Here are 98 books that City of Spells fans have personally recommended if you like
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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 moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’ve loved character-focused stories long before I loved horror, which is saying something, because I’ve loved horror for a long time. It’s my belief horror is at its best when a storyteller focuses on the characters, as it adds a new dimension to the scare and forces the audience to worry about the characters. Anyone can do a jump scare; they’re not hard, but a well-crafted character that amplifies the horror is more difficult, and that’s why it’s so special when it works. It’s why authors like Stephen King and William Peter Blatty are timeless – their stories are character-first.
A chilling horror in a small fictional English village.
I love The Woman in Black because it’s more than a ghost story; it’s also a story about love and the connection between family. I’ve read it twice and what I love the most about it is the ambience Susan Hill creates with her well-crafted sentence structure.
There’s a lot of focus on Arthur Kipps, the protagonist, and his life before and after the haunting of Eel Marsh, but it’s not only him the story cares about. The Woman in Black herself is a mystery and has a tragic backstory that turns her from a full-on villain to a sympathetic one.
The classic ghost story from the author of The Mist in the Mirror: a chilling tale about a menacing spectre haunting a small English town.
Arthur Kipps is an up-and-coming London solicitor who is sent to Crythin Gifford—a faraway town in the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway—to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of a client, Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. Mrs. Drablow’s house stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but Kipps is unaware of the tragic secrets that lie hidden behind its sheltered windows. The routine business…
I’m Catherine Cavendish – writer of Gothic and ghostly horror stories. I lived in a haunted house. It didn’t scare me because our ghost seemed to go out of her way to make us welcome. Elsewhere in the building was a different matter. This was occupied by a social club and in one room in particular, an entity targeted lone females, taking delight in poking and shoving them. Since we left there, I wonder about our friendly ghost. Does she continue to watch over her old home? As for the malevolent spirit – one encounter was quite enough for me! My experiences left me fascinated by the power of buildings to absorb its ghosts.
Adam Nevill is a British horror writer – you may know of him through The Ritual which was made into a successful film a few years ago.
This is an earlier work and tells the story of Stephanie – down on her luck and reduced to taking a cheap, seedy room in an even seedier house where it is soon apparent that there is something horribly wrong. The chilling and menacing atmosphere of the building is overwhelming, while the landlord is certainly not on the level.
As for his ghastly cousin…. Then there are the noises… Something is going on here that transcends the norm. It’s unnatural, maybe supernatural, and things are about to turn a lot worse when Stephanie digs deeper. This is a house like no other. And the truth of it will take her beyond her wildest fears.
Recently filmed, this is one of Adam Nevill’s most…
Winner of the August Derleth Award, No One Gets Out Alive is the ultimate haunted house thriller from horror writer Adam Nevill.
Darkness lives within . . .
Cash-strapped, working for agencies and living in shared accommodation, Stephanie Booth feels she can fall no further. So when she takes a new room at the right price, she believes her luck has finally turned. But 82 Edgware Road is not what it appears to be.
It's not only the eerie atmosphere of the vast, neglected house, or the disturbing attitude of her new landlord, Knacker McGuire,…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I’m Catherine Cavendish – writer of Gothic and ghostly horror stories. I lived in a haunted house. It didn’t scare me because our ghost seemed to go out of her way to make us welcome. Elsewhere in the building was a different matter. This was occupied by a social club and in one room in particular, an entity targeted lone females, taking delight in poking and shoving them. Since we left there, I wonder about our friendly ghost. Does she continue to watch over her old home? As for the malevolent spirit – one encounter was quite enough for me! My experiences left me fascinated by the power of buildings to absorb its ghosts.
Alice – the main character – devastated by the loss of her eight-year-old daughter, buys a large, dilapidated house. It will be a big job – a real fixer-upper that she can get her teeth into – but it isn't long before she finds out hers is not your everyday normal building.
It starts with the voices and manifestations... and the children. Local legends and folklore abound. Soon Alice is swept up in events far out of her control in both time and dimension. and the house is a key player in this. It guards its secrets well.
This story stayed with me for a long time, and I believe Simon Bestwick deserves to be far better known than he is. I have yet to be disappointed in anything he has written.
Alice has returned to her old home town to put her life back in order.
378 Collarmill Road looks like an ordinary house. But sometimes, the world outside the windows isn't the one you expect to see; sometimes you'll turn around and find you're not alone.
An old flame of Alice's - John Revell - reluctantly comes to her aid when the house begins to reveal its secrets. The hill on which it sits is a place of legends - of Old Harry, the Beast of Crawbeck; of the Virgin of the Height and the mysterious Red Man - and…
In my stories and novels, in my reading, and in my life, I'm inspired and captivated by what I call resonant places, places with deep connections to the past as well as the present moment. I grew up in a mid-century modern house my parents built. Although no other family had lived in it before, our own family—like all families—was haunted by ghosts of our past. My childhood home was bulldozed by the next owners; the house has become a ghost itself. But memories remain long after a family or a home is gone. As a writer, a reader, and a psychotherapist, I believe that memories are the seeds for both remembering and imagining.
Godwin’s psychological mystery Flora takes place in a remote, isolated house, a former mountaintop sanatorium in Tennessee.Adult narrator Helen looks back on her ten-year-old self, and her premature coming of age the summer she lived there with her young adult cousin and temporary guardian, Flora. Helen’s father has gone to do war work, her mother is dead. Flora and Helen cannot leave the mountaintop due to a polio threat in the valley. Both child and caretaker fall under the spell of a charismatic jack of all trades, Quinn. The consequences of their unconscious competition play out in the shadowy rooms of the big house.
This is a tale of psychological possession in a lonely estate; Godwin’s homage to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Years ago, I visited my great-aunt in her mountaintop summer home in Tennessee. Reading this book unlocked memories of that mysterious house.…
Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of the Second World War. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played…
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…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
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…
I've been a guest lecturer and featured presenter at colleges and conferences, served on the Board of Directors for ICON6, and authored eight published books on illustration and design. I'm a retired college art professor and freelance illustrator and still teach fine art, design, and cartoon classes for kids and adults; I’m also an English Dept. writing tutor at a local college. Right now, I am exploring the medium of cardboard. Cardboard taps into a material that is so ubiquitous and common, it’s often maligned as being inconsequential, but I’m positively tickled to be working in a material that was wonderfully simple and presents a simply wonderful challenge.
Haunted House so enthralled and inspired me, I bought it three times! It originally came out in a full-scale edition, then in half-size. I bought both, and the smaller version again, as a gift.
This is a pop-up book on steroids. The mechanics behind it is stunning—a tour de farce of paper engineering. The story line is riotous. Smart writing, great illustration, and a super clever concept, Haunted House is a kid’s book only on the surface.
Revisit - if you dare! - one of the best-loved pop-up books of all time, now more gleefully ghoulish then ever with the addition of several spooky surprises.
Enjoy a tour of this spooky old house where a spine-tingling surprise lurks in every dark corner. Re-issued in its original full-size format, with four new pop-ups, this definitive edition brings the classic novelty to a whole new generation.
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.
As the name might suggest, this novel is very much a spiritual descendant of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, with a very similar setup: ghost hunters visit a haunted house that’s been abandoned for decades. That, however, is where the similarities end. In Matheson’s work, the haunting is more physical, with bodily threats to the ghost hunters at every turn, and the psychological and spiritual terror it inflicts does far more damage to them at each step, turning them against each other in violent and sometimes deadly ways.
"Hell House is the scariest haunted house novel ever written. It looms over the rest the way the mountains loom over the foothills." -- Stephen King
From the author of I Am Legend comes Richard Matheson's Hell House, the basis for the supernatural horror film starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill.
Rolf Rudolph Deutsch is going die. But when Deutsch, a wealthy magazine and newspaper publisher, starts thinking seriously about his impending death, he offers to pay a physicist and two mediums, one physical and one mental, $100,000 each to establish the facts of life after death.
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
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…
