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Books like The Deep

Nick Cutter · 2015 · Canada · horror
★ 3.40 Goodreads · 47,432 ratings

As a plague of forgetting spreads around the world, a substance found eight miles down in the Mariana Trench may cure it, and the veterinarian Luke Nelson is sent down to the research station there, where his estranged brother has stopped answering.

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12 books for readers of The Deep

Into the Drowning Deep

Mira Grant · 2017 · US 97% match ★ 3.93 Goodreads · 49,902 ratings
Book 2 of 2 in Rolling in the Deep
shares: oceanic, maritime, body horror · violent, dark

Seven years after the ship Atargatis vanished in the Mariana Trench while filming a mockumentary about mermaids, the same network sends a new expedition, and the marine scientist Tory Stewart, whose sister was aboard, signs on.

The Troop

Nick Cutter · 2014 · Canada 94% match ★ 3.82 Goodreads · 144,903 ratings
shares: body horror, epidemic · dark, earnest

Five fourteen-year-old Boy Scouts and their scoutmaster are camping on a remote island off Prince Edward Island when an emaciated stranger arrives carrying something that begins to get inside them, in Lord of the Flies crossed with body horror.

Wilder Girls

Rory Power · 2019 · US 94% match ★ 3.44 Goodreads · 103,745 ratings
shares: body horror, epidemic · earnest, dark

Eighteen months after a sickness called the Tox struck the Raxter School for Girls on an island off the coast of Maine, the survivors live under quarantine as their bodies change in terrible ways, and when Hetty's best friend Byatt goes missing, she breaks the rules to find her.

Sphere

Michael Crichton · 1987 · US 93% match ★ 3.84 Goodreads · 203,517 ratings
shares: oceanic, isolated, claustrophobic, isolation · earnest, suspenseful

Norman Johnson, a psychologist, is flown to the middle of the Pacific to join scientists sent to a habitat a thousand feet down, where the navy has found a huge spacecraft that has been on the seabed for three hundred years.

Uzumaki

Junji Ito · 1998 · Japan 92% match ★ 4.45 Goodreads · 96,101 ratings
shares: nightmarish, body horror · dark, cold

In the small coastal town of Kurouzu-cho, teenager Kirie Goshima watches her neighbours become obsessed with spirals, starting with her boyfriend's father, as the pattern takes hold of the town in ever stranger and more horrible ways.

The Ruins

Scott Smith · 2006 · US 91% match ★ 3.69 Goodreads · 73,492 ratings
shares: isolated, claustrophobic, dread · dark, cold

Four young Americans on holiday in Cancún agree to help a German tourist find his brother, who went off to an archaeological dig in the jungle and has not come back.

Song of Kali

Dan Simmons · 1985 · US 89% match ★ 3.62 Goodreads · 16,789 ratings
shares: nightmarish, dread · dark, earnest

Robert Luczak, an American poet and editor, travels to Calcutta with his Indian wife and their baby daughter to collect a new manuscript by M. Das, a celebrated Bengali poet believed to have died years before.

The Passage

Justin Cronin · 2010 · US 89% match ★ 4.05 Goodreads · 227,697 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in The Passage
shares: epidemic, dread, scientific · earnest, dark

A secret military project to engineer soldiers from a virus found in the Bolivian jungle needs one more subject, six-year-old Amy Harper Bellafonte, and FBI agent Brad Wolgast, sent to bring her in, cannot go through with it, just as the experiment escapes its lab.

The Woman in Cabin 10

Ruth Ware · 2016 · UK 88% match ★ 3.71 Goodreads · 821,787 ratings
shares: maritime, isolated, claustrophobic · earnest, easy read

Travel journalist Lo Blacklock, shaken by a break-in at home, joins the maiden voyage of a small luxury cruise ship in the North Sea, and in the night she hears a woman go overboard from the cabin next door, though no one is missing.

We Used to Live Here

Marcus Kliewer · 2024 · Canada 88% match ★ 3.58 Goodreads · 347,372 ratings
shares: claustrophobic, dread · uncanny, suspenseful

Charlie and her girlfriend Eve are renovating an old house they bought cheaply, and when a family knocks one evening asking to look around the home the father grew up in, Charlie lets them in, and they do not seem to want to leave.

The Cabin at the End of the World

Paul Tremblay · 2018 · US 87% match ★ 3.32 Goodreads · 97,113 ratings
shares: isolated, claustrophobic, dread · dark, suspenseful

Seven-year-old Wen and her fathers, Eric and Andrew, are on holiday at a remote lakeside cabin in New Hampshire when four strangers carrying homemade weapons arrive and tell them they must make an unthinkable choice to prevent the end of the world.

I Am Legend

Richard Matheson · 1954 · US 87% match ★ 4.00 Goodreads · 138,408 ratings
shares: epidemic, scientific · cold, easy read

Robert Neville may be the last man alive in Los Angeles after a plague turned everyone else into vampires; by day he hunts them and searches for the cause, and by night he barricades himself in his house while they call for him to come out.