If the way Sophia’s “perfect” home and its HOA commandments masked a fable about marriage, obedience, and forbidden knowledge hooked you, you’ll love how The Bloody Chamber reimagines Bluebeard. Carter’s heroine is handed keys she must not use, then discovers the truth inside a locked room—much like Sophia’s creeping suspicion as she prowls her not-to-be-entered spaces with that smiley rulebook in hand. It’s lush, knife-sharp, and turns the fairy tale of the good wife on its head—just as the apple does in Sophia’s immaculate kitchen.

Sophia’s world is governed by a husband and a manual—an Edenic suburb whose rules are as sacred as they are sinister. In The Library at Mount Char, Carolyn and her siblings live under “Father,” a godlike figure whose catalogues confer impossible powers and whose rules are absolute. As Sophia pieces together what’s hidden behind the locked door, Carolyn and company navigate taboo knowledge, punishments, and a cosmology where breaking a rule can unmake a life. If the biblical undertow and the tyrannical domestic order in Sophia’s house thrilled you, this book doubles down on that divine dread.

If you were drawn to Sophia’s polished narration as she reassures herself that everything—and her husband—is perfect, Jackson’s Merricat will pull you in the same way. Told in a claustrophobic first person, We Have Always Lived in the Castle unfolds inside a house full of rituals, secrets, and a community that watches from the hedges. As Sophia tiptoes toward the forbidden room and what it says about her marriage, Merricat circles her family’s locked histories until the truth finally surfaces. It’s that same unsettling intimacy where the narrator’s certainty becomes the biggest question.

Sophia’s gated paradise feels off: the cheery bylaws, the too-perfect neighbors, the room you mustn’t open. Annihilation channels that uncanny hum as the Biologist enters Area X with a set of protocols that don’t quite govern reality, discovers impossible structures like the “tower/tunnel,” and keeps a journal that reframes who she is. If you loved how the house in Comfort Me With Apples seemed to breathe its own scripture—rewriting Sophia’s sense of self—Area X’s strange ecology and the lighthouse’s secrets will scratch that same surreal itch.

Sophia keeps telling herself she’s happy—cooking, waiting, obeying the rules—until the locked spaces and little artifacts of other women crack that story. In The Yellow Wallpaper, an unnamed wife is confined to a room by her physician husband; her fixation on the wallpaper’s patterns becomes a record of eroding selfhood. If the slow, intimate shift from “I’m fine” to “something is terribly wrong” in Sophia’s voice gripped you—the manual’s cheerful passages, the forbidden basement—this classic delivers that same psychological descent with devastating clarity.