If the cabin visitations, missing time on December 26, 1985, and Whitley’s hypnotic regressions left you fascinated by how memory warps around terror, you’ll sink right into Annihilation. The Biologist’s field journal about Area X reads like Whitley’s own account: intimate, elliptical, and increasingly unreliable as she descends the “Tower” (that’s really a tunnel), meets the Crawler, and edits her own past on the page. It’s the same eerie blend of confession and enigma you felt in Communion—a private mind against an inexplicable presence.

Strieber’s “Visitors” press not only on his life but on his psyche—fear, shame, wonder—and Solaris strikes that same nerve. When Kris Kelvin reaches the sentient ocean of Solaris and is confronted by a resurrected version of his lover, Rheya, he’s forced (like Whitley under hypnosis with Dr. Donald Klein) to face the parts of himself he can’t control or fully comprehend. The alien contact isn’t techy spectacle—it’s a mirror. If you were gripped by Communion’s inward spiral, Kelvin’s haunted intimacy will feel devastatingly familiar.

If the raw, personal focus of Whitley’s ordeal—his family, his fear, his attempt to make meaning—hooked you, The Sparrow offers that same human-first lens. Father Emilio Sandoz joins a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat, and what he brings back is trauma, faith in tatters, and a need to tell the story piece by piece. Like Communion, the speculative elements serve the social and spiritual questions: how a person endures contact with the “other,” and what faith or identity survives the encounter.

If the owl “screen memories,” shifting faces of the Visitors, and the terror of not knowing what’s real in Communion got under your skin, PKD’s hallucinatory classic will do the same. Barney Mayerson’s forays into the Chew-Z experience put him in thrall to the ever-present Palmer Eldritch—complete with the chilling stigmata—that may be god, devil, alien, or all three. It’s that same visionary dread Strieber evokes: a presence that follows you out of the experience and into your waking life.

If you were drawn to Whitley’s real-world sleuthing—the upstate cabin, the patterns around owls and visitors, the efforts to document and test his memories—Keel’s chronicle in Point Pleasant will scratch the same itch. He logs encounters with the Mothman, Indrid Cold, and Men in Black, chasing synchronicities much like the patterns Communion teases out of fear and missing time. It’s reportage that slides into the uncanny, exactly where Strieber’s investigation lives.