More like ShadowShow
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- Book of the Art
series3 books1989
similar byhorroreeriecontemporary+2 more
The Art was meant to be a trilogy about a hidden order guarding the boundary between our world and Quiddity, a dream-sea shared by all sleeping minds, but Clive Barker only completed two of its three volumes. The Great and Secret Show follows a decades-long feud between two men who discover Quiddity's power - one seeking to harness it, the other to protect it - with consequences that distort reality itself; Everville continues the story a generation later. The planned third volume was never published.
- Servant of the Bones
Anne Ricestandalone novel1996
similar byhorrorcontemporaryour world+2 more
Servant of the Bones (1996) is a historical horror novel by Anne Rice.
- Dracula
universe144 books1897
Start hereDracula · Start here
similar byhorror
"Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring" — so the Count greets his guest at the threshold of the Carpathians, and the great door shuts behind. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is the wellspring of the modern vampire: the account of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman who quits his crumbling castle for the crowded lodging-houses of London, and the handful of ordinary people — a young solicitor, a doctor of the mad, a professor of stranger learning — who must piece together what he is before he makes the whole city his fold. It is told wholly in fragments: journal entries, letters, telegrams, ships' logs, phonograph cylinders, each hand recording only its own sliver of the dark. Around that single novel a whole crypt of continuations has grown, raised by many writers across a century. Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Sequence hands the Count the microphone, retelling the old events from his own wry, aggrieved lips and following him into later intrigues. Robert Lory's brisk 1970s Dracula Horror Series revives him as a reluctant weapon turned against fouler things; Peter Tremayne's trilogy reaches back along his bloodline; and further sequels, a Quincey Morris spin-off, and Dracula's Children carry the shadow onward. This is a loose shared world built upon a public-domain figure, not one governed continuity — each author remakes him as villain, antihero, or sympathetic narrator. Begin, always, with Stoker's original; the letters and the mounting dread stand entirely on their own. From there follow whichever door tempts you — Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape for the monster's own confession, Lory or Tremayne for tales that never glance back at the Borgo Pass again.
- Anthony Monday
series4 books1978
completed
similar byhorroreerienorth america+2 more
Anthony Monday is a fictional 14-year-old American boy featured in a series of four children's gothic horror novels by John Bellairs that were published from 1978 to 1992. Anthony and his friends generally overcome evil forces bent on ending the world. Alternatively, Anthony Monday is the book series, as in ISFDB. Brad Strickland, who has completed Bellairs' works posthumously and written new novels based on his characters, has noted that Anthony Monday was disliked by those in charge of publishing and any book ideas with Anthony as the character were rejected. This is why there has not been an Anthony Monday book since John Bellairs died.
- Jerusalem's Lot
series3 books1975
similar byhorroreeriecontemporaryour worldnorth america
Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot follows writer Ben Mears as he returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that its residents are being turned into vampires by a newly arrived stranger. It transplants Gothic vampire horror into a small New England community, tracking that community's collapse under a supernatural siege. It is a single, self-contained novel.
- American Gods
series10 books1999
similar bycontemporaryour world+1 more
Neil Gaiman's American Gods (2001) follows Shadow Moon, an ex-convict who takes a job as bodyguard to a mysterious drifter who is secretly the Norse god Odin, and is drawn into a brewing conflict between the old immigrant gods of myth and the new gods of media, technology, and modern American life. Gaiman's 2005 novel Anansi Boys is set in the same mythological world and shares the trickster god Mr. Nancy, but follows a different protagonist and story, making it a loose companion rather than a direct sequel.
- Bod Owens
series3 books2007
similar byeeriecontemporaryour world+1 more
The Graveyard Book follows Nobody "Bod" Owens, a toddler who escapes the murder of his family and is raised among the ghosts of an old English graveyard, absorbing their otherworldly customs while a threat from his past waits beyond the gates. Neil Gaiman's 2008 novel won both the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and illustrator P. Craig Russell later adapted it into a two-volume graphic novel. Bod's story spans the original novel and that graphic-novel retelling rather than continuing in a prose sequel.
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaimanstandalone novel2013
similar byeeriecontemporaryour world+1 more
A seven year old farm boy becomes friends with an eleven year old neighbor girl, who he discovers is ancient and powerful and intervenes when a nonhuman entity attempts to make a home in earthly reality.
- Alderley
series4 books1960
similar bycontemporary+2 more
Alan Garner's Alderley books begin with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), children's fantasies set around the real Cheshire hill of Alderley Edge and drawn from its local legends. Garner returned to the same setting and characters decades later in Boneland (2012), a far darker novel for adults in which the now-grown Colin, afflicted with amnesia covering his entire childhood, tries to piece together what really happened to him and his sister. The three books span most of Garner's writing life rather than forming one continuous trilogy.
- Twilight Zone
universe40 books1960
Start hereStories from the Twilight Zone · Start here
similar byour world+3 more
Picture, if you will, an ordinary person on an ordinary afternoon: a tired salesman, a frightened child, a man who wants only to be left alone. Somewhere between the streetlight and the front door, the rules quietly change. This is the Twilight Zone — not a place on any map but a middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition, the pit of our fears and the summit of our knowledge. There is no continuing saga here, no cast to follow across the years. There is only the door, and the parable waiting on the far side of it. What the shelf holds is Rod Serling's anthology given the permanence of print. Serling turned his own teleplays into prose, the collections that open with Stories from the Twilight Zone, and the scripts survive alongside them — his and Richard Matheson's, the two hands that set the show's pulse. Around that core gather the story-collections of Walter B. Gibson, the volumes of new tales assembled by Carol Serling, standalone novels, and paired reissues: dozens of self-contained pieces, many writers under one banner. Read one or read forty. Each closes its own circle. The machinery is always the same and never predictable — a reasonable premise, a moral squeeze, a final turn that lands like a tap on the shoulder, sometimes cruel, sometimes merciful, always earned. Beneath the twist runs Serling's true subject: ordinary conscience under strain — prejudice, vanity, loneliness, the wish to go back. Begin where he began, with his own Stories from the Twilight Zone, then follow Matheson. There is no order to keep. You unlock this door with the key of imagination.
- Rosemary Reilly
series2 books1967
completed
similar byhorrornorth america+3 more
Rosemary's Baby follows a young wife in a Gothic Manhattan apartment building who grows increasingly convinced that her elderly neighbors, and even her own husband, are part of a conspiracy surrounding her pregnancy. Ira Levin returned to the character thirty years later in the 1997 sequel Son of Rosemary. Together the two novels form a short, self-contained horror series about faith, control, and motherhood.
- Frankenstein
universe128 books1818
Start hereFrankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus · Start here
similar byhorror
Light a candle against the November dark and consider what a single spark, rightly applied to dead matter, might wake. In a laboratory at Ingolstadt a student named Victor Frankenstein learns the secret of animating lifeless flesh, assembles a being from the harvest of charnel houses and graves, and, at the moment it draws breath, flees the thing he has made. What he abandons does not stay abandoned. This is the world Mary Shelley opened in 1818 with Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: the story of a maker and his unmothered creation, and the long ruin each works upon the other. Shelley's novel arrives as a nest of confessions, an explorer's letters from the frozen north enclosing Victor's account, which in turn encloses the Creature's own, an articulate and wounded voice that has read Milton and wants only not to be alone. From that single volume two centuries of other hands have built outward, not as one continuity but as a gathering of independent returns to the same fire. Dean Koontz transplants the myth to modern New Orleans across a five-book cycle, Prodigal Son through The Dead Town, where the original Creature, now called Deucalion, hunts a Victor who never died. Donald F. Glut's New Adventures and Frank Schildiner's Quest of Frankenstein run the monster through pulp adventure; the mid-century French novels published as Benoit Becker chase him across a ruined Europe; Scott Sonneborn's Frankenstein Journals and the comic Frankenstein's Aunt turn the legend toward younger and lighter readers. What binds them is the question the book asks and never settles: which is the monster, the forsaken creature who kills, or the man whose ambition and cowardice made and abandoned him? Expect little comfort and few clean villains; the abiding note is grief, sublime and articulate, set against Alpine ice and candlelit hubris. Begin where it began, with Shelley's own novel; the later cycles reward you only once you have heard the Creature speak for himself.
- Southern Reach Trilogy
series4 books2014
similar byhorroreeriecontemporaryour world+1 more
The Southern Reach Series is a series of novels by the American author Jeff VanderMeer first published in 2014—Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution. The series takes its name from the secret agency that is central to the plot. In 2013, Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights for the series, and a film adaptation of Annihilation was made with Alex Garland as writer-director. The film was released in 2018. The most recent book in the series, Absolution, was released on 22 October 2024.
- Goosebumps
universe234 books1992
Start hereRevenge of the Living Dummy · The connected HorrorLand story
similar byhorrorcontemporaryour world+1 more
Reader beware — you're in for a scare. That promise has been kept, book after book, since a boy first knocked on the door of the Dead House and found the whole neighborhood grinning too widely. Goosebumps is R. L. Stine's carnival of small-town dread, where the horror is always sized just right for a kid: a haunted ventriloquist dummy, a camera that photographs disasters before they happen, a mask that won't come off, a basement that hums. Each book is its own self-contained nightmare, narrated by an ordinary boy or girl whose ordinary street has quietly turned against them — and every one snaps shut on a twist that pulls the rug out one last time before the lights come up. The shelf is deep. The original run of paperbacks gave way to Series 2000, then the branching, choose-your-doom gamebooks of Give Yourself Goosebumps, the story-collections Tales to Give You Goosebumps, and villain showcases in Most Wanted. HorrorLand strung the standalones into a single running arc set inside a monstrous theme park, and SlappyWorld and House of Shivers keep the lights flickering for new readers, hosted by Slappy, the wooden fiend who considers himself the star of the whole show. The tone is mock-scary and knowing — spooky enough to thrill, silly enough to laugh off before bed, always short and always cliffhung. No reading order binds them; open any cover. Newcomers usually meet the dummy first, in Night of the Living Dummy, or start where it all began, in Welcome to Dead House.
- A Night in the Lonesome October
Roger Zelaznystandalone novel1993
similar byhorroreeriecontemporaryour world
A Night in the Lonesome October is a novel by American writer Roger Zelazny published in 1993, near the end of his life. It was his final book, and one of his five personal favorites.
- Bending the Landscape
series3 books1997
similar by+4 more
Bending the Landscape is the title of a series of LGBT-themed anthologies of short speculative fiction edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel. Three books were produced between 1997 and 2001, subtitled Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Each volume won LGBT or genre awards.
- Rivers of London
series32 books2011
similar bycontemporary+1 more
The Rivers of London series is a series of urban fantasy novels by English author Ben Aaronovitch, and comics/graphic novels by Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, illustrated by Lee Sullivan.
- If You Could See Me Now
Peter Straubstandalone novel1976
similar byhorroreeriecontemporaryour worldnorth america
If You Could See Me Now is a horror novel by American author Peter Straub. It is his third novel and his second work of gothic or supernatural fiction. The book was published by Jonathan Cape in June 1977 – the same London publisher who published Julia in 1976. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan published an American edition also in June 1977.
