11 Sinister Haunted House Stories for Fans of Shirley Jackson

Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote . . . and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

When Jacob left home for a new life, he pretty much forgot all about Maryfield, North Carolina. But Maryfield never forgot him. Or forgave him.

After a failed business venture in Boston, Jacob Logan comes back to the small Southern town of his childhood and takes up residence in the isolated house he grew up in. Here, the air is still. The nights are black. And his parents are buried close by. It should feel like home—but something is terribly wrong.

Jacob loses all his belongings in a highway accident. His car is stolen from his driveway, yet he never hears a sound. The townspeople seem guarded and suspicious. And Carl, the property caretaker with so many secrets, is unnervingly accommodating. Then there are the fireflies that light the night skies . . . and die as they come near Jacob’s home. If it weren’t for the creaking sounds after dark, or the feeling that he is being watched, Jacob would feel so alone. He shouldn’t worry. He’s not.

And whatever’s with him isn’t going to let him leave home ever again.

We could argue that the titular tree is the real evil force here, but the New England house where the narrator stays while the tree works on her already unstable mind is a marvelous character all by itself. Narrated from a found manuscript, the grinding dread of the situation grows even as the narrator descends deeper into unreliability, in a stifling, claustrophobic read by Kiernan.

This may seem like a strange addition to this list, because this isn’t a horror novel. It is a rather sweet fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast. But like most fairy tales, there’s something dark and toothy at the bottom of it. This Beast’s castle has no singing furniture, but it is full of doors that open by themselves and staircases that twist to confuse the climber, and which may only be pretending to be under the Beast’s control.

This isn’t just a creepy house, it’s a whole creepy apartment building. There are cockroaches with extra legs, locked doors, strange machinery, and skeletons in the walls. As the tenants try desperately to figure out what is going on inside the building, it turns out that the old brownstone is holding secrets that could destroy…well…everything. This one is less gnawing psychological horror than madcap Lovecraftian adventure, and it’s a whopper.

Darcy Coates has made a whole career out of haunted houses, and I particularly enjoyed this one, not least of which because the cat lives. (I feel strongly that all books with animals in peril should get a similar disclaimer.) Creepy messages carved into the walls? Check. Disturbing things in the mirror? Check. Hidden grave in the woods? Check. Heroine who is not about to let a monster eat her cat? Oh hell yeah, check.

A YA entry for the list, proving yet again that YA can be just as horrifying as anything written for adults. Lucy’s cousin is growing stranger and stranger, claiming that she hears the voice of her dead mother whispering to her from the walls of the Victorian mansion they share. Lucy thinks her cousin is going slowly mad, until she starts to hear the voices herself, and to realize that the women of her family have been caught up in something dark and strange for many generations.

A young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

I once described this book as “elegant and squishy.” I stand by this depiction. Friends visiting a haunted house on a lark that turns dead serious is a horror staple, but this incredible Japanese mansion is so vividly drawn that I kept rereading lines for their amazing imagery, even as I wanted to turn the page to see what happened next. Gore and rot and pageantry and painted screens—everything you didn’t know you wanted in a creepy house. Nothing But Blackened Teeth comes out in 2021. Find out more details here!

A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and terror in this gripping new novel from the author of the “innovative, unexpected, and absolutely chilling” (Mira Grant, Nebula Award–winning author) The Twisted Ones.

Pray they are hungry.

Kara finds the words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar area—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more one fears them, the stronger they become.

With her distinctive “delightfully fresh and subversive” (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you won’t be able to put down.