Books like “Ninth House”

What to read after “Ninth House” by Leigh Bardugo: 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 Atlas Six
Olivie Blake · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Dark Academia”
Six talented magicians are invited to the Alexandrian Society, a secret fellowship that guards lost knowledge. Only five can be initiated at the end of the year, and the recruits must decide how far they will go to keep their places, and whom they are willing to betray.
2
Vicious
V. E. Schwab · 2013
Similar atmosphere: “Dark Academia”
- Dark Academia
- Morally Grey Character
Victor and Eli are brilliant, lonely college roommates who turn a theory about near-death experiences into something real. Ten years later Victor leaves prison to hunt the friend who became his enemy, each armed with dangerous powers and neither willing to stop.
3
Bunny
Mona Awad · 2019
Similar atmosphere: “Dark Academia” and “Creeping Dread”
Samantha dislikes the saccharine clique in her MFA writing program until she is invited to their private workshop. There the four 'Bunnies' practice a kind of creation that turns fantasy into flesh, and Samantha is drawn into their ritual world until she loses the line between delusion and reality.
4
If We Were Villains
M. L. Rio · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Dark Academia”
- Dark Academia
- Morally Grey Character
Seven acting students at an elite Shakespeare conservatory are so close they share every role. When one of them is found dead during their final year, the friends must decide what story to tell the police. Ten years later, one of them finally explains what really happened.
5
A Deadly Education
Naomi Novik · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Dark Academia”
- Dark Academia
- Outcast Hero
The Scholomance is a magic school with no teachers, where students learn spells while monsters pick them off between lessons. Galadriel 'El' Higgins, feared for the dark power a prophecy says she will wield, has to survive to graduation and the hungry things waiting in the dark.
6
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.
7
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.
8
Slade House
David Mitchell · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
Behind a hidden door in a narrow London alley waits a house that appears only every nine years. Guests are drawn inside and never come out the same. Linked over decades, their stories reveal what feeds the house. A haunting dark-fantasy tale about appetite and illusion.
9
The Secret History
Donna Tartt · 1992
Similar atmosphere: “Dark Academia”
- Dark Academia
- Morally Grey Character
Richard Papen leaves California for an elite Vermont college and is drawn into a tight circle of classics students taught by a charismatic professor. Accepted among them, he becomes part of a murder committed before the story begins, and of the slow unravelling that follows.
10
The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman · 2008
From the same world: “Ghost Story”
- Ghost Story
- Secret Society
After his family is murdered, a toddler wanders into a graveyard, where its ghostly residents adopt and raise him as Nobody Owens. He grows up among the dead while the killer who took his family is still searching for him.
11
Rivers of London
Ben Aaronovitch · 2011
From the same world: “Ghost Story”
- Ghost Story
- Secret Society
Peter Grant, a London police officer, discovers that magic is real when he interviews a ghost about a headless corpse. He is assigned to a small, secret unit of the Metropolitan Police that deals with supernatural crime, and takes on a case that stirs up the city's old spirits.
12
Heart-Shaped Box
Joe Hill · 2007
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
Aging rock star Judas Coyne collects macabre curiosities. When he buys a haunted suit online, the dead man tied to it begins to stalk him and the women in his life. To survive, Jude must confront the violence in his own past. A supernatural horror about guilt and revenge.