Books like The Exorcist: 15 novels that haunt you the same way

Russell published this nine years before Blatty’s Exorcist, and almost nobody remembers it. A troubled teenage girl, a parish priest who isn’t sure he still believes, and a bishop who is. It’s short and talky in the best way, and it cares more about the priest’s faith than the girl’s symptoms, the same instinct that made The Exorcist more than a scary book. I read Russell’s book years after The Exorcist, while looking for books with similar themes. While it isn’t as graphic as Blatty’s novel, it captures the conflict between faith and truth.

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I think of this as the obvious pairing, and it earns the spot. Levin published it four years before Blatty, and both novels crack open a respectable household to let something ancient in. Chris MacNeil watches her child being taken from her. Rosemary Woodhouse can’t trust her husband, her neighbors at the Bramford, or her own body. What stayed with me most was Rosemary’s isolation: surrounded by people, yet completely alone. The growing paranoia makes the horror feel intimate and real.

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Amanda is an architect with a good marriage and a career that’s going well, until she starts doing things she doesn’t remember deciding. Gran keeps it under 200 pages and never fully says whether this is a demon or a breakdown. It’s next on my stack.

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Tremblay wrote this one in direct conversation with The Exorcist. Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett may be possessed; her family calls in a priest, and a reality TV crew films everything. Her younger sister Merry tells the story years later, and Tremblay never settles whether Marjorie was possessed or ill. What got under my skin was how the story blurs truth and performance, and how the family slowly loses control of their own story to outsiders and cameras. I finished the book unsettled, still questioning what was real and what was constructed.

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Before there was Regan MacNeil, there was Eleanor Vance. Jackson keeps her monsters mostly offstage and puts the horror inside Eleanor’s head, where Blatty puts it too: in a mother slowly accepting that medicine can’t save her child. Eleanor loosens her grip on herself so gradually that by the end it’s hard to say where the house stops and she begins. The scene that lingers for me is when Eleanor sits in the dark, holding a cold hand she thinks belongs to her companion, only to realize she’s alone. The uncertainty of never knowing whether the threat is outside or inside is what makes the book so quietly terrifying.

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The Rolfe family rents a Long Island mansion for the summer at a suspiciously low price. The one condition is that they bring meals to the elderly woman upstairs, who never leaves her room. Marasco builds dread the way Blatty does, quietly, and the house looks better as the family wears down. What unsettled me most was the creeping helplessness as ordinary routines became charged with menace, and the house itself seemed to feed on the family’s exhaustion. By the end, I felt the same cold unease The Exorcist gave me.

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A young couple, James and Julie, buy a house that starts doing things neither of them can explain. Jemc alternates between their points of view in short chapters, so the disorientation builds fast. I haven’t read it yet. It’s here because it produces the same not-knowing that hangs over Regan’s early symptoms.

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In 1950s Mexico City, Noemí Taboada receives a disturbing letter from her newly married cousin and travels to High Place, a decaying mountain mansion. Moreno-Garcia fills the house with mold, a bloodline-obsessed family, and something growing in the walls. The body horror arrives slowly.

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Barker’s first novel trades possession for a bargain. A millionaire won his fortune at cards from a man named Mamoulian, and when Mamoulian comes to collect, the millionaire’s ex-convict bodyguard gets caught in the middle. It’s dense and gory in places, and Barker takes evil as seriously as Blatty. What struck me most was how brutal and inescapable the bargain feels, with a constant tension between desire and destruction. I closed the last page unsettled, still feeling the weight of the characters’ choices.

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Barker’s novella introduced the Cenobites, the figures who became Pinhead and company in Hellraiser. Frank Cotton opens a puzzle box, seeking the limits of pleasure, and finds something else. It asks the question The Exorcist asks about Regan: what’s left of a person once something else has them. What has always haunted me is how Barker makes desire itself feel dangerous: curiosity, pain, and pleasure blur until the characters no longer recognize themselves. The Cenobites are unsettling, but the book’s obsession with what we’re willing to risk for something unknown stayed with me longer.

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Ned Constantine moves his family from New York to Cornwall Coombe, a New England farming village that looks like a postcard. The village’s harvest traditions are older and darker than anyone admits. Tryon wrote it decades before folk horror had a name, and Midsommar fans will recognize its shape. It’s also on my folk horror list. I haven’t read it yet.

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A boy disappears from a small Pacific Northwest town, and his younger cousin, Stevie, keeps looking. Ahlborn tells it through a kid who notices what the adults around him won’t say out loud. It’s on my to-read stack.

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A charming serial killer kidnaps Nora Chancel, and the trail leads back to a cult novel called Night Journey and the publishing family that owns it, her husband’s family. It’s closer to a thriller than anything else on this list, and it’s long. Straub treated evil as seriously as Blatty did, which is why it’s here. I haven’t read it yet.

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Nicholas and his girlfriend Nakota find a hole in the floor of a storage room in his building. They call it the Funhole. What goes in comes back changed, and Nakota can’t stay away. Koja’s debut never explains the hole, and the prose gets stranger as the characters do. It’s on my to-read stack.

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Elias Alder is born in a remote Austrian mountain village with a musical gift nobody around him understands. This is literary fiction more than horror, and it’s on the list for its suffocating atmosphere and religious weight, which run close to Blatty’s. I haven’t read it yet.

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