BVBook Verdict

If you liked

Books like The Pit and the Pendulum

Loved The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from horror, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.

10 books · ranked

  1. 1

    Dracula

    Bram Stoker · 1897 · Horror

    Letters and diaries trace a creeping invasion by an ancient predator; the novel that fixed the vampire in our imagination.

  2. 2

    The Haunting of Hill House

    Shirley Jackson · 1959 · Horror

    Four people spend a summer in a house that may be alive; the gold standard for the literary ghost story.

  3. 3

    The Shining

    Stephen King · 1977 · Horror

    A family caretakes an empty winter hotel that wants the father for itself; King's masterclass in dread.

  4. 4

    It

    Stephen King · 1986 · Horror

    A group of friends face a shape-shifting evil in their home town, then again as adults; a doorstop of fear and friendship.

  5. 5

    The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

    Algernon Blackwood · 1906 · Horror

    Collection of short fiction horror stories by the weird fiction writer Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951).

  6. 6

    Semilla del Diablo

    Ira Levin · 1900 · Horror

    She is a housewife—young, healthy, blissfully happy. He is an actor—charismatic and ambitious. The spacious, sun-filled apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is their dream home—a dream that turns

  7. 7

    A thin ghost and others

    Montague Rhodes James · 1919 · Horror

    This volume of M.R. James's classic ghostly fiction contains: "Preface," "The Residence at Whitminster," "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," "The Episode of Cathedral History, "The Story of a Disappearance an

  8. 8

    The Haunted Bookshop

    Christopher Morley · 1919 · Horror

    The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley is the delightful tale of the bookseller Roger Mifflin, the advertising man Aubrey Gilbert, and the lovely Titania Chapman who comes to work at Mifflin's Bro

  9. 9

    Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

    Rudyard Kipling · 1893 · Horror

    A courageous mongoose thwarts the evil plans of Nag and Nagaina, two big black cobras who live in the garden.

  10. 10

    Night Shift

    Stephen King · 1960 · Horror

    Stephen King has brought together nineteen of his most unsettling short pieces--bizarre tales of dark doing and unthinkable acts from the twilight regions where horror and madness take on eerie, unear

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