Books like 'Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life'
Readers who enjoyed Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical horror 20th century gothic season-winter folk-horror rural classics
-
Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters by Flannery O'Connor
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn her short lifetime, Flannery O'Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South... -
King Stakh’s Wild Hunt by Uladzimir Karatkevich
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsKing Stakh's Wild Hunt tells the tale of Andrey Belaretsky, a young folklorist who finds himself stranded by a storm in the castle of Marsh Firs, the seat of the fading aristocratic Yanovsky family. Offered refuge by Nadzeya, the last in the Yanovskys’ line, he learns of the family curse and terrible apparitions that portend her early death and trap her in permanent, maddening fear... -
The Roald Dahl Omnibus: Perfect Bedtime Stories for Sleepless Nights by Roald Dahl
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsEver since his stories first appeared, people have been telling and re-telling each other Roald Dahl's sometimes shocking and always brilliant and bizarre assortment of terror-tinted gems. Bawdy, funny, touching, and downright outrageous, there's simply no one else like Roald Dahl.This volume is a diabolical collection of 28 of Dahl's best stories... -
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe essential collection of the American literary master of terror, death, murder, fantasy, and revengeThe first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe presents a more complicated, perverse, and culturally engaged Poe... -
-
The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death by H.P. Lovecraft, E. Hoffmann Price
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis volume collects, for the first time, the entire Dream Cycle created by H. P. Lovecraft, the master of twentieth-century horror, including some of his most fantastic tales:THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH--Hate, genocide, and a deadly curse.THE NAMELESS CITY--Death lies beneath the shifting sands, in a story linking the Dream Cycle with the legendary Cthulhu Mythos... -
Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems by Georg Trakl, Carolyn Forché
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsGeorg Trakl's poems are considered some of the most difficult for any translator to tackle; his German is dense and sometimes almost impenetrable. Daniel Simko's collection Autumn Sonata, has been lauded for the "simplicity and directness" of its translations, accomplished with out sacrificing the drama of Trakl's rich imagery... -
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsBook by Hugh Wheeler Introduction by Christopher... -
Novels & Stories: The Lottery / The Haunting of Hill House / We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Other Stories and Sketches by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratings“The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,” writes A. M. Homes. “It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse... -
Hell Screen by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratings"There can be no doubt that Akutagawa had more individuality than any other writer of his time and has left in Japanese literature a mass of artistic work, often grotesque and curious, that, while it undoubtedly angers the proletarian experimenters who now hold the stage and fight with lusty pens and a highly developed class consciousness against all that he stood for, will continue to live as... -
The Red Laugh by Leonid Andreyev
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible... -
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe only annotated edition of M. R. James's writings currently available, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James's ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary... -
The Best Ghost Stories Of Algernon Blackwood by Algernon Blackwood
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSelected from the entire body of Algernon Blackwood’s work, this collection contains some of his finest writing. Blackwood’s ability to create and sustain an atmosphere of unrelieved horror is witnessed in ‘The Willows’, a starkly terrifying tale of another dimension impinging on our own. In contrast, ‘The Other Wing’, is a chilling but delicate evocation of the mysteries of childhood... -
Collected Short Stories of Saki (Wordsworth Classics) by Saki
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratings'All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples' Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried... -
Provinces of Night by William Gay
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe year is 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth has returned to his home - a forgotten corner of Tennessee - after twenty years of roaming. The wife he walked out on has withered and faded. His three sons are grown and angry. Warren is a womanising alcoholic; Boyd is driven by jealousy to hunt down his wife's lover; and Brady puts hexes on his enemies from his mother's porch... -
-
The Haunted Dolls' House by M.R. James
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsEvil comes with many different faces. A macabre human drama is re-enacted in a Gothic dolls' house one night; a whistle awakens a force of unspeakable malevolence; an ancient curse is passed from person to person; a grisly crime is avenged from beyond the grave; the tomb of a Swedish count will not rest quietly . M. R... -
The Amazing Mr Blunden by Antonia Barber
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIt was such an old house it sometimes seemed to Lucy that all the past was gathered up inside it as if in a great box; as though it had a life of its own that continued to exist just beyond the reach of her eyes and ears... -
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA much-awaited collection of prose and poetry from one of the great cosmic masters of the supernatural Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him "perhaps unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis... -
Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAcclaimed in her own time for her short story “The Lottery” and her novel The Haunting of Hill House—classics ranking with the work of Edgar Allan Poe—Shirley Jackson blazed a path for contemporary writers with her explorations of evil, madness, and cruelty... -
The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsInspired by serial killer Harry Powers, "The Bluebeard of Quiet Dell," who was hung in 1932 for his murders of two widows and three children. This best-selling novel, first published in 1953 to wide acclaim by author Grubb, (who like Powers lived in Clarksburg, West Virginia), served as the basis for Charles Laughton's noir classic... -
Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsM. R. James is widely regarded as the father of the modern ghost story, and his tales have influenced horror writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. First published in the early 1900s, they have never been out of print, and are recognized as classics of the genre... -
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H.P. Lovecraft, T.E.D. Klein
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsH.P. Lovecraft. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. [Sauk City]: Arkham House, [1986]. Corrected fifth printing. Octavo. 448 pages. Publisher's binding and dust jacket... -
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsTwo friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character... -
My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
Rated: 4.16 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsWhen Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach... -
The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic by Nick Joaquín, Gina Apostol
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsNick Joaquin is widely considered one of the greatest Filipino writers, but he has remained little-known outside his home country despite writing in English. With the post-colonial sensibilities of Junot Diaz, Teju Cole, and Jhumpa Lahiri and an ironic perspective of colonial history resonant with Marques and Llosa, Joaquin is a long-neglected writer ready to join the ranks of the world classics...Categorized as:
classics gothic 20th-century adult anthologies fiction historical historical-fiction -
-
Ancient Mariner; Kubla Khan and Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages...Categorized as:
classics gothic fiction action-adventure horror 20th-century university literary-fiction -
Through the Mist by Lindsay Jayne Ashford
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsTwo women disturb the dark history of a deceptively quiet postwar Cornwall village in a haunting novel by the bestselling author of A Feather on the Water and The Woman on the Orient Express.It’s winter 1947 when newlyweds Ellen and Tony Wylde move into an abandoned Cornish farmhouse overlooking the sea... -
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSurrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life... -
The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories Volume 1 by H.P. Lovecraft
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThat is not dead that can eternal lieAnd with strange aeons even death may die.Millenia ago, the Old Ones ruled our planet. Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive sea tremor brings the ancient stone city of R'lyeh to the surface once more, the Old Ones awaken at last... -
The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratings'It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh...'H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practitioner of the horror story, introducing to the genre a new evil, monstrous, pervasive and unconquerable... -
Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edogawa Rampo
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsCollected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo's best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic, the perverse, and the strange, in a marvelous homage to Rampo's literary 'mentor', Edgar Allan Poe... -
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 23 ratingsAlternate cover for this ISBN can be found hereSpine-tingling supernatural tales from "the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere" (H.P. Lovecraft)By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood... -
Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsFrom the peerless author of 'The Lottery' and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle', this is a spectacular new volume of unpublished and uncollected stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings... -
The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsL. M. Boston's thrilling and chilling tales of Green Knowe, a haunted manor deep in an overgrown garden in the English countryside, have been entertaining readers for half a century.There are three children: Toby, who rides the majestic horse Feste; his mischievous little sister, Linnet; and their brother, Alexander, who plays the flute. The children warmly welcome Tolly to Green Knowe.. -
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman, Reece Shearsmith
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsCold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full. The listener is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul... -
-
Abbadón el exterminador by Ernesto Sábato
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSabato poeta del apocalipsis, no es un profeta como San Juan, sino su testigo ocular, Obra grandiosa y alucinante, una introducción al reino de los demonios, que esta dentro y fuera de nosotros. English Translation: Sabato poet of the apocalypse, isn t prophet as San Juan, but its eyewitness, huge and hallucinating Work, an introduction to the kingdom of the demons, who this inside and outside us... -
Come Along With Me by Shirley Jackson
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA haunting and psychologically driven collection from Shirley Jackson that includes her best-known story "The Lottery"At last, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" enters Penguin Classics, sixty-five years after it shocked America audiences and elicited the most responses of any piece in New Yorker history... -
Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991 by Ramsey Campbell
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsRamsey Campbell is perhaps the world's most decorated author of horror fiction. He has won four World Fantasy Awards, ten British Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards, and the Horror Writers' Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. Three decades into his career, Campbell paused to review his body of short fiction and selected the stories that were, to his mind, the very best of his works... -
The Lake of the Dead by André Bjerke
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsDeep in the darkest part of the Norwegian woods stands Dead Man's Cabin, the site of tragedy a century earlier when Tøre Gruvik, in a fit of madness, murdered his sister and her lover, beheading them and throwing their corpses in a nearby lake before drowning himself to join them in death... -
The Penal Colony and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces is a collection of short stories and recollections by Franz Kafka, with additional writings by Max Brod. First published in 1948 by Schocken Books, this volume includes all the works Kafka intended for publication, and published during his lifetime (the only exception in The Stoker which serves as a first chapter for the novel Amerika)... -
A Thin Ghost and Others by M.R. James
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsCollection of stories by Montague Rhodes James, a noted medieval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge and of Eton College. He is best remembered today for his ghost stories in the classic Victorian Yuletide vein... -
Alraune by Hanns Heinz Ewers
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIllustrated English translation of Hanns Heinz Ewers' decadent novel, Alraune, the second volume in his Frank Braun trilogy: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Alraune, and Vampire... -
Angel Street: A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts by Patrick Hamilton
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA Broadway hit first produced on the West End under the title Gaslight and filmed twice, Angel Street tells the story of the Manninghams who live on Angel Street in 19th Century London. As the curtain rises, all appears the essence of Victorian tranquility. It is soon apparent however, that Mr... -
Opium and Other Stories by Géza Csáth, Marianna D. Birnbaum
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"Csáth's short stories are and extraordinary, uneasy mixture of sentimentality, sadism, and sexual repressions - nasty tales, not dissimilar to some of the fictions of the contemporary United States and United Kingdom, both countries in which the collective dream has, latterly, also broken down under the impact of too much reality... -
Boy in Darkness and Other Stories by Mervyn Peake, Joanne Harris
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA must-have for fans of the Gormenghast books, this anthology constitutes a chapter in the life of Titus Groan that unfolds beyond the pages of the author's monumental trilogy. Disturbingly atmospheric, these stories are told with the force and simplicity of allegory. This special volume includes rare stories as well as some never-before-seen illustrations... -
-
Time and the Gods by Lord Dunsany
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThis omnibus contains all the stories from Dunsany's earlier collections: Time and the Gods, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, A Dreamer's Tales, The Book of Wonder, The Last Book of Wonder, and The Gods of Pegāna... -
Classics of the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThis sumptuous volume celebrates the 80th birthday of one of the best-known and most-loved storytellers in the English language today, Daphne du Maurier.Here are six masterpieces of the imagination, illustrated in glowing color by prize-winning artist, Michael Foreman... -
My Bones and My Flute: A Ghost Story in the Old-Fashioned Manner by Edgar Mittelholzer
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsOnly when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination up river in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realize that there is more to Henry Nevinson’s invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a rich businessman... -
In a Shallow Grave by James Purdy
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA soldier named Garnet Montrose returns home to coastal Virginia bearing a grotesque injury which is nauseatingly repellent to anyone who sees him. He hires two young male caretakers, Quintus Pearch and Potter Daventry, who look after his disability... -
Glorious Nemesis by Ladislav Klíma
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsI feel myself to be walking in the footsteps ... of what Ladislav Klíma wrote and stood for.—Bohumil HrabalKlima's intense inner life and complex mental state are reflected in his peculiar writings... -
The Birds & Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier, Peter Capaldi
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsDu Maurier is of course world famous for many of her novels. These two stories are perhaps even better known as films (The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock and Don't Look Now by Nic Roeg), but here we bring you the full terrifying texts, superbly read by Peter Capaldi, who brings the true dimension of these works to the imagination...
Or - use our amazing romance book finder to get recommendations based on your favorite content tropes and themes. Mix and match at will.