Books like “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary”

What to read after “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” by M. R. James: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton · 1973
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
A collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, written across her career and gathered in one volume. Old houses, railway carriages and country estates hold grudges, apparitions return with unfinished business, and the supernatural creeps into the lives of people who insist they do not believe in it.
2
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
A young governess takes charge of two children at a remote country house and soon notices figures watching from the grounds and the tower. She becomes convinced the children are being influenced by something from beyond the grave, though no one else confirms what she sees.
3
The Woman in Black
Susan Hill · 1983
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
A young London lawyer is sent to a remote house to sort the papers of a dead client. In the town nearby he meets an unfriendly silence, a sea mist that cuts him off, and a woman dressed in black whose appearances are followed by the deaths of children.
4
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
Four elderly friends in a small New York town have spent a lifetime telling each other ghost stories at their club. Now something from a winter forty years earlier, a death they all helped to hide, has returned to collect the debt.
5
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters · 2009
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
In post-war England, a country doctor is drawn into the fading life of a once-grand family living in a decaying mansion. Strange events unsettle the house and its residents, and suspicion falls in every direction. An unnerving story about class, decline and things that may not be ghosts.
6
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson · 1959
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
An investigator of psychic phenomena invites several people to stay at Hill House, a building with a long history of death and madness. Among them is the fragile Eleanor, and as the house begins to single her out, the group's stay becomes a struggle to keep hold of sanity.
7
The King in Yellow
Robert W. Chambers · 1895
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
- Forbidden Knowledge
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.
8
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe · 1794
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
- Gothic Manor
After her parents die, Emily St. Aubert is left to the care of an aunt who marries an Italian nobleman. Taken to the gloomy castle of Udolpho, she is surrounded by unexplained sounds, sealed rooms and sinister men, while she tries to keep her love and her safety.
9
The Silent Companions
Laura Purcell · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
A young widow is sent to her late husband's crumbling estate and finds an eerie painted wooden figure that seems to move on its own. As the figures multiply, she begins to doubt her own mind. A gothic horror set in the English countryside, told through an asylum diary.
10
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson · 1962
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
- Gothic Manor
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.
11
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier · 1938
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
- Gothic Manor
A shy young woman marries the widowed Maxim de Winter and arrives at Manderley, his grand estate by the sea. There she is measured against his first wife, the beautiful Rebecca, whose presence lingers in every room, in the servants' loyalty and in a secret nobody will speak.
12
Hell House
Richard Matheson · 1971
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
A dying millionaire funds an expedition to the notorious Belasco House, a mansion in Maine where every previous attempt to study its hauntings ended badly. The group includes a physicist, a medium and two survivors, and the house begins to work on their most private fears.