Books like Susan Hill

Eleanor Vance joins a small group assembled to investigate Hill House, an old building whose rooms and angles seem subtly wrong. Jackson turns doors, wallpaper and nocturnal sounds into instruments of terror, yet never allows a comfortable distinction between a haunted house and a haunted mind.

Like Hill, she writes with immaculate restraint: the fear arrives through rhythm, implication and what a lonely narrator cannot admit to herself. Widely regarded as one of the supreme haunted-house novels, it is not merely influential—it remains unnervingly alive. Anyone captivated by the mounting dread of Eel Marsh House should experience what waits in Hill House.

In 1937, impoverished and resentful Jack Miller accepts a place on an Arctic expedition. His journal initially records practical matters—equipment, weather, strained companionship—but the approaching polar night changes the pressure of every sentence.

Paver understands, as Hill does, that isolation becomes terrifying before anything supernatural appears. Empty distances feel watchful; silence acquires intent; rational explanations begin to sound like pleas. Jack’s loneliness also gives the story genuine emotional weight, so the fear never feels like a clever exercise. This fiercely loved modern ghost story delivers the rare, elemental sensation that something is standing just beyond the range of sight.

A discovery on the Lancashire coast draws an unnamed narrator back into memories of childhood pilgrimages to a desolate shrine, where his devout family hoped for a cure for his mute brother. Hurley makes faith, shame and family loyalty inseparable from the bleak landscape surrounding them.

The kinship with The Woman in Black lies in its retrospective voice: an older man circles an experience whose full meaning he can scarcely bear to face. Hurley withholds rather than displays, letting dread accumulate in local customs, uneasy silences and the treacherous terrain itself. Winner of the Costa First Novel Award, The Loney announced an unusually assured Gothic writer—and its final impression is the kind that quietly rearranges everything that preceded it.