Books Backlist Bonanza Backlist Bonanza: 5 Books Set in Strange Houses Houses don’t have to be haunted to leave their mark on you… By Alex Brown | Published on April 9, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share As much as I love haunted houses, I also love just plain weird-ass houses. Houses with secret rooms or that shift its inhabitants around. Houses with mysteries that resist being solved or that you leave a different person than when you entered. Welcome to this list of five books set in strange houses. Don’t get too comfortable. The house won’t like it. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2020) I might be a little obsessed with Piranesi. Just a little. Like Susanna Clarke’s other magnum opus, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, not a week goes by since the day I read it that I don’t think about it. Piranesi lives in an inexplicable house. The house has infinite rooms full of strange objects. Birds flock to one room, tidal creatures to another, and statues gaze down at him ominously. Storms roar through the halls and water rushes down the stairs. Piranesi doesn’t know who he was before the house or how he got there. He simply is. But he’s not alone. The Other visits him from time to time to ask him questions and send him on quests. There are also the bones of previous inhabitants that died before Piranesi arrived. And then one day a new person tumbles into the house, a woman who will shatter Piranesi’s world, for better and for worse. This is a stunning achievement of a novel. Clarke is one of those “once in a generation” authors. Each time I read this book, I peel away another layer to discover something new. Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood (Wednesday Books, 2021) This young adult remix of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre adds some magic to the gothic creepiness of the original. Suddenly without a mentor or a license to practice as a debtera—a magician that can craft charms to ward off the Evil Eye—Andi takes the only job she can get. Now she finds herself on the grand estate of the dark and mysterious Magnus Rochester. She’s ostensibly there to clear the so-called wicked walls of malevolent spirits, but something else calls to her. The more time she spends with Magnus, the more she sees through his guise of callousness, but his secrets threaten to tear them apart. Magnus inherited the house and his wealth from his father, a chocolate magnate, as well as the curse that Andi has been hired to break. The estate is dark and full of terrors, but it might just be Magnus who consumes Andi. A Guide to the Dark by Meriam Metoui (Henry Holt and Co. Books for Young Readers, 2023) Besties Layla and Mira set out on a college road trip during spring break, excited to get away from home for a little while. Layla is working out her feelings as a closeted queer young woman secretly in love with her best friend, while Mira is consumed with grief after her brother’s sudden death. When their car breaks down in a small town in the middle of nowhere Indiana, they end up in a motel. Ellis, the son of the owner, lives there (so it’s technically a house, or at least close enough for my purposes) and tries to keep the ghosts at bay. It wouldn’t be a horror novel if there wasn’t a creepy room full of angry ghosts, and sure enough the girls end up in Room 9. What haunts that room, and what impact it has on Layla and Mira’s sanity drives the story to its intense conclusion. I’m pretty sure this is the only traditionally published YA horror book with a queer Muslim protagonists. It also features a creative use of first and third person POV and photographs taken by Metoui.  From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos (Psychopomp, 2024) Lethe and Petunia are prisoners in the endless house St. Edah’s. Every night, the mythological beings that reside in the house strip off their skin and indulge in their basest desires as skeletons. Every day, the two human women act as servants to their captors. They don’t know how they came to be in the mansion with its infinite rooms but they are desperate to escape. Although they’ve explored the house before, when one of the entities disappears, Petunia and Lethe are released into rooms they’ve never been allowed to visit. As they wander, the truth about who they were before the house tempts them away from each other. Full of sapphic longing and body horror, this novella is as good as it is unsettling. Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion (Strange Houses #1 — HarperVia, 2025) I couldn’t not include the first book in Uketsu’s series in a booklist about strange houses. This series is apparently very popular in Japan. The narrative style is as strange as the house our architect protagonist is investigating. The book uses floorplans to explore the house and the horrors within. Our nameless narrator is a freelance writer who becomes obsessed with a house up for sale in Tokyo. His architect friend looks over the floorplans and discovers hidden rooms with dark secrets. The more the writer digs into the history of the house and what those terrible rooms contain, the darker the mystery becomes. It’s a strange book about a strange house written in a strange way. What’s not to like?[end-mark] The post Backlist Bonanza: 5 Books Set in Strange Houses appeared first on Reactor.