If what hooked you in Leech was being inside the mind of a host who might be lying to you (and to itself), you’ll love the biologist’s account in Annihilation. The expedition’s reports contradict each other, memories warp, and the landscape itself seems to edit reality—much like the Institute’s physician piecing together the previous doctor’s death and what’s burrowed into that frozen château. The result is the same intoxicating blend of eerie fieldwork, organismal strangeness, and a narrator whose precision only makes them more suspect.

You enjoyed stalking drafty corridors in Leech, sifting through a dead doctor’s secrets while something alive and ancient nested in the walls. Mexican Gothic sends you into another rot-infested estate where a family’s power is literally rooted in a parasitic organism. The late-night explorations, medical curiosities, and the sickly intimacy of a house that wants to absorb you echo the autopsies, mine-shafts, and invasive ‘inheritance’ that drive the Institute’s doctor to the truth.

If the snowbound château’s isolation and the close-quarters dread of Leech thrilled you, The Luminous Dead ratchets that intensity up. One caver, one manipulative handler, and miles of rock compress into a psychological pressure cooker—just like being stuck with the Institute’s presence inside a single body while a rival organism prowls the mines. You’ll get invasive tech, untrustworthy guidance, and the suffocating question of whether the real threat is the environment or the person in your head.

One of Leech’s most arresting tensions is identity: a doctor who is many, wearing a single face while older selves whisper from within. In A Memory Called Empire, Mahit arrives at an imperial court with an outlawed imago device—someone else’s memories braided into her own. As she untangles a predecessor’s death and resists being subsumed by a greater power, you’ll recognize the same intimate struggle over the body’s steering wheel and the politics of who gets to inhabit whom.

If the sinewy, clinical horror of Leech—autopsies, spores, and the ethics of letting something alien pilot a human life—stayed under your skin, The Girl With All the Gifts hits the same nerve. A child host forces her caretakers to confront whether the ‘infection’ is a monster, a new form of personhood, or both. It shares Leech’s grim atmosphere, moral queasiness, and fascination with organisms that don’t just kill us—they rewrite us.