Here are 100 books that The Watchers fans have personally recommended if you like
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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…
Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.
So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment 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.
Let’s start off with: if my old friends called me up for a hike into the Scandinavian wilderness, I’d tell them to have fun and send pictures. Thankfully, I am not a horror story protagonist.
In horror, I love a creepy forest setting. What could be watching you? How dangerous is it? I felt like I was in the forest, lost, alone with friends I may no longer trust. And then, when things got weird, we had to escape a monster too.
Was it a bit of a departure? Yes. Was I here for it? Also yes. It felt like the telling of an old campfire story that eased you in quietly, then bashed you over the head.
The Ritual is Adam Nevill's horror novel depicting a group of friends lost in a remote wilderness in Sweden where something supernatural lurks.
When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, they aim to briefly escape the problems of their lives and reconnect with one another. But when Luke, the only man still single and living a precarious existence, finds he has little left in common with his well-heeled friends, tensions rise. With limited experience between them, a shortcut meant to ease their hike turns into a nightmare…
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…
Anita Walsh, still reeling from her husband's sudden death, finds herself haunted not only by grief, but his Negative Image, a new phenomenon where the deceased prey on those they loved in life, turning intimate memories into nightmares. This spectral figure uses their shared past as a weapon, systematically dismantling…
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…
I’m autistic, with a passion for narrative structure and my brain is exceptional at predicting twists, so something genuinely surprising is a rare treat I crave and value. As a queer and trans person, I’m always looking for content in which I can see myself and my loved ones. I’m obsessed with YA thrillers that don’t just keep me guessing but also give me messy, brilliant, unforgettable queer characters to root for. These are the books that stuck with me, made me lose sleep to finish, and gave me new queer icons to love. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
I’m an absolute sucker for a ‘what really happened that night’ tale and this is one of my all time favourites due to the unreliable narration and the sense of slowly creeping dread.
The core of this book is the messy tangle of friendship, obsession, and unspoken longing, which I can never get enough of. Throughout my first read of the story, I re-evaluated what I thought I knew, and went back to the start over and over. I had to know who was lying…
Jessica Wong is the kind of girl nobody notices. She's also the kind of girl who sees everything. There's no one better at overlooking Jess than her best friend, Angie. Jess can live without Angie knowing her real feelings, just so long as they're best friends. But when Angie meets Margot, Jess recognises that things will never be the same. Worse still, Margot is one of the rare people who sees exactly how Jess feels about Angie. As Angie falls hard for Margot and gets caught up with Margot's wealthy friends, Jess's life begins to fall apart. If she isn't…
As a child, I received an electronic typewriter as a gift and immediately got to work on a story about a family living on an island. Even at ten, I recognized the power of islands, with their built-in problems of isolation and rich possibilities for metaphors. So it only made sense I’d one day publish a book set on one. If you’re like me and can’t resist books with island settings, you’ll love these book recommendations. Each island in this collection has its own personality that becomes a character of its own, and none of these books could exist in the same way without their unique settings.
I’m a school librarian, so I couldn’t pass up a book about a librarian who works in an island school! This is set on Galveston Island, and the Texas culture there definitely brings its own flavor to the story.
The friendly community feel of the school and town really appealed to me and gave this book a cozy dimension despite its darker themes. A new principal arrives and immediately begins ruining the happy librarian’s life with new rules that she fights at every step—so naturally, the two begin to fall in love. I loved the animals in this book. I couldn’t stop smiling when I finished this one.
Samantha Casey is a school librarian who loves her job, the kids, and her school family with passion and joy for living. But she wasn't always that way. Duncan Carpenter is the new school principal who lives by rules and regulations, guided by the knowledge that bad things can happen. But he wasn't always that way.
And Sam knows it. Because she knew him before - at another school, in a different life. Back then, she loved him - but she was invisible. To him. To everyone. Even to herself. She escaped to a new school, a new job, a…
As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I like this novel because it is one of the few that I know of that features a blind musician like the protagonist of my novel. Also, I feel that the author offers fine descriptions of jazz piano and jazz music. This book was published in 1965, a turbulent time in America. The author depicts being black as a disability like blindness. I think William Melvin Kelley was an excellent novelist who deserves greater recognition.
At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world.
The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.
A Drop of Patience is the story of a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart -…
My interests lie in the personal experiences of war and revolution and their aftermaths. Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution is a tribute to my parents' generation of young Vietnamese who sought to combine their attempts to free themselves of the shackles of oppressive tradition with the struggle to win independence from French colonial rule before the introduction of competing ideologies.
Most North Vietnamese soldiers were of peasant background and believed in the sacred cause for which they fought. Then came the end of the war and, eventually, economic reforms. The old general is lost in this new consumerist society, his devotion to egalitarian ideals mocked by his children.
When it first appeared in 1987, the title story of this collection of stories by Nguyen Huy Thiep caused a sensation in Vietnam. Not since the Communist revolution had readers found as stark and compelling a view of their world as The General Retires offered them. Written in spare, succinct prose, it captures the despair of an old general who, after many years of devoted service to his country, is alienated by the emptiness of the society into which he retires and ultimately flees. Nguyen probes similar themes in the stories that follow, from Cun, the moving tale of a…
As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
Gavin Lambert adapted the works of D. H. Lawrence and Tennessee Williams for the films Sons and Lovers and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. He directed one interesting, low-budget, Paul Bowles-like movie, Another Sky. His prose work is insightful about the behind-the-scenes world of the movies.
The linked stories in this book memorably spotlight hangers-on and working-class people on the edges of entertainment. Also of interest is Inside Daisy Clover, his novel about a teen tomboy star which became an affected, bombastic, entertaining Natalie Wood movie.
The land along Pacific Palisades is apt to slip away without warning, hence the road-side signs - SLIDE AREA. Narrated by a script-writer, Lambert's widely-acclaimed 1959 Hollywood classic of lonely souls marooned on a glittering wasteland is a perceptive and sensitive study of human emotion.
A good part of my life has been devoted to trying to think and write creatively about politics, history, media, and democracy. Under the pseudonym Erica Blair, my first writings were about the meaning and significance of civil society. In early 1989, in London, I founded the world’s first Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD); more recently, I designed and launched the experimental Democracy Lighthouse platform. My books have been published in more than three dozen languages, and I’ve also contributed interviews and articles to global platforms such as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Letras Libres, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Brimming with paradoxes and ironies, this 18th-century novel about language and power is more than an ingenious attack on the bland literary fashions of a closed-minded ancien régime of aristocratic power and privilege.
I love its playful celebration of heterodoxy and its witty defense of the clever thoughts of an upstart servant who demands to be treated with respect by daring to call into question his master’s illusions about the meaning of life.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was among the greatest writers of the Enlightenment, and in Jacques the Fatalist he brilliantly challenged the artificialities of conventional French fiction of his age. Riding through France with his master, the servant Jacques appears to act as though he is truly free in a world of dizzying variety and unpredictability. Characters emerge and disappear as the pair travel across the country, and tales begin and are submerged by greater stories, to reveal a panoramic view of eighteenth-century society. But while Jacques seems to choose his own path, he remains convinced of one philosophical belief: that every…
