What to read after “The Plague Stones” by James Brogden: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
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.
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 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.
In 1959 every resident of a remote Swedish mining village vanished, leaving one dead woman and a newborn behind. Decades later, documentary maker Alice Lindstedt brings a small crew to the abandoned village to film the truth, but equipment fails, people disappear, and the empty streets begin to feel occupied.
In the town of Black Spring, a seventeenth-century witch walks the streets with her eyes and mouth sewn shut. The elders hide the curse from outsiders, but bored teenagers who want to broadcast her presence set off events that no one can undo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One ordinary day, everyone in the English village of Midwich falls unconscious, and a barrier cuts the place off from the outside world. When the villagers wake, nothing seems wrong until the pregnancies begin. The children born months later are alike, golden-eyed and strangely powerful, and the village must decide what to do with them.
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.
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.
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.
Patricia, a suburban housewife in 1990s Charleston, joins a true-crime book club that becomes the only excitement in her week. When a new neighbour is suspected of preying on local children, the women try to convince a town that would rather not listen, and then take matters into their own hands.
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.
Orphaned heiress Maud Ruthyn is sent to Bartram-Haugh, the remote house of her uncle Silas, a man once suspected of murder. Isolated there with him, his strange son and a governess, she slowly realises the household is closing in on her.
A couple whose marriage is failing take a weekend trip to a remote chapel in the Scottish countryside. Cut off and cold, they each keep a secret, and the anniversary gift they open is not what either of them expects.
After her parents die, Emily St. Aubert is left to the care of an aunt who marries an Italian nobleman. Taken to the gloomy castle of Udolpho, she is surrounded by unexplained sounds, sealed rooms and sinister men, while she tries to keep her love and her safety.
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 respected London doctor is oddly close to a violent, mysterious man named Hyde. When a friend investigates the link between them, he uncovers a scientific experiment that set loose a darker self.
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.
Start with “Harvest Home”, “Small Angels”, “'Salem's Lot”: they are the closest to “The Plague Stones” 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 Plague Stones” these are Cursed Village, 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 “Small Angels”, “The Lost Village”, “Hex”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
