Fans pick 100 books like The Elementals

Jackson’s Gothic horror flows like black chiffon over a yawing window. That’s how I felt reading about Hill House. I loved the way the house sneaks up with its psychological weights swinging and jarring. Eleanor possesses a dark ambiance. She desperately needed to belong to something or someone, and I couldn’t let go of that.

Her emotions and fears were right there with me. But it was the romantic underbelly that got me: Eleanor’s romance with Hill House. The statuesque gardens, the light, and shadows, all tempted her into its sinister realm. As it tempted me. I felt deeply for Eleanor, wanting to belong to something extraordinary to replace her dull life. Shirley Jackson is quoted as saying, “I delight in what I fear.” This book proves it.

Stephen King is a literary titan whose work continues to captivate and terrify readers worldwide. This is undoubtedly one of his most iconic novels, a chilling tale of a family’s descent into madness. King’s ability to build suspense and create unforgettable characters is unparalleled.

But it is just the tip of the iceberg. King’s body of work is vast and diverse, encompassing everything from psychological horror to supernatural thrillers. Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, IT, and 11/22/63 are just a few examples of his many masterpieces.

What makes King so special is his ability to tap into our deepest fears and anxieties. His stories often explore the darker side of human nature, exposing the horrors that lurk beneath the surface. Yet, even in the darkest of times, King’s characters offer hope and resilience, reminding us that the human spirit can endure even the most terrifying trials.

King’s prolific output and enduring… show more.

This is a significant departure from the notion of a “haunted house” most of us are familiar with. We expect an old house, haunted by the past, far from humankind, and left to rot and fester in isolation somewhere remote. The haunted house in Siddons’s novel, however, is right in the middle of an upper-class neighborhood in Atlanta, and it’s a brand-new build. Rather than being haunted by the ghosts of the past inhabitants, the house itself is a force of evil, corrupting all who cross its threshold in terrible, terrifying, and often deadly ways.

As the name might suggest, this novel is very much a spiritual descendant of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, with a very similar setup: ghost hunters visit a haunted house that’s been abandoned for decades. That, however, is where the similarities end. In Matheson’s work, the haunting is more physical, with bodily threats to the ghost hunters at every turn, and the psychological and spiritual terror it inflicts does far more damage to them at each step, turning them against each other in violent and sometimes deadly ways.

This book isn’t nearly as well known as the others except to real aficionados of the genre. But it’s one of the scariest evil house novels ever written, in part because of the surprising twist at the end. A young couple decides to get out of the city for the summer and rent a house in upstate New York. Right away, there’s something odd: an elderly woman lives in the house, and she stays locked in her room all the time. As the days go by, it becomes obvious that something weird and terrifying is happening in the house, and there’s a reason the couple got it for such a cheap price. And by the time they discover the truth, it might be too late.

While there are haunted house-like novels before James’s 1898 classic, this in many ways is a granddaddy of modern haunted tales. An isolated country estate? Check. A creepy housekeeper? Check. Two even creepier children, possibly possessed? Check, check! When the unnamed narrator is hired as the new governess in a remote country home in England, she arrives to find that her two young wards are already nearly corrupted by the ghosts of the former governess and groundskeeper. As she works to save them, the narrator herself is threatened, both by the ghosts and by the children she’s meant to save. The psychological possibilities of this book, however, linger at the edges of the text, threatening to undermine the whole notion of what this haunting really is.

This audiobook had me laughing and cheering out loud, especially toward the end. I was totally enamored of Anna Pace, a disaster bisexual along a quieter vein than my beloved Nell Talbot. Anna doesn’t start bar fights with biker gangs; she’s just quietly done with all this shit, and it’s surprisingly endearing.

This classic haunted house story is rounded out with cutting depictions of dysfunctional family dynamics and dry humor. Lots of otherwise very good horror novels whiff the ending, but this is where this book cements its claim to greatness, with an unexpected but incredibly satisfying resolution to both the haunting and the family drama.

The other recommendations on my list are titles that will help you if you want to calm yourself down, maybe even get some sleep, whilst staying in a haunted house. But maybe you want to lean into the atmosphere. If that’s the case, you need M. R. James. 

His ghosts are rarely glimpsed clearly, you get troubling hints of their appearance, or you just see the horrible things they have done to their victims, and that makes them all the more terrifying. In these stories, anything could turn on you: a doll’s house, your Latin homework, the advert you see on your daily commute. Proceed with caution.

Godwin’s psychological mystery Flora takes place in a remote, isolated house, a former mountaintop sanatorium in Tennessee. Adult narrator Helen looks back on her ten-year-old self, and her premature coming of age the summer she lived there with her young adult cousin and temporary guardian, Flora. Helen’s father has gone to do war work, her mother is dead. Flora and Helen cannot leave the mountaintop due to a polio threat in the valley. Both child and caretaker fall under the spell of a charismatic jack of all trades, Quinn. The consequences of their unconscious competition play out in the shadowy rooms of the big house.

This is a tale of psychological possession in a lonely estate; Godwin’s homage to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Years ago, I visited my great-aunt in her mountaintop summer home in Tennessee. Reading this book unlocked memories of that mysterious house. Good novels… show more.

Gaby Triana excels at creating and transmitting atmosphere. She transports you into the swamps, oppressive heat, terrors, and scares of the Florida she has created in her Haunted Florida trilogy of which this is the final part.

In City of Spells, Queylin Sanchez runs a shop selling incense, charms, and all manner of items designed to appeal to those interested in the occult, but when an elderly man crosses the threshold and enlists her help in ridding his home of an unwanted ghost, she accepts the commission and sets in motion a frightening chain of events that threaten her sanity and her life – in fact, much more than that is at stake as she unravels the sinister and disturbing truth.

I can assure you, the tradition of Southern Gothic is alive and well in this author’s capable hands. If you haven’t read any of Gaby’s work yet – it’s… show more.