98 Books Like Reader, I Married Him

This book has haunted me for decades. 

So much so that I’ve read it several times since I first encountered it as a teenager. (Plus watched both movie versions, twice each.)

The first line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," drew me in and refused to let go. I wanted to return to Manderley. I wanted to find out what dark secrets would be revealed there. The unnamed, naive young heroine is haunted by the all-pervading presence of her husband’s first wife, Rebecca… and so was I.

And although some of the social attitudes are jarring to a 21st-century reader, and although I know the plot by heart now… I will still return to it.

Another incredible rewriting of Wuthering Heights and one that’s as dark and Gothic as Emily’s momentous original. In Ill Will, Michael Stewart picks up Emily’s narrative at the point when Heathcliff, having heard Cathy declare that it would degrade her to marry him, departs the Heights. Stewart unravels the tale of where Heathcliff went during the three years that he was missing from Cathy’s world and imagines what happened to him to make him return in such a vengeful guise. Ill Will is also a rewriting that takes up the issue of race, for here, Heathcliff is a young black man and his departure from the Heights prompts him to trace Mr. Earnshaw’s walk to Liverpool in the hope of finding out who he is. 

This is probably the most powerful example of literary pastiche novels I’ve read, not just because it takes on one of the most beloved novels in English literature—Jane Eyre—but because it brutally turns that novel’s premises on their gentrified heads.

I am truly awed by how vibrantly Rhys inhabits Antoinette, Rochester’s doomed wife, weaving in themes of colonialism and gendered power into Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance and, in the process, making it a kind of subversive and gritty feminist and anti-colonial manifesto.

Rhys’s depiction of Antoinette’s descent into madness is so visceral and believable that you are (or at least I am) all but cheering as she literally burns the patriarchy to the ground. I also love that while it’s generally considered Rhys’s masterpiece, she wrote it in her seventies. 

Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child is a poignant novel that brings together a rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights with a reimagining of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, as well as a quick visit to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. In a bookended narrative, Philips gives us the backstory of how Heathcliff came to be in Liverpool before being taken to Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw. In the centre, however, is the story of Monica Johnson, a young woman living in Windrush Britain whose marriage to Julius, an African-Caribbean graduate with whom she has two children, causes a fracture with her family. An outcast like Heathcliff, The Lost Child examines Monica’s struggle to raise her sons in the north of England, showing her family’s experience with racism, trauma, and mental ill-health. Philips’s storytelling gets to the heart of what it means to be an outcast in society.

I have a soft (tender, bruised) spot for stories exploring childhood bullying, and Susan Hill’s I’m the King of the Castle is one of the best. I also love big creaky old houses, and here we have Warings, a big creaky Victorian house inherited by Joseph Hooper, who moves in with his son, Edmund. Joseph, a widower, brings into the household a housekeeper-cum-companion and her son, Charles Kingshaw. Edmund does not want to share ‘his’ house and lets Charles know he’s unwelcome, but the grown-ups insist that the boys, both ten years old, will be friends, and go on insisting that they are friends even as Edmund is persecuting Charles, making his life a misery. It’s a claustrophobic and compelling novel and the final lines are brilliant and memorably harrowing.

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.

Edith Pearlman is a gem. These 20 beautifully written and fascinating short stories delve into the moments that matter most in everyday life. Read them one at a time or all together like a mosaic for modern women. Pearlman’s characters – men women and children – are all unique, and also extraordinary, in their way, and all mirror our own realities. Across the globe and across time, her tales are so true and so wise, I love reading them again and again, especially when I have little time and need a touch of literary magic.  

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.

Since I plowed my way through this rollicking 800-page epic, I have eagerly recommended it to others. It ranks as one of a select few long books that never bogged down and left me with a twinge of sadness that it did not just keep going.

When the curtain finally fell (as I knew it would, upon Confederate collapse in 1865), I had been enthralled by dozens of expertly drawn characters and episodes. Some of the ministers, soldiers, and publicists appear once or twice; others provide a narrative spine that charts developments across the entire struggle.

Collectively, this dramatis personae restores the drama to what less gifted story-tellers than Foreman have termed “Anglo-American relations” in the battle for and against the Confederate rebellion.

Writing a really good spooky short story is hard. Writing 13 of them is near-impossible. Yet Allen has put together an anthology of sheer terror, with each story hinging on something simple and mundane. Basically, Allen makes you afraid of everything, and does it with a smile.