Here are 78 books that If She Only Knew fans have personally recommended if you like
If She Only Knew.
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Iâm a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the charactersâ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
Itâs been a while since I read this book, but I remember thinking every place described felt real. It hits all the right notes of thriller with a fallible yet strong heroine who gets the job done, sometimes at great personal cost. Michael is as close to a shapeshifter as normal humans can be. She can become anybody. (Content warning â contains strong language)
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 mindâsupposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nildaâs new home delivers, with the help of its longtime housekeeper. And NildaâŠ
Iâm a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the charactersâ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
Ireland Craneâs under a curse. If she doesnât sort it quickly, sheâll be doomed to become the Headless Horseman.Â
Ha. Maybe I just have a type. This womanâs personal life is also a bit of a mess. The stakes couldnât be higher. If she fails, sheâs doomed to become a monster.
The Horseman is unending, his presence shanât lessen. If you break the curse, you become the legend.
Washington Irving and Rip Van Winkle had no choice but to cover up the deadly truth behind Ichabod Craneâs disappearance. Centuries later, a Crane returns to Sleepy Hollow awakening macabre secrets once believed to be buried deep.
What if the monster that spawned the legend lived within you?
Now, Ireland Crane, reeling from a break-up and seeking a fresh start, must rely on the newly awakened Rip Van Winkle to discover the key to channeling the darkness swirling within her. Bodies are pilingâŠ
Iâm a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the charactersâ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
This story featured a cop just trying to get her job done. Sheâs not a saint, but she busts her backside to solve the mystery while wading through office politics.
Kateâs not perfect. She makes mistakes, but sheâs got an admirable sense of determination to see justice done.
I think thereâs a killer fight scene at the end of the book.
What would you do if someone murdered your daughter?
Jasmine, a lovely, teenage kid with a bright future was brutally murdered and thrown away like a rag doll.
It was Lt. Kate Gazzaraâs first case as lead detective. For eight years she played Dr. Watson to Sergeant Harry Starkeâs Sherlock Holmes, and then he was gone. Jasmine changed her life.
Who killed the poor kid?
Why did she have to die?
What could she have done to deserve such a fate?
It was her parentâs worst nightmare. Itâs every parentâs worst nightmare, and it begs the question: What would youâŠ
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 mindâsupposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nildaâs new home delivers, with the help of its longtime housekeeper. And NildaâŠ
Iâm a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the charactersâ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
Logan loses it all. Then her best friendâs charged with murder. Timeâs running out and a deranged killer wants her dead.
In the first novel of Davissonâs thrilling, best-selling series, Logan loses her husband, her illusions, the company they built together, her music, and now, probably her job. But when a young glassblower is brutally killed at the local arts festival and her good friend, Thomas Delgado, a Native American artist, is accused of the crime, Logan drops everything to come to his defense.Â
It doesnât help that Thomas is refusing to defend himself. As Logan struggles to maintain herâŠ
My Swedish grandmother first introduced me to the horror genre when I was a small boy. Her folktales of trolls and witches really fueled my imagination! Then, when I was in junior high, my father encouraged me to read Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. I didnât get hooked on things Gothic, however, until I heard the lyrics of Jim Morrison and the Doors in high school. After college, I became a freelance writer. I quickly learned that 80% of my spooky stuff got accepted by magazines while only 10% of my general interest work was published. That said, itâs no wonder I became a horror writer!
The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood features the authorâs scariest tales, including âThe Willowsâ and âThe Wendigoâ. Blackwood piles detail after detail atop one another until the reader nearly suffocates from the gloom and terror they create! He also squeezes much fear from isolated places like Canada and the Danube River.
A woman of snow . . . a midnight caller keeping his promise . . . forests where Nature is deliberate and malefic . . . enchanted houses . . . these are the beings and ideas that flood through this collection of ghost stories by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). Altogether thirteen stories, gathered from the entire corpus of Blackwood's work, are included: stories of such sheer power and imagination that it is easy to see why he has been considered the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century. Blackwood's ability to create an atmosphere of unrelieved horror and sustain itâŠ
While I love straight-up fiction and read plenty of novels, Iâve always been just as interested in art as I have been in writing. The further into my writing career I get, the more it becomes obvious that art and illustration are just as vital to the way I want to tell my stories. I did the covers for my first few books and started experimenting with illustrating them as well with The Writhing Skies, creating a very strange blend of splatterpunk horror and Betty Boop-inspired illustration. Soft Places is a further step in the direction of telling stories in a way thatâs a little different.
Edward Gorey is a forever favorite of mine, a pen and ink artist popular for the dozens of strange and macabre little books he created. The West Wing is unique in that it has no words at all, and the story is told entirely through his meticulous pen and ink images. Without a plot, or even any characters, there is only mood and vibes, and they are spooky and mysterious. Each page shows a different part of The West Wing and its seemingly endless rooms with their hints of ghosts and the feeling that someone has just left, or that something horrible has just happened. Itâs my favorite haunted house story of all time.
Edward Gorey's The West Wing is an invitation to the imagination. On each page, a room beckons, inviting the reader to wonder why three shoes lie here abandoned, what is retreating in that mirror's reflection, or why there is an imprint of a body on the wallpaper, faded and floating four feet above the floor. A wordless mystery, it is one of Gorey's finest works.
During Covid, I gave myself the Story-a-Month Challenge. I started a story on the first day of each month and stopped on the last day. A subconscious theme emerged: the struggles of grown people and their parents, done fantastically. By yearâs end, I had twelve stories, placed in magazines somewhere. I collected them, adding earlier stories, longer and with younger protagonists, but with the same theme of arrested development. I called the book âAdult Children,â a wry reference to offspring of alcoholics (I am one). Also subconscious: my inspiration from other authors of fantastical collections, some of whom Iâve included here.
These days, âfolk horrorâ is a popular term for movies like Midsommer and The Witch.
In the early twentieth century, M. R. James is said to have invented this genre and revitalized the ghost story as a form. His memorably unsettling work often involves academics, scholars, and researchers confronting an uncanny, bucolic world.
The most renowned stories in this collection include âCasting the Runesâ (a reviewer of an occult book learns an earlier critic died mysteriously), âThe Mezzotintâ (an upsetting engraving changes each time a curator looks at it), and âOh Whistle, and Iâll Come to You, My Ladâ (a professor dubious of the existence of ghosts fatefully finds an ancient whistle on vacation).
When we think of ghost stories, we tend to think of cub scouts cringing by a fire, s'mores at the ready, as some aging camp counselor tries to scare them witless with yet another tale from the crypt. But as Michael Chabon's marvelous introduction reminds us, the ghost story was once integral to the genre of the short story. Indeed, as he points out, it can be argued that the ghost story was the genre. Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"-most of the early short story writers wrote ghost stories as a matter of course.âŠ
Though Iâve always found the idea of survival after death fascinating, it was my interest in Modern Spiritualism that really sparked the desire to write Chasing Ghosts. That era (mid-1800s to the early 1900s) was a time when millions confidently believed they could communicate with the dead. Of course, this was only the tip of the paranormal iceberg. So I continued the journey into the lore of haunted places, ancient cultural beliefs, and scientific endeavors to find evidence for paranormal experiences or to debunk it. As a historian of the weirder pages of the past, this topic endlessly fascinates me. I hope it will for you as well.
This obscure 1896 book is a collection of interviews with dead luminaries. At least, thatâs what the psychic author alleges. Inside youâll find conversations with Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Discover their wisdom from beyond the veil, and in the case of Ben Franklin, you can enjoy a new set of his famous aphorisms, including this one: âSpiritual knowledge, like gems hidden in the bowels of the earth, is only to be reached by patient upturning of the soil.â
A previous volume, given through the mediumship of Mrs. Horn, entitled Strange Visitors, was so interesting, that it gave pleasure to learn that another volume of a similar kind was in preparation, and that the Spirit editor, Judge Edmonds, desired that it Should be placed in our hands for publication. The matter was found to be insufficient to form a volume of the kind intended, and during the movements of the medium, to secure favourable conditions for receiving further communications, much time was exhausted, as the dates appended indicate. The localities subjoined to theâŠ
As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling Iâd get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, Iâm able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below).
I really love this book because I have been known to go on a âhauntedâ history tour now and again and I love a good ghost story. However, I realize that sometimes the true stories from our past are more scary than the fantastic ones.
This book particularly hit home because it covers quite a few ghost stories from New Orleans that I am very familiar with. However, those âspookyâ ghost stories become truly frightening when contextualized by Miles.Â
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of ""ghost tours,"" frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. ""Dark tourism"" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters andâŠ
I was invited to travel to Africa and the Mid East on a job and I started to say, âIâm not that kind of guy.â Then I realized I am. Iâd already traveled around the world and even off it, reading. Iâve been happy and sad in books, victorious, scared, in love, survived storms and fierce wars, mourned valiant friends, and even space traveled. Books add dimension to life. What is dimension? Simply more. Like frosting on cake, hot sauce on fries, ice cubes in soda... fudge sauce on ice cream... I read daily, get great ideas and feelings from books, still make new friends asking, âHave you read this?â Well, have you?
I originally found this book used, for a buck, read a few pages, and decided to chance it. I have now read it multiple times, loving the notion of ghostly beings among us, and of time shifts, in a context that really makes sense in a story. (It helps that Iâm also a sucker for old spooky houses.) I quickly imagined myself in these pages, part of the fabric of risk, intrigue, and danger, never guessing where it all might end up. Letâs see if you do.
Lucy and her brother Jamie meet two mysterious figures in the garden, beginning a dangerous friendship with two children who had died a century earlier. Reprint.
