95 Books Like Not After Midnight, and Other Stories

If ever there was a perfect ghost story, this is it. Gothic with atmospheric language and vivid scenes that still haunt me. I suppose this could have been written by Jane Austen because of its nightmarish ghostliness on the English moors. So masterfully done—the wreaths of moving fog and haunted cries.

I love the unknown fear of it all. Susan Hill is highly skilled in making ghosts present on the page: the eerie sound of the rocking chair in the old nursery is a spine-tingler, albeit a cliché. Written in a sublime fashion, it fits the “quiet horror” genre. Quiet horror is so savory to me because it digs into the imagination with shadowy phantoms without slamming the reader viscerally. I love that kind of artful creation.

In Midwinter of the Spirit, Rickman’s excellent prose superbly evokes Herefordshire settings as a backdrop to his protagonist’s, (parish priest, rooky exorcist, and single mum Merrily Watkins), foray into a twilight world. Merrily’s character is painted by Rickman as vulnerable but driven, qualities that eventually lead her into mortal danger, with evil pursuing her in the most personal way through her daughter, and also manifesting itself at the heart of the religious establishment that should be her ultimate protector. Midwinter of the Spirit was subsequently made into an excellent TV serial, and the cathedral scenes were coincidentally filmed at Chester Cathedral, which features in my novel (and is where I was standing when the mug shot shown on this page was taken!). 

I enjoyed learning about religion from Dan Brown. I am not a religious person, so presenting so much research in a tightly bound thriller was an excellent way to keep me engaged and reading.

I came away from this book with a deeper psychological understanding of God and the devil.

The undisputed master of the Occult thriller, Wheatley sold over 50 million books, regularly topping best seller lists in the mid-20th Century. In To The Devil a Daughter, Wheatley contrasts the colour of the post-war French Riviera with the greyness of ration-book 1940’s Britain with a rare vividness, and atypically for the time, creates a ‘kick-ass’ middle-aged female protagonist. His descriptions of the Essex marshes, and the sinister Canon Copely-Syle who lives there, are superb. In another book, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, Wheatley describes a school (loosely based on the infamous Dartington Hall school), that partly inspired ‘The Academy’ in my own book. When reading Wheatley’s books, bear in mind he was a man of his time, as many of his views do not date well. I was massively flattered recently when a reader of my book said my style (not my views!) reminded him… show more.

Speaking of movies, as I’m afraid I often am, it’s not just the novels of Daphne du Maurier (like Rebecca) that have made great films; her short stories have inspired them, too. And they’re weirder and darker than her full-length works.

Don’t Look Now and Other Stories is a recent collection curated by Patrick McGrath, another excellent horror-adjacent author. It features the title story, source of Nicolas Roeg’s famously frightening 1973 film, and “The Birds,” on which Hitchcock based his notoriously gory (for 1963) film.

While the movies are swell, these brief, insidious, and ambiguous tales can make them seem a little lumbering and obvious by comparison.

Hill’s minimalist style, ability to evoke despair, and superb descriptions, combined with the most vivid of imaginations, make her a compelling writer of ghost stories. Hill generally includes all my favourite elements in her ghost stories, starting in familiar surroundings, then moving to more exotic locations, often delivering a shocking twist at the end. In The Man in the Picture, a story set in Venice during Carnival is told to the narrator by an aging professor in his Cambridge rooms on a winter’s night. You don’t read a Susan Hill book to come out feeling better afterwards, but… if you like to be left with a feeling of disquiet, even though you know it’s only a story you just read, The Man in the Picture’s definitely for you.

Here you get McCarthy’s whit and her fine descriptions about living in Venice. Although her stay happened long ago, her stories about interacting with her landlord and other Venetians, and all the adjustments one must make when living in a water-bound city, ring true today as well.

Most people know Anson from The Amityville Horror, but this is a whole other horror, and gratefully, totally fictional this time. A couple moves into their dream home (sound familiar?), soon, strange and frightening things begin to happen at the house with the ominous address. Things that have happened in the same house, at other locations, in other times. I read this book years ago and the imagery of the final chapters still unnerves me.

In 2006, John Berendt published a true crime caper every bit as serpentine and seductive as his iconic first book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – but this time, he took aim at the quirks and secrets of Venice, Italy.

Exploring the mystery behind a terrible fire that consumed Venice’s historic opera house, Berendt immerses himself in the tale.

Reading it felt like settling into the iconic city and getting to know the wonderful characters who call it home.

The greatest travel writer of her generation (she died in November of 2020) produced a popular introduction to the city, mixing fact and story in her uniquely engaging style. It is a book that rivals Honour’s guide but focuses more on the patterns and rituals of life in Venice, linked by a profound appreciation for that unusual place, a city where the “streets are full of water”. If you like Morris, you might also be interested in her old but still engaging Venice, written when she was still James Morris.