The Shining is a haunted house novel, but the hotel is only half of what makes it frightening. Jack Torrance takes the winter caretaker job at the Overlook, a grand hotel cut off by snow in the Colorado Rockies, and brings his wife Wendy and his son Danny, who has a psychic gift. The building works on Jack’s weaknesses (his drinking, his temper, his resentment) until the real horror is what is happening inside the family.

So “books like The Shining” can mean several things: more Stephen King, another haunted building, another family under siege, or the same feeling of being trapped somewhere with no way out. Each pick below is matched to one of those, so you can choose by what you loved.

1. Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Closest match. Best for: readers who want to know what happened to Danny.

King’s 2013 sequel follows Dan Torrance as an adult: a recovering alcoholic, like his father, working at a hospice in New Hampshire, where his gift lets him ease patients into death. When he connects with Abra Stone, a girl whose shining is far stronger than his, they become targets of the True Knot, a band of near-immortal travelers who feed on children with the gift. It is more of a chase thriller than a haunted house novel, but it returns to the Overlook’s legacy, and it gives Danny’s story an ending.

Content notes: addiction, violence against children.

The sequel, and the most satisfying next step.

2. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Best for: readers who found the family breaking down the scariest part.

Louis Creed, a doctor, moves his family to a house in rural Maine beside a busy road. Behind the house is a pet cemetery, and beyond that, as his elderly neighbor Jud eventually shows him, a burial ground where what you bury comes back. The supernatural is almost secondary: this is a book about grief and how far a parent will go to undo it. King has often said it is the book of his that frightened him most.

Content notes: grief, death, including the death of a child.

King’s darkest novel, and his most personal.

3. Hell House by Richard Matheson

Best for: readers who want the evil-building idea pushed to its limit.

A dying millionaire sends a small team to spend a week in the Belasco House, a mansion in Maine known as the most haunted house in the world, and find out whether anything survives death. The team includes a physicist who thinks haunting is a matter of energy and two mediums, one of them the only survivor of an earlier investigation. Like the Overlook, the house targets each person’s weaknesses one by one. It is more explicit and more violent than King, and it moves fast.

Content notes: violence, sexual content.

The haunted house novel at full volume.

4. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Best for: readers who loved the slow psychological dread.

Dr. Montague invites a small group to stay in Hill House to study the paranormal, among them Eleanor, a lonely young woman who has spent her adult life caring for her mother. As the house begins to focus on her, Jackson keeps you unsure how much is the house and how much is Eleanor’s mind. Stephen King has named it one of the great supernatural novels of the last hundred years, and its opening paragraph is one of the most famous in the genre.

Content notes: psychological distress, suicide.

The novel every haunted house story since has learned from.

5. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Best for: readers who loved watching a home become a trap.

Rosemary and her husband Guy, a struggling actor, move into the Bramford, a grand old Manhattan apartment building with a dark history. Their elderly neighbors are overly attentive, Guy’s career suddenly takes off, and when Rosemary becomes pregnant, everyone around her starts to take a very close interest. Levin builds the paranoia through small, ordinary details, and the book is short, tight and hard to put down.

Content notes: sexual assault, pregnancy-related horror.

Paranoia in a pristine apartment, told with almost no wasted words.

6. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Best for: readers who want a parent fighting for a possessed child.

Chris MacNeil, an actress filming in Washington, D.C., watches her young daughter Regan change into something she does not recognize. Doctors find nothing, and she turns to Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit psychiatrist who is losing his own faith. Like The Shining, the horror is rooted in a family and in a man struggling with his own demons, and the book is far more about doubt and faith than its film’s reputation suggests.

Content notes: graphic violence, harm to a child, blasphemy.

The possession novel against which all others are measured.

7. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Best for: readers who want an isolated house and a modern gothic twist.

In 1950s Mexico, glamorous Noemí Taboada receives a frantic letter from her newly married cousin and travels to High Place, the crumbling mansion of her husband’s English family in the mountains. The family is cold, the house is decaying, and Noemí begins having vivid dreams she cannot explain. It has the cut-off, closed-in feeling of the Overlook moved to a misty mountainside, with a heroine who fights back.

Content notes: violence, sexual assault, body horror.

A classic gothic setup with a very modern payoff.

8. Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Best for: readers who loved the claustrophobia and the threat you cannot see.

Something has appeared in the world that drives anyone who sees it to violent madness. Malorie and two small children, all blindfolded, set off down a river to reach a place that might be safe. The book alternates between that journey and the months Malorie spent sheltering in a house with strangers, and the tension comes from never being allowed to look.

Content notes: suicide, violence.

Isolation horror where the eyes are the enemy.

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Where to start

• More Danny Torrance: Doctor Sleep.
• More King, darker: Pet Sematary.
• Another evil building: Hell House, then The Haunting of Hill House.
• A home that becomes a trap: Rosemary’s Baby.
• A family facing something supernatural: The Exorcist.
• Gothic atmosphere: Mexican Gothic.
• Pure claustrophobic tension: Bird Box.

If you want horror that is more psychological than supernatural, see our most disturbing books. For thrillers with the same slow-building dread, try our books like Gone Girl.