If the way Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade straddle boyhood and terror grabbed you, you’ll love how Cory Mackenson’s twelfth year unfolds in Boy’s Life. Like Cooger & Dark’s arrival in Green Town, a murder and strange happenings ripple through Zephyr, Alabama, mixing bikes-at-dawn freedom with lurking, near-mythic menace. It captures the same bittersweet tilt from innocence to wisdom you felt as Will and his father faced Mr. Dark and the Dust Witch.

Like the Pandemonium Shadow Show slipping into a quiet Midwestern night, The Ocean at the End of the Lane lets something ancient and hungry seep into a normal neighborhood. If the Nighshade–Halloway duo’s brush with the Dust Witch and carousel magic thrilled you, you’ll sink into the Hempstock women’s serene, terrifying wisdom as they confront a creature that warps reality as slyly as Mr. Dark’s tattoos.

If Bradbury’s autumnal sentences—Charles Halloway musing in the library, the carnival lights seeming to breathe—were what you savored, Little, Big offers that same spell of language. Crowley’s prose turns doorways and gardens into thresholds as uncanny as Cooger’s carousel at midnight, wrapping family, fate, and hidden realms in a style as aromatic and shimmering as Bradbury’s best.

If Mr. Dark’s sideshow—illusionists, freaks, and a carousel that steals time—haunted you, Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao is the ur-text of the uncanny carnival. Its menagerie of impossible exhibits slides into a desert town with the same chill you felt when Will and Jim first saw those tents unfurl, asking what people truly want—and what it costs to look too closely.

If the carousel’s transformations and the Dust Witch’s balloon chase hooked you on magic that feels powerful yet unexplained, The Night Circus gives that same shimmering uncertainty. The black-and-white tents arrive like Cooger & Dark’s—sudden, irresistible—and inside, feats bend reality with the seductive, perilous glamour that tempted Jim Nightshade while Will sensed the lurking cost.