Books like The Monkey
You responded to the way King turns a ridiculous object into an engine of dread—then makes that dread matter through guilt, family damage, and the terrible randomness of death. These three novels strike that same nerve without simply repeating his premise.
If you liked The Monkey, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Monkey, and we tell you exactly what.
A seemingly ordinary amulet passes from person to person, leaving spectacular ruin behind. McDowell’s real gift, however, is not the curse itself but the pitiless momentum: every attempt to redirect disaster only tightens its machinery.
Like The Monkey, this is gruesome, swift, and wickedly funny about death’s refusal to behave meaningfully. McDowell—also the author of the cult-beloved Blackwater saga and a screenwriter of Beetlejuice—draws an entire Southern community with acid precision, making each fresh calamity feel both outrageous and socially revealing. Few horror novels make doom this inventive or this horribly entertaining.
When estranged siblings Louise and Mark return to clear out their late parents’ home, they encounter the accumulated debris of childhood: old resentments, buried family history, dolls, puppets—and one particularly appalling homemade puppet named Pupkin.
Hendrix understands the peculiar horror King exploits in The Monkey: a childish object can remain faintly absurd even while becoming genuinely terrifying. The novel’s manic set pieces and black comedy gradually uncover something more painful—a story about grief, sibling rivalry, and the lies families preserve as heirlooms. Pupkin has already become one of contemporary horror’s most memorable monsters, but it is the bruised human story beneath him that makes the book difficult to shake.
An aging rock star who collects morbid curiosities buys a dead man’s suit online, only to discover that the ghost attached to it is neither decorative nor random. The haunting quickly becomes intimate, relentless, and bound to moral debts the protagonist would rather leave unexamined.
Hill gives the curse a brutally simple forward drive reminiscent of The Monkey, while grounding every supernatural escalation in character: guilt has consequences, cruelty echoes, and survival requires more than finding the right occult loophole. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, Heart-Shaped Box announced Hill as a major horror writer in his own right. It begins with a splendid hook and keeps deepening until its scares carry unexpected emotional weight.