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Recommendations based on We Have Always Lived in the Castleby Shirley Jackson
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The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
A group of people investigating a mysterious and haunted house, uncovering its secrets.
It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, the lighthearted ... (Goodreads)
The Lottery and Other Stories
by Shirley Jackson
A collection of short stories exploring the dark side of human nature and society's norms.
The Lottery , one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker . "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical ... (Goodreads)
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A small group of misfit college students uncover a sinister secret and their lives become entangled with dangerous consequences.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the ... (Goodreads)
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
A satirical tale of an eccentric slacker's misadventures in New Orleans.
Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found, here, "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles ... (Goodreads)
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
A dark and mysterious tale about the mysterious suicides of five teenage sisters in a suburban town.
As an ambulance arrives for the body of Cecilia Lisbon, a group of anonymous adolescent neighborhood boys recalls the events leading up to her death. The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in the ... (Wikipedia)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
A whimsical tale of two magicians mastering the mysteries of English magic.
The novel opens in 1806 in northern England with The Learned Society of York Magicians, whose members are "theoretical magicians" who believe that magic died out several hundred years earlier. The ... (Wikipedia)
Pet Sematary
by Stephen King
A family's terrifying journey of life and death, as the line between the living and the dead blurs.
Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago , is appointed director of the University of Maine 's campus health service. He moves to a large house near the small town of Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their two ... (Wikipedia)
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
A fantastical, satirical examination of Soviet life, intersecting with the supernatural.
The novel has two settings. The first is Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears at Patriarch's Ponds as Professor Woland . He is accompanied by Koroviev, a grotesquely-dressed valet; Behemoth , ... (Wikipedia)
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A governess confronts her fears and doubts about a mysterious and sinister presence in her employer's home.
On Christmas Eve, an unnamed narrator and some of their friends are gathered around a fire. One of them, Douglas, reads a manuscript written by his sister's late governess . The manuscript tells the ... (Wikipedia)
The Monk
by Matthew Gregory Lewis
A young monk's descent into moral corruption and his struggle to redeem himself.
The Monk has two main plotlines. The first concerns the corruption and downfall of the monk Ambrosio, and his interactions with the demon in disguise Matilda and the virtuous maiden Antonia. The ... (Wikipedia)
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
A day in the life of a high-society woman, delving into her inner thoughts and feelings.
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about ... (Wikipedia)
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
A diplomat's mission to a distant planet, exploring themes of gender and identity.
The protagonist of the novel is Genly Ai, a male Terran native, who is sent to invite the planet Gethen to join the Ekumen, a coalition of humanoid worlds. , Ai travels to the Gethen planetary system ... (Wikipedia)
The Lottery
by Shirley Jackson
A small village's annual lottery reveals a dark secret, with sinister implications.
Details of contemporary small-town American life are embroidered upon a description of an annual rite known as "the lottery". In a small village of about 300 residents, the locals are in an excited ... (Wikipedia)
Hell House
by Richard Matheson
A group of paranormal investigators explore a haunted mansion, facing the horrors within.
The story of Hell House concerns four people – Dr. Lionel Barrett, a physicist with an interest in parapsychology , his wife Edith, and two mediums (Florence Tanner, a spiritualist and mental medium, ... (Wikipedia)
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
A story of two sisters navigating their lives in a small town, and the matriarchal figure that unites them.
Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details are similar to Robinson's ... (Wikipedia)
Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin
A woman's descent into darkness as she is unknowingly forced to carry a child of the Devil.
The book centers on Rosemary Woodhouse, a young married woman who has just moved into the Bramford, a historic Gothic Revival-style New York City apartment building, with her husband, Guy, a ... (Wikipedia)
House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski
A family discovers a hidden door in their home leading to an ever-shifting labyrinth.
House of Leaves begins with a first-person narrative by Johnny Truant, a Los Angeles tattoo parlor employee and professed unreliable narrator . Truant is searching for a new apartment when his friend ... (Wikipedia)
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
A young man's journey of love and loss set against the backdrop of the 1960s.
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of ... (Goodreads)
Stories of Your Life and Others
by Ted Chiang
A collection of short stories exploring themes of science, technology, and humanity.
Ted Chiang's first published story, ",Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon ... (Goodreads)
Let the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist
A vampire and preteen boy form an unlikely bond while struggling against loneliness and persecution.
It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. ... (Goodreads)
Annihilation
by Jeff VanderMeer
A team of four women venture into a mysterious, surreal landscape in search of answers.
A team of four women cross the border into an uninhabited area known as "Area X", an unspecified coastal location that has been closed to the public for three decades. The group consists of a ... (Wikipedia)
Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
A thrilling tale of two women who conspire to swindle a wealthy gentleman.
Sue Trinder, an orphan raised in "a Fagin -like den of thieves" by her adoptive mother, Mrs Sucksby, is sent to help Richard "Gentleman" Rivers seduce a wealthy heiress. Posing as a maid, Sue is to ... (Wikipedia)
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
An unconventional family living in a crumbling castle navigate life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.
The novel takes place between April and October in a single year in the 1930s. The Mortmain family is genteel, poor, and eccentric. Cassandra's father is a writer suffering from writer's block who ... (Wikipedia)
The Yellow Wall-Paper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A woman's descent into madness due to oppressive social expectations.
A woman and her husband rent a summer house, but what should be a restful getaway turns into a suffocating psychological battle. This chilling account of postpartum depression and a husband's ... (Goodreads)
La Belle Sauvage
by Philip Pullman
A daring adventure of a young girl and her allies, in a future world threatened by forces of oppression.
Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead and his dæmon Asta live three miles from Oxford. Malcolm works alongside fifteen-year-old Alice in his parents' inn, The Trout, close to the Priory of St. Rosamund ... (Wikipedia)
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
Post-apocalyptic exploration of a world drastically changed after a pandemic.
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse,, Station Eleven, tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Lathe of Heaven
by Ursula K. Le Guin
An exploration of the power of dreams, with the potential to reshape reality.
The book is set in Portland, Oregon , in the year 2002. Portland has three million inhabitants and continuous rain. It is deprived enough for the poorer inhabitants to have kwashiorkor , a protein ... (Wikipedia)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
A young Native American boy's struggles to survive in a difficult world.
The book follows a fourteen-year-old boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation near Wellpinit, Washington for a school year. It is told in episodic diary style, moving from the ... (Wikipedia)
Ancillary Justice
by Ann Leckie
A sci-fi epic of revenge and redemption, exploring the far reaches of the galaxy.
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking ... (Goodreads)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
A story of love and loss in a politically turbulent Czechoslovakia.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being , Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and ... (Goodreads)
