed just as many lives. These books cover that same territory in depth.

7. Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer

Sidney Gottlieb ran the CIA's MKUltra mind control program for two decades, dosing unwitting subjects with LSD, running interrogation experiments that killed people, and destroying most of the program's records before Congress could review them. Kinzer reconstructs the program from what survived, and the story reads less like history and more like the kind of thing Dark History builds an entire episode around.

Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer covers the CIA's MKUltra mind control program in the kind of detail a single episode can't fit.

8. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Larson tells two stories at once: the building of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who used the fair's crowds to lure victims to a hotel purpose-built with hidden rooms and a gas chamber. The dual narrative gives you both the historical spectacle and the crime underneath it, exactly the combination Dark History's format is built around.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson pairs H.H. Holmes's murders with the 1893 World's Fair that gave him his victims.

9. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation were murdered one by one after oil was discovered under their land, and the newly formed FBI's first major homicide investigation uncovered a conspiracy that reached into the local white community that had married into Osage families specifically to inherit the oil rights. It's a historical scandal with a body count that mainstream American history mostly left out.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann covers the Osage murders and the FBI's first major homicide investigation.

What is Bailey Sarian's Dark History about?

Dark History is Bailey Sarian's YouTube series and podcast covering true crime, cults, corporate scandals, and historical events left out of standard curricula, delivered while she does her makeup. It grew out of her earlier Murder, Mystery & Makeup format and expanded beyond individual killers into broader scandals and cover-ups.

Does Bailey Sarian have her own book?

Yes. Bailey Sarian published a book titled Dark History that covers stories in the same format as her show and podcast, aimed at fans who want a print companion to the video and audio content she's known for.

Unsolved cases and small-town mysteries

Not every Dark History episode ends with an arrest. These two books sit in that same unresolved space, cases where the investigation itself becomes the story because the ending never arrives cleanly.

10. Lost Girls by Robert Kolker

Kolker follows five women who went missing near Long Island, killed by a still-unidentified serial killer, and builds the book around their lives before they disappeared rather than treating them as case files. It's as much an indictment of how law enforcement treated sex workers reporting people missing as it is a crime investigation.

Lost Girls by Robert Kolker follows an unsolved serial murder case through the lives of the victims rather than the investigation alone.

11. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Berendt moved to Savannah, Georgia and spent years embedded in the city's social circles before a prominent antiques dealer shot and killed a younger man, a killing that four separate trials couldn't cleanly resolve. The murder is almost secondary to the portrait of a city that closes ranks around its own, which is the kind of texture Dark History rarely has time to build in a single episode. Read it for the Southern Gothic cast of characters as much as for the crime itself.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt turns a Savannah murder trial into a portrait of an entire city's social order.

12. Columbine by Dave Cullen

Cullen spent ten years correcting the myths that formed around the 1999 Columbine shooting within days of it happening, myths about bullied outcasts and a "Trench Coat Mafia" that turned out to be almost entirely wrong. The real psychological profile of one shooter as a clinical psychopath and the other as depressive and suicidal only became clear once investigators released documents years later, and Cullen's book is the account built on those documents instead of the initial panic.

Columbine by Dave Cullen replaces the myths that formed in the days after the shooting with the psychological record built over the following decade.

What all twelve of these books share with Dark History isn't just true crime as a category, it's the refusal to stop at the crime itself. Sarian's episodes work because she connects a killer or a scandal to the systems around it: the police departments that missed warning signs, the corporations that buried evidence, the social circles that protected their own. Every book on this list does the same thing with a few hundred more pages of room to do it in.

Three to start with if you're new to the genre

• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, the closest thing to Dark History's own format: a historical spectacle with a serial killer running underneath it.
• Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, the cult and murder case with the most detailed inside account available.
• Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer, for the corporate and government scandal side of the show, not just the individual killers.

For more true crime reading built around specific cases, see our lists of best serial killer books and best books about cults, or start with the full best true crime books of 2026 roundup. If Ted Bundy specifically is what brought you here, we cover him in more depth in the best books about Ted Bundy.