The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
Jackson's own haunted-house novel shares the same controlled, claustrophobic prose and the sense that a house itself can work on the people inside it.
9 books to read next
Books Like We Have Always Lived in the Castle
If you loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a slim, unsettling novel about the Blackwood sisters, who live in an isolated house on the edge of a suspicious village. Readers love its gothic atmosphere, its wry and precise narration, and the slow build of dread that stays rooted in ordinary domestic detail. The tone is dark but often darkly funny, and the pace is quiet, letting menace gather in small gestures and gossip.
Same gothic unease
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
Like Castle, it centres on a mansion and a narrator outsiders regard with suspicion, with a slow build of dread around a family's dark past.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
A classic of ambiguous menace in an isolated country house, where the reader is left uncertain what is real and who can be trusted.
Sharp, witty narrators
Eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh
A bleakly funny, unreliable first-person voice trapped in a dreary world, much like Merricat's odd, defiant view of her surroundings.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Less eerie, but it offers a strong community portrait and a clear-eyed look at how a village or neighbourhood judges outsiders.
Strange families
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters, Jaime Zulaika Goicoechea
A decaying country house, a family in slow decline and an intrusion nobody can quite explain, all drawn with the same restraint Jackson uses.
Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
A recent gothic novel about an insular family estate and the secrets its household keeps, with rich, unsettling atmosphere.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
A close-knit group of insiders, a crime at the centre and a narrator who slowly reveals how isolated their world has become.
Go deeper into Jackson
The Lottery and Other Stories
Shirley Jackson
Jackson's short fiction shows the same sudden turn from polite village life into cruelty, in compact and pointed form.
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