100 books like Ghost Eaters

I adore reading atmospheric adventures of mystery, supernatural, and ghostly powers; this book has these values in abundance. Noemi’s alluring character is smart, savvy, and admirably vulnerable. Loved her. At High House in the Mexican countryside, Noemi discovers ghostly entities repeatedly forming blisters across the walls. How mysterious and threatening; I was fascinated.

The best part of the novel for me was the emotional intelligence of the characters because their behavior is both suspiciously rational and heart-stopping clever. Gripping as all heck. This family was obsessed with a relentless desire to rule and control their destiny at all costs via Otherworld powers. Absolutely compelling. I was breathless along with Noemi at every step as she was drawn into the dangers and treacherous family secrets that threatened to kill her.

After a “massacre” of a herd of elk on a protected reservation forest—a scene which spoke more of frenzied bloodlust than hunting for sustenance—four Blackfoot men become the prey of a creature bent on revenge.

Jones’s narrative satisfied my thirst for wholly original horror while exploring the clash of Native American traditional and contemporary culture. The story touches on the characters’ drive to assimilate, guilt and sense of identity, and the need to move beyond resentments to create a life worth living.

I loved the originality of the beast, the slice of reservation life, and the endearing, flawed characters, all rendered with gorgeous precision.

She Said Destroy is a mind-bending, award-nominated collection of short stories that speak to the horrors of home, childhood, and family. It’s the kind of stuff I wish I could write! They’re fantastical, haunting, unabashedly political, and heartbreakingly beautiful. Bulkin’s among the vanguard of new and emerging voices in horror. In my favorite story from the bunch, a final girl tames a dragon!

A meticulously researched retelling of the Donner Party tragedy, Katsu's book is a slow-spooled tragedy and creeping horror of intense claustrophobia and distrust.

And that's before the supernatural elements take hold! This book is meaty, with a lot to chew on and a ton of character drama packed into its relatively brief word count, but you'll leave it thinking quite differently about the forces that shaped our American frontier...

This Thing Between Us is a strange, mesmerizing, and oddly funny story about one man’s grief and how it leads to an invasive, evil force penetrating our world from the beyond. In part, it’s a haunted house story, but the ghost is in the machine—specifically a smart speaker named “Itza,” which is Moreno’s version of Alexa. I had the idea to a write a haunted house novel in which the house is haunted by a computer, but Gus beat me to it, and did it ten times better than I could have. You won’t read anything like this one, I promise. 

The Bus on Thursday introduces the reader to Eleanor Mellett who, after recovering from breast cancer, travels to a remote town in Australia to teach primary school. The horrors that ensue are both hilarious and terrifying. From a new lover who fights kangaroos in the middle of the night to body parts in the local lake, it is a wild ride. One that reveals the horrors of an isolated small town just as much as it does the potential horrors of the kind of isolation that a cancer diagnosis or experience can cause. Bartlett’s voice is one of the strongest I’ve read in quite some time—she writes with energy and venom, creating a fairly unlikable main character that the reader can’t help but entangle themselves with.

Gabino Iglesias has become a phenomenon in horror through a lot of hustle and plain hard work. His 2022 novel cemented his reputation as the king of border horror.

This novel follows the fate of Mario, a man broken by debt due to his family’s crushing medical bills. With a failing marriage, he reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, agreeing to do one last job hijacking a cartel’s cash shipment before it can reach Mexico.

Mario reluctantly works with his meth-addicted friend and a cartel insider. To make this dangerous endeavor worse, enter supernatural horrors that shocked me—and I am not easily shocked.

Is there blood? Of course! Gore? Plenty! Monsters and demons? Yes! You are guaranteed to lose sleep after reading this novel.

I love haunted house stories, and this one was genuinely creepy. It is a first-person account of the growing paranoia of a couple looking to escape their own demons, with both unable to communicate the weird things happening in their house.

I love how it subverted your usual ghost story elements. Instead of leaky pipes, weird spaces appear in the walls. Instead of creepy moans, bruises appear out of nowhere. Is it psychosis? Sickness? Or is something otherworldly in the house? I don’t know. The unsettling horror is ambiguity amplified by a failure of communication, and that’s why I find it so creepy.  

Talk about teenage angst. This YA novel is like living inside the mind of an anxiety-driven, introverted teenager who constantly finds herself in precarious positions.

I loved the honesty of this book the most. I got so frustrated with the main character because she kept making decisions that I’ve seen people in real life make. I wanted to scream at her so many times throughout the novel, and several times, I put the book down and shook my head in frustration. That’s when you know the novel is a winner. 

This is the book that made me want to write a historical romance. The protagonist, Miss Jane Fairfield, is outlandishly rich. But she can’t get married and leave her younger sister, who has epilepsy, to the well-meaning but cruel treatments recommended by their uncle, who is also their guardian. Since her money makes her an appealing target for many an impoverished rake, Jane has to work extra to become unappealing while still seeming like she’s trying to attract a man. She wears obnoxiously bright clothing, insults people with the kindest tone, and—in one desperate attempt to make a man be mean to her—takes the food right off his plate. This is a book about people trying to put you in your place and keep you small. And let me give you a hint: it’s a romance, so there’s definitely a Happily Ever After, and that includes small-minded people getting their… show more.