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The Motion of Puppets

Keith Donohue · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Behind the Attic Wall

Sylvia Cassedy · 315 pages

At twelve, Maggie had been thrown out of more boarding schools than she cared to remember. "Impossible to handle," they said — nasty, mean, disobedient, rebellious, thieving — anything they could say to explain why she must be removed from the school. Maggie was thin and pale, with shabby clothes and stringy hair, when she arrived at her new home. "It was a mistake to bring her here," said Maggie

Creepy DollsEerieMagical RealismFemale Lead
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Dream Country

Neil Gaiman · 160 pages

Presents four Sandman stories, including "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in which Shakespeare's company, at the instigation of the Lord of Dreams, gives an open-air performance of the play to an audience of fairies.

Mythology RetellingEerieMagical RealismGreek Mythology
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Sleep

Haruki Murakami · 51 pages

Magical RealismEerieMarriage in TroubleLiterary Fiction
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Of Bees and Mist

Erick Setiawan · 407 pages

From high in the house that stands on the hill, young Meridia watches her stern father Gabriel, disappear off into a mist each night and her proud mother speaking to her pots and pans in strange language ... A haunting and mythical debut from a major new literary talent.

Magical RealismMarriage in TroubleEerieLiterary Fiction
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The Scorpio Races

Maggie Stiefvater · 435 pages

It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die. At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them. Puck Connolly is different. She

Mythology RetellingEerieMagical RealismFemale Lead
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Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

Mythology RetellingMarriage in TroubleLiterary FictionGreek Mythology
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Not the End of the World

Kate Atkinson · 278 pages

Arthur is a precocious eight-year-old boy whose mother is a B-list celebrity more concerned with the state of her bank account than with her son's development. Then an enigmatic young nanny named Missy introduces him to a world he never knew existed.

Magical RealismMythology RetellingLiterary FictionGreek Mythology
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The Silent Companions

Laura Purcell · 304 pages

**When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . . .** When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury. But with her husband dead just weeks after their marriage, her new servants rese

Creepy DollsEerieFemale LeadHorror
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Agnes Cecilia

Maria Gripe · 282 pages

After experiencing several inexplicable incidents, lonely Nora receives a strangely lifelike doll, which leads her to discover long-hidden secrets about her family.

Creepy DollsEerieFemale Lead
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The Icarus Girl

Helen Oyeyemi · 336 pages

Jessamy "Jess" Harrison, age eight, is the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother. Possessed of an extraordinary imagination, she has a hard time fitting in at school. It is only when she visits Nigeria for the first time that she makes a friend who understands her: a ragged little girl named TillyTilly. But soon TillyTilly's visits become more disturbing, until Jess realizes she doesn't

Magical RealismEerieLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Such Small Hands

Andres Barba · 105 pages

"Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to find her place, she invents a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence"--Back cover.

Creepy DollsEerieLiterary FictionHorror
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The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Steven Sherrill · 320 pages

Five thousand years on - and the Minotaur, or M as he is known to his colleagues, is working as a line chef at Grub's Rib in Carolina, keeping to himself, keeping his horns down, trying in vain to put his past behind him. He leads an ordered lifestyle in a shabby trailer park where he tinkers with cars, writes and re-writes to-do lists and observes the haphazard goings on around him. Outwardly con

Magical RealismMythology RetellingLiterary FictionGreek Mythology
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Vassa in the Night

Sarah Porter · 303 pages

In the enchanted kingdom of Brooklyn, the fashionable people put on cute shoes, go to parties in warehouses, drink on rooftops at sunset, and tell themselves they ve arrived. A whole lot of Brooklyn is like that now but not Vassa s working-class neighborhood.

Creepy DollsMagical RealismFemale LeadFantasy
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The Marriage of Sticks

Jonathan Carroll · 272 pages

Magical RealismEerieLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado · 248 pages

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying di

Magical RealismEerieLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey · 389 pages

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-hai

Magical RealismMarriage in TroubleLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes

Scott Cawthon, Kira Breed-Wrisley · 224 pages

In this first ever official guide to the bestselling horror video game Five Night at Freddy's, fans and gamers alike can immerse themselves in the characters, locations, game play etc. and try to uncover the secrets and unlock the mysteries kept so hidden within the game itself.

Creepy DollsEerieFemale LeadHorror
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Fen

Daisy Johnson · 208 pages

Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A

Magical RealismEerieLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Rose Madder

Stephen King · 487 pages

Mythology RetellingMagical RealismMarriage in TroubleFemale Lead
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House of Small Shadows

Adam Nevill

"Catherine's last job ended badly. Corporate bullying at a top antiques publication saw her fired and forced to leave London, but she was determined to get her life back. A new job and a few therapists later, things look much brighter. Especially when a challenging new project presents itself: to catalogue the late M.H. Mason's wildly eccentric cache of antique dolls and [preserved animals] ... Ca

Creepy DollsEerieFemale LeadHorror
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Among the Dolls

William Sleator · 77 pages

A dark awakening . . . When her parents give her a gloomy old dollhouse for her birthday instead of the ten speed bike she's expecting, Vicky is disappointed. But she soon becomes fascinated by the small shadowy world and its inhabitants. The hours she spends playing with the dolls is a good way to escape from her parents's arguments. As Vicky's life becomes more troubled, she starts to take out

Creepy DollsEerieFemale LeadHorror
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Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories

Elizabeth Hand · 282 pages

Magical RealismEerieLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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The Doll in the Garden

Mary Downing Hahn · 128 pages

After Ashley and Kristi find an antique doll buried in old Miss Cooper's garden, they discover that they can enter a ghostly turn-of-the-century world by going through a hole in the hedge.

Creepy DollsEerieFemale Lead
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Night of the Living Dummy

R.L. Stine · 134 pages

Lindy finds a ventriloquist's dummy and has fun learning to make him move and talk. Kris is jealous, and decides to get a dummy of her own. Then nasty evil things begin to happen. No way can a dummy be causing all the trouble. Or is there?

Creepy DollsEerieFemale LeadHorror

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