Here are 91 books that Catherine House fans have personally recommended if you like
Catherine House.
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I’m a human being who struggles with feeling human. When I was 17, I got my brain pretty shaken up after a traumatic event, causing a swathe of memory loss and mental health problems. How do you regain a sense of yourself when chunks of your childhood memories, your skills, and your sense of self have disappeared? Here are some books that grapple with that question, and others.
I believe this book is one of the classic staples of surreal fiction. Its disjointed, spiraling narrative and sprawling non-linear plot lines challenge the definition of what a ‘book’ is. It uses everything from footnotes to text alignment to color schemes to make the act of reading itself increasingly difficult, which matches the house’s influence on the narrators’ memories and interests.
Reading it for me was like learning Latin or watching Casablanca–it gave context to decades of experimental media inspired by it, from TV shows to DOOM game mods. Love it or hate it, it’s a solid tool for any inhuman’s toolkit.
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,…
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’ve been fascinated by how people behave and how in-group bias can change who they are. That interest led me into computational sociology (I study human behavior for a living), with my work appearing in The New York Times, USA Today, WIRED, and more. But my deepest fascination has always been with people’s propensity for the horrific. I LOVE the liminal space where fear, secrecy, and belonging collide. Being neurodivergent, living in a small Virginia town with my wife and our neurodivergent, queer son, I see how communities can both shelter and suffocate. That tension is why I’m drawn to stories saturated in dread, beauty, and what lives in the shadows.
This is the book that taught me how powerful loneliness can be.
Every time I return to it, I feel one character’s ache settle into me, that desperate want to belong somewhere, even if it’s a house that doesn’t love you back. I recommend it because it still feels as if I’m attempting to figure out what is happening alongside the characters, the way only great writing can.
Jackson makes you realize that the scariest hauntings aren’t in the walls, they’re the ones we carry within us.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
I have a lifelong fascination with houses and the sway they hold over us. Coming from a family that moved pretty frequently, I’ve experienced the way a house can feel like a true home, or like an unwelcoming space. Unlike the characters in The Wonder State, I don’t break into places to explore (not even abandoned spaces!). But I always take notice of the homes and structures in every neighborhood and city I visit, wondering what the residents’ lives are like and how their houses affect them. I’m a novelist who focuses on the speculative, and all three of my novels feature weird houses in some capacity.
When Magnolia’s grandmother dies, the nineteen-year-old protagonist of Brashear’s sultry novel experiences another kind of loss as well. Her predatory landlord turns Magnolia’s home into a hostile space, quite literally forcing her out of the protection her grandmother left behind.
I love the way fairytales take center stage… Magnolia often imagines herself as part of iconic fables. I devoured fairytales as a child, so I felt particularly drawn into this obsession.
Without her own house, Magnolia seeks shelter with a mysterious artist named Cotton. But as always happens in such tales, nothing comes without a cost. Magnolia agrees to pose as mourners’ lost loved ones. Just like her house is no longer her own, even Magnolia’s own body doesn’t fully belong to her.
An enchanting Black Southern gothic debut, perfect for readers of Mexican Gothic... "Fresh, haunting...In her roller-coaster ride of a gothic debut novel, Monica Brashears upends expectations at every turn." ―The New York Times
“Every page, every scene, every sentence of Monica Brashears’s debut novel House of Cotton dazzles and surprises. An intense, enthralling, and deeply satisfying read!” ―Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
"A new, dazzling, and essential American voice." ―George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
Magnolia Brown is nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan. She feels stuck and haunted: by her…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I have a lifelong fascination with houses and the sway they hold over us. Coming from a family that moved pretty frequently, I’ve experienced the way a house can feel like a true home, or like an unwelcoming space. Unlike the characters in The Wonder State, I don’t break into places to explore (not even abandoned spaces!). But I always take notice of the homes and structures in every neighborhood and city I visit, wondering what the residents’ lives are like and how their houses affect them. I’m a novelist who focuses on the speculative, and all three of my novels feature weird houses in some capacity.
The house referenced in the title of this atmospheric thriller is no ordinary home, but I had to take quite a journey before understanding what makes this place so sinister.
In Reyes’ thriller, Maya is haunted by the seemingly inexplicable death of her friend. She suspects that the death has something to do with Frank, the mysterious man who created a rift between Maya and her friend. But Maya can’t prove anything… until she sees Frank connected to yet another woman’s bizarre death.
Without any spoilers, this particular house is unlike the others on the list, and Reyes plays with reality and perception in a fresh and intriguing way. Good luck guessing what’s going on in this eerie house in the woods… I certainly couldn’t anticipate the twists.
A REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'AN ABSOLUTE, CAN'T-PUT-IT-DOWN THRILLER' Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club Jan '23 Pick)
'EERIE AND ATMOSPHERIC' Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of The House Across the Lake
'CREEPY' The Times
'I READ IN A SINGLE SITTING, TOTALLY ENTHRALLED' Lisa Gardner, Sunday Times bestselling author of One Step Too Far
'SUPERB' M. W. Craven, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Botanist
'CHILLED ME TO THE BONE' Andrea Bartz, author of Reese's pick We Were Never Here ________
This is the story of a house. The cabin lies deep in…
David DeKok became interested in environmental disasters in his native Michigan in 1974, when PBB, a fire-retardant chemical, was accidentally mixed with animal feed, entered the food chain, and then most people in the state, probably including himself. As a journalist in Pennsylvania, he wrote extensively about the Centralia mine fire and the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and is the author of four books. He tends to write about small towns and small-town people in crisis.
While this is not a comprehensive history of the TMI accident and its aftermath—none exists––you can happily read this book and understand the seriousness of what happened. It is not encumbered with anti-nuclear ideology, like some of the books written immediately after the accident were. It has many photos, a glossary of nuclear terms, and an index.
It was 5 a.m. at the nuclear power plant on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River. Suddenly an alarm shrieked. Something was going wrong inside the plant. Within minutes human error and technical failure triggered the worst nuclear power accident in the United States and within hours, the eyes of the world were on Three Mile Island. Wilborn Hampton transports the readers to this pivotal moment in American history, telling the hour-by-hour story of covering the nuclear accident as a U.P.I. (United Press International) reporter. His fascinating account will compel readers to consider one of the most…
I’ve always been intrigued by monsters. I grew up watching or reading anything that had a monster in it, much to the chagrin of my monster-hating mother. Over time, I grew bored with the same monsters in the same historical settings. It wasn’t until I discovered some of the books on this list that I found writers doing new, fun, and inventive things that reinvigorated my own love for them. I’m always going to be a monster junky, but I always hope to find authors that can bring these classic terrors into the modern world.
I was enamored with the main character from this book. Learning about the world and mythology with her made it way more enjoyable for me and put me right beside her for the ride. Every terror, struggle, victory, and loss were so much more poignant because I was so attached to Laura Caxton.
The villain is evil with a capital E, and I found myself hating them more with each exposure to them. Solid action and tension that kept me interested and hanging on.
The monster knelt in the mud, his balled fists punching at the ground, his head bowed. He started to get up and Arkeley shot him again. He'd had thirteen bullets to start with how many did he have left? All the official reports say they are dead-extinct since the late '80s, when a fed named Jameson Arkeley nailed the last vampire in a fight that nearly killed him. But the evidence proves otherwise. When a state trooper named Caxton calls the FBI looking for help in the middle of the night, it is Arkeley who gets the assignment - who…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I love historical fiction because it’s the next best thing to the invention of time travel. Books can immerse you in a time and a place in a way that comics and movies can only gesture at. For books likeNever SleepI even make sure to cook the foods my characters are eating, to make sure the era is evoked for the readers in all five sense.I love fantasy and science fiction as the next person, but the idea of transporting people to times and placesthat actually happened, to the best of my skill as a dramatist and researcher, is a challenge I find irresistible as an author.
A direct inspiration on my book, this is a great espionage thriller set in Philadelphia about a disgraced Revolution-era spy who gets hired by Alexander Hamilton to help against his arch-enemy, Thomas Jefferson, and finds his path intersecting with a farmwife standing up against a frontier uprising.
Liss is a master of the historical form (and a friend, full disclosure!)
America, 1787. Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington’s most valued spies, is living in disgrace after an accusation of treason cost him his reputation. But an opportunity for redemption comes calling when Saunders’s old enemy, Alexander Hamilton, draws him into a struggle with bitter rival Thomas Jefferson over the creation of the Bank of the United States.
Meanwhile, on the western Pennsylvania frontier, Joan Maycott and her husband, a Revolutionary War veteran, hope for a better life and a chance for prosperity. But the Maycotts’ success on an isolated frontier attracts the brutal attention of men who threaten to destroy…
I grew up in western Pennsylvania where my dad loved history and always tried to stop at any battlefield or historic sign that happened to be within his field of vision. My mom was a passionate researcher of our family ancestry and I spent our childhood looking in cemeteries for specific names and gravestones. When I was ten years old, we joined a living history reenactment group that portrayed everyday life in the 1750s, and I was immediately hooked. I began researching about our group known as “Captain William Trent’s Company” and after almost thirty years of living and breathing summer weekends at 18th Century historic sites, the pages of Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost: Captain Trent’s Fort came to life. I picked these five books because I want future readers to be transported like I was when I first read them.
This book is unique because it shows the reader how you can walk in the footsteps and travel like those trekking across Pennsylvania in the early 18th Century where there were no interstates or turnpikes, but instead, indigenous paths that influenced the roadways we know today. It also gave me a visual where I could experience firsthand what a traveler saw when he or she walked this route.
Since its original publication in 1965, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania has remained the standard volume for charting the foot trails forged and followed in Pennsylvania by Native Americans, documenting an era of interaction between Indians and European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the advent of European settlement, the Indian trails that laced the wilderness were so well-situated that there was little reason to forsake them until the age of the automobile. The trails that traverse the mountains “kept the level” so well that they remain an engineering curiosity. Equally as remarkable are the complexity of the system…
I knew I wanted to be a writer of fiction when I was 10 years old, being raised by my father. He thoughtfully gave me a typewriter, and plenty of other encouragement too. As a youngster, I couldn’t read enough about what youngsters read about: animals, sports, cowboys, child detectives. Soon, I came to love books that probed human conflict through characters who reached deeply into my soul. Not simplistic “good versus evil” driven principally by plot, but gut-pulling interpersonal struggle coming to life (and sometimes death) in characters facing moral and legal dilemma, and facing it with wit, humor, and human frailty.
I read it in high school, again in college, and still again (twice) as an adult, once aloud to my 3 young daughters over 3 weeks at bedtime. For me, it is the most powerful, frontier-themed American novel out there.
I love a novel that educates me and tells me things I am surprised I didn’t know because I should have, in beautifully constructed sentences.
The dialogue carries its characters so naturally that it is as if you are speaking with them yourself at your main room table in your 18th-century frontier home in Pennsylvania.
A beautifully illustrated edition of a novel that has enthralled young American readers for generations. It is the story of John Cameron Butler-captured as a small child in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier by the Indian tribe Lenni-Lenape. Adopted by the great warrior Cuyloga and renamed True Son, he has spent 11 years living and thinking of himself as fully Indian. But when the tribe signs a treaty that requires them to return their white captives, 15-year-old True Son is returned against his will to the family he had long forgotten, and to a life that he no longer…
When I was a kid on the farm in Saskatchewan, I had a handful of books to read and re-read and read yet again. No television, no radio—just books. Then we moved to the city and I discovered the bookmobile, but I could only take out three books at a time. Deciding was torture. From bookmobile to library to bookstore to e-reader. Life is good. With all that reading, I knew I had to write a novel. I finally did. One became seven. How on earth did that happen? Re-reding my books I realized that teens play significant roles in all my novels. I’m a retired teacher—go figure!
I liked this book so much, I read it twice. What made it so good? O’Dell’s mastery of creating “real” people. I cared about them. I wanted to be in the story with them such was the power of her writing—a captivating story with an unusual set of characters, their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Spain, the US, bulls and bullfighters, an old lady, a couple of teen brothers, a dysfunctional family, love and hate, baseball…
When their hard-drinking, but loving, father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town’s matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys’ story. Candace Jack doesn’t have an ounce of maternal instinct, yet for reasons she does not even understand herself, she is compelled to offer them a home.
