What to read after “Such Sharp Teeth” by Rachel Harrison: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
Carlota Moreau grows up on her father's remote estate in the Yucatán, where he creates human-animal hybrids. Sheltered and loyal, she begins to question his work as money troubles, a suitor, and the arrival of outsiders threaten the estate and the careful life he has built around her.
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.
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.
Five boys and their scoutmaster camp on a remote island for a weekend. A starving stranger arrives by boat, carrying a parasite that turns the body against itself. As the infection spreads, the small group's most immediate danger becomes one of the boys themselves.
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.
Jake Marlowe has been a werewolf for two hundred years and is now the last of his kind, watched and hunted by a secret organisation. Weary and ready to die, he is given a reason to live that forces him back into a world of hunters, old bargains and appetites he has never controlled.
After a virus makes all animal meat deadly, Argentina legalises the farming of humans for food. Marcos works the slaughter line and keeps his feelings out of it, until he is given a live woman as a gift and begins to treat her as a person.
Edward Prendick is rescued from a shipwreck and left on a remote island owned by the physiologist Moreau. There he finds creatures that are part human and part beast, and learns what the doctor's experiments have made of them. A story about the cruelty people allow themselves in the name of knowledge.
After a car crash in a snowstorm, novelist Paul Sheldon wakes in the remote home of Annie Wilkes, who calls herself his number one fan. She nurses him back to health, then learns he has killed off her favourite character, and will not let him leave until he writes her a new book.
Ox Matheson grows up lonely in a small Oregon town until the Bennett family moves in down the road and he learns they are werewolves. He becomes part of their pack and falls for Joe, the youngest son. Years later a murder tears them apart, and Ox has to find his own strength when Joe returns.
Four women cross into Area X, a coastal region sealed off for decades, to survey it as the twelfth expedition. The biologist records the abandoned bunker, the writing on its walls and the animals that seem almost aware. She also knows her husband went in before her and came back changed.
Juliet Moreau, the daughter of a disgraced doctor, works in London until she learns her father is alive and continuing his work on a remote island. She travels there, finds his laboratory and the creatures he has made, and is caught between two men who want her as she learns what his experiments have cost.
In occupied Baghdad a junk dealer stitches a corpse together from the body parts of the dead, and a wandering soul animates it. The creature walks the streets demanding justice for the people it was made from, and soon needs fresh parts to keep going. A bleak, darkly funny story of war, guilt and monstrousness.
Michael Gallatin is a Russian-born British agent who is also a werewolf. In 1944 he is sent behind German lines to stop a secret weapon from being used against the Allies, while flashbacks show how he was raised by wolves and learned to control his double nature.
A Penguin Classics selection of Lovecraft's stories, from 'Dagon' and 'The Picture in the House' to 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. Scholars, sailors and dreamers glimpse buried civilisations and vast indifferent forces, and the knowledge slowly takes their minds apart.
Mercy Thompson is a coyote shapeshifter who fixes cars in Washington State and keeps her distance from the local werewolf pack. A runaway teenage werewolf turns up at her shop, and his murder pulls her into pack politics, vampire deals and a hunt for whoever is preying on the supernatural community.
Kitty Norville hosts a late-night radio show about the supernatural in Denver, and she is a werewolf hiding her nature from most of her listeners. When a caller's story draws the attention of her pack and a killer, Kitty has to decide how much of her life she is willing to show.
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.
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.
Grace has watched a yellow-eyed wolf in the woods behind her house for years. When a wounded boy named Sam appears at her door, she learns that the wolves of Mercy Falls are people in winter and that Sam will soon lose his human form for good. Their romance grows as the cold closes in.
Sixteen-year-old Vivian is a werewolf living with her pack in suburban Maryland. She falls for Aiden, a human who is drawn to the supernatural, while the pack expects her to mate with Gabriel. A murder near town threatens to expose them all, and Vivian must choose between two worlds.
In a near-future Los Angeles reshaped by a media company's neural-socket technology, a loose circle of musicians, programmers and addicts drifts around the industry that made them. When the network begins to swallow minds, they must work out what the technology is really doing to the people wired into it.
Misery Lark, a Vampyre outcast, agrees to marry Alpha werewolf Lowe Moreland to keep a fragile peace between their species. She has her own reason for entering Were territory, but neither expects the mate bond that forms between them or how much it complicates their alliance.
Start with “The Only Good Indians”, “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau”, “What Moves the Dead”: they are the closest to “Such Sharp Teeth” 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 “Such Sharp Teeth” these are Werewolves, Body Horror, Sympathetic Monster), 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 Only Good Indians”, “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau”, “What Moves the Dead”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
