Books Backlist Bonanza Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Books About Evil Houses Houses that try to murder their occupants is one of our favorite horror tropes… By Alex Brown | Published on October 16, 2025 Comment 1 Share New Share I don’t read much horror, but nothing will get between me and a good haunted house story. The wave of haunted house movies from the late 1990s and early 2000s—featuring such, well, maybe “classics” is too strong a word, like Thirteen Ghosts, The Haunting, What Lies Beneath, and House on Haunted Hill—are part of my regular Halloween media rotation. Houses trying to murder their occupants is one of my favorite horror tropes, and the following five books are some great examples of it. The Good House by Tananarive Due (Atria Books, 2003) Angela Toussaint is a high-powered Hollywood lawyer dealing with the aftermath of a messy divorce and joint custody. With teenage son Corey in tow, she decides to take a break from everything and spend the summer in her childhood home in the small town of Sacajawea, Washington. Of course, her troublesome ex-husband Tariq crashes her peace and quiet. Although the house itself is known by the chipper name of “Good House,” within its walls, things are anything but. Built by Angela’s root worker ancestor a century prior, Good House has seen plenty of horror over the years, both inside the house and outside in the racist local community. When Corey unintentionally summons an evil spirit, it will take every ounce of strength Angela has to rescue him from a grim fate. The Haunted by Danielle Vega (The Haunted #1 — Razorbill, 2019) When her parents relocate to Drearford, New York, Hendricks Becker-O’Malley wants nothing more than to leave behind the terrible thing that happened to her in her old town. The trauma of that event drives a lot of her future choices. The rundown mansion, Steele House, is the perfect project for her house-flipper parents. But all isn’t as it seems. The house is, as Hendricks learns first hand, very much haunted. Living in that house is an unsettling experience. Screams echo through the halls, people wake up with strange injuries, and there’s a pervasive and overwhelming sense of looming dread. Eddie Ruiz, a schoolmate, lost family members to that house before Hendricks moved in, so he teams up with her on an exorcism. Things get worse when their cleansing attempt goes horribly wrong. Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey (Tor Books, 2022) Vera Crowder left home years ago. Her father, a notorious serial killer, died in prison, and her cold and distant mother cut her out of her life. Now with her mother teetering on the edge of death, Vera is forced to return. She plans to put the house in order in preparation for her mother’s demise, but things keep getting in the way. Things like her mother’s knife-sharp personality, the fragments of her father’s journal that keep appearing around the house, and the creepy artist and son of her father’s true crime biographer who moved himself in and now won’t leave. The Crowder house is haunted, but by whom? Ghosts? Cruel humans? Or Vera herself? Francis Crowder slaughtered too many people under the floorboards of their picture-perfect suburban home, and now that blood is bubbling up, ready to pull Vera into its depths. She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran (Bloomsbury YA, 2023) Let’s take a trip to Đà Lạt, Vietnam to visit Nhà Hoa, a hundred year old French colonial mansion. It’s currently owned by the estranged father of sisters Jade and Lily Nguyen who plans to restore it to its former glory. He promises Jade money for college in exchange for the girls spending five weeks helping him with the renovation. At first, only Jade encounters the strange goings-on in the house. She finds dead bugs in inexplicable locations. Ba keeps secrets and lies to his daughters. Things go bump in the night. Lily acts strange, like she’s someone she’s not. Florence, the beautiful daughter of her father’s business partner, makes it hard for Jade to stay in the closet as a bisexual. But the real horror is colonialism. The sins of the past threaten to consume the Nguyens. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean the French colonizers who built the estate aren’t still hellbent on stealing everything from their imperial victims. Model Home by Rivers Solomon (MCD, 2024) Growing up in a predominately white community in the suburbs outside Dallas was no small feat for the Maxwell kids. As the only Black family in the gated neighborhood, the Maxwells survived by the sheer bullheadedness of their mother. But it wasn’t just oppression that wore them down. Terrible things happened in that house, horrors no one could understand, a malevolent force draining them dry. As soon as they could, they got out of Dodge. Now as adults, Ezri, Eve, and Emmanuelle return to find their parents dead. The cops ruled it a murder-suicide, but the siblings know it was the house that killed them. It’s Rivers Solomon, so be prepared for poetic prose, heavy discussions of queerness, neurodivergence, class, race, and trauma along with supernatural horror.[end-mark] The post Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Books About Evil Houses appeared first on Reactor.