What to read after “The Madman's Daughter” by Megan Shepherd: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Elizabeth Lavenza survives a cruel childhood and is taken in by the Frankenstein family, where she becomes indispensable to the strange, solitary Victor. As he grows obsessed with creating life, Elizabeth helps conceal his work, and her own need for safety pulls her deeper into his experiments and the darkness they leave behind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mary Jekyll, orphaned and poor, sets out to find her father's old colleague, the missing Doctor Hyde. Instead she gathers a family of young women who are the daughters or creations of famous scientists, from Moreau and Jekyll to Rappaccini. Together they investigate a series of murders in Victorian London.
Rory returns to her hometown to help her pregnant twin sister and is attacked by a werewolf after hitting an animal on a dark road. She grows stronger, craves raw meat and dreads the full moon, while trying to protect her family and work out what kind of monster she is becoming.
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.
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.
Ten teenagers are invited to a party on an isolated island, where a storm cuts them off and a recorded message promises revenge. As a slasher kills them one by one, Meg tries to work out who is behind it before nobody is left.
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.
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.
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.
Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life and assembles a living creature from the dead, then abandons it in horror. Lonely and rejected, the creature turns on its maker, and both are drawn into a cycle of guilt and vengeance.
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.
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.
In 1954 two US marshals travel to a hospital for the criminally insane on an island off Massachusetts to find a patient who has disappeared. As a storm cuts the island off, one of them begins to suspect the investigation is not what he was told.
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.
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.
In 1873 Ohio, Sethe lives in a house still haunted by the daughter she lost. When a young woman who calls herself Beloved appears at the door, the family's buried past, and the cruelty of slavery, returns to claim what it is owed.
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.
Every summer Cadence joins her wealthy family on their private island, where she and three cousins form an unbreakable group. The summer she is fifteen something goes wrong, and Cadence returns two years later with gaps in her memory that she is desperate to fill.
Start with “The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein”, “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau”, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”: they are the closest to “The Madman's Daughter” 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 Madman's Daughter” these are Mad Scientist, Deserted Island, Body Horror), 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 Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein”, “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau”, “Mexican Gothic”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
