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Books like A Box Full of Darkness

Simone St. James · 2026 · Canada · horror · mystery
★ 3.73 Goodreads · 23,514 ratings

Years after their youngest brother Ben vanished near the woods everyone avoids in the strange town of Fell, New York, the three estranged Esmie siblings, Violet, Vail and Dodie, come home when Ben seems to be calling them back.

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12 books for readers of A Box Full of Darkness

Ghost Story

Peter Straub · 1979 · US 96% match ★ 3.91 Goodreads · 85,159 ratings
shares: upstate New York, haunting presence, small town, ghost · suspenseful, earnest

In the small town of Milburn, New York, four elderly men who call themselves the Chowder Society meet to tell ghost stories, and after the strange death of a fifth member, a winter of nightmares tells them that a secret from their youth has come back.

How to Sell a Haunted House

Grady Hendrix · 2023 · US 96% match ★ 3.63 Goodreads · 185,534 ratings
shares: creepy, haunting presence, grief · easy read, suspenseful

After their parents die, Louise has to go home to Charleston and work with her estranged brother Mark to clear out and sell the family house, which is full of their mother's puppets and dolls and does not want to be sold.

The Graveyard Apartment

Mariko Koike · 1986 · Japan 95% match ★ 3.26 Goodreads · 5,193 ratings
shares: creepy, haunting presence, family · easy read, earnest

Teppei and Misao Kano, their young daughter and their dog move into a brand-new apartment building in Tokyo that looks out over a cemetery, and as one neighbour after another moves out, they find that something lives in the basement.

Hidden Pictures

Jason Rekulak · 2022 · US 95% match ★ 4.13 Goodreads · 714,450 ratings
shares: creepy, haunting presence, ghost · easy read, suspenseful

Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab, takes a job as nanny to five-year-old Teddy in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, and when the boy's stick-figure drawings give way to disturbingly skilled pictures of a woman being dragged into the woods, she wonders who is guiding his hand.

Faerie Tale

Raymond E. Feist · 1988 · US 95% match ★ 3.88 Goodreads · 11,770 ratings
shares: creepy, upstate New York, family · easy read, earnest

The Hastings family moves into an old farmhouse in upstate New York, and the twin boys start meeting something in the woods.

The Darkest Part of the Forest

Holly Black · 2015 · US 94% match ★ 3.86 Goodreads · 91,627 ratings
shares: forest, small town, family · easy read, speculative

In Fairfold, a town where humans live alongside the fae, Hazel and her brother Ben have always loved the horned boy asleep in a glass coffin in the woods, until one day he wakes.

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

C. M. Waggoner · 2024 · US 94% match ★ 3.41 Goodreads · 11,362 ratings
shares: upstate New York, supernatural, small town · easy read, intimate

Sherry Pinkwhistle, a mild-mannered librarian in the sleepy upstate New York hamlet of Winesap, has a habit of solving the murders that keep happening around her, and lately she suspects a demon is behind them.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving · 1820 · US 94% match ★ 3.77 Goodreads · 159,978 ratings
shares: upstate New York, supernatural, small town, ghost · easy read, intimate

Ichabod Crane, a gangly Connecticut schoolmaster, courts an heiress in a Dutch farming village on the Hudson and runs afoul of a burly rival and the local legend of a headless horseman.

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson · 1959 · US 94% match ★ 3.81 Goodreads · 432,407 ratings
shares: haunting presence, supernatural · easy read, intimate

A scholar of the supernatural invites three guests to spend a summer at Hill House, a notoriously haunted mansion, and the house begins to work on Eleanor, the loneliest of them.

Salem's Lot

Stephen King · 1975 · US 94% match ★ 4.10 Goodreads · 690,769 ratings
shares: supernatural, small town · easy read, earnest

A writer moves to a quiet Maine town and discovers that the respectable residents are being turned into vampires, one invitation at a time.

All Adults Here

Emma Straub · 2020 · US 94% match ★ 3.57 Goodreads · 93,289 ratings
shares: upstate New York, small town, family · easy read, earnest

Astrid Strick, a widow in a small Hudson Valley town, sees an acquaintance killed by a school bus, and decides it is time to tell her grown children something she has kept from them.

Pet Sematary

Stephen King · 1983 · US 94% match ★ 4.09 Goodreads · 737,258 ratings
shares: supernatural, grief, family · easy read, earnest

Doctor Louis Creed moves his family to rural Maine, where an old neighbour shows him the burial ground beyond the pet cemetery behind their house, a place that can bring the dead back, though not as they were.