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Books like The Changeling

Victor LaValle · 2017 · US · horror · fantasy
★ 3.76 Goodreads · 29,601 ratings

Apollo Kagwa, a used-book dealer in New York, has just become a father when his wife, Emma, begins insisting that their baby is not their baby, and an act he cannot comprehend sends him across the city, and into its fairy tales, to find out why.

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12 books for readers of The Changeling

The Devil in Silver

Victor LaValle · 2012 · US 96% match ★ 3.54 Goodreads · 8,413 ratings
shares: monstrous, New York, monster · easy read, dark

Pepper, a big, hot-tempered moving man, is committed to New Hyde, a psychiatric hospital in Queens, for a seventy-two hour hold after a scuffle with police, and learns that something with a bull's head walks the ward at night.

Lone Women

Victor LaValle · 2023 · US 96% match ★ 3.69 Goodreads · 39,891 ratings
shares: monstrous, African American, monster · suspenseful, easy read

In 1915 Adelaide Henry sets fire to her family's California farm and heads for a homestead in Montana, taking with her a heavy steamer trunk she keeps locked at all times.

The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night

Marjorie Liu · 2022 · US 95% match ★ 3.86 Hardcover · 35 ratings
shares: monstrous, family, monster · suspenseful, easy read

Thirty-year-old twin siblings in pandemic New York learn their Chinese-immigrant parents are not quite what their cooking-show manners suggest.

The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing · 1988 · UK 94% match ★ 3.65 Goodreads · 26,504 ratings
shares: monstrous, unsettling, family · intimate, suspenseful

Harriet and David Lovatt, a happy couple who want a big family in a big house, have four children, and then a fifth, Ben, who is not like the others.

Shadowland

Peter Straub · 1980 · US 94% match ★ 3.88 Goodreads · 12,980 ratings
shares: fairytale, fairy tale · uncanny, dark

Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale, friends from a grim boarding school, spend a summer at Shadowland, the Vermont estate of Del's uncle, a stage magician who promises to teach them real magic.

The Other Black Girl

Zakiya Dalila Harris · 2021 · US 93% match ★ 3.35 Goodreads · 84,727 ratings
shares: African American, unsettling, New York · suspenseful, easy read

Nella Rogers, the only Black editorial assistant at a Manhattan publishing house, is thrilled when Hazel joins the office, until anonymous notes start appearing on her desk telling her to leave.

Mr. Mercedes

Stephen King · 2014 · US 93% match ★ 4.04 Goodreads · 394,288 ratings
Book 1 of 6 in Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney
shares: suspenseful, easy read

Bill Hodges, a retired detective drifting through empty days, gets a gloating letter from the unknown man who drove a stolen Mercedes into a crowd of job seekers, and starts hunting him with a teenage neighbour and an unlikely ally.

The Good House

Tananarive Due · 2003 · US 92% match ★ 4.03 Goodreads · 11,794 ratings
shares: African American, family · earnest, suspenseful

Two years after her teenage son died at her late grandmother's house in Sacajawea, Washington, Angela Toussaint goes back to it, and learns why the women in her family were once feared there.

Relic

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child · 1995 · US 92% match ★ 4.05 Goodreads · 118,575 ratings
Book 1 of 22 in Pendergast
shares: monstrous, New York, monster · suspenseful, intricate plot

Days before a blockbuster exhibition opens at New York's Museum of Natural History, visitors and guards are found savagely killed in its halls, and a graduate student, a city detective and an unusual FBI agent from New Orleans come to suspect something is living in the basement.

Sundial

Catriona Ward · 2022 · UK 92% match ★ 3.78 Goodreads · 27,816 ratings
shares: unsettling, family · dark, intricate plot

Rob, a mother in the suburbs who fears what her older daughter Callie is becoming, drives her out to Sundial, the remote desert house where Rob grew up, and begins telling her the family's story.

Last Call

Tim Powers · 1992 · US 91% match ★ 4.05 Goodreads · 6,756 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in Fault Lines
shares: father son, family · intricate plot, suspenseful

Scott Crane, a professional gambler who lost an eye in a strange poker game on a houseboat on Lake Mead twenty years ago, finds that the men he played with then want to finish what they started.

Through the Woods

Emily Carroll · 2014 · Canada 91% match ★ 3.94 Goodreads · 89,838 ratings
shares: fairytale, unsettling, fairy tale · easy read, uncanny

Five gothic, fairy-tale horror stories in comics form, a new bride in a house with a secret, sisters waiting for a father who does not come home, drawn in Carroll's luminous, blood-red palette.