38 Books Like The Window In the Ground

I loved this book from the first page. There’s something both eerie and comforting about a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard. I was enamored by the atmosphere, soft fog, ancient tombstones, and strange creatures lurking just out of sight.

Gaiman has a gift for writing stories that feel like old folktales, but are still fresh and full of heart. I didn’t want it to end because I fell in love with the idea of this unconventional “family” protecting a boy as he grows up surrounded by the dead. It’s dark, magical, and unexpectedly warm.

This book messed with my head in all the right ways. I expected scares, but I didn’t expect the emotional gut-punch.

It’s not just about death; it’s about grief, denial, and how far someone will go to outrun the pain.

You feel the characters trying to escape what’s coming, running from fear, from loss, from truth, but it always catches up. The horror creeps in slowly, then hits like a truck, literally. Once the line between life and death is crossed, there’s no turning back. 

It’s one of the few books that left me genuinely unsettled because I understood the choices, even when they led straight into darkness.

I loved BirdBox, but then I read Unbury Carol and discovered Josh Malerman had managed to peer directly into my brain and write a book just for me. I don’t know how he did it, and I don’t really want to know because it’s possibly more than a little freaky, but there you go.

This is not your typical horror novel. I’m not sure if it’s even horror, but who cares? It feels like a real olde-worlde adventure yarn where steampunk meets western and they have a scrap to decide who is best, and the only winner is the reader.

I have a bone to pick with you, Mr. Everington! What are you doing stealing my settings for your stories?

It just so happens Paupers’ Graves is set in the city of Nottingham, where I grew up, and uses as its main location Rock Cemetery which was on my route to and from school every day. It’s a fascinating place, not least because it’s not your run-of-the-mill array of graves in a green field. As the name suggests; Rock Cemetery is built around a great rock, creating multiple levels and layers. I had every intention of using it as the location for one of my stories but James Everington got there first!

Butler was a captain in the military force sent west by the Canadian government to put down the 1869-70 Red River rebellion by discontented Metis. Afterward, he embarked on a 700-mile journey from the Red River settlement at present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba, to present-day Edmonton, Alberta.

He depicts in poetic prose the desolation caused by the near extermination of the once innumerable herds of bison and the devastating impact on the Indigenous people of the Canadian prairies.   

Journalist, author, and retired United Church minister, Kenneth Bagnell has written a vivid account of the thousands of slum children (not all of them were orphans) who were dispatched to Canada from 1869 to the late 1930s by well-meaning philanthropists, philanthropic rescue homes, and parish workhouse schools. At the time, this seemed to be the ideal solution to a two-pronged problem: what to do with the tens of thousands of children from the slums of Britain who faced a bleak future there and how to meet the soaring demand for cheap labour on Canadian farms.

The interiority of a depressed, perpetually anxious, and possibly suicidal teen girl recently relocated from Trinidad to Canada is captured with detail and sensitivity. Her trusted circle consists of a single friend from home, her aunt and aunt’s partner with whom she lives in Edmonton, and a new boy, who stirs other complicated feelings in her. The fractures in her relationship with her mother, back home, remain unhealed. It is a deeply melancholic book but it can also potentially make any young person struggling with the same issues feel a little less alone. All of Burt's books are published by Caribbean publishers; to Home Home’s credit, it is one of a handful to have also been released with the US publisher. It’s the realness and insight for me!

I was immediately drawn into the story and admired how the author wrote three parts skillfully and had the tenacity to drive many miles to find the people who took part in the original story to portray what happened.  

I found this to be a powerful book in many ways. It combines the story of the 1959 murder of a family in small-town Alberta, the possible miscarriage of justice, the author’s search for the truth about the case, and a fictional account of a family in which things turned out differently.  

A book that falls between Lummis and Steinbeck chronologically is William Francis Butler’s The Wild North Land: Being the Story of a Winter Journey, with Dogs, Across Northern North America, an account of his retracing of the route of the 18th-century Scottish explorer Alexander McKenzie who traversed much of Canada from Lake Chipewyan in Alberta to the Pacific Ocean. Butler had a dog team whose leader was Cerf-Vola, who distinguished himself for his sagacity and strength. Ultimately, Butler retired him from sled duty to dog companion. That relationship did not prevent Butler from giving the dog to an acquaintance when he returned to England, saying that it broke his heart when he had to lay aside his emotions for “the sterner stuff of civilization.”

Lost, confused, and feeling the victim, Ethan visits Thailand. He falls down a sinkhole into an alternate reality. Even more lost among really weird people, feeling even more confused and victimized, he learns the true meaning of life. But can he get back to live his real life?

Who hasn’t tumbled into Ethan’s emotions? We go along thinking we’re doing good and suddenly the worst happens. We didn’t deserve any of it yet we’re stuck alone and destitute in it.

Ethan meets an archaeologist who introduces him to indigenous people and their ghost stories. I love cultural studies, sociology,  archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics, all sciences represented in this story. Reality gets smudged and blurred, but love, loyalty, and forgiveness remain true and unshaken in this beautiful story of redemption.