Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson never needed a monster. A house with walls that aren’t quite at right angles, a small town that gathers every summer for its annual lottery, two sisters who keep house together after the rest of the family is gone — that was enough. Her horror lives in the gap between what a place or a person is supposed to be and what it actually is, and she found that gap most often inside the home, the family, and the community everyone assumes is safe. If that specific unease — domestic, social, psychological, never quite supernatural enough to let you off the hook — is what you come back to her for, here are ten authors who work the same territory.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Gothic · Psychological Horror · Domestic Unease · Updated June 2026
Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca follows a new bride haunted by the presence of her husband’s dead first wife inside the sprawling manor of Manderley — a ghost story with no actual ghost, where dread comes entirely from memory, jealousy, and the house itself. It’s an early and foundational entry in the domestic horror tradition Jackson would later master.
If Hill House taught you that a haunting doesn’t require anything supernatural, du Maurier got there first. Rebecca is the clearest ancestor of Jackson’s own non-supernatural dread.
Henry James
James’s novella The Turn of the Screw follows a governess at a remote estate who becomes convinced the two children in her care are being visited by malevolent ghosts — though the novella never confirms whether the haunting is real or a symptom of the governess’s own unraveling mind. The ambiguity is the entire point.
Jackson built Hill House on exactly this kind of ambiguity: is the house haunted, or is Eleanor? James’s novella is the clearest literary precedent for that unresolved question.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” uses a decaying mansion as a direct symbol for its inhabitant’s psychological and physical decline — the house and the mind collapse together, inseparably. It’s one of gothic literature’s foundational uses of architecture as character.
Jackson inherited this device directly: Hill House isn’t just a setting, it’s an active participant in Eleanor’s unraveling. Poe is where that idea comes from.
Sarah Waters
Waters writes gothic fiction that doubles as psychological study, often centered on repression, institutional confinement, and queer desire that society refuses to name. Affinity follows a woman doing charity work in a Victorian women’s prison who becomes entangled with a spiritualist inmate — gothic dread layered over very real social constraint.
Jackson hinted at Theo’s queerness in Hill House without ever stating it outright. Waters writes that same repression as the text’s central subject rather than its subtext.
Helen Oyeyemi
Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching follows four generations of women inhabiting a vengeful, gothic house that actively rejects outsiders — the structure itself functioning as a character with its own hostile will, much like Hill House.
For readers who want a more contemporary inheritor of the “house as antagonist” tradition, Oyeyemi takes Jackson’s haunted-house premise and adds generational and racial inheritance to the haunting.
Stephen King
King has named Jackson as a direct influence on his own work, and the lineage shows clearly in novels like Carrie, where ordinary domestic and social settings curdle into horror through psychological pressure and small-town cruelty rather than invented monsters.
King has said outright that Jackson’s influence runs through his work, particularly the way she found horror inside telekinetic, ostracized young women — a direct line to Carrie.
Patricia Highsmith
Highsmith’s psychological thrillers — most famously the Ripley novels — find dread in ordinary social settings and morally ambiguous protagonists rather than in anything overtly supernatural. Her prose is cool and controlled even as her characters do increasingly unconscionable things.
Readers have compared the unsettling tonal precision of Jackson’s short fiction to Highsmith’s own controlled menace. Both write characters whose darkness emerges from ordinary frustration rather than monstrousness.
Donna Tartt
Tartt’s The Secret History follows a small, insular group of classics students at an elite college whose intellectual exclusivity curdles into moral collapse and murder. The horror is entirely social — a tight community’s capacity to justify the unjustifiable to itself.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Secret History share a fascination with small, self-justifying communities that close ranks around something terrible. Tartt scales that same dynamic up to a campus.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” follows a woman confined to a room by her husband for a “rest cure,” who becomes obsessed with the pattern in the wallpaper as her sanity deteriorates. It’s one of the earliest and most direct uses of domestic confinement as a vehicle for feminist horror.
Jackson’s own protagonists — Eleanor, Natalie Waite, Merricat — are repeatedly trapped by domestic expectation as much as by anything supernatural. Gilman wrote the foundational text for that specific kind of horror decades earlier.
Daisy Johnson
Johnson writes contemporary folk-gothic fiction in which reality bends under pressure from myth, landscape, and female rage. Everything Under reimagines the Oedipus myth along an English canal, blurring memory, gender, and identity until the line between the literal and the symbolic disappears.
Jackson drew heavily on folklore and ballad tradition in her own work — her husband was a folklorist. Johnson is the clearest contemporary inheritor of that folk-gothic instinct, applied to a thoroughly modern unease.
Where to start if you loved Shirley Jackson
If you loved The Haunting of Hill House, then…
Read Henry James. The Turn of the Screw built the same unresolved question — is the house haunted, or is the woman inside it?
If you loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle, then…
Read Donna Tartt. The Secret History shares the same fascination with a small, self-justifying community closing ranks around something terrible.
If you loved The Lottery, then…
Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the foundational text for horror that emerges from domestic and social confinement rather than the supernatural.
If you loved the non-supernatural dread, then…
Read Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca is a ghost story with no actual ghost, the clearest ancestor of Jackson’s own method.
If you want a contemporary inheritor, then…
Read Helen Oyeyemi. White Is for Witching takes Jackson’s house-as-antagonist premise and layers in generational and racial inheritance.
If it’s the queer subtext you noticed, then…
Read Sarah Waters. She writes the repression Jackson only hinted at with Theo as the explicit center of her own gothic fiction.
