If the way A Study in Drowning braided Effy’s beloved text, Angharad, into the present-day unraveling of Emrys Myrddin’s legacy hooked you, this one doubles down on that pleasure. Plain Bad Heroines nests timelines and texts—film scripts, memoirs, and a scandalous century‑old book—into a sly, haunted narrative about a New England girls’ school and the actresses adapting its story. Like Effy and Preston poring over drafts and marginalia at Hiraeth Manor, you’ll follow competing versions of the truth as the story comments on itself, asking who gets to author history—and who gets drowned out.

You liked watching Effy and Preston dig through archives and lies to expose the rot behind Myrddin’s sainted reputation. In Ninth House, Alex Stern navigates Yale’s secret societies to investigate a suspicious death, peeling back elite façades to reveal the predation beneath. There’s the same heady mix of campus politics, forbidden rooms, and rituals that don’t want witnesses—plus a reluctant partnership full of sharp banter that echoes Effy and Preston’s uneasy alliance as they piece together what really happened at Hiraeth.

If Effy’s visions of the Fairy King and the suffocating pull of the sea mirrored her trauma—and if uncovering the truth about Myrddin felt like reclaiming her sanity—Jane’s descent will speak to you. After a pragmatic marriage of convenience, Jane discovers her husband’s forbidden occult work and a house thick with secrets. The narrative tightens into the same intimate, claustrophobic headspace as Effy’s nights at Hiraeth Manor, where belief and delusion tangle and dangerous men exploit the stories women are told to keep them silent.

If the tidal, sensuous language of A Study in Drowning—the sea-salt rot of Hiraeth, the siren-call of Angharad—swept you away, The Binding offers that same luxuriant cadence. Here, books are made by siphoning people’s memories, turning trauma and desire into beautiful objects that can be bought or buried. As with Effy’s dawning realization about Myrddin’s thefts, each page interrogates who owns a story and what it costs to take it, all in prose that feels as textured and palpable as wet vellum and storm-warped wood.

Drawn to the way Effy’s world lets the sea and the Fairy King seep in at the edges—never fully explained, yet undeniably powerful? Gaiman’s novella works that same spell. A man revisits a childhood farm where Lettie Hempstock and her family once warded off a hungry thing from beyond, and the rules of reality bend like waves. It echoes the briny folklore of A Study in Drowning: storms that remember, boundaries that thin near water, and a danger that’s less about spell mechanics than about the stories we let into our heads.