Books like Jay Anson

A New York family rents an enormous country house for a suspiciously low price, provided they look after its elderly owner. Marasco makes the bargain irresistible before exposing the need and vanity behind it: the house offers escape, status, and renewal while quietly demanding more attention.

Few novels better capture the malign intimacy that makes The Amityville Horror so effective—the sense that a building can study a family’s weaknesses and turn domestic routines against them. A cult classic that helped shape the modern haunted-house novel, Burnt Offerings is elegant, patient, and suffocating. Its horror creeps forward so naturally that the house’s influence can feel like your own thought.

Siddons puts evil in a prosperous Atlanta suburb, inside a striking new home rather than a cobwebbed ruin. Neighbor Colquitt Kennedy watches successive occupants unravel and records what she sees with the practical intelligence of someone reluctant to believe her own conclusions.

That eyewitness credibility will appeal to readers who loved Anson’s reportorial manner: social calls, architectural details, and respectable lives become evidence in a mounting case. Stephen King famously championed the novel in Danse Macabre, and its reputation has only deepened. The House Next Door is urbane, psychologically acute horror whose polished surfaces make its malice especially hard to dismiss.

Julie and James flee the city and buy a house they hope will steady their troubled marriage. Instead they find inexplicable sounds, shifting spaces, strange stains, and a neighbor who may know more than he admits. Their alternating accounts agree just often enough to be frightening—and diverge just enough to make certainty impossible.

Where The Amityville Horror piles incident upon incident, Jemc turns that accumulation inward: every fresh disturbance also tests memory, trust, and the stories spouses tell each other. Short, jagged chapters create a compulsive pace, while the prose makes the house feel less like a monster than an infection in perception. It is one of the most unnerving contemporary reinventions of domestic haunting.