Books like Through the Woods

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll reads as eerie, haunting. These 12 books share its genome — matched by how they actually read, not just their shelf label.

What Through the Woods is like to read

Five chilling illustrated tales that lure the reader into gothic woods where dread accumulates through image as much as text. Short, nightmarish, and visually ornate — a horror-comic in the Grimm/Gorey lineage. Best for: readers who want atmospheric gothic horror in graphic form, in the Grimm/Gorey/Highsmith vein.

Uzumaki

Junji Itō · 2013

A small town is slowly consumed by an impossible geometric curse — spirals warp hair, bodies, smoke, and finally people themselves, in escalating vignettes of grotesque body horror.

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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

Emil Ferris · 2017

A visually dense, diary-form graphic novel where a child's monster-obsessed imagination collides with a real murder investigation and buried Holocaust history, moving between 1960s Chicago and wartime Germany.

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In the house in the dark of the woods

Laird Hunt · 2018

Shares the vspare + vhypno thread

The houseguest and other stories

Amparo Dávila · 2018

Quiet domestic scenes curdle into dread as ordinary anxieties—an unwelcome guest, insomnia, jealousy—metastasize into something uncanny; the horror is atmospheric and psychological rather than explicit.

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The Insect God (The Vingear Works #2)

Edward Gorey · 1963

Shares the vspare + vhypno thread

Apartment 16

Adam Nevill · 2010

A slow-burn haunted-house horror where inherited art and a malevolent presence unravel a woman's grip on reality, delivered in Nevill's dense, oppressive atmosphere.

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Dark Tales

Shirley Jackson · 2016

A collection of psychologically sharp, darkly atmospheric horror stories that expose the uncanny and malevolent lurking within mundane domestic and small-town settings, rendered wi

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The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892

A journal-entry descent into madness inside a single room — clipped, feverish sentences that fracture as the narrator's grip does, culminating in one of literature's most iconic images of confinement.

intensely scarycomplete story

The Seas

Samantha Hunt · 2004

Shares the vspare + vhypno thread

salt slow

Julia Armfield · 2019

A collection of unsettling, lyrical short stories where ordinary female lives tip into myth and metamorphosis, dwelling in bodily transformation and quiet dread.

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