What to read after “The Witching Hour” by Anne Rice: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
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.
In the small Southern town of Gatlin, Ethan Wate dreams of a girl before Lena Duchannes arrives at his school. They fall for each other at once and uncover her family's magic and a curse that will decide her future on her sixteenth birthday.
Signa has been passed between guardians who wanted her inheritance, and death has followed her all her life. At Thorn Grove she finds a family in mourning and a mother's ghost who claims she was poisoned. To find the killer Signa works with Death himself, a shadow she has known since childhood and now cannot stop wanting.
A young governess takes charge of two children at a remote country house and soon notices figures watching from the grounds and the tower. She becomes convinced the children are being influenced by something from beyond the grave, though no one else confirms what she sees.
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 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.
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.
A collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, written across her career and gathered in one volume. Old houses, railway carriages and country estates hold grudges, apparitions return with unfinished business, and the supernatural creeps into the lives of people who insist they do not believe in it.
An investigator of psychic phenomena invites several people to stay at Hill House, a building with a long history of death and madness. Among them is the fragile Eleanor, and as the house begins to single her out, the group's stay becomes a struggle to keep hold of sanity.
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.
Yadriel, a trans boy, wants his traditional family to accept him as a brujo. When his initiation goes wrong he raises the ghost of a murdered classmate, and together they search for answers while Yadriel hides the truth from everyone he loves.
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.
Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, has given up on dating until a vampire named Bill Compton walks into the bar. As the town's first vampire resident, Bill draws suspicion, and when women close to Sookie are murdered, she must use her gift to find the killer.
Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school after a scuffle with a white teenager. He can see ghosts, including the boys who died there, and the warden wants to use that ability. Outside, his sister works with a lawyer to bring him home.
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.
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.
A broke dog-walker in a gated Alabama neighborhood charms a recent widower whose wife drowned in a boating accident. As she settles into his grand house and hears more about the woman who came before her, the story she is being told keeps failing to add up.
Witch sisters Emilia and Vittoria live secretly among humans, hiding from those who would kill them. When Vittoria is found murdered, Emilia swears to hunt down the killer, even using forbidden magic. Her search brings her to Wrath, a prince of Hell she cannot trust and cannot look away from.
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.
Sybel lives alone on Eld Mountain with the magical beasts she has called to her. A soldier, Coren of Sirle, brings her an infant to raise, then returns twelve years later to take the boy back. Sybel is drawn into a world of kings and revenge, where love and hatred become hard to separate.
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.
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.
With the witch hunts still burning, Lou and Reid flee and try to gather allies against the church. They bargain with people they do not trust and hide a bond more dangerous than any enemy. As the threat grows, Lou senses that the darkness inside her is not as harmless as she believed.
Start with “The Elementals”, “The Spite House”, “Beautiful Creatures”: they are the closest to “The Witching Hour” 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 Witching Hour” these are Witches, Gothic, Southern Gothic), 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 Spite House”, “Beautiful Creatures”, “Belladonna”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
