96 Books Like The House on the Borderland

I believe this book is one of the classic staples of surreal fiction. Its disjointed, spiraling narrative and sprawling non-linear plot lines challenge the definition of what a ‘book’ is. It uses everything from footnotes to text alignment to color schemes to make the act of reading itself increasingly difficult, which matches the house’s influence on the narrators’ memories and interests.

Reading it for me was like learning Latin or watching Casablanca–it gave context to decades of experimental media inspired by it, from TV shows to DOOM game mods. Love it or hate it, it’s a solid tool for any inhuman’s toolkit. 

What one reads as a child often makes a powerful impact. While not exactly a haunted house novel, I first encountered this tale of a bedridden young girl who finds that she dreams of what she draws (with a magic pencil) through the legendarily creepy 1972 adaptation, Escape into Night, (of which only black and white videotapes remain) and afterward read it and thought it very atmospheric.

Every attempt by Marianne to ‘correct’ her defective artwork somehow makes the situation more nightmarish, and the house she initially draws is particularly disturbing in the way naïve drawings can be, as are the sinister, crude stone entities that gather around it, imprisoning the boy who she has drawn–and trapped–inside; and the landscape, literal and psychological, is eerily memorable.

This is a really atmospheric graphic novel–a form that can be brilliant at conveying creeping unease (see also Charles Burns). Dowdy Abbey lives with her newish dentist husband (she’s his second wife) and alienated daughter Crystal in his picturesque lakeside house. Living mostly inside her head, Abbey starts to believe there is a dark secret concerning her husband’s first wife, Sheila, who is dead. She starts to dream and then sees what appears to be the ghost of Sheila. Yet, is the increasingly alarming entity what it seems?

This graphic novel pulls off what the supernatural genre almost never manages to–genuinely keeping the reader guessing as to whether or not it’s all happening in Abbey’s head–while also delivering surprising and deft twists and turns all along the way. Loved it.

When Truman Capote reread this book to make a screenplay of it, he grumbled there was ‘barely a writeable scene’ because so much of the book concerns the unnamed governess’s increasingly frantic interpretations of phenomena that may only be hallucinations.

When I first read it, I found its protagonist excessively flighty; since then, it’s grown on me as perhaps the subtlest of ghost stories, its implicitly sexually predatory specters (who hope, it seems, to escape hell by perverting the two young innocents in the governess’s care), prefiguring the garish horrors of films like Hellraiser, in which demon cenobite Pinhead, summoned by the opening of a magical box, threatens depraved protagonist Frank: ‘Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell’–which fate seems apt for the malign Peter Quint and Miss Jessell.

I love this novel so much that I named my son Phineas in homage.

Anthony Trollope might seem the ur-English novelist because of his much-loved series of Barhhester novels set among clerics in a provincial town, but he spent much of his working life in Ireland and wrote passionately about the country in many of his books.

Phineas Finn is a kind of alter ego, a young Irishman equipped with charm, good looks, and very little money. He becomes a Member of Parliament and sets out to find his way through the challenges and dilemmas of high society in Victorian London. His moral compass sometimes goes slightly awry, but it generally comes right in the end.

Trollope’s psychological subtlety draws out the ambiguities and prejudices that Phineas encounters and reminds us of the central part played by Ireland in the British Empire. He died long before Ireland’s separation from Britain,… show more.

There are newer versions of this book, often described as the “Illiad/Odyssey” of Irish tradition, but this is the classic translation from 1969.

Kinsella was a poet and a Gaeilgeoir (Irish speaker) so he really understood this text due to his deep knowledge of the source language and of Irish poetic norms, plus he spent 15 years lovingly translating it into the best English facsimile possible.

This is one of (if not the most) important myths of Ireland and is an essential read for those interested in Irish mythology.

This masterful study of trimmings made and used in Britain and Ireland from 1320-1970 is a lesson in how to look carefully. Westman’s understanding of the most sumptuous elements in interiors, essentially the “bling”, offers insights into specialist working practices and the relationships between clients, suppliers, makers, and fashionability. Her forensic approach means that often the stunning images are paired with a detail of a tassel, cord, or fringe. You’ll never look at a painting of an interior in the same way again!

I’m super-passionate about giving young people the window into the world that they deserve – in fact, I wrote a whole book about journalism and fake news for kids.

David McCullagh, with this book, has flung that window wide open.

David will be familiar to Irish audiences as the anchor of the main evening news programme on RTE, but he’s managed to do the almost-impossible with this book. Namely: communicating the world of politics to kids in a way that doesn’t patronise or talk down to young people.

This beautifully-illustrated book explains some quite complicated concepts clearly with real-word examples and some excellent tongue-in-cheek humour.

I’ll be forcing it on my wee nephew as soon as he’s old enough!

In my view, this is the finest field guide ever produced for a group of animals or plants.

It is not only the best guide available to identify this most spectacular of floral groups when in flower – but also helps you put names to them when mere leaves growing up or when in seed, and on the way out. Throw in excellent, up-to-date maps, and you have a wonderful field guide that inspires you to explore Britain like never before.

I find so true this depiction of a family cruelly affected by their father’s grim past as an IRA commander, which has turned him into a strict, even cruel, disciplinarian.

I shuddered with empathy with the children and wife and rejoiced in the eventual escape of the sons he beat while still, in the end, feeling for him and his loss of their love.

I read it years ago, and it always stayed with me, so I recently recommended it to my reading group and read it again. I was no less moved.