After a break-in, a London couple moves with their son to a remote village where Tricia has inherited a house. Old stones around the village once marked the boundary beyond which plague victims could not pass, and each year the trustees renew it with a ceremony. When the family breaks the custom, the village learns what the boundary was really holding back.
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.
A New York family moves to an isolated Connecticut village where the people keep to the old ways and celebrate the corn harvest with rituals closed to outsiders. The father grows suspicious of the village herbalist and of the honour given to the coming Harvest Home, while his wife and daughter settle happily into village life.
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.
On the Yorkshire moors in 1674, Mercy Booth runs her father's sheep farm beside an old path used to carry the dead. Coins vanish, a shadow follows her through the fog, and a quiet stranger arrives looking for work. The house and the moor seem to hold a buried wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On their smallholding in the Yorkshire Dales, Richard and Juliette are grieving the sudden death of their five-year-old son. Richard digs the barren field opposite the house for an oak remembered in local stories, while Juliette, convinced the boy is still near, turns to a group of occultists.
Alex Easton travels to the Ushers' decaying manor to see a childhood friend who is dying. Madeline's body is changing in ways the doctors cannot explain, down to the hairs on her arms, the local hares behave strangely, and the tarn beside the house seems to be watching.
A writer returns to the small Maine town where he grew up, hoping to finish a book about an old house on the hill. Instead he finds the town changing: people vanish, the dead do not stay buried, and an ancient hunger has taken root. He and a handful of neighbours must face what is spreading through Jerusalem's Lot.
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.
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.
Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school after a scuffle with a white teenager. He can see ghosts, including the boys who died there, and the warden wants to use that ability. Outside, his sister works with a lawyer to bring him home.
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.
At the end of a quiet street live a man, his daughter and a cat, keeping to themselves. When a new neighbour comes looking into a child's long-ago disappearance, the house's careful routine bends and the story it protects begins to break apart.
Start with “The Plague Stones”, “The Woman in Black”, “Harvest Home”: they are the closest to “Small Angels” 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 “Small Angels” these are Ghost Story, Small Town Secrets, Creeping Dread), 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 “The Plague Stones”, “The Silent Companions”, “The Coffin Path”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
