Books Like House of Leaves: 10 Mind-Bending Reads to Devour Next

House of Leaves is a book people describe with their hands. A family moves into a house on Ash Tree Lane that is bigger on the inside than the outside, and their story reaches you as an academic manuscript by a blind old man, which reaches you in turn through the footnotes of Johnny Truant, a tattoo-parlour apprentice whose own life comes apart as he edits it. The pages tilt and thin and spiral to match the corridors, one word is always printed in colour, and the appendices keep going long after the story has stopped. Underneath the puzzle is a slow, existential dread, a parody of academia, and a love story that sneaks up on you.

Nothing else is quite House of Leaves, so we split the appeal into its parts. Some of these books give you the form: documents, annotations, narrators arguing on the page, text that misbehaves. Some give you the house, the impossible geometry and the sense of a building with intentions. Some give you the annotator you cannot trust. A few are not horror at all, and we say so; every one of them is a book the House of Leaves reader will recognise as kin.

What to read after House of Leaves

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Investigative journalist Scott McGrath once tried to expose the reclusive horror director Stanislas Cordova and lost his career doing it. When Cordova's daughter Ashley is found dead in an abandoned warehouse, McGrath goes back in, and the novel hands you his evidence as he gathers it: web pages, case files, photographs and interview notes reproduced on the page. It has the found-document dread of House of Leaves with a plot that moves at a thriller's pace.

Find Night Film at Ever After Books

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Eric Sanderson wakes on a bedroom floor with no memory of who he is, and finds letters addressed to him from the person he used to be. What is hunting him is a conceptual shark, a creature that lives in language and eats memory, and as it closes in the text itself starts to change shape on the page. British, strange and genuinely unsettling: the closest thing this country has produced to Danielewski's typographic maze.

Find The Raw Shark Texts at Ever After Books

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

A man who calls himself Piranesi lives alone in a House of endless halls lined with statues, where the sea floods the lower levels and birds nest in the upper ones, and he keeps a careful journal of all of it. The only other living person is the Other, who visits twice a week, and slowly the journal begins to record things that do not fit. It is the impossible architecture of Ash Tree Lane made beautiful rather than terrifying, short enough to read in an evening, and a novel that is, above all, about a house.