Here are 100 books that The Ritual fans have personally recommended if you like
The Ritual.
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I’ve been a horror fan since I first read The Fog by James Herbert at much too young an age. Being British-born and now Australian, the horror I write is almost always set outside America (and the UK more and more often), and I’m always on the lookout for good horror fiction set in different places. I’m fascinated by cultural folklore and mythology and how people create stories to understand the world. For three years, I was President of the Australasian Horror Writers Association.
Kaaron Warren has a unique style, and this is my favorite of her novels and one of my favorite novels of all time. I’m a sucker for grief horror and stories of people lost in urban decay, and I’m a sucker for ghost stories.
This is a ghost story unlike any other. I was moved by this book as much as I was disturbed. It’s a deeply emotional story that really dug under my skin. Some books stay with you; they leave a mark on your soul that you know you’ll never be able to remove, and this did that to me in the best way.
Winner, Best Horror Novel, 2016 Aurealis Awards Winner, Best Novel, 2016 Shadow Awards Winner, Best Novel, 2016 Ditmar Awards
There are many grief holes. There's the grief hole you fall into when a loved one dies. There's another grief hole in all of us; small or large, it determines how much we want to live. And there are the geographical grief holes, the buildings that attract sorrow and loss and are filled with ghosts. Theresa sees these ghosts better than most, but can she figure out how to close the holes?
The bodies of the People are asleep in the frozen winter ground, while their spirits wander in the dreamlands. But what emerges in the spring from the winter houses is not always human.
Kua, a reluctant shaman, cursed with the other-sight that allows her to see the monstrous powers ruling…
I’ve been a horror fan since I first read The Fog by James Herbert at much too young an age. Being British-born and now Australian, the horror I write is almost always set outside America (and the UK more and more often), and I’m always on the lookout for good horror fiction set in different places. I’m fascinated by cultural folklore and mythology and how people create stories to understand the world. For three years, I was President of the Australasian Horror Writers Association.
Clive Barker is one of my favorite authors and greatly influenced me. This is his first novel but also, in my opinion, one of his best. I love books that blend crime and horror, particularly supernatural horror. I enjoyed the interplay here between the protagonist, recently released from prison, and the wealthy Londoner he starts to work for as a bodyguard.
I was hooked by the slow ramping up of danger throughout the book as the characters get more deeply entangled in the supernatural elements. I love Barker’s lyrical style and amazing use of language, and this remains one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read.
"ONE OF THE BEST HORROR NOVELS IN A VERY LONG TIME...do not miss it!"-USA Today
There are things worse than death. There are games so seductively evil, so wondrously vile, no gambler can resist. Amid the shadow-scarred rubble of World War II, Joseph Whitehead dared to challenge the dark champion of life's ultimate game. Now a millionaire, locked in a terror-shrouded fortress of his own design, Joseph Whitehead has hell to pay. And no soul is safe from this ravaging fear, the resurrected fury, the unspeakable desire of...
I have always been a horror lover, from being an 8-year-old card-carrying member of the local Goosebumps Fan Club to reading Ray Bradbury and Stephen King when I should have been reading Classics for school. I love horror that bubbles up slowly and makes you feel like someone is watching over your shoulder. I want to wonder if the legends are true and if my local creepy forest holds secrets of its own. It’s so much harder to scare without falling back on jump scares and gore. Creeping dread is hard to do, but when it’s done well, it has me side-eyeing every shadow.
Go clean out a relative’s house: simple, basic even. But that is the perfect trap to lull you into a sense of knowing what will come. The atmosphere here really nails the vibe of modern-day folk horror.
Mouse’s narration and humor hit perfectly for me, helping set off the building dread and making it all that much more effective when things got really spooky. And we can’t forget Bongo—I am a sucker for well-written animal sidekicks, and Bongo is top-notch!
When Mouse's dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there's more-Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather's journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants...until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.
Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors-because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are…
The bodies of the People are asleep in the frozen winter ground, while their spirits wander in the dreamlands. But what emerges in the spring from the winter houses is not always human.
Kua, a reluctant shaman, cursed with the other-sight that allows her to see the monstrous powers ruling…
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
Alright, so a theme seems to be developing here, but in this case, ‘Don’t mess with nature’ gets a Canadian island treatment (those poor Boy Scouts). And, of course, a storm is coming. And, of course, the communications go out. I was gripped and frankly grossed out by this Stephen King-esque tale.
There are also shades of Frankenstein and Lord of the Flies, and I love a horror novel that asks the question of which monsters are worse—the ones we create or the ones that lurk inside.
'THE TROOP scared the hell out of me, and I couldn't put it down. Not for the faint-hearted' STEPHEN KING
He felt something touch his hand. Which is when he looked down.
For the scouts of Troop 52, three days of camping, hiking and survival lessons on Falstaff Island is as close as they'll get to a proper holiday.
Which was when he saw it.
But when an emaciated figure stumbles into their camp asking for food, the trip takes a horrifying turn. The man is not just hungry, he's sick. Sick in a way they have never seen before.
I have always been a horror lover, from being an 8-year-old card-carrying member of the local Goosebumps Fan Club to reading Ray Bradbury and Stephen King when I should have been reading Classics for school. I love horror that bubbles up slowly and makes you feel like someone is watching over your shoulder. I want to wonder if the legends are true and if my local creepy forest holds secrets of its own. It’s so much harder to scare without falling back on jump scares and gore. Creeping dread is hard to do, but when it’s done well, it has me side-eyeing every shadow.
But slightly disappointed as I was, I ran off to find the book—the book is ALWAYS better. And it was. The creep factor of the set-up was so much better in the book, learning the rules but not fully understanding the situation—building that feeling of dread settling in because you know it’s going to get worse before it gets better. That was this book for me.
I love to be asking questions, and turning pages looking for answers. I loved how the creatures remained so mysterious. I wish I had read the book before seeing the movie.
Soon to be a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE produced by M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN and starring DAKOTA FANNING. You can't see them. But they can see you. This forest isn't charted on any map. Every car breaks down at its treeline. Mina's is no different. Left stranded, she is forced into the dark woodland only to find a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams. Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the Watchers…
I’ve been a horror fan since I first read The Fog by James Herbert at much too young an age. Being British-born and now Australian, the horror I write is almost always set outside America (and the UK more and more often), and I’m always on the lookout for good horror fiction set in different places. I’m fascinated by cultural folklore and mythology and how people create stories to understand the world. For three years, I was President of the Australasian Horror Writers Association.
I’m often not a huge fan of vampire fiction as it’s been done so much, but occasionally something really different comes along. I love fiction that deals with family, especially when it explores working class people and addresses issues of existential angst and social isolation.
This kind of thing is one of the horrors I enjoy the most, and I loved the way those themes were woven into this novel set in a working-class suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I found this novel truly disturbing and particularly enjoyed the varied and unpleasant cast of characters.
John Ajvide Lindqvist’s international bestseller Let the Right One In is “a brilliant take on the vampire myth, and a roaring good story” (New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong), the basis for the multi-film festival award-winning Swedish film, the U.S. adaptation Let Me In directed by Matt Reeves (The Batman), and the Showtime TV series.
It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at…
I have always been a horror lover, from being an 8-year-old card-carrying member of the local Goosebumps Fan Club to reading Ray Bradbury and Stephen King when I should have been reading Classics for school. I love horror that bubbles up slowly and makes you feel like someone is watching over your shoulder. I want to wonder if the legends are true and if my local creepy forest holds secrets of its own. It’s so much harder to scare without falling back on jump scares and gore. Creeping dread is hard to do, but when it’s done well, it has me side-eyeing every shadow.
So when I picked this one up and read the prologue with Carrot the parrot and found myself staring down my dark hallway, I had to take a breath and text my mom about this one. She is a horror fan too, similarly afflicted with nerves of steel. Carrot freaked her out too.
The rest of the story kept me just as on edge, leaving me questioning what I would do in the characters' shoes. I will never look at someone talking in their sleep the same way, and I darn sure hope I never pick up the habit; it leaves some terrifying doors open to evil.
A romantic cabin getaway doesn’t go exactly as planned. High up on the windswept cliffs of Pale Peak, Faye and Felix celebrate their new engagement. But soon, a chorus of ghastly noises erupts from the nearby woods: the screams of animals, the cries of children, and the mad babble of a hundred mournful voices. A dark figure looms near the windows in the dead of night, whispering to Faye. As the weather turns deadly, Felix discovers that his terrified fiancée isn’t just mumbling in her sleep – she’s whispering back.
Originally a contest-winning story on reddit.com’s horror community NoSleep, Stolen…
I have always been a horror lover, from being an 8-year-old card-carrying member of the local Goosebumps Fan Club to reading Ray Bradbury and Stephen King when I should have been reading Classics for school. I love horror that bubbles up slowly and makes you feel like someone is watching over your shoulder. I want to wonder if the legends are true and if my local creepy forest holds secrets of its own. It’s so much harder to scare without falling back on jump scares and gore. Creeping dread is hard to do, but when it’s done well, it has me side-eyeing every shadow.
I love a short story; they were my first foray into adult horror, and I’ve come to truly appreciate how hard short horror is, so when I find one that grabs me and doesn't let go until the last page, I don’t stop talking about it.
This is that story. I grabbed it in audio to listen to at the gym. Usually I quit the treadmill after half an hour... I kept walking until this story ended, hoping I somehow would help the characters walk out of the woods.
No spoilers, but both I and the characters really need to walk faster! Clip-clop demon hooves were chasing me all the way home.
Some chilling campfire tales ring too true to ignore. For one young woman, an urban legend calls her into the woods in a spine-tingling short story by the bestselling author of Bird Box.The dense Michigan forest. Haunting wails. The clip-clop of demon hooves on a bridge to nowhere. It’s more than a tall tale to Brenda Jennings, whose sister disappeared in those woods one fateful night. Three years later, on a solo stakeout in the dark, Brenda goes in after her. She’s desperate for answers, and terrified to find what lies waiting on the other side of that bridge.Josh Malerman’s…
Like most people I know, I have always been fascinated with serial killers, and more importantly why they do what they do. What makes one man murder multiple victims while another with a similar upbringing sells white goods and wouldn’t attract a traffic ticket. In my books, I am as interested in showing my readers why a killer kills, as I am in the hunt to catch him. My goal is to not so much get the reader to ‘like’ the antagonist but to understand, and dare I say even feel sorry for him. We are all products of our environment and upbringing, yet some of us murder others for fun.
Henning Mankell (RIP) was the master of the ‘troubled detective’ Kurt Wallander, who is trying to find a murderer while his own life is in tatters. This hunt for a serial killer who scalps his victims, is a rich tapestry of character development, police procedure, and a deeply disturbed killer. This is one of the finest stories of the dark Scandinavian crime thriller genre, and spawned a major TV series starring Kenneth Branagh.
Midsummer approaches, and Inspector Kurt Wallander prepares for a holiday with the new woman in his life, hopeful that his wayward daughter and his ageing father will cope without him.
But his restful summer plans are thrown into disarray when a teenage girl commits suicide before his eyes, and a former minister of justice is butchered in the first of a series of apparently motiveless murders. Wallander's desperate hunt for the girl's identity and his furious pursuit of a killer who scalps his victims will throw him and those he loves most into mortal danger.
Although I’d been to Scandinavia many times as a translator and travel writer, it wasn’t until about twenty years ago that I spent significant time above the Arctic Circle, writing my travel book, The Palace of the Snow Queen. Over the course of three different winters spent in Lapland, I discovered a world of Sami history, politics, culture, and literature. I was particularly interested in the friendship between Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi. It’s been inspiring over the past years to see a new generation of artists and activists shaping and sharing their culture and resisting continued efforts to exploit natural resources in territories long used by the Sami for herding and fishing.
If you’re curious about the woman who collected the Sami folktales, you’ll want to read Emilie Demant Hatt’s story of living in a tent with a Sami family in a community in Northern Sweden. You’ll be fascinated by her grueling journey with a group of Sami herders and their hundreds of reindeer over the icy mountains in the spring of 1908 to find summer pastures on the Norwegian coast. I’ve long loved the adventure, humor, and visual feast in this book, first published in 1913, and was eager to translate it and share it with readers curious about the high north of Scandinavia. Demant Hatt was a brilliant observer and an early immersive journalist who didn’t shy away from hard work, rough conditions, and learning the Sami language.
With the Lapps in the High Mountains is an entrancing true account, a classic of travel literature, and a work that deserves wider recognition as an early contribution to ethnographic writing. Published in 1913 and available here in its first English translation, With the Lapps is the narrative of Emilie Demant Hatt's nine-month stay in the tent of a Sami family in northern Sweden in 1907-8 and her participation in a dramatic reindeer migration over snow-packed mountains to Norway with another Sami community in 1908. A single woman in her thirties, Demant Hatt immersed herself in the Sami language and…
