What to read after “Starve Acre” by Andrew Michael Hurley: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
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.
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.
Chloe arrives in a Suffolk village on the edge of Mockbeggar Woods to prepare the old church of Small Angels for her wedding. The villagers are uneasy, her fiancé is distant, and the woods at the edge of the village are stirring. Something that was banished long ago is waking, and the wedding, the village and Chloe are all in its path.
After her father is killed in Mexico's war of independence, Beatriz marries a widower and moves to his country estate. The housekeeper burns copal and chalks signs on the doorways, and Beatriz begins to fear that her husband's first wife never left.
Two related families spend a summer at Beldame, a lonely stretch of Alabama coast where three Victorian houses face the Gulf. The third house is slowly drowning in sand, and something inside it has been waiting for the children since they were small.
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.
After her mother's death, Mary Yellan goes to live with her aunt at Jamaica Inn on the bleak Bodmin Moor. Her uncle keeps the inn closed to travellers and answers to dangerous men from the coast. Mary must work out what her one remaining family is hiding before the moor and its secrets close over her.
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.
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.
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.
In 1950s Mexico, socialite Noemi Taboada travels to the mountain mansion of High Place to check on her newly married cousin, who writes of ghosts and sickness. The English family that owns it is cold and strange, and the house itself seems to be listening and slowly changing her.
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.
In 1893 the newly widowed Cora Seaborne moves to a village on the Essex marshes, drawn there by reports of a winged serpent. A keen amateur naturalist, she befriends the local vicar, whose faith is tested as the rumours spread, while the doubtful and the devout hunt for signs. A slow, atmospheric story of belief and desire.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
On New Year's Eve, thirteen-year-old Rebecca Shaw goes missing while walking with her parents near a village on the moors, and the search does not end. Over thirteen years the novel follows the villagers, the seasons and the wildlife around them as ordinary life continues beside an unresolved absence.
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.
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.
A new house is built beside the Kennedys in their quiet Atlanta neighbourhood. Over two years the families who move in are destroyed by scandal and violence, and even visitors are touched. Colquitt begins to believe the house itself is malevolent, and decides to warn the world.
Start with “The Coffin Path”, “The Woman in Black”, “The Plague Stones”: they are the closest to “Starve Acre” 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 “Starve Acre” these are Windswept Moors, Creeping Dread, Gothic), 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 Coffin Path”, “The Plague Stones”, “Small Angels”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
