8 New England Horror Books if You Loved Widow’s Bay on Apple+

An isolated island off the coast of Maine in the midst of a nor’easter is haunted by its own secrets, by the town’s history, and by a supernatural force. Will the people of the town have the courage to face what’s coming, or will the youngest residents pay the ultimate price? 

While this sounds like it could be a plot description for Widow’s Bay, it’s actually the synopsis of Stephen King’s 1999 story Storm of the Century. Originally conceived as a teleplay for a TV miniseries, King himself called it a “novel for television,” and Storm of the Century was subsequently released in book form. 

Acclaimed American filmmaker and television showrunner Mike Flanagan has named Storm of the Century a major influence on his work, especially on his hit Netflix series Midnight Mass.

If Stephen King has an obvious inheritor to the title of New England’s premier horror writer, it would have to be his own son, Joe Hill, whose novels have been translated into films and TV, such as Black Phone, NOS4A2, episodes of Creepshow, and many more. 

In his latest novel, a group of students at Maine’s Rackham College forges an unlikely deal with a powerful dragon named King Sorrow… a deal that they quickly come to regret. Can they undo the curse they’ve placed upon themselves? 

Kirkus Reviews hailed the novel, Hill’s first in nine years, as “at turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.”

Though he was active as a writer for only a comparatively brief time, H. P. Lovecraft cast his long shadow across all of horror and weird fiction—and his touch can definitely be felt in Widow’s Bay. Most of Lovecraft’s stories took place within “Lovecraft Country,” a collection of fictional towns and villages in and around Massachusetts. 

Many of these stories deal with insular New England towns, the superstitious locals who inhabit them, and the dark secrets and hidden histories those towns conceal. Within the pages of The Best of H. P. Lovecraft, you’ll find some of his most iconic New England stories, especially “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which is a must-read for Widow’s Bay fans.

“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” The unsolved murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in 1892 became one of America’s most notorious crimes—and their daughter, Lizzie, became the prime suspect, even if she was acquitted in a court of law. 

This “remarkable novel” reimagines Lizzie Borden’s life after that grisly crime, and how and why those murders came about. Set in Borden’s home in Fall River, Massachusetts, Maplecroft combines “Victorian drama and Lovecraftian myth” into a spellbinding concoction perfect for fans of Widow’s Bay (Christopher Golden, New York Times-bestselling author).

Sure, not all of the stories in this collection of short tales by Nick Mamatas take place in New England, but all of them have Lovecraftian resonances, interstitial storytelling techniques, and copious nods to horror tropes and traditions that will be familiar to fans of Widow’s Bay. 

And the ones that do take place in New England nail the sense that the past is a source of both pride and horror—and sometimes also unlikely black comedy. 

A former editor at Clarkesworld Magazine and Viz, Mamatas won a Bram Stoker Award and has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Hugo Awards for his clever use and inversion of familiar horror elements.

Kyle Murchison Booth is the Senior Archivist in the Department of Rare Books at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum. Is that (fictional) museum located in New England? 

If not, it’s definitely somewhere very close, and Booth’s necromantic adventures have a distinctly New England flavor, shot through with Victorian sensibilities and the stuff of classic ghost stories, but with surprising bursts of modernism. 

Together, most of Booth’s exploits are gathered in The Bone Key by Sarah Monette, though she’s written a few others that aren’t found here, including the haunted house novelette A Theory of Haunting. Any or all of them make for perfect reading on a cold, stormy day, or after an episode of Widow’s Bay.

Lex McCall is a bookseller in a quiet Vermont town who falls for a dashing ghost hunter who comes to town to investigate the burg’s many “verified” ghost stories. There’s just one problem… Lex made most of those stories up herself, publishing them on a video blog called Haunted Happenings, which she kept years before. 

Can she keep her secret long enough to win the heart of her new acquaintance? And what will happen when he finds out the truth? Those are the questions posed in this “fun, well-written rom-com, that hits all the right notes,” with just a dash of ghostliness thrown in for good measure (Red Carpet Crash).

The mayor of a small island town is desperate to cover up local tragedies in order to save the tourist trade. In Widow’s Bay, that mayor is our protagonist, Tom Loftis. 

In Jaws, it’s the much less sympathetic Larry Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie adaptation. Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel came first, however, and was a hit in its own right. 

It also makes a great read for those who wish to see the dynamics of Widow’s Bay turned on its head, as the local sheriff struggles to get the threats taken seriously, even while the mayor endangers more lives by denying them…