97 Books Like The Monkey's Paw

When I first read Interview with the Vampire (I was 12), I was struck by how Anne Rice made darkness beautiful. The mood, the grief, the sensuality—it all felt so rich and strange and alive.

I didn’t just want to read about Louis and Lestat; I wanted to live inside that shadowed world, however painful. The power of her vampires was alluring, even as their sadness confused me. How could being immortal be such a torment?

This book taught me that supernatural fiction could be poetic, philosophical, even transcendent. There’s a reason this novel endures.

It made me want to write stories where beauty and horror dance together in candlelight.

This is the book that taught me how powerful loneliness can be.

Every time I return to it, I feel one character’s ache settle into me, that desperate want to belong somewhere, even if it’s a house that doesn’t love you back. I recommend it because it still feels as if I’m attempting to figure out what is happening alongside the characters, the way only great writing can.

Jackson makes you realize that the scariest hauntings aren’t in the walls, they’re the ones we carry within us.

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.

When Dr. Tenma sacrifices his social standing by defying orders to save a child, he takes comfort in the fact that he did the right thing. It’s not that he thinks one life is more important than the other; it simply happens that the boy was rushed in first with a gunshot wound in the head. Who wouldn’t put him ahead of all emergencies? 

At the heart of Monster is a knot of ethical conundrums: are all lives equal? Who do we save? Who deserves to die? What happens if the right choice leads to the worse outcome? What do we do then? Do we try to undo the good that we did? Naoki’s Monster is as cynical as it is compassionate. It’s almost rare to find a brilliant psychological thriller with this much heart in it.

How do witch hunts start? How do they keep? Who keeps them churning until all parties involved are dizzy, and only the accusers are innocent?

A group of girls in 1692 are caught dancing around a fire in the woods, trying to conjure spirits or cast spells. They discover they can escape retribution by blaming the slave, Tituba, which starts a slew of false accusations. Whenever the so-called prosecution comes close to the truth, whenever evidence is about to expose the girls’ elaborate lie, they scream, fall to hysterics amidst befuddled men, as if some witch is tormenting them, and so point out a fresh victim for the witch hounds to pursue. The biggest lark is that none of them are witches, and the only craft the girls weaved was condemning innocent lives to torture and eventually death. You have to wonder who’s to blame here: Abigail… show more.

What a sensible-sounding title to a series that was anything but. David Lynch is famously known for avoiding explaining his work lest he kills the mystery, but not only did Frost deftly provide an explanation while keeping the mystery alive, he aggrandized the lore behind it into mythology. 

This novel has so many reasons to recommend it. It incorporates radical experimentation and horrifying surgeries being done in a bizarre hospital. To make it even more mysterious, there is a hurricane threatening the island which complicates the investigation of US Marshall Teddy Daniels searching for a patient who has disappeared.

I loved the creepy island hospital and the use of weather as a character.

Like Stephen King, Clive Barker has an impressive list of horror-themed novels for all tastes, ranging from fantasy to deeply disturbing and graphic horror tales like Books of Blood. This book skews more toward fantasy but still has its share of scares and disturbing imagery.

A young boy is sent on a whimsical and horrifying imaginative adventure. It’s like a modern-day Grimm fairy tale, right up my alley.

This is Andalusia at its most picturesque, with its castles and craggy mountains and a story with all the colour and brio of a medieval costume drama. It’s actually seriously researched history but written in the style of a romantic novel.

It was written in the mid-nineteenth century out of a fascination, which I share, for the story of the demise of the last Muslim kingdom in medieval Iberia. It’s full of heroic deeds, foolhardy escapades, chivalric episodes, and emotional scenes, all based on documentary evidence.

But what I especially like is the ironic stance the author achieves on the bigotry and intolerance characteristic of the victors in the conflict through the conceit of pretending his tale is written by a Spanish monk. It made me think about how history is written, who writes it, and how often we take for granted narratives that first emerged from political propaganda. 

I’m so glad that I didn’t have a lot of big deadlines looming when I started reading this epic story, because I would have failed to meet them. I couldn’t put it down–all 757 pages of it!

I’ve since visited many of the places and some of the castles that feature in Matilda’s story, and I’ve walked in her footsteps with her voice still ringing inside my head. I found the sinister re-telling in the modern-day story of cynical journalist Jo Clifford equally gripping.

As the past starts to manifest in the present, it becomes a psychological thriller to rival the best of that genre. It is simply a masterpiece of dual-timeline fiction.