Books like House of Salt and Sorrows

Silvia Moreno-Garcia sets Mexican Gothic in a decaying mansion in the Mexican countryside during the 1950s, where socialite Noemi Taboada arrives to rescue her cousin from a crumbling estate and a controlling family. Like House of Salt and Sorrows, the novel treats its setting as something almost alive, a place that breathes malice into every room. Both books feature young women who refuse to accept the explanations given to them, pushing past family resistance and supernatural intimidation to uncover the truth.

Where Craig draws on maritime folklore, Moreno-Garcia pulls from colonial history and mycology to build her horror. The slow accumulation of wrongness in both novels works the same way: strange dreams, shifting walls, family members who seem to know more than they say. Readers who appreciated the way Craig made Highmoor feel like a trap will find the same claustrophobic dread in High Place.

The gothic tradition runs strong in both, but each author brings a distinct cultural lens that makes the familiar tropes feel fresh and unsettling.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House stands as the foundation stone for every haunted house story that followed, and its DNA runs through House of Salt and Sorrows like a current beneath dark water. Jackson builds terror through suggestion and psychological pressure rather than gore, letting readers question whether the house is truly haunted or whether Eleanor's mind is fracturing under isolation. Craig uses this same technique with Annaleigh, whose visions may be ghostly visitations or symptoms of the madness that supposedly runs in her family.

Both novels understand that the scariest haunted houses are the ones that make their inhabitants doubt themselves. Jackson's prose is spare and precise where Craig's is more lush, but both writers know how to make a doorway or a staircase feel threatening. The group dynamics in Hill House mirror the Thaumas family tensions, with each character reacting differently to the house's influence.

This is essential reading for anyone who loved the psychological depth beneath Craig's supernatural surface.

Adalyn Grace's Belladonna drops readers into a world where Death is not just a concept but a character with whom the protagonist has an uncomfortable intimacy. Signa Farrow, raised by a revolving door of relatives who keep dying around her, arrives at a grand estate to claim her inheritance and finds herself entangled in a murder mystery with supernatural stakes. The parallels to House of Salt and Sorrows are striking: both feature young women in sprawling estates where family members die under suspicious circumstances, and both protagonists must sort ghostly interference from human treachery.

Grace writes with a dark romanticism that matches Craig's aesthetic sensibility, filling every scene with candlelight, poison, and whispered warnings. The mystery elements work in tandem with the gothic atmosphere rather than competing with it. Where Craig grounds her story in maritime isolation, Grace uses the social expectations of high society as another kind of cage.

Both novels reward readers who pay close attention to the details hiding in plain sight.

Margaret Rogerson's Sorcery of Thorns takes place in a world where books are living, dangerous things, and the Great Libraries that house them need armed protectors. Elisabeth, a foundling raised among these sentient grimoires, gets drawn into a conspiracy that threatens to unleash ancient sorcery when a book she was guarding transforms into a monster.

While the setting trades Craig's coastal gloom for magical libraries, both novels share a love of atmospheric world-building and heroines who must trust their own instincts when everyone around them offers conflicting counsel. Rogerson writes action sequences with the same intensity Craig brings to her horror set pieces, keeping the pacing tight even as the world expands.

The romance in Sorcery of Thorns develops alongside the mystery rather than distracting from it, much as Annaleigh's relationships in House of Salt and Sorrows serve the larger plot. Both books also play with the idea that beauty can be dangerous and that the most alluring surfaces often hide the darkest truths.

Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale transports readers to medieval Russia, where young Vasilisa can see the household spirits that protect her family's homestead from the dark forces of the forest. When a new stepmother and a zealous priest arrive, the old protections begin to fail, and Vasya must choose between obedience and the wild magic in her blood.

Both Arden and Craig build their stories on the bones of folklore, transforming fairy tales into something with real teeth. The wintry Russian setting creates the same sense of beautiful isolation that Craig achieves with her storm-battered island, and both novels use their natural environments as active forces in the narrative.

Vasya and Annaleigh share a stubborn refusal to accept the roles assigned to them, whether that means a forced marriage or silence about what they have witnessed. Arden's prose carries a fairy tale cadence that pairs well with Craig's ornate style, and both authors understand that the best dark fantasy treats its supernatural elements with reverence rather than irony.

Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni brings two creatures of myth to life in 1899 New York City, where a golem created to be a wife and a jinni trapped in a copper flask both find themselves navigating a world that has no place for them. The novel shares Craig's gift for making the magical feel tactile and grounded, treating its supernatural elements with the same matter-of-fact intensity.

Where House of Salt and Sorrows uses its gothic estate as a pressure cooker for family drama and horror, Wecker uses the immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan to create a different kind of atmospheric density. Both novels are interested in characters who exist between worlds, never fully belonging to the human sphere or the magical one.

The dual-narrative structure gives readers two distinct perspectives that gradually converge, creating a suspense that builds through character development rather than cheap shocks. Wecker's historical detail functions like Craig's architectural descriptions, grounding fantastical elements in a reality that makes the wonder and terror feel earned.

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi takes place in an impossible house of infinite halls, where statues line corridors flooded by ocean tides and a lone inhabitant keeps meticulous journals about his strange world. The mystery at the center of the novel unfolds through the narrator's gradual realization that his reality may not be what he believes, a technique Craig uses to devastating effect in House of Salt and Sorrows.

Both novels feature narrators whose understanding of their own situation is incomplete, and both use architecture as a central metaphor for psychological states. Clarke's prose is luminous and precise, creating a sense of wonder that sits alongside genuine menace, much as Craig balances the beauty of Highmoor with its horrors.

The ocean plays a crucial role in both books, serving as both backdrop and threat. Piranesi is shorter and more concentrated than Craig's novel, but it packs the same emotional punch, building toward revelations that reframe everything the reader thought they understood about the story and its world.