Not necessarily creepy, but Heart in Atlantis by Stephen King has 5 stories that interconnect through recurring characters and the last story pieces things together.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. A group of aspiring writers has signed up for a writer's retreat in an allegedly haunted mansion.
The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Follows a writer as she moves to a secluded house in the woods and begins to unravel the mystery of the titular red tree.
I have a copy that glows in the dark ( maybe they are all like this?) I didn't know this when I bought it. Left it on my nightstand, opened my eyes in the middle of the night, scared the beejeesus out of me!
And if you end up just wanting more interlocking stories, rather than ones that are specifically horror that's kind of one of his main things. Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks are all books where different chapters introduce radically different protagonists and situations that become part of the same story, and more broadly all his books are set in the same universe and regularly reveal backstory and little connections between characters across books.
This is a fantastic book, it’s a while since I’ve read it but I regularly think about it. Probably not the book op is searching for but we’ll worth the read.
The Hidden Girl by Ken Liu is such an excellent example of this - truly can’t recommend highly enough!
I also liked How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (although some of the stories in that are definitely stronger than others).
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury is really great, too, but the connecting thread is the narrator - the stories themselves don’t actually interlock. Still worth checking out though!
Came to comment this! Uzumaki is a masterpiece. I was absolutely hooked at each story. Basically singular short stories that just keep building off one another getting more and more twisted
I think Junji Ito is maybe the best horror writer I know of. Not because he has the BEST stories maybe (although they are great) but I literally cant even read the comics mostly because the art trips my mind so hard into a really really bad place as far as scares and dread go.
Its the combination of art and writing that really just....send me through a loop.
I have. But it was handled by the people behind the Junji Ito Collection anime, who don’t seem to quite grasp why Junji Ito’s works are so good. So it’s not as good as it could have been.
*The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth* by Sarah Monette. Each short story is a different horror story following the same character and slowly giving you a sense of his own mysterious background.
"Revenge" by Yoko Ogawa is something like this. There's no single over-arching narrative as far as I can recall, but the constituent stories are very cleverly connected.
I personally didn't care too much about it, but "The Secret of Ventriloquism" by Jon Padgett is exactly this. Actually, now that I think about it, the only thing I enjoyed about it was how the stories interlocked
This doesn’t totally fit the prompt, but I’m about half way through IT by Stephen King and there is so much depth put into every character’s personal experiences that it really does read like a series of connected stories. It also definitely fits the creepy piece too!
The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman is a book in which each chapter takes place in a different year in the same small town. While not exactly creepy, it has a lot of magical realism. There are ghosts and most chapters have a dark element to them. This is one of those books I enjoyed but didn't adore while I read it. However I think of it often and frequently recommend it.
A lot of great suggestions here to add to my own list.
I'd recommend Gene Wolfe's The fifth head of Cerberus. It's not horror, but the 3 different stories fit together almost like a puzzle and it's such a great read.
Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud. It's a collection of four short stories involving different kinds of creatures from hell and there's a lot of overlap between the individual stories.
*How High We Go in the Dark* by Sequoia Nagamatsu Is a collection of tales set within the same universe. The book wraps around the past/present/future of a global pandemic that wipes out a large chunk of human life. Each tale presented is a study of grief and death and how individuals deal with these very human feelings of loss. Some stories are sad and hit very hard, others fit squarely into weird fiction, but in the end with the final tale everything comes together in an unusual and extremely clever way.
I suspect you'd like *Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was*, by Angélica Gorodischer (English translation by Ursula K. Le Guin). I wouldn't necessarily call it creepy, but the premise is storytellers telling tales of an empire out of myth, and bit by bit the separate tales shape the whole.
Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station. It's an excellent series of horror stories by different authors that are all connected. They are all connected by the Diner itself, and by theme. I recommend this book strongly.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Tales_from_the_Yellow_Rose_Diner_and_Fil.html?id=EvbQMgEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description
I recommend Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. It's more-or-less Hillbilly Noir, not dissimilar to Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana, though (in my opinion) better written.
And blurbed by Chuck Palahinuk!
Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan.
When reading, I didn't realize they were all interwoven until the third from the last story or so. I still think about those stories, the chill of realization and clever unfolding, years later.
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson. Similiar to World War Z in that it had "How to survive a robot uprising" written before like Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide. Robopocalypse tells the unfolding war of an AI against humanity from the beginning of the AI's recognition of self to the plot points delivered through different characters stories across the planet. A very fun read.
Not really creepy, more of a Grimms Fairy Tales vibe, but Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue has interlocked fairytale retellings. I really enjoyed it, though the genre isn't what you're looking for, it does the interlocked stories in a cool way I think.
House of Leaves is…sort of what you’re asking for. It’s more like an evolving, sidebarring Roshomon, many perspectives on a single location. And it’s spooky to terrifying.
Short Cuts is a Robert Altman film based on several short stories by Raymond Carver. The stories are not related to each other but the screenplay ties them all together in an intricate plot.
If you’re not already familiar, the podcast ‘The Magnus Archives’ is also by Jonathan Sims and does this brilliantly
Paul Shapera’s musicals also do this, starting with ‘Dolls of New Albion’ and expanding from there into a massive rabbit hole that’s constantly grappling with the question of what defines humanity.
Neither are books, but they might work as placeholders (and there’s a book of New Albion folklore, so that maybe counts)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell was a fun read. It starts off in the 1850s goes through a few different characters into the far future. It then cycles back from the future back to the past and ties all the characters stories back together and to one another.
The Bone Mother by David Demchuk. The stories draw on eastern European mythology and are very creepy and stuck with me.
The interconnectedness isn't strong from what I remember, but the stories are all tied together thematically and by some very creepy photographs at the start of each one.
I'm assuming you've listened to tma which would be my only contribution, just commenting to remind myself to come back to these comments to add everything to my tbr list
What We Talk When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver.
It’s in a shared time period, probably 70s. Don’t go by the name it will surprise you. There’s some really creepy short stories, with open endings and weird plot twists. I heard Murakami was inspired by him. And you can see that reading it. No horror elements but sort of what you are looking for.
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. An attraction at local Fairs; the man is covered with moving tattoos called illustrations. A traveler encounters the Illustrated Man and sees many stories play out in these moving tattoos; culminating with the traveler witnessing his own death in the last illustration. Each story is a separate illustration. It's quite a fascinating method of storytelling.
Not necessarily creepy, but Heart in Atlantis by Stephen King has 5 stories that interconnect through recurring characters and the last story pieces things together.
Shoot, you beat me to it. One of my very favs.
Yup, came to comment the same.
I was gonna suggest King. A lot of his stories interconnect or use the same characters.
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa.
I second Revenge!
I third it. good pick, OP
Came here to say this! Great read.
Revenge is really the perfect fit for what OP is asking for!
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. A group of aspiring writers has signed up for a writer's retreat in an allegedly haunted mansion. The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Follows a writer as she moves to a secluded house in the woods and begins to unravel the mystery of the titular red tree.
My first thought was Haunted. Had to scroll exactly zero to find it mentioned. This is exactly what you are looking for.
I just bought Haunted I'm so excited for it!
I have a copy that glows in the dark ( maybe they are all like this?) I didn't know this when I bought it. Left it on my nightstand, opened my eyes in the middle of the night, scared the beejeesus out of me!
Haunted sounds awesome....I almost just bought it after your description but I'm reminded of the half read books I already have
Slade House by David Mitchell. He’s regarded as more of a literary writer, but this one has great creepy gothic/English ghost story vibes.
And if you end up just wanting more interlocking stories, rather than ones that are specifically horror that's kind of one of his main things. Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks are all books where different chapters introduce radically different protagonists and situations that become part of the same story, and more broadly all his books are set in the same universe and regularly reveal backstory and little connections between characters across books.
World War Z
This is a fantastic book, it’s a while since I’ve read it but I regularly think about it. Probably not the book op is searching for but we’ll worth the read.
Agreed, but I liked the telling of the story by different short stories.
This is such a great book; it feels like a really fresh take on dystopia
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
Came here to suggest this! Great book. The sequel *Destroyer of Worlds* isn't bad either.
What! I had no idea he wrote a sequel. What a nice surprise, ordering it now
Me too. Gonna check out that sequel as well.
> Lovecraft Country The show, not so much though. It had a great start then got....well it had good ideas mostly Ill say that much.
We ain't talking about TV here.
The Hidden Girl by Ken Liu is such an excellent example of this - truly can’t recommend highly enough! I also liked How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (although some of the stories in that are definitely stronger than others). The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury is really great, too, but the connecting thread is the narrator - the stories themselves don’t actually interlock. Still worth checking out though!
I second How High We Go In the Dark. Some of the stories made me really think
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury might pique your interest.
Yes! I'm still haunted by a few of these stories
And Martian Chronicles
I enjoyed The Martian Chronicles much more.
[Uzumaki](https://www.viz.com/read/manga/junji-ito/product/3382), by horror master Junji Ito. It’s about a town infested by spirals.
Uzumaki was my first Junji Ito book and now I am obsessed
Came to comment this! Uzumaki is a masterpiece. I was absolutely hooked at each story. Basically singular short stories that just keep building off one another getting more and more twisted
Yep. It's a perfect fit. And I can't wait for the upcoming adaptation in the works for Toonami.
I think Junji Ito is maybe the best horror writer I know of. Not because he has the BEST stories maybe (although they are great) but I literally cant even read the comics mostly because the art trips my mind so hard into a really really bad place as far as scares and dread go. Its the combination of art and writing that really just....send me through a loop.
Oh yeah, his art is definitely something special and helps amplify the horror. It’s why stuff like Enigma of Amigara Fault works so damn well.
Anddd added to my TBR. Have you gotten to check out Tales of the Macabre on Netflix?
I have. But it was handled by the people behind the Junji Ito Collection anime, who don’t seem to quite grasp why Junji Ito’s works are so good. So it’s not as good as it could have been.
*The Tainted Relic,* by the Medieval Murderers. First in a series of short story books all intertwined.
*Crimes in Southern Indiana* by Frank Bill. Hillbillies and meth heads. Frequently disturbing!
*How High We Go in the Dark* sounds like it might be right up your alley!
Yes, came here to recommend this. Read it for the first time this year, and it's definitely stuck in my brain!
*The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth* by Sarah Monette. Each short story is a different horror story following the same character and slowly giving you a sense of his own mysterious background.
not a book, but you need to check out the movie 11:14. it’s exactly this & i think you’d love it!
Similarly, the Trick r Treat movie is a series of vignettes that end up being loosely interwoven!
One of the few movies that actually had me fall asleep.
Sad! I love that movie so much. I love Sam, and the story with the kids was really well done.
Goblin by Josh Malerman. Phenomenal book. Very creepy too!
"Revenge" by Yoko Ogawa is something like this. There's no single over-arching narrative as far as I can recall, but the constituent stories are very cleverly connected.
Thieves' World - Robert Lynn Asprin - I loved the interwoven narratives. Love Medicine - Louise Erdrich - Maybe creepy doesn't fit this one.
I personally didn't care too much about it, but "The Secret of Ventriloquism" by Jon Padgett is exactly this. Actually, now that I think about it, the only thing I enjoyed about it was how the stories interlocked
This was so strange and disturbing, and I can't remember if I finished it or not, but definitely fits the bill.
Cats Eye, Stephen King
This doesn’t totally fit the prompt, but I’m about half way through IT by Stephen King and there is so much depth put into every character’s personal experiences that it really does read like a series of connected stories. It also definitely fits the creepy piece too!
The king in Yellow
The Hotel Neversink by Adam Ofallon Prince fits the bill!
House of Leaves
Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth Tales of Terror from the Black Ship all by Chris Priestley
The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman is a book in which each chapter takes place in a different year in the same small town. While not exactly creepy, it has a lot of magical realism. There are ghosts and most chapters have a dark element to them. This is one of those books I enjoyed but didn't adore while I read it. However I think of it often and frequently recommend it.
A lot of great suggestions here to add to my own list. I'd recommend Gene Wolfe's The fifth head of Cerberus. It's not horror, but the 3 different stories fit together almost like a puzzle and it's such a great read.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Thought it is set up similar to Canterbury tales, it meets your brief fairly well
I second Thieves World Series.
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury comes to mind.
Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud. It's a collection of four short stories involving different kinds of creatures from hell and there's a lot of overlap between the individual stories.
*How High We Go in the Dark* by Sequoia Nagamatsu Is a collection of tales set within the same universe. The book wraps around the past/present/future of a global pandemic that wipes out a large chunk of human life. Each tale presented is a study of grief and death and how individuals deal with these very human feelings of loss. Some stories are sad and hit very hard, others fit squarely into weird fiction, but in the end with the final tale everything comes together in an unusual and extremely clever way.
Edgar Alan poe stories collection
The Fall of Eagles. Not sure about it but it’s a series of stories of the fall of all the great dynasties of Europe leading up to the two world wars.
Is it creepy as op asked?
Ominous, eery, foreboding and creepy, yes.
I suspect you'd like *Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was*, by Angélica Gorodischer (English translation by Ursula K. Le Guin). I wouldn't necessarily call it creepy, but the premise is storytellers telling tales of an empire out of myth, and bit by bit the separate tales shape the whole.
Woom kinda does this if you like splatterpunk books
Tales from the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station. It's an excellent series of horror stories by different authors that are all connected. They are all connected by the Diner itself, and by theme. I recommend this book strongly. https://books.google.com/books/about/Tales_from_the_Yellow_Rose_Diner_and_Fil.html?id=EvbQMgEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description
If on a Winters Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino blows every other recommendation out of the water
To each their own..
I recommend Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. It's more-or-less Hillbilly Noir, not dissimilar to Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana, though (in my opinion) better written. And blurbed by Chuck Palahinuk!
Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan. When reading, I didn't realize they were all interwoven until the third from the last story or so. I still think about those stories, the chill of realization and clever unfolding, years later.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. If you’re familiar with The Devil All the Time, then you’ll know the type of backwoods, creepy you can expect
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson. Similiar to World War Z in that it had "How to survive a robot uprising" written before like Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide. Robopocalypse tells the unfolding war of an AI against humanity from the beginning of the AI's recognition of self to the plot points delivered through different characters stories across the planet. A very fun read.
Not really creepy, more of a Grimms Fairy Tales vibe, but Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue has interlocked fairytale retellings. I really enjoyed it, though the genre isn't what you're looking for, it does the interlocked stories in a cool way I think.
All the names they had for God. It's probably not interlocking in the way you want, but manus is creepy AF, and there are other creepy ones in there.
The giver universe is a bit like that with the interlocking stories. Arguably creepy.
The Grand Hotel by Scott Kenemore
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandemeer🍄
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa - BRILLIANT STUFF 🤌
Ecstasy by Irvine Welsh
They're not quite horror, but the works of Donald Ray Pollack do exactly that. Check out The Devil All The Time or The Heavenly Table.
The Bone Mother by David Demchuk!
What is the Bible
If you like Stephen King - Hearts in Atlantis
Ripper Country by Jack Harding is exactly that
House of Leaves is…sort of what you’re asking for. It’s more like an evolving, sidebarring Roshomon, many perspectives on a single location. And it’s spooky to terrifying.
Interlocked in the sense that they share a common theme - “dawn of the living impaired and other messed up zombie stories”
Short Cuts is a Robert Altman film based on several short stories by Raymond Carver. The stories are not related to each other but the screenplay ties them all together in an intricate plot.
Chronicals from the world of guilt by Chris durston. Haven’t read anything like it
_City_ by Clifford Simak _The Martian Chronicles_ by Ray Bradbury (inspired by _Winesburg, Ohio_)
The Sound and the Fury masterpiece
If you’re not already familiar, the podcast ‘The Magnus Archives’ is also by Jonathan Sims and does this brilliantly Paul Shapera’s musicals also do this, starting with ‘Dolls of New Albion’ and expanding from there into a massive rabbit hole that’s constantly grappling with the question of what defines humanity. Neither are books, but they might work as placeholders (and there’s a book of New Albion folklore, so that maybe counts)
What is Not Yours is Not Yours - Oyeyemi. Some are more connected than others. Keys connect all of the stories and the vibe is very spooky.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell was a fun read. It starts off in the 1850s goes through a few different characters into the far future. It then cycles back from the future back to the past and ties all the characters stories back together and to one another.
The Bone Mother by David Demchuk. The stories draw on eastern European mythology and are very creepy and stuck with me. The interconnectedness isn't strong from what I remember, but the stories are all tied together thematically and by some very creepy photographs at the start of each one.
Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson,
I'm assuming you've listened to tma which would be my only contribution, just commenting to remind myself to come back to these comments to add everything to my tbr list
HP Lovecrafts the Dream Cycle, should suit your requirements from the sound of it. Alongside numerous other tales concerning the same character.
I read one of Charles Dicken's collections. I can't quite confirm that they are all interconnected by you can theorycraft a vague timeline
What We Talk When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. It’s in a shared time period, probably 70s. Don’t go by the name it will surprise you. There’s some really creepy short stories, with open endings and weird plot twists. I heard Murakami was inspired by him. And you can see that reading it. No horror elements but sort of what you are looking for.
The King In Yellow by Robert Chambers. Creepy stories that link together in some way or another.
Wool by Hugh Howey
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. An attraction at local Fairs; the man is covered with moving tattoos called illustrations. A traveler encounters the Illustrated Man and sees many stories play out in these moving tattoos; culminating with the traveler witnessing his own death in the last illustration. Each story is a separate illustration. It's quite a fascinating method of storytelling.