What to read after “At the Mountains of Madness” by H. P. Lovecraft: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Four women cross into Area X, a coastal region sealed off for decades, to survey it as the twelfth expedition. The biologist records the abandoned bunker, the writing on its walls and the animals that seem almost aware. She also knows her husband went in before her and came back changed.
A collection of linked horror stories built around a forbidden play, The King in Yellow, that disturbs everyone who reads it. Around it are tales of artists, masks and a lake city where ordinary life slides, without warning, into dread.
After his wife's death, Abe takes up fishing and befriends a coworker who has also lost his spouse. Dan suggests a trip to Dutchman's Creek, a spot with a dark reputation. There they meet a fisherman trying to land a primordial creature, and are offered a chance to recover the people they have lost.
Don Miller, an aging geologist, has built a quiet life with his anthropologist wife Michelle and their adult twins, but he keeps losing pieces of his past. A long-ago trip to Mexico City, where Michelle disappeared for a time, returns to him in fragments, and the old family stories begin to look like accounts of something real and very old.
Atticus Turner returns from the Korean War to find his father missing and a strange letter pointing to a house in rural New England. He sets out with his uncle and a childhood friend, and their search leads them into a secret order that wants something only Atticus's family can give.
A Penguin Classics selection of Lovecraft's stories, from 'Dagon' and 'The Picture in the House' to 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. Scholars, sailors and dreamers glimpse buried civilisations and vast indifferent forces, and the knowledge slowly takes their minds apart.
A scientist named Griffin discovers how to make his body invisible, but he cannot reverse the process. Wrapped in bandages and increasingly desperate, he hides in a country inn, turns to theft and violence, and searches for a former colleague who might help him before the whole countryside turns against him.
New York, 1924. Tommy Tester runs small errands and plays guitar for money, one of the few Black men willing to do business with a sorcerer. Hired by a strange wealthy man in Flatbush, he is drawn toward the Sleeping King and the Great Old Ones, and chooses what kind of power he is willing to serve.
In 1845 two Royal Navy ships sail to find the Northwest Passage and vanish into the Arctic ice. As the crews endure cold, scurvy and starvation, they are stalked across the frozen waste by a creature that should not exist.
An envoy from a galactic federation lands on the frozen world of Gethen to invite its nations into an alliance. Its people have no fixed gender, and as he crosses the ice with a disgraced politician, he learns how much of his own culture he took for granted.
In a New York where great cities are born as living avatars, a homeless artist becomes the spirit of the city. As a hostile force called the Woman in White spreads through the streets, five avatars of the boroughs must unite to defend a city still struggling to be born.
During the Cultural Revolution a secret military project sends signals into space, and an answer comes back. Decades later a scientist is pulled into a hidden struggle over how humanity should reply to an alien civilization facing its own collapse.
In 1937, a young London clerk joins a year-long expedition to a remote bay in Svalbard. As the polar night closes in and his companions leave one by one, he stays alone with the radio, the cold, and a presence that seems to be waiting in the abandoned camp.
A meteor shower blinds most of humanity, leaving a few sighted survivors in a world where walking, venomous plants have escaped from farms. A young man and a small group try to reach safety and decide what kind of society can be rebuilt.
A crew is sent to the edge of the solar system to meet an alien intelligence that has been watching Earth. Led by a man who has rewired his own brain, they discover that the visitor's mind works nothing like their own.
Eighteen-year-old Merricat lives with her sister and uncle in a large house outside a village that despises them, after the rest of the family died years earlier from poison. When a cousin arrives hoping to claim the estate, the careful order of Merricat's world is broken.
Eight ghost stories in which scholars and clergymen uncover things better left alone. An old manuscript, a whistled tune and a locked country house each hold a presence that follows the people who found it back into ordinary life.
A woman is confined to an upstairs room by her physician husband and told to rest. Cut off from work and company, she becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper, convinced that a figure is trapped behind its pattern and that she must set it free.
Dana, a Black writer in 1976 California, is suddenly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation, where she saves the life of a white boy named Rufus. Again and again she is dragged into the past, where she must survive slavery and protect Rufus to keep her own future alive.
One ordinary day, everyone in the English village of Midwich falls unconscious, and a barrier cuts the place off from the outside world. When the villagers wake, nothing seems wrong until the pregnancies begin. The children born months later are alike, golden-eyed and strangely powerful, and the village must decide what to do with them.
In the totalitarian superstate of Oceania, every thought and word is watched. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past, until he starts a diary and a secret affair. His small rebellion against a system that controls reality itself slowly closes in around him.
A tattoo artist assembles the scattered notes of a blind old man who wrote a study of a film. The film records a family discovering that their house is larger inside than out, with a hallway that opens onto darkness where the rules of space break down.
A strange, insect-like creature arrives in London bent on revenge against a member of Parliament, and its powers reach into the lives of everyone near him. The story is told through several witnesses who each encounter the being and try to stop it.
Cylinders fall from Mars onto the English countryside, and the machines inside prove ruthlessly hostile. A student watches the invasion spread toward London as orderly Victorian society collapses around him.
What should I read after “At the Mountains of Madness”?
Start with “Annihilation”, “The King in Yellow”, “The Fisherman”: they are the closest to “At the Mountains of Madness” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “At the Mountains of Madness” these are Cosmic, Forbidden Knowledge, Arctic), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Annihilation”, “The Fisherman”, “The Croning”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
