Books like “What Moves the Dead”

What to read after “What Moves the Dead” by T. Kingfisher: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

About “What Moves the Dead”

Another favorite book?

Or start with a well-known book

1
The Troop
Nick Cutter · 2014
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
- Body Horror
- Creeping Dread
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.
2
The Exorcist
William Peter Blatty · 1971
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
- Body Horror
- Creeping Dread
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.
3
Ghost Eaters
Clay McLeod Chapman · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
- Body Horror
- 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.
4
The Only Good Indians
Stephen Graham Jones · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
- Body Horror
- 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.
5
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson · 1962
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
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.
6
Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
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.
7
The Hacienda
Isabel Cañas · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
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.
8
The Elementals
Michael McDowell · 1981
Similar atmosphere: “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.
9
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer · 2014
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
- Body Horror
- Creeping Dread
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.
10
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton · 1973
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
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.
11
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
H. P. Lovecraft · 1999
Similar atmosphere: “Body Horror” and “Creeping Dread”
- Body Horror
- Creeping Dread
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.
12
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.