Books like It

Dan Simmons set Summer of Night in 1960 Elm Haven, Illinois, where five boys stumble onto an ancient evil nesting inside their crumbling grade school. The parallels to It are immediate: a group of kids, a dying small town, a long summer that turns from lazy to lethal. But Simmons brings his own strengths to the setup. His prose lingers on the texture of rural Midwest life in ways King never quite does.

The Old Central School becomes a character of its own, a decaying monument to something that has been feeding on the town for generations. Simmons also takes a harder turn into body horror than King typically does in It. The creatures here are more physically grotesque, more willing to get under your skin through sheer biological wrongness. The friendships between the boys carry real weight, built on shared bikes and baseball cards and the kind of loyalty that only exists before adulthood complicates everything.

If It made you nostalgic for childhood summers while simultaneously making you afraid of the dark, Summer of Night does both with equal skill. The sequels continue the story into the boys' adult lives, mirroring the dual-timeline structure of King's novel.

Robert McCammon's Boy's Life opens in 1964 Zephyr, Alabama, where twelve-year-old Cory Mackenson watches his father pull a dead man from a lake. That mystery drives the plot, but the real engine is Cory's experience of a single year in a town where magic and menace overlap. McCammon writes childhood with a tenderness that matches King at his best. Zephyr is a place where a dinosaur might live in the river and a local woman might actually be a ghost, and Cory accepts all of it with the matter-of-fact openness that kids bring to the world.

The horror here is quieter than in It. There is no cosmic entity, no sewer-dwelling clown. Instead, the darkness comes from human cruelty, racial violence, and the slow realization that adults carry secrets they will die to protect. McCammon's writing shifts between warmth and menace with the smoothness of a Southern summer turning into a thunderstorm.

The novel won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award, and it deserved both. For readers who loved the Losers' Club sections of It, Boy's Life delivers the same emotional core with a distinctly Southern voice.

Peter Straub and Stephen King were close friends, and Ghost Story reads like the darker, more literary cousin of It. Set in the fictional town of Milburn, New York, the novel follows the Chowder Society, a group of aging men who gather to tell each other scary stories. But their stories circle around a shared secret from fifty years ago, and that secret has taken physical form and returned to destroy them. Where It uses childhood as its emotional anchor, Ghost Story uses old age and guilt.

The members of the Chowder Society are haunted not just by a supernatural entity but by what they did as young men and the lies they told to live with it. Straub writes with more formal elegance than King, and the novel has a layered, almost nesting-doll structure where stories contain stories contain stories. The scares are genuine. Straub understood that the worst horror comes from things you thought you had buried staying buried.

The novel draws on classic ghost story traditions while pushing them into modern psychological territory. If you want something that hits the same narrative beats as It but through an adult lens, Ghost Story is the pick.

Thomas Tryon published The Other in 1971, and it remains one of the most unsettling novels about childhood ever written. Set on a Connecticut farm in 1935, it follows twin brothers Niles and Holland Perry through a summer marked by increasingly disturbing incidents. Animals die. A baby is harmed. Something is very wrong with one of the twins, and their elderly grandmother seems to know more than she is saying.

Tryon, a former Hollywood actor who turned to writing, had an instinct for slow-building dread. The novel moves at the pace of a hot summer afternoon, each chapter adding a new detail that recolors everything that came before. The twist, when it arrives, reframes the entire book. Unlike It, The Other keeps its horror entirely human. There are no monsters under the bed, no cosmic entities.

The evil here grows in a child's mind, watered by imagination and loneliness. That makes it scarier in some ways. King himself has cited The Other as an influence, and you can feel its DNA in the way he writes about the darkness children carry inside them. The novel is short, tight, and vicious in its final act.

Grady Hendrix set My Best Friend's Exorcism in 1988, and the pop culture references come fast: Trapper Keepers, E.T. lunchboxes, Phil Collins. But underneath the neon nostalgia sits a sharp horror novel about two teenage girls, Abby and Gretchen, whose friendship gets torn apart when Gretchen starts acting like someone else entirely after a night in the woods.

Hendrix plays the possession angle straight while also using it as a metaphor for the ways friendships fracture during adolescence. Abby watches her best friend change and has to decide whether the thing wearing Gretchen's face is a demon or just the cruelty that teenagers sometimes grow into. The book is funny and scary and surprisingly emotional, sometimes all on the same page. Where It grounds its horror in the bonds between the Losers' Club, My Best Friend's Exorcism does the same with a two-person friendship.

The 1980s setting provides the same kind of nostalgic warmth that King's 1950s Derry offers, and Hendrix uses it just as effectively. The stakes feel personal rather than cosmic, which makes the horror land harder.

Nick Cutter's The Troop takes a group of boy scouts to a remote island off the coast of Prince Edward Island for a weekend camping trip. Then a stranger stumbles out of the woods, impossibly thin, and everything goes wrong fast. The novel is structured as a found-document thriller, mixing the main narrative with newspaper clippings, court transcripts, and scientific reports about a bioengineered parasite that has escaped containment. The horror here is relentlessly physical.

Cutter writes body horror with a precision that makes your skin crawl, and he does not look away when things get ugly. The Troop shares DNA with It in its focus on a group of boys whose friendships are tested by something awful. But where King's Losers' Club faces a supernatural threat, Cutter's scouts face something biological and terrifyingly plausible. The group dynamics fracture under pressure, and the novel becomes as much about what fear does to friendships as about the parasite itself.

The island setting creates the same sense of isolation that Derry's psychic blindness does in It. Once the boys are trapped, there is no one coming to help.

King wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon in 1999, and it stands as one of his leanest, most focused novels. Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland wanders off a hiking trail in the Maine woods and gets lost. That is the entire premise. For two hundred pages, Trisha walks deeper into the wilderness, growing weaker, hallucinating, and talking to her hero, Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, on a Walkman radio that keeps fading in and out.

The novel strips away everything that makes It sprawling and epic and leaves only the essential question: can one scared kid survive? King writes Trisha's deterioration with clinical accuracy. Hunger, dehydration, insect bites, and the slow erosion of hope all accumulate. There may or may not be something following her through the trees, something that leaves partially eaten deer carcasses in her path.

The ambiguity is the point. This is King writing about childhood fear at its most primal, without the cosmic mythology of It but with all the same emotional power. Trisha is as memorable as any member of the Losers' Club, and her fight to survive will stay with you long after the last page.