Here are 92 books that A Sudden Light fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have researched and observed attempts to map, enhance, and control biological human bodies since I was a teenager. I was always interested in how people described and related to themselves as biological creatures. As part of that, I was fascinated by attempts to talk about the human body with other words than the strict biological, both by poets, artists and by, entrepreneurs, and scientists. As a researcher in cultural studies, I concentrate on different ways to understand ourselves as biological creatures and on imaginaries about (bio)technology and how these dreams about what technology can do affect our self-understanding.
The book is better than the movie, and the movie is amazing. I love how the author manages to create a dense feeling of female suffocation, gaslighting, hallucination, panic, satanism, conspiracies, deception, and paranoia while simultaneously describing the ordered and neat lives of New York City's emerging glitterati through detailed descriptions of the housewife’s sphere of choosing the right material of towels and the right hue of wallpaper when nesting.
Rosemary’s personal limits and borders, both physical and psychological, are challenged as she becomes a vessel of something unknown, but only unknown to her. An amazingly dense yet easily accessible book.
'The Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King
Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor-husband, Guy, move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbours Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome them; despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, her husband starts spending time with them. Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare.
As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I grew up in an isolated rural pub in England. My love of folk horror was born of a strong nostalgia for that time and it has fed into both my writing and my reading. I understood isolation, small communities, the effect of strangers, as well as the sense of ‘otherness’ in the atmosphere of the countryside – the calm before the storm, the liminal twilight. It also meant that I could tell when a writer had captured the ‘essence’ of folk horror. When the author weaves a story between the landscape and man, blends traditions and mythology – they take me to that place I know.
Think folk horror and you think rural setting, pretty cottages, white picket fences, and lurking ritual. Harvest Home is a folk horror classic and hits these expectations spot on.
A city couple escapes to the village of Cornwall Coombe to give their daughter a better quality of life. Everything is perfect until the husband discovers they were welcomed for a very specific reason. This discovery, becoming more evident as the harvest ritual approaches, leaves him in fear of losing his life and his family.
I loved this gradual teasing out of horror, subtle nuances that build to the awful climax. The ending is chilling, contrasting so sharply as it does against the background of a rural paradise, giving me one of those ‘oh!’ moments.
A family flees the crime-ridden city-and finds something worse-in "a brilliantly imagined horror story" by the New York Times-bestselling author (The Boston Globe).
After watching his asthmatic daughter suffer in the foul city air, Theodore Constantine decides to get back to the land. When he and his wife search New England for the perfect nineteenth-century home, they find no township more charming, no countryside more idyllic than the farming village of Cornwall Coombe. Here they begin a new life: simple, pure, close to nature-and ultimately more terrifying than Manhattan's darkest alley.
When the Constantines win the friendship of the town…
I’ve always admired epistolary novels—stories told in the form of diaries, letters, or other mass media. They seem so real and so much more believable than plain narratives. When dealing with fantastic subjects, like paranormal phenomena, any technique that can draw the weird back into the real world helps me become more invested as a reader. It’s a quality I’ve also tried to capture as a horror writer. Moreover, the epistolary format pairs well with unreliable narrators, often filtering stories so as to make them more ambiguous and disturbing. From the many epistolary works I’ve read over the years, here are my picks for the most compelling—and creepy.
This phantasmagorical oral history unfolds during one of my favorite time periods, the psychedelic late 60s/early 70s. It also fuses two of my favorite sub-genres, folk horror and haunted houses.
I could easily visualize the setting and the different characters as I read their statements and tried to piece together the reality of what happened during the band’s infamous time at Wylding Hall.
After the tragic and mysterious death of one of their founding members, the young musicians in a British acid-folk band hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with its own dark secrets. There they record the classic album that will make their reputation but at a terrifying cost, when Julian Blake, their lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen again. Now, years later, each of the surviving musicians, their friends and lovers (including a psychic, a photographer, and the band s manager) meets with a young documentary filmmaker to tell his or her own version…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Maybe because I grew up in San Diego, a city that boasts what ghost hunter Hans Holzer called the most haunted house in America, I’ve always loved ghost stories. I never encountered a ghost when I visited the Whaley House Museum, as Regis Philbin did when he spent the night, but I once took a photograph there that had an unexplained light streak on it. Although I conceived a passion for the printed word with my first Dick and Jane reader and wrote my first story at the age of six, it took me a few decades to fulfill my long-held desire to write a ghost story of my own.
This book had the greatest influence on my desire to write my own ghost story.
I liked the stalwart Brit characters, Roderick and Pamela, even though they were a bit slow putting together the clues. I figured out the secret before they did, which only added to the fun. The writing style is old-fashioned enough to add to the atmosphere, and the story is beautifully told.
A gothic, bone-chilling Irish ghost story first published in 1941 and now brought back into print. The title benefits from an introduction by well-known academic Professor Luke Gibbons and Martin Scorsese and various critics, including William K. Everson and Leonard Maltin, regard The Uninvited as one of the best ghost stories ever filmed.
I’m a writer of sapphic horror and romance fiction, and a professor of nineteenth and twentieth literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. I’ve been an avid reader of ghost-focused fiction since I was a little kid. This fascination was, in part, encouraged by my horror-loving parents, but I think I’ve just always loved being scared, and for me, the scariest thing imaginable is a haunted house. I’ve read widely in the genre, by turns spooked, thrilled, and baffled, and this reading eventually encouraged me to write my own haunted house novels. If you love a chilling tale, you’re going to love the books on this list.
While there are haunted house-like novels before James’s 1898 classic, this in many ways is a granddaddy of modern haunted tales. An isolated country estate? Check. A creepy housekeeper? Check. Two even creepier children, possibly possessed? Check, check! When the unnamed narrator is hired as the new governess in a remote country home in England, she arrives to find that her two young wards are already nearly corrupted by the ghosts of the former governess and groundskeeper. As she works to save them, the narrator herself is threatened, both by the ghosts and by the children she’s meant to save. The psychological possibilities of this book, however, linger at the edges of the text, threatening to undermine the whole notion of what this haunting really is.
A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead.
Like the other tales collected here - `Sir Edmund Orme', `Owen Wingrave', and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they…
I grew up watching the old Universal horror movies, which led me to read Frankenstein, Dracula, and other horror classics. It wasn’t until I read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre that I started asking myself what it is that I find truly frightening. Not so much monsters but rather what is unsettling – A recognizable world that suddenly turns askew. Dead Hungry grew out of that: What if there were people who simply had to eat the dead?
Another haunted house story, with a similar emphasis on atmosphere. A sister and brother visit a friend whose house is infected with competing ghostly forces. A constant sense of dread permeates the atmosphere. Blackwood keeps the reader on edge, waiting for the shoe to drop. And that’s it. It may pale by today’s standards of horror, but the novel excels at how ghostly presences vie for dominance.
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About The Damned by Algernon Blackwood The Damned by Algernon Blackwood is a great haunted house story along the lines of Turn of the Screw and the Haunting of Hill House. A brother and sister spend some time with a recently widowed friend. Her deceased husband was a strict fire and brimstone preacher who damned everyone who didn't believe like him to hell. His less strong-willed wife fell under his spell, but now the house seems to be haunted by...a shadow? Goblins? Ghostly pagans? Or…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I've been a paranormal investigator (a paranormal reporter, actually) for over a decade. One of the very best parts of my job is that I get to gorge myself on books of true accounts of the paranormal. It's exciting to see what else is out there, and what other people have experienced – both historically, and personally. I'm so grateful for the chance to add to this body of work; there are many renowned investigators and writers out there, and I'm thrilled to be counted among them. And someday, someone will read about my experiences and be terrified and intrigued and inspired by them.
I will read absolutely anything that Richard Estep writes. He has written books about the Villisca Ax Murders, Malvern Manor, and other crazy-haunted places. This one, about a site in his native England, is utterly terrifying. Estep writes with a very straightforward, matter-of-fact style (his writing reminds me much of my own style), and the evidence he presents for this haunted site is deeply chilling -- especially since his team is one of the groups that has investigated the Cage.
When single mother Vanessa Mitchell moved into a historic cottage in Essex, she had no idea that a paranormal nightmare was about to unfold. The cottage, known as the Cage, used to imprison those accused of witchcraft back in the 1500s. From her first day living there, Vanessa saw apparitions walk through her room, heard ghostly growls, and was even slapped and pushed by invisible hands. Unable to handle the dark phenomena after three years, Vanessa moved out and paranormal investigator Richard Estep moved in. Spirits of the Cage chronicles the years that Vanessa and Richard spent in the Cage,…
I’ve been a fan of horror books since I was old enough to read, and one of my favorite subgenres has always been the haunted/evil house. Ghosts, demons, unnamed forces – I love it. One of the first books I ever wrote was about a demonic carnival, and I’ve returned to the theme of the haunted/evil house or place many times in both my long and short fiction. Even in real life, I have a fascination for visiting so-called haunted places: abandoned asylums, murder houses, etc. So it’s no surprise that I’d create a list of my favorite evil house books. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Although this book is only a few years old, it should be considered a classic in the genre of evil houses. A young woman inherits her mother’s childhood home and decides to convert it into a hotel. Only the place comes with some surprises: ghosts, demons, and an ancient evil that has been locked away in the dark basement. Now that evil is loose again, and the bloodshed and death are just beginning. Author Chantal Noordeloos doesn’t hold back with the frights or the blood, as person after person suffers a horrible death while poor Freya discovers her true destiny is not what she planned, and that the place they call Lucifer Falls might never let her go.
A beautiful house – with a dark and deadly secret.
When Freya inherits her mother's childhood home, she sees it as an opportunity. A chance for a new life with her best friends, as they convert the crumbling mansion into an exclusive hotel.
Instead, they'll be lucky to escape with their lives.
As the first hammers tear through the bricked up entrances, a dark, terrible and ancient evil stirs beneath the house. An evil that has already laid claim to Freya and her companions' souls.
My real name is Susan Berger and I'm a certified bookaholic. I'm also an actor and I love my work. Being older has been very lucky for me. I wrote children’s books as Susan J Berger. COVID closed my publisher and I'm not actively submitting at the moment. I write romance as Susan B James because I didn’t want my children to have to acknowledge that their mother knew anything about sex. Falling in love and living happily ever after is an ageless state. But in romance novels heroines are mostly under thirty. I happen to be chronologically gifted myself. And many of my favorite romances feature older heroines. I think we need more.
Jennifer Crusie writes some of the funniest heroines I ever met. I adore her voice and I wanted to add her to my list. When I went to Jen’s blog ArghInk to ask her which of her heroines was over forty. She said Andie.
Andie’s ex-husband North wants one last favor from her as closure. Help him settle the two delinquent orphans he inherited from a distant relative. He knows Andie can handle anything.
Her new fiancée isn’t pleased. When Andie meets the two children she quickly realizes things are much worse than she feared. The place is a mess, the children, Carter and Alice, aren't your average delinquents, and the creepy old house where they live is being run by the worst housekeeper since Mrs. Danvers. What's worse, Andie's fiancé thinks this is all a plan by North to get Andie back, and he may be right.
Andie Miller is ready to move on with her life. She wants to marry her fiancé and leave behind everything in her past, especially her ex-husband, North Archer. But when Andie tries to gain closure with him, North asks one last favor: Since the death of a distant cousin, he's become the guardian of two orphans who have already driven away three nannies. North needs someone to take care of the situation―and he knows Andie can handle anything.
Carter and Alice aren't your average delinquents, and the creepy old house where they live is being run by the worst housekeeper…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve been fascinated by haunted houses and the lore behind them ever since childhood. I spent my summers walking our neighborhood cemetery and devouring novels by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Shirley Jackson. It was only natural, then, that my debut novel had to be a haunted house story—my own love letter to the genre. Having lived in a haunted house myself, the experiences I had within those walls did little to discourage my fascination with the paranormal. While I may have left my ghosts behind me, you can still sense their lingering presence inside Parting the Veil.
I love a classic, gothic haunted house story with an unexpected twist, and Priory delivers. When Oliver Hardacre returns to his namesake home, located outside the gloriously atmospheric Yorkshire town of Whitby, he opens the door to his past. The narrative is told from Oliver’s modern perspective and his mother’s point of view in the 1970s, when Oliver and his brother were children at Hardacre Priory. Replete with dark, twisted secrets and multi-layered, complex characters, Wright’s sentient, menacing estate comes alive under her masterful touch. This is a short read, easily finished in one sitting. Crack it open on a foggy morning, with a spot of tea and a blanket to cut the chill.
Memories are like ghosts. They linger in doorways, whisper with the howling wind when lightning strikes. They are the dark phantoms of my youth. My mind buried my memories for good reason, and I spent forty years believing I could escape them.
Until with one phone call, I found myself in my childhood home: Hardacre Priory.
I knew from the first step through the door that it was all over. The forgotten events of 1979 leapt to the surface and screamed their truths. Everything I thought to be true was a lie.…
