Books like “Heart-Shaped Box”

What to read after “Heart-Shaped Box” by Joe Hill: 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 Only Good Indians
Stephen Graham Jones · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
Years ago four Blackfeet men shot an elk on land they had no right to hunt. Now something is stalking them across the reservation, taking them one by one, in a story about grief, guilt and the debts that follow a person home.
2
Hell House
Richard Matheson · 1971
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “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.
3
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson · 1959
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “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.
4
The Exorcist
William Peter Blatty · 1971
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Creeping Dread”
- Psychological Thriller
- Creeping Dread
An actress's young daughter falls ill with symptoms no doctor can explain, and the doctors eventually suggest a religious explanation. A priest trained in exorcism is asked to help, and he must confront both the thing in the room and his own wavering faith.
5
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski · 2000
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Creeping Dread”
- Psychological Thriller
- Creeping Dread
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.
6
The Shining
Stephen King · 1977
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Creeping Dread”
Jack Torrance takes a winter caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel, bringing his wife and young son to its empty corridors. As snow seals them in, the hotel's violent past works on Jack's temper and drinking, while Danny's gift shows him things the family should never have seen.
7
The Spite House
Johnny Compton · 2023
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
Eric Ross is on the run with his two daughters, taking whatever work he can find. He answers an ad offering a large sum to anyone who will stay in the Masson House, a spite house in Texas said to be the state's most haunted, and record what happens there. The house may also hold answers about his family.
8
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979
Similar atmosphere: “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.
9
A Head Full of Ghosts
Paul Tremblay · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Creeping Dread”
- Psychological Thriller
- Creeping Dread
Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett begins to act strangely, and her family turns first to a priest and then to a reality-television crew. Years later her younger sister tells the story of what happened in the house, though her memory is not entirely trustworthy.
10
Ghost Eaters
Clay McLeod Chapman · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
Erin is still grieving her ex-boyfriend Silas when a friend offers her Ghost, a drug that lets users see the dead. She takes it hoping for one more conversation with him, and finds the boundary between the living and the dead starting to give way around her.
11
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton · 1973
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- 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.
12
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Creeping Dread”
- Psychological Thriller
- Creeping Dread
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.