The thumbnail for this one is shortened to “Haunted House Books”, but it’s really called “Something Isn’t Right About This House” Books. These don’t all necessarily deal with houses that have classic ghosts or things that go bump in the night, but they all deal with houses where something is just off, and the residents know it, and it’s starting to overtake their lives.
You can watch the accompanying reel here:
and then read below to find out more about each of these spooky books.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
At this point, House of Leaves seems kind of legendary in the horror community, but if you still haven’t given it a shot, you definitely should. This one came highly recommended to me by Johnathan, as its one of his favorite books, and it was a great recommendation. I can see why people would be intimidated diving into this massive book including several stories within stories and footnotes and things in the margins, but once you get into it, into the story and what’s going on, everything coalesces into an overall sense of just….dread.
At its core, reduced to the simplest terms, House of Leaves is about a house. A family moves into a new house, and all seems well until they discover an anomaly: the house is bigger on the inside that it is on the outside. When they make attempts to venture into the extra space—and into the unknown—the horror only builds from there.
In addition to being a really spooky read, House of Leaves is a fun read. It does a lot of unique things. There are multiple stories and lots of threads to pick up, but the text and the format and the way things are presented on the page also add to the story, and bring it to life in an interesting way. I’ve seen other books attempt similar things to a lesser degree of success, but House of Leaves really nails it.
Man, Fuck This House by Brian Asman
Man, Fuck This House, by Brian Asman, could easily have also made it into the short books to read in a weekend list, because this is a brief novel that you will totally tear through. In some parts inspired by The Haunted by Bentley Little, Man, Fuck This House starts how any good haunted house story starts: a family moves into a new house, thinking it’s going to be a great new start, and then things get weird fast. This one follows Sabrina, Hal, Michaela, and Damien. Hal is the most dad of all dads—the kind of guy who wears New Balance and khakis and cracks jokes that make you roll your eyes—and Sabrina is a housewife growing increasing disillusioned with her lot in life. Her young son, Damien, is a little weirdo hellbent on torturing her and making her believe he’s truly his Omen namesake reincarnated, and Michaela is a teenage girl who couldn’t possibly get excited about anything ever.
Things begin with Sabrina—she starts seeing people in the house, starts zoning out, losing time, totally checking out of her physical body. But soon the other family members start to have experiences, too, with varying degrees of maliciousness as the house—or whatever entity is doing this—almost seems to favor Sabrina in a way.
I think this took the classic haunted house story and put a really different spin on it, and you definitely won’t expect the ending. The characters all have really interesting aspects that keep them from becoming stereotypes of themselves, and the humor throughout the book tempers the spooky (especially Michaela and Damien’s running joke of dressing up for Halloween as a pair in which Damien is always a “Nancy”—Sid and Nancy, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and Jeff Gilooly and Nancy Kerrigan.
Plus, I think everyone can agree it wins the award for best title of a book ever.
The Haunted by Danielle Vega
If you’re looking for some YA haunted house adventures, this would be the way to go. I actually have a much longer review of this one over here if you’d like a deeper dive, but to sum it up, The Haunted follows Hendricks as she moves to a new town and into a new house that kindof already seems to have a “reputation” as being a bit of a spooky house amongst the other kids in town. Think of the scene in Casper when everyone finds out where Kat lives and then they want to come over to see the place even though they were all being little assholes to her before.
Things start small with just weird noises or strange feelings, then the Nanny gets spooked by something that happens to her while she’s there caring for Hendricks’s baby brother, until slowly things build to a full on haunting, and Hendricks and her friends—including bad boy neighbor Eddie—come face to face with the real source of the horror in the house.
This one also has a sequel, The Unleashed, which I didn’t like as much as the first book, but I still wanted to check out because—well, it’s Danielle Vega. What can I say?
The Haunted by Bentley Little
The Haunted is clearly a popular and straightforward title for haunted house books, but this one by Bentley Little takes a much more adult approach to the topic as we follow another nuclear family moving into their new house and slowly unravelling as each of them starts to experience strange things in their own way. The neighbors definitely don’t want to come over, the plants definitely don’t want to stay alive, and you definitely don’t want to go in the basement.
For all your spontaneous dirt-eating, animal bone digging, supernatural text message sending, ghostly computer hacking, party crashing, sleepover Ouija board using, corner lurking, child threatening needs, check out The Haunted by Bentley Little.
The Grip of It
The Grip of It is one of those haunted house books where thing slowly deteriorate in a way that makes the reader unable to tell if it’s a supernatural presence or the characters are all slowly losing their minds, or if it is in fact, both, and I love that about it. It starts out with a couple moving into their new house and realizing they hear a strange noise—just a constant humming—that their realtor claims not to notice at all. As someone who hears frequencies in everything and could always swear I’m hearing strange noises in my apartment, I was instantly compelled to see where things went from there—and wow did they go downhill and to some unexpected places.
The Hollow Places
Everything about The Hollow Places was just great. After her divorce, a woman moves into her uncle’s home/business—a museum of oddities called the “Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy” with a collection of strange items ranging from costumed taxidermy mice to artifacts sent in by friends and fans to total junk replicas that are definitely just being passed off as real. Kara agrees to run the place while Uncle Earl recovers from knee surgery under the watchful care of Kara’s mother. But one day, Kara discovers a hole in the drywall of one of the museum’s rooms—and the hole leads to a hallway and the hallway leads to a door and all of a sudden we’re doing some really scary House of Leaves type stuff as she discovers space that should not physically be able to exist with the confines of the actual human world and the way special limitations supposedly exist here.
She enlists the help of her friend who is also the barista at the coffee shop next door to the museum and they venture further in, only to find themselves in another realm of existence full of entities that are out to harm them, dotted with bunkers graffitied with the warning “Pray they are hungry.”
And then they can’t find their way back.
Inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Willows” from 1907, this, like House of Leaves, doesn’t fit neatly into the category of “haunted house story”, but instead gives off the vibes of “something is definitely not right with this house”. It’s fast-paced and, as some have said, does read a little like YA at times, but YA with pressing cosmic dread and some gorey moments that I can’t forget.