Atticus Turner returns from the Korean War to find his father missing and a strange letter pointing to a house in rural New England. He sets out with his uncle and a childhood friend, and their search leads them into a secret order that wants something only Atticus's family can give.
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.
New York, 1924. Tommy Tester runs small errands and plays guitar for money, one of the few Black men willing to do business with a sorcerer. Hired by a strange wealthy man in Flatbush, he is drawn toward the Sleeping King and the Great Old Ones, and chooses what kind of power he is willing to serve.
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.
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.
A collection of linked horror stories built around a forbidden play, The King in Yellow, that disturbs everyone who reads it. Around it are tales of artists, masks and a lake city where ordinary life slides, without warning, into dread.
In a New York where great cities are born as living avatars, a homeless artist becomes the spirit of the city. As a hostile force called the Woman in White spreads through the streets, five avatars of the boroughs must unite to defend a city still struggling to be born.
A scientific expedition to Antarctica discovers a mountain range, a frozen specimen and a ruined city older than humanity. As the team reconstructs the history of its builders, they realise the myths they dismissed were warnings, and something is still alive beneath the ice.
Carolyn and a dozen other orphans were raised by a man they call Father, who taught them strange arts from a library that may hold the secrets of creation. When Father vanishes, the siblings turn on one another for his power, and Carolyn must decide what she will trade to win.
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.
In 1348, as the Black Death empties France, a disgraced knight finds an orphan girl in a dead village. She says the plague is only part of a larger war between heaven and hell, and persuades him to carry her across a ruined land toward Avignon.
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.
Something outside drives anyone who sees it to violence, so the survivors live blindfolded. Malorie has kept two children safe for years. Now she must row them downriver without looking, toward a refuge that may or may not exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Galaxy Stern, the lone survivor of a brutal murder, is offered a place at Yale by the secret societies that run the university's magic. Her task is to watch their rituals, but when a local girl dies, Alex must use the very power she fears to find the killer.
In Bethel, a settlement ruled by a prophet's strict laws, Immanuelle Moore is an outcast because of her mother's forbidden union. A trip into the Darkwood where four witches were killed leaves her with her mother's diary and a growing sense of the lies at the heart of the town. To survive, she must confront what the Darkwood wants from her.
A crew is sent to the edge of the solar system to meet an alien intelligence that has been watching Earth. Led by a man who has rewired his own brain, they discover that the visitor's mind works nothing like their own.
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.
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.
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.
During the Cultural Revolution a secret military project sends signals into space, and an answer comes back. Decades later a scientist is pulled into a hidden struggle over how humanity should reply to an alien civilization facing its own collapse.
Start with “Lovecraft Country”, “The Fisherman”, “The Ballad of Black Tom”: they are the closest to “The Croning” 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 “The Croning” these are Cosmic, Creeping Dread, Secret Society), 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 “Lovecraft Country”, “The Fisherman”, “The Ballad of Black Tom”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
