Books like “The Reformatory”

What to read after “The Reformatory” by Tananarive Due: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
Ghost Eaters
Clay McLeod Chapman · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
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.
2
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
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.
3
The House Next Door
Anne Rivers Siddons · 1978
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
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.
4
The Spite House
Johnny Compton · 2023
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
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.
5
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
Grady Hendrix · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
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.
6
The Only Good Indians
Stephen Graham Jones · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
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.
7
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters · 2009
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
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.
8
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic”
Thirteen-year-old Jojo rides in the back of a truck as his mother drives across Mississippi to collect his white father from prison. The journey stirs up family history and two restless ghosts, drawing Jojo toward a harder understanding of his mother and his own name.
9
The Silent Companions
Laura Purcell · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Ghost Story
- Creeping Dread
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.
10
The Woman in Black
Susan Hill · 1983
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
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.
11
The Elementals
Michael McDowell · 1981
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
- Southern Gothic
- Creeping Dread
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.
12
Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn · 2006
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
Reporter Camille Preaker returns to her small hometown to cover the murders of two girls. She must face her mother and half-sister, and her own memories, while the pressure of the assignment pushes her back toward the habits she has tried to leave behind.