Here are 24 books that Clue fans have personally recommended if you like
Clue.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I really enjoyed reading this book about writing because it offered some good tips on how to make your writing practice work for you and the rest of your life.
The creative process can be treacherous, even for the most experienced writer. Facing the blank page, staying inspired, sustaining momentum, managing competing priorities, and coping with rejection are just a few of the challenges writers face regularly.
The Productive Writer is your guide to learning the systems, strategies, and psychology that can help you transform possibilities into probabilities in your writing life.
Create the writing life you most desire. The Productive Writer will help get you there.
Artist Nilda Ricci could use a stroke of luck. She seems to get it when she inherits a shadowy Victorian, built by an architect whose houses were said to influence the mind—supposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nilda’s new home delivers, with the help of its longtime housekeeper. And Nilda…
A bit slow-paced, but did a good job of showing the many perspectives of the main characters and how their thoughts influenced their actions, and how that in turn influenced the rest of the story. I felt that the romantic subplots were a bit slow to develop but they weren't a detriment to the rest of the book!
An epic sword and sorcery fantasy,this novel continues the history of the people and gods of Midguard. Following 300 years after the tumultuous events of CHILD OF THUNDER it tells of a new threat to Midguard's hard won peace. The old king of Bearn is dying and his heirs are falling prey to disease and murder,those not killed outright are failing the traditional test of kingship.With their failure comes the threat of chaos-without a tried and tested ruler Bearn will fall and the balnce between good and evil won by the legendary Renshai,Colbey Calistinsson,will be lost. A new Renshai of…
As a computational sociologist, I’m fascinated by the patterns people create, the signals they miss, and the stories they build when the world doesn’t make sense. That’s also why I’ve always been drawn to grounded horror: not monsters crashing through windows, but the quiet dread of a room, a street, a sound, or a thought that won’t behave. As a writer, I love books that make fear feel intimate and human, the kind that crawls under your skin because it’s real. These are the stories that stay with me: books where reality tilts, trust gets shaky, and everyday life becomes the scariest place imaginable.
I love this book because it proves fear does not have to shout to own the room.
Shirley Jackson makes dread feel elegant, patient, and almost polite, which somehow makes it worse. I admire how much she trusts atmosphere, silence, suggestion, and character discomfort.
That is the kind of horror I respect most: not just “what is happening?” but “why does everything suddenly feel wrong?”
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…
Artist Nilda Ricci could use a stroke of luck. She seems to get it when she inherits a shadowy Victorian, built by an architect whose houses were said to influence the mind—supposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nilda’s new home delivers, with the help of its longtime housekeeper. And Nilda…
I’m a lifelong New Jerseyan married to a man whose family comes from Georgia. It gave me an opportunity to observe the white, Southern, upper-class weltanschauung, up close. To hear them talk, you’d think the Civil War had ended just a few days earlier, and if the Yankees had only respected states’ rights, none of that mess would have happened. My book is about a dysfunctional Georgia family who has far too much money than is good for them. Hijinks ensue.
I love a sprawling family saga set in a small town. My husband’s father came from a small town in South Georgia that was founded by one of his ancestors. My husband’s grandfather, after visiting Chicago and being impressed by the big department stores he saw there, decided that what his tiny little town needed was a huge department store of its own. He built one, and amazingly, it was a success for many years, with folks coming from all around to marvel at its architectural sophistication and its dazzling array of wares. Like the fictional town of Perdido, Alabama, where the action is centered in Blackwater, everyone there knows everybody else, and nothing secret stays hidden for long.
On Easter Sunday, 1919, a flood engulfs Perdido. Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of the town’s most influential family, discovers a stranger named Elinor Dammert waiting patiently inside a room on…
Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido’s first family. But her beautiful exterior hides a shocking secret. Beneath the waters of the Perdido River, she turns into something terrifying, a creature whispered about in stories that have chilled the residents of Perdido for generations. Some of those who observe her rituals in the river will never be seen again…
My name is Mia Dalia. I write dark speculative fiction across genres. A lot of it is psychological horror, which I love! My latest novel features a rather unique haunted house and a family who spend their summer vacation there. Hauntings are a theme I have visited before in shorter forms and were very excited to explore in full. My goal here was to deconstruct the myth of an all-American happy family within the frame of a classic may-or-may-not-be-haunted house. Those who have dared to stay in Haven have been profoundly unsettled. It is a hungry house, always looking for more visitors. I hope you’ll come for a stay!
Most vacations take place in the summer, and this next book is a perfect example of how wrong they can go. I love how unique this take on the genre is: it actually takes place over three houses on Beldame, a small island on the Gulf Coast of Alabama.
I really appreciated the dramatic tensions between the two families, amplified by heat, secrets, and worse. This gem of Southern Gothic fiction does a stellar job of walking the line between real and supernatural. Like a tidal island, the reader may find themselves slowly submerging into horror. The way each character’s nightmares are slowly revealed and realized has stayed with me for a long time.
"The finest writer of paperback originals in America." - Stephen King
"Surely one of the most terrifying novels ever written." - Poppy Z. Brite
"Beyond any trace of doubt, one of the best writers of horror in this or any other country." - Peter Straub
"Readers of weak constitution should beware!" - Publishers Weekly
"McDowell has a flair for the gruesome." - Washington Post
After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses…
Placing the reader squarely into the mind and sensibility (if you can call it that) of a sociopathic killer, Ms. Highsmith created an entirely new type of thriller; in this case, the reader is not so much concerned with whodunit as to why hedunit. Following Mr. Ripley across Europe and witnessing his extended string of crimes and the extensive web of lies he weaves--and his appreciation for the finer things in life, I was both enthralled and repulsed by his exploits. In a weird way, I admired him and found myself rooting for him. To create the interior life of such a repugnant human being, and to do it so well, is a great achievement in fiction. Not since Humbert Humbert have I read about such a likable criminal.
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring"…
I grew up hearing Scottish folklore told as truth, stories of spirits, warnings, and strange kindnesses passed off as everyday fact. I have always been fascinated by the idea that there is something more, something hidden just out of sight. As a child I was scared of everything, so I forced myself to watch old Hammer horror films to toughen up. It worked a bit too well and left me with a lifelong love of the dark underside of things. Now, as a stand-up comedian and writer, I have learned there can be humour in anything, and sometimes the best way to make something real is to laugh at the awful.
Even the darkest things are not wholly dark, and that makes a story about vampires seem far more real than many books set in the "real world." It uses the supernatural to tell a story about the human condition, in all its stark, bleak, beautiful loneliness.
John Ajvide Lindqvist’s international bestseller Let the Right One In is “a brilliant take on the vampire myth, and a roaring good story” (New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong), the basis for the multi-film festival award-winning Swedish film, the U.S. adaptation Let Me In directed by Matt Reeves (The Batman), and the Showtime TV series.
It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at…
As well as being a novelist, I am also a script editor for film and TV. I specialise in thriller narratives and big themes in screenwriting, so it's no accident I am drawn to them in fiction too. Dystopian worlds offer such a rich backdrop for the BIG questions and observations. By putting new societies and threats under the microscope in stories, it can hold a mirror up to what's going on in real life. I think of dystopian novels as being akin to the canaries in the coal mine: they are not only cathartic, they sound the warning bell on where we are going as a society ourselves.
This pandemic thriller might just be my favourite post-apocalyptic story of all time. The premise is so original, the world-building so visual and rich, and the lead character Harper is a real badass and pregnant (super unusual in ANY story, never mind a thriller like this).
Nobody knew where the virus came from. FOX News said it had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated it might've been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides. While every TV station debated the cause, the world burnt.
Pregnant school nurse, HARPER GRAYSON, had seen lots of people burn on TV, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the…
As an author, I love reading books that feature writers and explore their daily ups and downs as well as their larger successes and failures. Working on a novel or an article is already a harrowing task, but throw in other complications like writer’s block, dangerous fans, and sources who won’t give you the information you need, and life gets a lot more challenging. These twisty tomes explore what happens when these writers find their own stories taking some perilous turns.
This list wouldn’t be complete without a story about a journalist in peril.
Reporter Camille Preaker returns to her hometown to cover the murder of teen girls after she’s been through a tough time herself. As she covers the story and meets some interesting characters, she begins piecing things together, never realizing how close she is to the true danger.
Camille has had a rough past, which colors her worldview and her judgment. The book explores how grief and trauma aren’t easily overcome and can’t be shelved simply because time has passed and other people have told you to move on.
I love the notion that sometimes danger is much closer than you think. As readers, we care and worry about Camille as she attempts to not just report on this story but also crack the case.
NOW AN HBO® LIMITED SERIES STARRING AMY ADAMS, NOMINATED FOR EIGHT EMMY AWARDS, INCLUDING OUTSTANDING LIMITED SERIES
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GONE GIRL
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds…
I’ve spent a lifetime reading horror, I was probably in third grade when I stumbled across a battered collection of short stories by Saki in the adult section of the library—where I wasn’t supposed to be. I snuck the book back to the children’s section, started reading, and I was hooked. Then it was Edgar Allan Poe, and from Poe until now, it’s been every horror novel or short story I could find. The best of them have never left me. And they make up my list, The Most Terrifying Novels You Can’t Escape From.
Like the other books on the list, The Shining felt personal, more like something that was happening to me than a story I was reading.
Like Jack, I could feel myself hanging on while the menace around me grew more real, more concrete. And more overwhelming. Even today, I can feel the terror of losing control, of becoming part of the menace, part of the threat to everything of meaning and value. Snowbound with horror, and Spring will never come.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Before Doctor Sleep, there was The Shining, a classic of modern American horror from the undisputed master, Stephen King.
Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote . . . and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around…
